We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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It seems that Estonia is well on the way to becoming a shining example of robust capitalist virtues… and high tax Finland is concerned it will turn into a tax haven (article will only be available on-line for a short time for non-Baltic Times subscribers).
In Finland, corporate income tax is 29 percent while in Estonia it is 26 percent and there is no tax on reinvested corporate profits. The personal income tax rate is progressive in Finland and may reach up to 60 percent; in Estonia it is set at 26 percent.
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“Estonia certainly wants to preserve the comparatively low taxation level for a long time,” Kallas said. “I suggest other countries move toward decreasing taxes rather than pressuring others to increase theirs.”
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But it is hard for Finland to decrease the tax rate while trying to uphold a social-welfare system, he said, and so it is difficult for the country to compete internationally on low tax levels. He suggested that the EU set tax standards to avoid harmful competition between member states.
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Viialained said that taxation was an internal matter for Estonia, but EU negotiators should have considered the issue more carefully.
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“When Estonia is a member of the same union, then the common internal market is not totally (the country’s) own business any more,” he said. “That is why I hope Estonians understand our criticism.
Of course they understand EU criticism, a simpleton could understand it! The political classes in places like Finland (and France and Germany) do not want the owners of capital to have access to less kleptocratic taxation within the EU as that would endanger the system of pork barrel and kick backs they depend on for their perks. Oh if only more former communist nations would follow Estonia’s brave example and turn their back on the toxic social democratic model of the European Union.
To more or less complete indifference by the so called human rights champions of the left, Robert Mugabe continues the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of white farmers and brutal murders of black political opponents in Zimbabwe.
Insignificant sanctions have not saved a single life from Mugabe’s thugs nor prevented the theft of land than is leading inexorably to mass starvation in that unhappy country.
Yet it is no more a ‘political’ question that dealing with a marauding wolf attacking one’s sheep is. Commentators should not be calling for ‘harder sanctions’ or ‘robust diplomacy’ but rather for the violent overthrow of Mugabe. There is no material difference between the Mugabe’s and Saddam Hussain’s of this world and the more murderous Mafia families of Corleone in Sicily and you don’t see the Italian state negotiating with Mafia dons but rather sending para-military police with guns after them.
There is only one reasonable way to deal with murderous tyrants and that is to kill them. As I have said before, until someone puts a bullet through Mugabe’s head and that of any who would emulate him, Zimbabwe will continue its spiral towards complete societal meltdown. The ‘heads’ of all such governments belong on pikes in a public square and any government who has civil dealing with such people are part of the problem. The world is awash with morally ambiguous issues but this is not one of them. Sic semper tyrannis.
One of the great things about the blog phenomenon is that it gives we humble writers the chance to subject the frequently idiotic views of newspaper columnists to systematic criticism. In the past, the best we could hope for would be a letter published in an editorial page. Blogs often contain line-by-line dissections of an article which shred an argument in a way that reminds me of a particularly rigorous university seminar.
Step forward Pejman Yousefzadeh for this brilliantly detailed take-down of Brian Whitaker, a writer for the British daily, the Guardian, who wrote a sneering piece about the website MEMRI, a site charting the often violently anti-semitic content of certain Arabic-speaking newspapers. The wretched Whitaker, in accusing MEMRI of being a shady organisation and therefore of dubious value, only fuels precisely the kind of mindset which MEMRI is determined to highlight. Pejman’s piece of Fisking is a must-read.
As David Carr pointed out on these pages earlier, Britain’s state-subsidised British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is increasingly indistinguishable from a ward of the state. It is not a free standing commercial organisation which has to persuade folk to watch or listen to it out of their free will, but rather has a license fee which is essentially a tax on owning a television. Broadcasting peers around the world are therefore getting annoyed that the BBC seems bent on grabbing a share of their audiences despite it having the unfair advantage of a guaranteed income. An article in the Financial Times (sorry, link requires registration) indicated:
“In the past two years, that output has largely transformed the BBC from a largely domestic news service oriented around two analogue channels – BBC1 and BBC2 – to an international competitor among commercial satellite and cable broadcasters including CNN and Fox News of the U.S.”
One question which is begged by the FT article – if the BBC is posing such a threat and is not a fair commercial competitor, but one with coercive funding, how come domestic or international competition authorities like Mario Monti of the EU Commission are not kicking up a stink? Maybe they should do so. As a reporter for one of the oldest and greatest news services in the world (creep!), I feel I have a small stake in the matter!
I’ve just listened to Lawrence Lessig’s lecture on Free Culture and highly recommend it. Larry describes how much liberty we have lost in the last fifty years. A small number of giant media Corps have used their lobbying power to criminalize more and more of what was once unregulated behavior.
Government acting alone is not the only threat to liberty. The self interest of exceedingly greedy corporations in conjunction with exceedingly greedy lawmakers is a formula for the destruction of civil society. Think how close the world of William Gibson’s Corp ruled dystopia is. The combination of latent totalitarians such as Jack Valenti and outright crooked politicians – Sen Hollings (D Disney) comes to mind – is a deadly one for everything we as libertarians stand for. It is also an attack on the core of everything the Left and the Right believe in as well.
Therein lies our hope.
As Ben Franklin said: “We must indeed all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
Paul Marks is revealed to be the hard man of the blogosphere!
Now I have stopped writing as an unbiased person (at least as unbiased as I can be) in my blog Monetary Policy I can get on to a question that interests me as a hard money faction Austrian School man.
Those of you with the courage to read my last blog (I should have made it more plain – but I lack the wit to do so) will hopefully know that a Austrian school man of my type believes that money should be based entirely on one commodity and that institutions that issue paper money (bills of credit, whatever) should actually have enough of that commodity to cover all their notes. Traditionally people of my sort have supported the so called ‘100%’ or ‘real’ gold standard (as opposed to the various statist frauds that have existed under the name of ‘gold standard’) – but actually any commodity might be used, and there might be competition between commodities – as there was (for example) in the Kingdom of Hanover before the mid 19th century. As long as only one commodity was used for each money and there were no fixed exchange rates between the commodities – if (for example) a certain amount of gold ‘has’ to buy a certain amount of silver then things are messed up.
Some people who read these blogs are well aware of the ‘Austrian’ arguments against Monetarists (that the concept of a ‘price level’ is too loose to be useful, that a price ‘index’ is a misunderstanding [even Hayek argued that himself at various times – but sometimes seemed to like the concept of a price index], and that the ‘money supply’ does not gush everywhere like water, but instead piles up like treacle – creating asset price bubbles, distorting relative prices and creating mal-investment).
However, I am not going to deal with all this here. My question is this – given that the world is not what I would wish it to be, just what will happen?
Traditionally a hard money man would say there will be a bust or a crack up boom. In a bust the government stops propping up the magic circle of ‘private’ financial institutions and other favoured business enterprises (by ‘increasing the money supply’) and the economy goes into slump. In a ‘crack up boom’ the government continues to increase the money supply (i.e. credit money) till there is vast open inflation (not just asset price inflation but ‘prices in the shops’) and a ‘flight from money’ occurs – and the thing comes to a terrible stop. The boom-bust cycle (with the crack up boom being far worse than a normal bust).
However, what happens if government continues to increase the credit-money supply, but not enough to create vast open ‘in the shops’ inflation? As the various speculations of the financial institutions and other favoured enterprises go wrong so the government increases its credit money supply to prop them up – but (by their very failures) the institutions’ own credit paper (‘broad money’ if you like ‘M3’ etc) shrinks – so there is not much actual change in what people see as the ‘price level’.
Well of course things become more and more inefficient as a greater and greater share of resources are devoted to propping up mal-investments – so there is general economic decline over time. But is there a formal big bust?
Readers of this should get to find out over the next few years – as governments seem determined to neither go for vast open inflation, or to allow the financial system to bust.
The economy will get worse – but in what way the process manifests itself will be very interesting.
Please take some time off from the simple process of survival, over the next few years, to observe and consider these matters. A bit of observation and thought will not reduce your survival chances (if survival is what interests you) – it may even help.
Paul Marks
Seven years ago I left the Conservative Party and have opposed it’s claim to be a vehicle for libertarian reform. I have contested two local elections as an Independent Libertarian candidate, and would do so again.
Now it seems that “libertarian” Conservative candidates and members of parliament believe that they may have to leave and set up their own party. I agree.
If the libertarians in the Conservative Party really take inspiration from John Galt, they should look at the closing passage of my alternative budget, published in 1995:
“There are many who will hope that the day never comes when a Libertarian Party is founded, to compete in the present electoral system. Whether or not we descend into the pit of party politics, I can see no reason for refusing to challenge those libertarians who remain in the Conservative Party. They are despised and feared by their supposed allies, and only suffered for their money and election time support.
Those libertarians who campaign for the Conservatives, without believing half of the bland collectivist verbiage they are told to support should ask themselves how far they are prepared to go, in the words of Francisco d’Anconia in “Atlas Shrugged”:
“[…] if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world on his shoulders – what would you tell him to do?”
“I… don’t know. What… could he do? What would you tell him?”
“To shrug.”
Just because you’re sworn enemies doesn’t mean you can’t be friends, does it?
– Snibril of The Carpet People by Terry Pratchett
Paul Staines is skeptical but interested regarding stories of a break away faction in the Tory party
Two stories in yesterday’s Telegraph caught my eye and made me smile, the first hinting that disgruntled young Conservatives (young means they are all over 30, but below pensionable age) are organising to split the party.
The second, more interesting article, seemed to me to
As a son of a Suffolk farmer, I am delighted to see that arable crop production in the west, pressured by the lure of cheap imports from the rest of the world, could yet be saved by this rather cunning invention.
Well, it made me laugh.
Never become mired in defending an unworkable idea out of some misguided ego or machismo motivation. Cut your losses and move on.
– James C. Freund
I imagine that the life of a satirical magazine like Britain’s Private Eye or the hilarious Brains Trust website must be getting progressively harder when you come across the increasingly insane forms of real-life eccentricity sweeping much of the planet.
The latest example is this news story about the fact that Britain’s police forces, are, apparently, “too Christian” for the liking of many would-be recruits, and moves are afoot to change small details in police badges to accomodate this.
Now I am an atheist with no particular axe to grind on this, but I cannot help feeling that the growing willingness of old British institutions to lose any trappings of anything remotely “western”, “Christian” or, heaven forbid, “British”, is not something to be welcomed. It is a sign that our civilisation is losing its nerve. Little things like this all add up to something bigger.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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