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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That is to ask, who actually foots the bill for business taxes? It is much easier for a politician to raise taxes on businesses, which do not vote and are constantly portrayed as the villains by our virulently ignorant press, than on individuals. But we learn, from todays (subscription-only) Wall Street Journal Political Diary, that it is not so simple::
A new study by American Enterprise Institute scholars Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur shows that the corporate income tax is for the most part paid by workers in the form of lower wages. They found manufacturing wages were negatively associated with high corporate tax rates in a study of 72 nations.
Taxes have to come from somewhere. Businesses will pass costs on to those with the least bargaining power. Businesses have to choose between holding down wages, charging customers more (hard to do, in a competitive market), paying capital less (very hard to do, in the brutally competitive capital markets), and cutting capital re-investment (not smart if you want to be in business in three years). In the absence of an extremely tight labor market, keeping wages down is the path of least resistance.
but still a good one:
Three white collar prisoners are hanging around the yard comparing notes:
Former Exxon executive: They say I charged too much for oil. I’m in for price gouging.
Former Microsoft executive: They say I charged too little for software. I’m in for unfair competition.
Former Samsung executive: They say I charged the same price as everyone else for computer chips. I’m in for price fixing.
Lebanese Political Journal makes for grim reading. It is all well and good to wish for the destruction of Hezbollah (as indeed I do) but that does not reduce the sadness I feel when I read personal accounts of the cost to ordinary Lebanese people.
If only there was some other way but I cannot see what that would be. My fear is that the aftermath of this will kill off the modern secular state Lebanon is struggling to become.
The anger of the Lebanese people under the bombs who do not support Hezbollah is understandable but that does not change the fact Hezbollah exists as a state-with-a-state and that it attacks Israel and is dedicated to its destruction. Until there is a Lebanese solution to the ‘problem’ of Hezbollah, Israeli interventions are inevitable. Unfortunately I am unsure Israel has exercised sufficient discrimination to keep this as a war between Israel and Hezbollah rather than Israel and everyone in Lebanon.
People in Lebanon have ample reason to distrust Israeli good will or promises but then Israel knows all too well what Hezbollah has in mind for it and until the Islamo-fascists and their sponsors are taken out of the equasion it is hard to see how anything will improve.
The government is now proscribing two successor organisations of Al-Mujahiroun. These are Al-Ghurabaa and the Saved Sect, two cloaks for the continued radicalisation and recruitment of Muslims on British soil. However, they are not being banned because they pose a threat to our security, but for the glorification of terror.
Al-Ghurabaa and the Saved Sect are the first two organisations to be banned under new laws outlawing the glorification of terrorism.
John Reid, the Home Secretary, laid an order in Parliament making it a criminal offence for a person to belong to or encourage support for either group.
It will also be illegal to arrange meetings in their support or to wear clothes or carry articles in public indicating support for either group.
One can oppose this ban on utilitarian grounds: the individuals who organise these groups will merely band together and continue their activities under a different guise. If the symbols or pickets are written in Urdu or Arabic, what policeman or member of the public could ever understand the acts that they were glorifying. Such a placard may as well state “Ronaldo forever”. The practicality of this ban is in grave doubt. At best, there is a slender chance that it may hinder the recruitment of those we should fear most: white Muslims who can walk unhindered and cause the greatest headache for the security services
But utilitarian arguments trade on the ground that the prohibitionists choose to stand upon. No matter how much we may oppose the precepts of these two groups, proscription is wrong. Liberty includes allowing the supporters of terrorist acts to stand up and air their views for all to witness. If they are not linked to acts of violence, and do not step beyond the boundaries of our traditional laws on incitement, who are we to gag and silence those we do not wish to hear. Security is not bought by stopping your ears or allowing the state to stop them for you. You cannot rely upon your own vigilance in identifying those who pose a threat to you, once the state has silenced them and you.
The New American Century is beginning to prove trying. I have remarked here before about the spreading fondness of governments for extraterritoriality, and the cartelisation of states. The global War on Drugs of the last century has been almost entirely driven by the US, but has operated through state cartels. Non-Americans can hold themselves and their countrymen to blame for going along with the moralistic folly.
Now, however, the US is starting to apply its laws in ways that purport to apply in the rest of the world, and to reach into other states and impose those laws on their residents, their citizens, who would have had every reason to believe they were entitled to live according to local custom. I suspect that this is partly a phenomenon of power, that any other state with the power to do so would be similarly tempted. But the US, a state founded on the principle of limited self-governance, should know better. Unfortunately limited self-governance looks more and more tainted with unlimited self-righteousness. As with the War on Drugs, so with the War on Terror – “the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.”
Last week we had the NatWest three: charged with a ‘crime’ against a British bank in Britain that neither the bank itself nor the normally trigger-happy FSA and Serious Fraud Office had taken any interest in, yet extradited to Texas – “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.”
This week the chief executive of an internet gambling firm listed on the London Stock Exchange is arrested air-side on ‘racketeering’ charges on his way to Costa Rica The basis appears to be that some Americans choose to gamble online, and for their immorality someone must be punished – that the person is a foreigner operating entirely legally according to the foreign jurisdiction he does business in does not bother the feds, who “subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.”.
Something is askew when the US federal government purports to operate such an extraterritorial jurisdiction over a Briton, but will not touch gambling in the Native American territories on the fiction that they are independent.. try putting anything but tobacco in your peace-pipe, and see how far being in an Indian Nation exempts you from the mission of government. You probably will not get that far. Nor have I seen signs of a civil war being levied against Nevada and New Jersey. US forces will happily bomb obscure Peruvian and Afghan drug fields over enormous logistical difficulty, and without regard for (foreign) casualties (“…plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people”). Meanwhile Las Vegas – a large, well illuminated target close to several major air-bases is mysteriously still standing.
Forget several property for a moment. To insure any of the rights we have against a global tyranny, we need de facto several jurisdiction: separate and equal station among the powers of the earth. The state does have a value, folks. But we forget at our peril that the key one is to defend us against other states. If they club together against their peoples, or subordinate their power to other states, then states might as well not exist. The limiting cases are places like Congo where neighbouring powers prey at will on the population.
This should mean something:
Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let of hiderance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.
But I do not think it does, much. Even Britain, notionally a Great Power, scarcely pretends to assert its power for the protection of its own people’s interests.
There has to be somewhere to run or all the world ends enslaved to a monopoly of power. Let us have some diversity. Disunited nations would be a good thing. What will it take to get nations to declare their independence of the international system?
The Farnborough Air Show is on near London this week. In the commercial jet market, things have changed dramatically since the Paris Air show last year. A year ago Airbus had their first flying displays of their very large new A380 airliner, and for the fifth year in a row Airbus received more orders for airliners than did Boeing. Through a combination of more modern aircraft, more modern production lines and (perhaps) state subsidies, Airbus has come from a distant position in the market to market leadership.
However, this year Airbus fallen to a distant second in the market, having received only 117 orders this year to Boeing’s 480. The A380 is behind schedule, the first airlines to receive it will be getting it six months late, and Airbus has scarcely received an order for it in the last couple of years. (Total orders are presently for 159). Boeong has received orders for 400 of its new mid-market 787 aircraft (and orders for Airbus’ A330 and smaller A340 variants have dried up completely) and is also significantly ahead of Airbus in the upper mid-market segment containing Airbus’ A340-600 aircraft and Boeing’s 777-300. Airbus’ British shareholder BAe Systems would like to sell its minority stake in Airbus, and therefore recently commissioned N. M. Rothschild to provide a valuation of the stake. The resulting valuation (€2.75bn) was dramatically less than the (€4bn) BAe Systems had anticipated.
The short term reasons for this turnaround are fairly obvious. The dollar has weakened significantly compared to the euro. While Airbus has hedged its currency exposure on existing orders and these will therefore still be profitable, it lacks this advantage going forward on new orders. While Boeing’s production methods were outdated five years ago, its logistical systems have been dramatically improved since, and in terms of production it once again can compete. The A380 delay is certainly a short term factor, but most aircraft programs feature a delay like this at some point.
But these are only the short term reasons. There are more long term reasons, but the financial press seems to have failed to put the whole story together. → Continue reading: Airbus misses a paradigm shift
I think Tory leader, windmill pioneer and attendee of uber-Chav celebrity bashes, David Cameron, might want to take a break from the social whirl and read this about the much-derided U.S. tax cuts of 2003:
In the nine quarters preceding that cut on dividend and capital gains rates and in marginal income-tax rates, economic growth averaged an annual 1.1%. In the 12 quarters–three full years–since the tax cut passed, growth has averaged a remarkable 4%. Monetary policy has also fueled this expansion, but the tax cuts were perfectly targeted to improve the incentives to take risks among businesses shell-shocked by the dot-com collapse, 9/11 and Sarbanes-Oxley.
This growth in turn has produced a record flood of tax revenues, just as the most ebullient supply-siders predicted. In the first nine months of fiscal 2006, tax revenues have climbed by $206 billion, or nearly 13%. As the Congressional Budget Office recently noted, “That increase represents the second-highest rate of growth for that nine-month period in the past 25 years”–exceeded only by the year before. For all of fiscal 2005, revenues rose by $274 billion, or 15%. We should add that CBO itself failed to anticipate this revenue boom, as the nearby table shows. Maybe its economists should rethink their models.
Britain’s Conservatives believed – at least during the 1980s when a certain Nigel Lawson was Chancellor – that cuts to marginal tax rates could actually generate more, not less revenue for the State, as well as being a good thing in its own right for widening economic liberty and reducing the bite taken out of the pockets of the citizenry. Now, I know that some libertarian purists out there might actually be suspicious about a measure that would raise more revenues, even if it is a good thing for individual taxpayers. I say let purity be damned. we know that politicians are not motivated much by supposed abstract concerns about the balance between the individual and the State these days, but the practical benefits of cutting tax rates should still resonate with our political classes. The Laffer Curve still operates, at least if you accept the WSJ article. Even current Chancellor Gordon Brown might wake up to the sort of facts that the Wall Street Journal is on about. It would be nice to think that the Tories would seize on such data, make a fuss, point out the benefits of flattening the tax code, simplifying it and cutting rates. Instead, unless I am missing out here, is silence.
Maybe the implosion of the current government means the opposition can afford to slump in the hammock during the back end of summer and wait. But it would be nice to think that they could be a tad more ambitious. Only a tad – I would not want our Dave to break into a sweat or anything.
Bob Bigelow has released his first baby picture.
The Genesis 1 space station test article is working so flawlessly the Bigelow crew is wandering about with glazed eyes or collapsing to recover from long weeks of sleep deprivation.
The module unwound and inflated to its full 8 foot diameter, the solar panels are delivering power and they are receiving more telemetry data than they can handle.
 Photo: Bigelow Aerospace
The Hezbollah missiles landing on civilians deep within Israel change everything. I would suspect that the Syrians and Iranians who have supplied Hezbollah with the weapons to effectively attack Israel’s cities will soon find Israel’s fury directed against them directly. If we start seeing chemical or even radiological warheads, which are by no means beyond possibility, the Israeli reaction scarecely bears thinking about.
Will the US and UK get dragged in? Well given that Syria and Iran are both also integral to the insurgency against the US and UK in Iraq, it may well be in the interests of the allies to strip away the fiction that these nations are not a key enabler of their woes in Iraq. A wider Middle Eastern war would open all manner of options against the manufacturers and suppliers of the weapons killing US and UK forces. The upside/downside could be considerable. Roll the dice.
Pondering putting your spare cash onto petroleum futures? You had better do it quick.
This by Greg Burch, about the differences between Marxism and Islam, linked to by Instapundit, strikes me as shrewd. And the posting is also, unlike other blog postings I have found myself reading recently, mercifully brief, saying a great deal in a few pithy paragraphs.
Marxism, Burch reminds us, promises heaven on earth, and in time, this promise will prove wrong. So, to defeat Marxism all you have to do is quarantine it, and then wait for it to defeat itself. But Islam makes no verifiable and hence self-defeating real world promises.
This difference makes the nature of the protracted struggles faced by the West against these two fundamental challenges very different. In many ways, there was a basic premise inherent in the policy of containment taken against the communist world: Wait long enough and the truth of the superiority of liberal societies will become apparent to the world. But a policy of containment against Islamic imperialism cannot hope for such eventual success. Since Islam does not make any ambitious proposal to improve the lot of its followers in the real world, but only in an imaginary afterlife, no amount of waiting can undermine its claim to truth.
I do not claim that this is in any way a new insight, but it is an important meme, well stated. It also feeds in to what Johnathan said yesterday, about us “setting an example” to Islam rather than barging in and re-arranging it.
Another good Islam-related meme emerged from a not-that-recent (but it deserves to be placed on the Samizdata record, I think) conversation between me and Perry de Havilland. Perry perpetrated that widespread meme-that-ain’t-so, to the effect that Islam needs a Reformation. The muddle here is that it confuses Reformation in the sense of reform in the direction of sanity and niceness with reformation in the direction of more devoted adherence to the original texts, which of course means the exact opposite of sanity and niceness.
My so far rather limited reading of the Koran causes me to agree with Islamic fundamentalists about what the Koran says and what it demands of Muslims. Reformation, in the sense of what happened historically in Europe with Christianity – believers reading the stuff for themselves and not allowing the message to be bent out of shape by priests before it gets to them – is what Islam has for many decades now been busily engaged in, and that, from the point of view of Western Civilisation, is the problem, not the solution.
Perry quickly rephrased what he was all along trying to say. Islam, he said, needs a New Testament. I.e. something fundamentally different for the fundamentalist true believers to read. Again, I am sure that this is not an original notion, but it is still a meme to conjure with, I think. It is a lot to ask, but that is the point. Islam has to change a lot before it can hope to rub along contentedly with the rest of us.
I suspect that lots of people benignly raised within the Muslim religious tradition, but appalled by what Islam actually says, have many times attempted such a project, but that Original Islam 1.0 contains not only the contradiction of all such niceness memes, but also other memes which have the effect of preventing the niceness memes from ever catching on and becoming more than historical footnotes.
However, the world is a very different place now to what it has been throughout most of Muslim history, and I remain optimistic that Islam may eventually reform itself, in the sense that Perry and I and everyone else who is civilised would all like. Such a benign transformation would be unprecedented and utterly out of character with almost everything that went before in Muslim history. But, so are mobile phones.
Overseas readers often scoff at my pessimism about the state we are in in Britain. Scoff may be the wrong word. Scoffing is now under close supervision:
David Ashley, headmaster of Greenslade primary, says that pupils who bring in packed lunches “are allowed chocolate on a biscuit but not a Mars bar”. If such sweeties are spotted, parents are called in for a quiet word.
At Charlton Manor primary, the head, Tim Baker, says: “Children get stickers for healthy boxes . . . If a child brings in a chocolate bar, we take it out of the lunchbox and give it back to the parent at the end of the day.” Pupils give each other away, he confides: “They say, ‘Miss, he’s got sweets in his box’.”
Perhaps the scariest thing about the article from which that comes is the vaguely approving tone. Here is information about what is being done, no questioning that it needs and should have government attention.
Earlier today, Tim Blair laughingly reported on a senior Pakistani shi’ite cleric falling victim to a suicide bomber – presumably fielded by his sectarian rivals. The manner of this man’s demise carries a strong element of poetic justice, considering he allegedly supported Hamas and Hezbollah – both terrorist groups not unfamiliar with “martyrdom operations”. However, I do not feel as jolly about this cleric’s death as many of the commenters on the linked Blair thread. Certainly, when a prominent Hamas and Hezbollah supporter gets his comeuppance in the so-very-appropriate form of a zealot with a bomb strapped to his gut, one could be forgiven for revelling in schadenfreude. Trouble is, such an event is precisely the sort of thing that could trigger a large-scale Islamist movement that overthrows Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf, or adds further impetus to ongoing efforts to assassinate him.
The Economist’s recent article on Pakistan is a timely reminder that the West’s current alliance with that nation is conditional in the extreme – and almost wholly reliant on Musharraf – whose death could not come soon enough for a large number of people he rules over. If he is assassinated, the General’s successor might well be cut from a far more fundamentalist cloth. If this circumstance arises, a nuclear-armed Pakistan becomes an even more alarming prospect; raising the stakes over Kashmir and making nuclear weapons proliferation more likely. The risk of a nuclear weapon being detonated in a Western city is proportionate to the greenness of Musharraf’s replacement.
If the Pakistani leadership was to fall into fundamentalist hands, this would represent a massive setback in the global struggle against international Islamic terrorism. The mission in Afghanistan would be deeply complicated, for a start. Then there’s the problem of Pakistan becoming an even greater hub for Islamofascists. I will stop there; the list of conceivable heinous consequences could fill many pages. Unfortunately, “our boy” in Islamabad has made a lot of bitter enemies during his rule, and – according to the Economist article linked above – has also governed in a way that makes a post-Musharraf Pakistan a very ugly prospect indeed. Musharraf’s removal or death would likely be catastrophic to the interests of those nations struggling against Islamofascism.
Certainly, the Pakistani cleric copped it most aptly. However, any gloating at the nature of his death may well be overshadowed by wider consequences relating to it.
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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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