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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If the best we get by having a choice between a “democratically” elected Statist behemoth and a dictatorially selected Statist behemoth then we’ve got a major problem. So “scale” is important when discussing democracy. Granted local authorities can be corrupt as well, but the whole notion is to “set aside” bad government, not elect in a new batch of the same. In the end, the bigger the government, no matter how it is contrived, the more self serving and unresponsive it will be. The anti-federalists knew this, but lost out for the most part
– Commenter ‘Brad‘
The French involvement in the Rwandan genocide in 1994 has been something about which the chattering classes have been largely indifferent, much to the annoyance of many Rwandans. The Rwandan government recently unceremoniously threw out the French embassy, and any French institutions with links to the French state, after a court in France issued arrest warrants against several leading Rwandans (including the president) for assassinating former President Habyarimana, whose death was the event that sparked the genocidal murder of 800,000 Tutsi. That was rather like France in 1956 calling for the arrest of the few surviving conspirators behind the (sadly failed) plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler in 1944.
I cannot escape the suspicion that if somehow, however tangentially, the USA was involved then articles about Rwanda would be a far more common thing in the media. That said, I have no doubt that someone, somewhere has concocted a conspiracy theory that it was the CIA, rather than France, who was backing the Bad Guys in 1994, supplying the Interahamwe with machetes from a secret Halliburton machete factory in somewhere in Texas.
I believe in democracy because I distrust the elites. I distrust the elites because I believe that self-deception is widespread, and the elites are particularly skilled at it. Accordingly, I believe that it is important for those in power to have the humility of knowing that they may be voted out of office.
Others believe in democracy because they are hoping to see the triumph of a particular elite. Many liberals want to see sympathetic technocrats manipulating the levers of government, nominally for the greater good. I see government technocrats as inevitably embedded in a political system that inefficiently processes information. The more they attempt, the more damage they are likely to do. Many conservatives want to see government used for “conservative ends.” However, I believe that the more that government tries to correct the flaws of families, the more flawed families will become.
– Arnold Kling
The following item is for sale. One bucket of whitewash. This has recently been obtained by the English cricket team at a knockdown price during their tour of Australia.
The English cricket team wishes to sell this precious prize of English achievement in auction as quickly as possible. However, only purchasers of a more unpopular standing may need apply. They are therefore awaiting bids for this most useful of items.
Please note: only politicians or journalists may apply.
For those of you who have been following the story of the Pakistan born ex-Muslim blogger ‘Isaac Schrödinger’ who has been seeking asylum in Canada, I am delighted to report a very happy ending.
President Bush faces two tests on Social Security (the US government pension scheme).
The first test is whether he agrees to the deal US government officials have made with Mexico. This deal would allow Mexican illegal immigrants to the United States to collect Social Security benefits whilst having only paid 18 months worth of Social Security tax to the United States government – as long as they had paid at least eight years two months worth of Mexican payroll tax to the Mexican government (the Mexican government would keep this money, not hand it over). As this is an ‘equal’ deal should any American sneak into Mexico and pay Mexican payroll tax for 18 months, having paid Social Security tax to the United States government for at least 18 months, they will get a Mexican government pension, unlike Mexican citizens who have to pay far longer to get anything like a full pension – even a full pension paid at the Mexican rate.
Libertarians might object to illegal immigrants being deported as Eisenhower did in the un-PC named ‘Operation Wetback’ in the 1950’s, but paying them a government pension seems a bit odd to start with. Even ten years of ‘contributions’ is not sustainable… a illegal immigrant with documents claiming he is 55 years of age comes illegally into the United States, pays the payroll tax for ten years and then gets a government pension till he dies. Indeed government pensions are part of the reason that free migration just does not work in a Welfare State, and make no mistake, that is what the United States has evolved into.
If a poor person can enter the country and say “I have children, pay for their education”, “I am sick give me health care – Medicaid or emergency State and local medical care” and, after a while, “I am old, give me a pension and …” then tens of millions of come and indeed about 12 million already have come illegally, and the system will collapse a lot quicker than it would otherwise. → Continue reading: Social Security: two tests for President Bush
It is some time since the book was published, but as I am increasingly finding due to pressures of time, I only recently managed to finish the book “1421, the Year China Discovered the World”, written by former Royal Naval submariner Gavin Menzies. He writes in the tradition of revisionist historians who, fired by a sense that a group of people have been done a great injustice – the Chinese treasure fleet sailors – puts his own skills to righting a perceived wrong. It is an enthralling read, drawing on Menzies’ own navigational knowledge and seamanship, his thirst for adventure and historical knowledge, and above all, by an almost Sherlock Holmes-like ability to track down awkward facts to build a case.
The case is a pretty powerful one, although there are some holes in it, at least on a first reading. What makes the book enjoyable all the way through is that it does not strike the reader that Menzies is full of that tedious modern desire to debunk the achievements of great men in order to exalt his own cleverness. This trait, this desire to show that certain brave folk have feet of clay, bores me to tears. Menzies reveres Cook, Magellan and other European explorers, but he feels the Chinese, who put together massive fleets of enormous sailing junks, have been the victims of undeserved obscurity.
Without spoiling the book for those who have not read it, what Menzies does is to show how certain maps of the mid and late 15th centuries, used by the Portugese and folk such as Columbus, could not possibly have contained the information in them without someone having done the prior work of charting certain areas. He finds all kinds of evidence: fauna, flora, jewellery, stoneware, and patterns of trade. He shows how the Chinese, centuries before Englishman John Harrison invented his vital chronometer, cracked the problem of accurately measuring longitude. Menzies’ navigational expertise is vital to showing how maps of the Middle Ages, when corrected for certain errors, make sense for the modern navigator (as an amateur yachtsman myself, I find this sort of stuff fascinating).
I have a few problems though with this thesis, although they may not be fatal to it. First of all, the mandarin-run China destroyed pretty much all the known written evidence that the voyages that Menzies writes about took place. Several of the admirals who led the expeditions were killed or disappeared. Thousands of their sailors died or found shelter in the lands on which they were shipwrecked. Although a European monk – converting to Islam to avoid problems, perhaps wisely – apparently sailed on the ships and transmitted evidence of the expeditions, it is often rather hard to see how the details that Menzies uses to base his claim can be assembled coherently. I find it frankly incredible that not one major Chinese sailing officer ever laid down independently verifiable accounts of his actions and voyages and that those accounts were all destroyed. The probabilities of such an outcome strike one as low. Menzies relies to a large extent on informed and clever conjecture. But conjecture is what we have and I am not sure how all this would pass muster in a court of law.
→ Continue reading: The Chinese got there first – quite possibly
There is an interesting story about Simone Clarke, a ballerina with the English National Ballet who has incurred the ire of many by being an outspoken member of the neo-fascist British National Party (and who happens to also have a Chinese boyfriend). Calls have been coming in thick and fast for her to be sacked by all the usual suspects.
Lee Jasper, equalities director for the mayor of London and chairman of the National Assembly Against Racism, said: “The ENB must seriously consider whether having such a vociferous member of an avowedly racist party in such a prominent role is compatible with the ethics of its organisation. I seriously doubt that it is and that should lead to her position being immediately reviewed. I think she should be sacked.” He called on funders and David Lammy, the arts minster, to intervene.
As the ENB gets tax money, it is inevitable that this becomes a political issue, which is yet another reason no artistic organisation should ever be given public money for any reason whatsoever. However I really have no fundamental problem with the owners of a company or institution sacking people or refusing to hire them in the first place for no other reason than they do not like them (which is not to say I necessarily think firing someone because you dislike them is always a good idea). Just as Lee Jasper wants Simone Clarke to be fired, I would probably be disinclined to hire Lee Jasper to work for me because I just do not like people who support using the law to abridge the right of people to freely associate and dis-associate. Oh I share his aversion to racists (though Simone Clarke can hardly be a conventional white supremacist given that she has a Chinese-Cuban boyfriend), I just despise people who want to use the the state to back their social prejudices with the violence of law.
I am perfectly happy to state my prejudices and to act on them to whatever extent suits me on my own property and perhaps to try and get them acted upon within any company I have any degree of control over, but I do not expect my views to be imposed as the law of the land. So although the issue of the detestable tax funding makes this a more murky issue, if I was one of the Nobs at the ENB, I would hire and fire on whatever criteria I thought was appropriate to the job. If the bosses think being a member of the BNP is bad for their ‘business’, they should feel free to sack Simone Clarke. If they feel her nasty fascist politics make not a jot of difference to her ability to do the job and other considerations do not matter, they should tell the people calling for her to be fired to get stuffed… but it should be their call (and of course that will only be really true if they stop taking tax money to support themselves).
Finally, thirty or so years too late, the Communists have come up with a slogan with makes Communism sound attractive:
Well, not quite. Actually this poster is a send-up of the attitude of the music industry, which is now engaged in suing the Russian-based online music website AllofMP3.com for $165 trillion.
This meme – downloading mp3 files for free is Communism! – is but the latest in a long line of similarly wrong-headed memes collusively created by stupid anti-Communists and not-so-stupid Communists, or not so stupid anti-anti-Communists (also scum in my opinion), which make Communism look and sound far better and far sexier than it ever really was or will be. Workers demanding the right to free association is Communism! Workers going on strike is Communism! Adolescents having sex is Communism! Rock and roll is Communism! Having fun is Communism!
Please note that I am not saying that downloading mp3 files for free (or for that matter going on strike or having sex) is necessarily right or wise, merely that it is very attractive, and in a way that Communism never was. I mean, for starters, how many people, under actually existing Communism, had the kit to download, legally or illegally, and then listen to mp3 files?
I tried copying the above poster from this website, but I couldn’t make that work. So, I googled it and found it from somewhere else. Does someone perhaps have something against people downloading picture files for free? (LATER: the downloading of that poster is not a problem, see comments, but just a problem for me and my photo-processing software. Apologies.)
A mailing from the Royal United Services Institute invites me to a conference in April:
The Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) is both the backbone and the lifeblood of the country. It comprises the assets, services and systems that support the economic, political and social life of the UK. Any disruption, damage or destruction to all or part of the CNI could result in grave consequences for the functioning of government, the economy and society. Clearly the CNI is vital to the country’s well-being but the planning and implementation of its security is a Byzantine process; the CNI is a complex and uneven environment with ownership and responsibility spread across the public and private sector.
The threats it confronts are myriad including terrorist attack, industrial accidents and natural disasters. As demonstrated during the July 7 bombings, the Buncefield Disaster, and the foot and mouth outbreak, the CNI is a labyrinthine web of interdependent vulnerabilities that requires a coordinated and coherent response across its entirety to ensure its effective security and resilience in the face of such threats.
Dangerous rubbish. This is an epitome of the statist miscomprehension of complex systems, of economies and ecologies. ‘It is messy; we must coordinate it,’ they say. There are vital things that can be identified in advance as such, and other things not necessary to the ‘backbone of the country’, they think.
But the connections in a natural web are flexible, or they don’t get established in the first place. “Interdependent vulnerabilities” are what make systems adapt, the source of resilience. In unmanaged, open, systems everything is important and everything is unimportant: all things contribute their part to everything else (and you can’t directly measure their contribution), but competition ensures they are all redundant and replaceable.
The response to 7 July was a demonstration of improvisation by thousands of separate actors – millions if you count all those who took simple decisions to get out and walk, rather than passively waiting to be evacuated by the authorities, which would have been the orderly, planned, way to do it. London was functioning again in a day, despite, not because of, the “strategic interventions” that restricted the recovery of traffic flow, and filled the streets with police.
Livestock farming in Britain almost didn’t survive the Deprtment for Rural Affairs’ “coordinated” response to the last “foot and mouth” outbreak. Fortunately at the time DEFRA lacked the powers to coordinate more farmers out of business. The department didn’t see it like that: Its plans were frustrated, and that’s why things were as bad as they were. The ‘defect’ has been eliminated by the Animal Health Act 2002 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.
Nobody in government had to tell Tesco’s dealers to buy up more petroleum in Rotterdam when the Buncefield depot caught fire. The state way is a ‘strategic reserve’ of petrol under armed guard somewhere, distributed eventually by rationing according to who is important enough to get it, after declaration of a suitable emergency. As it was, loss of 20% of the country’s stocks overnight caused scarcely a single car journey to be cancelled – apart from those of the people no longer commuting to the flattened industrial estate.
Those ex-commuters would not be comforted by the thought that distributing tiles or soft drinks is not “critical” and not to be guarded by the state. What they do matters to them and their customers. When I want petrol, petrol matters; when I want tiles, they matter. We are all equally made poorer by the unavailablilty of either, because we can’t predict what we will want. Nor can the state.
How dare the planners decide for me what it is I want, as they do implicitly when they define some workers, some structures, as “key”? Well there’s a confirmation bias at work. What the state can best monitor is important (invisible, uncontrollable processes couldn’t be); so those who work for it are. Chaos is bad. State plans are designed to control chaos; therefore they do, and any unfortunate or unforseen consequences are just the remnants of chaos uncontrolled. Bad things are not in the plan, so not of the plan. They are part of the failure to squeeze out doubt, never caused or exacerbated by wrong or unnecessary decisions by the authorities.
The misunderstanding at the heart of planning is a fundamentalist belief that order and simplicity are public goods. They aren’t. It may be good to have them in your own life – if you want them. It is probably necessary to have them in managing a task, running a business, playing a game; to make any well-defined single goal attainable. Clarity in shared procedural rules is highly desirable. But if we want to live in a world where the goals and threat aren’t well defined, where we have a choice, and where how we live is not vulnerable to simple shocks from unexpected angles, then universal order and simplicity are bad. Conflict and competition, difference and redundancy are good. The more disorder, uneveness, and complexity our society has, the richer our lives, and the better equipped we are collectively to meet disaster by routing around damage.
And a “Long Tail” discussion is about the England cricket team presumably.
– Michael Jennings commenting on this at my blog this morning. Last night, England’s 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 managed a total of four runs between them.
A few days ago, Perry de Havilland suggested the rather cute idea of erecting statues of the US Senators who cooked up the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting law, on the grounds that this law has encouraged many firms into listing their businesses outside the United States and holding Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) outside Jefferson’s Republic. London’s stock market has benefited from this, as have bourses such as the Amsterdam Euronext, for instance. I do not know whether some of the impact of S-O has been exaggerated – this may be the case – but there is no doubt that from a regulatory point of view, the United States is not quite the model of laissez-faire capitalism that its supporters or indeed opponents imagine it to be. In fact, the US has been becoming a regulatory hell-hole for some time, such as with the recent crackdown on online gambling, to take one example.
Another man who deserves some sort of award for unintentionally driving business away from America is departing NY Attorney-General Eliot Spitzer. He is stepping down from the job to run for political office, and some say he has been doing that while in his present role. While some of his highly public campaigns to crack down on dodgy dealings should be applauded by free marketeers on the grounds that markets need laws against fraud, some of his campaigns seem to be driven more by the wrong-headed belief that markets must in some sense be “fair” and “perfect” in order to work in the interests of the general public. The mistaken idea that markets must contain no barriers to entry, contain “perfect” information and so on, has done incalculable harm to real capitalism, as also seen in the absurdities often perpetrated in the name of “trust-busting”. In his campaign against biased stock market research, for instance, Spitzer seems to downplay the old wise dictum, “let the buyer beware”, and presume to protect the customer against the shock-horror fact that banks might not be models of Olympian objectivity. There is a good and passionate attack on Spitzer’s record here.
Spitzer did some good but also a lot of harm to Wall Street and beyond. Competing financial centres, possibly including the rapidly-growing hub of Dubai, will rush in to fill the gap as capital becomes ever more fluid in this information age (yes, you read me correctly, I said Dubai, notwithstanding the local regional, er, difficulties).
In case any US readers get all hot under the collar about yours truly, a Brit, taking a prod at the US economy, I am only too well aware of how Britain is falling under the same regulatory menace, both of the home-grown and EU varieties. We all lose if the world’s biggest free economy becomes encumbered by bad laws.
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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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