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.
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“…and the nominees in the category of Best Fashionable Issue in a Guilt-Supporting Role are….(pause)…World Poverty (applause)…AIDS (applause)…the Iraq War (bigger applause)…Africa (applause)…and Saving the Planet (huge applause).
And the winner is…..(rustle, rustle, rustle)…Saving the Planet!! (more huge applause, whoops, whistles).
Sadly, the Planet can’t actually be with us tonight because its currently on location shooting another movie with Al Gore. But it is going to speak to us now by live satellite link.”
PLANET: (by satellite feed) Oh…oh…this is just so…I don’t know. What can I say? I’m overwhelmed, you know. I mean, I’m up there with World Poverty and AIDS, I mean, WOW, what competition!! I’m just….I don’t know, let me tell you that I am one thrilled, happy, proud biosphere right now. But, you know, this Award isn’t for me. It’s an Award for all the brilliant people who made it possible to save me, all those NGOs and…especially Al Gore…and let me tell you, I am so in awe of that man. I am totally, unbelievably excited to be working with him again. He is my saviour. Absolutely, you know. And I’m accepting this for him as well. What else can I say? I need a drink. Somebody get me a drink (burst of laughter, close up of Jack Nicholson busting a gut). But, seriously, I really want to thank the Academy and I also want to thank my agent, Murray Felberman….I love you, Murray, I love you man. So, I got to get back to work now but I just want to say that I love you all and when I get back to LA we’re going to have a big party (blows kiss).
There is a pull-out supplement in the latest Spectator, entitled “The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Cricket World Cup 2007”. Peter Oborne is very gung-ho about cricket just now (no link because the bit I am about to quote is stuck behind a registration wall – I read it on paper):
Never have there been so many outstanding international teams. Go back to the previous ‘golden age’ before the first world war and there were just three Test-playing nations: England, Australia and South Africa.
So far so routine, this being from a piece by Oborne entitled “A new golden age”, which he does explain. Basically, not only are there more good national teams now, and more excellent players, but they also play cricket that is entertaining to watch, unlike what was played a generation ago. But then comes this kicker, and in brackets if you please:
(Actually there should have been four: until 1914 the United States was well capable of competing at the highest level, and a cricket tour of the United States formed the background to Psmith Journalist, one of P. G. Wodehouse’s best novels. Unfortunately, the Imperial Cricket Conference, which governed international cricket, excluded America because it was not part of the British empire, so it went off and played baseball instead. This snub to the US at such a promising stage of its cricketing development, is one of the tragedies of history.)
I did not know that (more about this sad story here). I am not used to feeling spasms of hatred toward those who presided over the British Empire, although I often learn about things that make others understandably angry about these people. But I did when I read that. We have talked here before about cricket in the USA, but I do not recall this particular circumstance being mentioned by anyone. Apologies if someone did and I missed it. For while I would not put this particular tragedy of history down there with the Slave Trade and the Holocaust and the depredations of King Leopold, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the rest of them, this certainly does seem like a definite pity to me.
Talking of cricket, and what with cricket’s World Cup fast approaching, Samizdata’s travel correspondent Michael Jennings has been, well, talking of cricket. He has done a podcast with Patrick Crozier, about Australian sport in general, and Australian cricket in particular, what with cricket being the biggest sport in Australia. Did you know that Aussie pace ace Brett Lee (who will sadly be missing the World Cup because of injury) does commercials on Indian telly, and has had a pop hit in India? You do now.
And for more about how sport and politics intersect, do not miss this sports report by Guido Fawkes.
In the course of my day job, I have to give my boss a round-up of the Sunday business pages to keep track of all the latest news and features. Not surprisingly, the Sundays are full of stuff right now about Britain’s ‘super-rich’, such as those folk brokering lots of mergers and takeovers at the moment (see my post below defending private equity). Well, the socialist looters among us will be thrilled to know that the enemies of personal enrichment are alive and kicking. Here is a job ad in the Sunday Times:
“HM Revenue & Customs. Make a real difference, take our information to a new level” (I liked that bit)
“Attractive six-figure package – central London”
I am sure it is very attractive.
“You probably know HM Revenue & Customs as the people who collect tax but there’s far more to it than that”
I bet there is. Go on, we are dying to know.
“We play a vital role in law enforcement and protecting society”
Yep. When Gordon Brown fucked the UK pensions system, it was all about protecting society.
“90,000 work within HMRC, and we have over 40 million customers (taxpayers, claimants and others)
“Customers” – that is beautiful. And we ‘customers’ of VAT, income tax, inheritance tax, stamp duty, national insurance (tax), etc, are being cared for by 90,000 caring, sharing, hugging, cuddly people. Terrific.
“In every sense we have a huge responsibility for society and the economy, so customer focus sits at the heart of everything we do”
I do not know who writes these adverts, but the Comedy Central Channel is always in need of new blood. Hire this person immediately.
When I read the following column by Will Hutton, lambasting private equity firms for daring to take over big UK companies like supermarket J. Sainsbury or whoever, I laughed out loud. Here is his lead paragraph in Friday’s Guardian:
It is time to come to the defence of the public limited company, one of the great Enlightenment gifts to western civilisation. Increasingly capital, in the quest for higher returns to make vast personal fortunes, is going private to escape the demands of public accountability on stock markets. If uninterrupted, the long-term adverse consequences of this privatisation of capital for our economy, society and democracy will be profound.
Rubbish. Firms that are floated on the London Stock Exchange, Nasdaq or the Martian 250 are privately owned, Will. They are not owned by the state. True, limited liability laws, as the libertarian writer and friend of mine, Sean Gabb, likes to point out, present serious issues in terms of the gap between ownership, responsibility and control (I wrote about this topic a while ago). But to argue that private equity shops like Apax, Carlyle or Texas Pacific – those evil Amerikans – are taking what should be ‘public’ into grubby ‘private’ hands is economic illiterate nonsense. Firms exist to make a profit, Will. As Milton Friedman trenchantly put it without hint of apology to the gods of ‘social responsibility’, a company’s job is to make a profit for their owners, not to further whatever corporatist/fascist/socialist/ist agenda that happens to attract the gaze of Guardian editorialists.
Why the current wave of hysteria about private equity? It is being fuelled by two things: fear and envy. Fear of the power of these sometimes shadowy firms to buy up famous companies with great wodges of debt finance, or leverage, as the finance geeks put it. Envy, because of the large bonuses that the private equity honchos pay themselves and the often high profits they make in turning firms around. And of course no story about private equity can be written without referring to the Masters of the Universe lampooned by Oliver Stone in Wall Street or portrayed in books with such objective titles like Barbarians at the Gate.
In the main, what these firms do is target cash-rich firms that are run by often lazy executives who have presided over crappy business decisions. Take the meltdown of Marconi a few years ago, one of Britain’s most famous companies. That was a listed company. The destruction of value and jobs in that company remains, in my mind, one of the most disgraceful episodes in British corporate history and who knows, it might have been saved from making big errors had a private equity fund been in charge, rather than deluded executives. Private equity firms helped stymie Deutsche Börse’s foolish bid for the London Stock Exchange 2 years ago, and have turned around businesses. They typically buy and hold a firm for 5 years or more, take a hands-on approach to running firms before spinning them off to another buyer or floating them in an IPO. So Will Hutton should spare us sentimental guff about how limited liability firms floated on the stock exchange represent the perfect model of doing business or something that Adam Smith or Voltaire would exalt. They are merely one of the many ways in which economic activity manifests itself. As interest rates rise and the economic cycle turns, some of the excesses of leveraged buyouts will fade and private equity transactions will decline. No doubt Will Hutton will forget everything he has written and go back to bashing listed firms for their “short-termist” fixation with pleasing shareholders, or whatever.
As mentioned several times in these pages, by the way, one additional reason why listed firms go private is because their bosses prefer not to have to put up with onerous reporting requirements under US and other laws, like the onerous Sarbanes-Oxley rules. If Hutton or other big government advocates are worried about the migration of companies off the listed stock market, they might like to remember that point.
Right, my rant of the day is over. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.
Update: have slightly amended the text about Marconi, just to reinforce the point. One commenter, Bryan Appleyard, has argued that firms become “cultural” forces, as if released from the laws of supply and demand. I have heard some odd attacks on private ownership and M&A before, but that is a new one. Companies that have been taken over by private equity include the Automobile Association, Kwik Fit, Debenhams, various property firms, HEA, the US health chain, and many more. I don’t really see how the cultural issue makes a bit of difference to the folk who work in them or buy their products.
I’d also add that I think some of these private equity deals are in danger of coming unstuck, and no doubt much gloating and gnashing of teeth will occur when or if this happens. It is partly a function of low interest rates and the impact this has on asset prices. Monetary growth is strong at the moment and this is one of the ways in which money supply growth comes out. Another lesson from Friedman to remember.
The powers-that-be are moving to remove that annoyance to business-as-usual called the United Kingdom Independence Party by killing them with a legal move.
The UK Independence Party faces a crippling demand from election watchdogs to forfeit more than £360,000 of donations. The Electoral Commission is due to announce today that it is launching legal action to recover 68 separate donations made to the anti-Brussels party by one of its main backers […] The threat has stunned Ukip’s leadership, which admitted yesterday that forfeiting the money would effectively leave the party penniless […] He and Nigel Farage, the party leader, are furious at what they say is over-reaction to a “simple clerical error”. Mr Farage, who said Ukip’s annual income was about £250,000, said: “I would have expected a rap on the knuckles.”
What seems strange to me is that UKIP actually appear to be surprised something like this could happen. They are trying to break The System and neither of the two main parties who benefit from it really has any interest in seeing the vast body of consensus they both share threatened by outsiders. The LibDems are a predictable ‘given’ that do not really threaten the status quo… UKIP on the other hand is a wild card. If the UKIP thought the risk they posed as a spoiler was going to be fought out amongst ‘gentlemen’ via the ballot box, then they are more naive than I thought.
Also a pet peeve of mine… “launching legal action to recover 68 separate donations…” Recover? The money will be gobbled up by the Treasury. Seize, confiscate, appropriate, take, perhaps, but in order to ‘recover’ the money they would have to give it back to the donor. I have always though the legal use of the word ‘recover’ was the state speaking at its most euphemistically disingenuous.
To date, libertarian ideas have had no material impact upon the body politic.
True or false?
It must be a good show when a sociologist (who does not seem to think his discipline is a by-word for socialism) says:
A lot of progressives have stopped believing in progress… and have begun to look nostalgically to the past and have come to reject modern life in many respects and, in a very kind of desperate way, believe that in the good old days when things were small and tangible and when people lived in small villages, everything was all right.
Yah. When asked if those making charitable donations to certain green organisations campaigning to halt industrial-scale development in the third world realise the consequences of their support, this same individual says
Absolutely not, people do this for the best possible motives, but the kids don’t realise that by going there and telling them ‘this is the way you must live your life’, you’re actually being fairly coercive; you’re imposing upon people a lifestyle that is quite ill-suited to their circumstances, and you end up becoming complicit in an authoritarian world order where one group of people’s world-view becomes the dominant one and everyone else’s becomes quite secondary.
[my emphasis – JW]
Who is this erudite chap? Why, it is Professor Frank Furedi, interviewed on the excellent Mine Your Own Business documentary. This movie has been billed by some as a ‘right-wing’ counterpart to a Michael Moore production, but it comes across as considerably less polemical – and enormously more believable – than the average output from the portly and infamous self-declared son of Flint.
This is a useful film for the liberal cause. I am twenty six, and I have a lot of friends who I would describe as instinctively left-leaning. I have shown the film to some of them. I would like to describe a ‘road to Damascus’ scene, but there were no Pauls in my audience. Still, several seeds of doubt were planted, and that is a great start – I too was a socialist, but for that seed of doubt planted several years ago. Consequently, I talk to a lot of young people about extending the principle of personal responsibility. I have often thought that the young are natural libertarians – yet, because they are frequently reliant upon the patronage of others for their livelihoods, matters of economics concern them not. Socialism appears affordable and desirable when one pays less than 10% of their income to the tax man. Regardless, I have discovered that it is not so hard to convince a young person of the merits of what is dismissively described as “rugged individualism” by statists – until the environmental question is raised. This is much harder to overcome, because the underlying science is arcane, mastered by few and is thus vulnerable to manipulation. I firmly believe that green politics represents the ultimate bulwark against the adoption of liberal ideals. Therefore I recommend this film. It graphically displays the victims of international green politics – the world’s poorest – those that the green movement purports to champion. For this alone, Mine Your Own Business is a useful production. Young people who are socialists are generally well-meaning. They want to help the poorest. Fine – help the poorest the liberal way. Help them via voluntary charity. Decouple the link between the Greens and the poor, because the poor confused Greens are inherently antipathetic towards the plight of the poor, whilst championing them. They are no good to anyone – in fact, they can be positively deadly.
Thus, it is essential that the Greens are denied the ability to become a large ‘catch-all’ political movement by encroaching meaningfully into the economic arena. Scarily, they have come thus far and we must aim to roll their influence back to saving sequoias and killer whales, because when it comes to economics – that is, the realm of human welfare – Greens are instinctively genocidal. Of course, they will deny this, but ask them about the earth’s grave overpopulation problem. Most will concur but not extend this rationale to its logical conclusion because they are good (and misguided) people who would never associate themselves with a cause that overtly demands the slaying of billions. Deduction, fools! Admittedly, the Greens have their consistent advocates. And you thought the Final Solution was a pretty fucking awful idea.
The point is that the Green movement has crept into the mainstream. It urgently needs to be repulsed to the ideological fringes, because it is inherently anti-human. Mine Your Own Business contributes to this process, so it should be supported.
Only Blair could repackage scuttle as a political victory. The situation in the south of Iraq has worsened over the last few years as British troops have withdrawn from the main towns, leaving the local areas in the control of the Mahdi Army and the Shi’a militias, often under the influence of Iran. The Times reports that the main tasks assigned to the British Army: pacification and reconstruction, have not been achieved.
Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washing-ton, said the British move would simply hand more power to the Islamist groups backed by neighbouring Iran. “The British cuts will in many ways simply reflect the political reality that the British ‘lost’ the south more than a year ago,” he said.
Although there is no Sunni-Shia carnage to compare with Baghdad, the Shia-dominated south has been torn by a cutthroat internal competition for power that has turned bloody. Since August, both Diwaniyah and Amara have been convulsed by clashes between the mainly Shia Iraqi Army, and Sadr’s militia.
Unwilling to increase defence expenditure and recruitment, the government tried to hide behind a victory message whilst hoping to prevent the possible creation of a Shi’astan with a reduced force. Soldiers have done a sterling job under impossible political conditions, whilst stabbed in the back by the hypocrites in the Liberal Democrats. If the government cannot fulfil the security commitments that Blair undertook on our behalf, it should say so honourably and withdraw leaving the United States to hold the ring. If a hot war results from the Shi’a-Sunni tensions ensuing, Blair’s legacy will stand out: defeat abroad, failure at home.
One of the grey areas in European Union law is the primacy of community law in relationship to the constitutions of the Member States. As the treaties have encroached more and more upon the national sovereignty of Member States, this has become a fraught issue. It has resulted in a staunch defence of sovereignty or a surrender of the national prerogative. The country having the strongest debate upon this issue is France.
In a recent case at the Conseil D’Etat, Arcelor had requested a ruling on whether EU law violated the principle of equality in the French Constituion as steel companies had to comply with climate change laws whereas the competing industrial sector of plastics was exempt. The Conseil D’Etat declined to make a ruling and referred the case to th European Court of Justice. This has caused a debate in France as to whether the French constitution is now subordinate to the European Court of Justice.
The French court’s decision not to conduct a constitutional test on EU legislation is seen as significant as it arguably places France’s constitution below the ECJ in the legal hierarchy.
Although the supremacy of EU law over national law has been well-established, the status of national constitutions has been less clear not only in France but also elsewhere, including Germany.
Leading newspaper Le Monde was quick to predict on the day of the ruling that sovereignists and eurosceptics would probably interpret the judgement as a “Waterloo” of French sovereignty – something which became a self-fulfilling prophecy as sovereignists were eager to stress that even Le Monde called the ruling a “Waterloo.”
There is some debate as to whether this was the groundbreaking referral that some commentators have stated. As the ruling concerned EU law, it has been argued that the Conseil D’Etat was only deferring to the European Court of Justice on this matter as equality was a governing principle with European law. Therefore the European Union and the French Constitution are complementary.
Despite the radical arguments of some who view the entry into the EEC as a watershed that fundamentally abrogated British sovereignty, the right of Parliament to bind the powers of its successor is not a recognised convention yet. Given the political will and a majority in Parliament, the United Kingdom could democratically withdraw from the European Union and assert the primacy of British law. The illiberal EU may not recognise self-determination except as an entry principle, but the constitutional recognition of European law is a parliamentary derogation, nothing more.
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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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