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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I know two people who have bought new computers lately. One, the president of my company, bought a Vista equipped computer for home use. As a result, our company will hang on to our old computers as long as possible and then consider switching to Linux. True, it’s only one small company, but I imagine this same scene is being played out everywhere.
– the point being not that this is any kind of revelation, but that Hugh MacLeod, recycling the experience of one of his many commenters, is making Microsoft (with whom he is now working) listen to such stuff.
Maybe you recall that this time four years ago much was made here of the Rugby World Cup. This was because England fans like me genuinely reckoned England could win the thing. England went into the tournament on the back of two great wins in the Southern Hemisphere against the might of Australia and New Zealand, and when the tournament began they were the top ranked side in the world. If England played as well as they were capable of, they would win in some style. Actually, they did not play quite that well, but they still won, by the skin of their teeth and a famous Jonny Wilkinson drop goal in the final minute of extra time.
This time, it was all completely different. The only Samizdata coverage of this event so far has been Johnathan Pearce’s piece about how the shirts worn by New Zealand and Scotland in their group match were impossible to distinguish (I felt just the same).
I for one make no apology for this. I think that the way to enjoy sport is to pay close attention when your team is winning, but otherwise to relax and treat it all as only the game that it is.
England arrived at this current tournament in a state bordering on shambles. They won their first game against the USA, a rugby union minnow, but scored no points at all in the last half hour of the game while the USA even managed a try. And in the next game England hit rock bottom, being utterly annihilated by South Africa by the crushing scoreline of 36-0. Meanwhile, the other Southern Hemisphere sides were storming through their early games, winning by cricket scores. Any thought that England might be able to make a serious defence of their title was, frankly, ridiculous. → Continue reading: Quelle surprise!
I’m a blonde secular Jewish bisexual. That makes me very versatile. I can be secular when needed, I can be Jewish when needed, and I can flirt with anyone I need to. And it never occurs to anyone in the British media a Jewish woman might not be left of center so that was never a problem.
– So sayeth an American friend of mine when I asked her how she ended up working for the BBC.
I hate chewing gum. Well, not chewing gum itself, but the annoying things that a hideous proportion of gum chewers do with their gum after they have chewed it. These are the gum scum, and a conspicuous blot on Western Civilisation they are too.
During my summer blogging break, I more and more found myself ignoring politics on the internet. But I kept up with the gadget blogs, cataloguing as they do one of the most positive aspects of Western Civilisation. The gadgets just keep on coming, cheaper, smaller, better.
So, you can imagine my delight when I came across this posting at Engadget:
Revolymer’s latest concoction won’t play music or record your favorite shows, but if it passes European health and safety tests, it could end up in your mouth before long. The Bristol University spin-out company “claims that it has created a new material (dubbed Rev7) which can be added to gum that makes it much easier to remove from surfaces,” and in testing, it actually “vanished from street surfaces within 24 hours,” presumably from rain or street sweepers whisking it away. Moreover, the newfangled gum would even dissolve quicker than traditional pieces, and if all goes as planned, it could be launched as “early as next year.” Shoe soles, rejoice.
And pavement cleaners. More here.
This is how Western Civilisation works. It has a problem, and people moan about it, often believing it to be insoluble without social transformation or draconian punishments. But then, the techies get to work and deploy a technical fix. I am not saying that this particular technical fix will work perfectly, or that even if it does work well, technically speaking, everything about its deployment will be good. But this at least might be a step in the right direction, gumwise.
I mean, will non-non-stick gum become illegal to sell? It shouldn’t, but if mandating this new non-stick gum could result in cleaner pavements and fewer defaced adverts, you can bet your last fiver that it will be, which would be wrong. Chewing actually existing gum is not wrong; it is the throwing about of it afterwards that is the problem.
So, one step forward, half a step back is my guess as to how this story may develop next. That’s Western Civilisation for you.
I belong to a Facebook group called “Che Guevara was a murderer and your T-Shirt is not cool”. It has 10,935 members. It’s not nearly enough. To celebrate the anniversary of his death, why not join up and get on the right side of history?
– Marc Sidwell, with thanks to David Thompson for the link
My friend Patrick Crozier often writes about the harmful impact of planning restrictions on the housing market. If he has not already read this posting by Virginia Postrel, and this article of hers that she links to, he should.
A key paragraph in the article, which she recycles at her blog if only to ensure that it may continue to be read after the article as a whole has disappeared behind some Old Media Wall, goes thus:
Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both reflect and reinforce different cultural and political attitudes. One model fosters a family-oriented, middle-class lifestyle – the proverbial home-centered “balanced life.” The other rewards highly productive, work-driven people with a yen for stimulating public activities, for arts venues, world-class universities, luxury shopping, restaurants that aren’t kid-friendly. One makes room for a wide range of incomes, offering most working people a comfortable life. The other, over time, becomes an enclave for the rich. Since day-to-day experience shapes people’s sense of what is typical and normal, these differences in turn lead to contrasting perceptions of economic and social reality. It is easy to believe the middle class is vanishing when you live in Los Angeles, much harder in Dallas. These differences also reinforce different norms and values – different ideas of what it means to live a good life. Real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states.
And here is the concluding paragraph of the article:
The unintended consequence of these land-use policies is that Americans are sorting themselves geographically by income and lifestyle – not across neighborhoods, as they used to, but across regions. People are more likely to live surrounded by others like themselves, creating a more-polarized cultural map. In the superstar cities, where opinion leaders congregate, the perception is growing that the country no longer has a place for middle-class life. Yet the same urban sophisticates who fret that you can’t live decently on less than $100,000 a year often argue vociferously that increasing density will degrade their quality of life. They may be right – but, like any other luxury good, that quality commands a high price.
My only tentative disagreement would be to ask: unintended? If you are inclined to read this entire article, do it soon.
The more I think about the Green Belt that surrounds London, the more I find myself loathing it. I agree that greenery is nice to live near, very nice (I live quite near to St James Park, London SW1, and very fine it is too. It is what you might call the Buckingham Palace front garden, which maybe it once was for real, approximately speaking). But considering how huge the Green Belt is, hardly anyone lives in or near it. That is the whole idea. Judging by what the Green Belt looks like from the train when I go to visit my mum, who lives just outside it, it consists mostly of boring fields that only farmers have anything to do with or would want to. What would be nice would be lots of big parks, like Richmond Park or Wimbledon Common, surrounded by more houses.
If that makes daily commuting into London even more unpleasant than it is now, well, just put up the train and road use prices at the point of use. This would encourage people who now commute either to work nearer to home, or even to stay at home and do (more of) their work from there (maybe they could take a laptop into a nearby park). Plus it would encourage more and better railways and roads. The economy would adjust happily, if only all the economic signals were responded to rather than merely the signals that say that an ever growing number of people, from all over the world, are chasing a heavily restricted number of London houses.
Just in case you missed it – and I nearly did – I feel I should draw your attention to a document issued by HM Treasury at the same time as the Pre-Budget Report that has been exciting all the British media so. It is the “Service Transformation Agreement” [pdf] setting out in fifty-eight pages a general vision and departmental service plans. The latter, forming the bulk of the document, explain how each government department will use “identity management” to collate and share information about citizens and businesses.
They will be led by the new Ministry of Justice introducing “measures to overcome current barriers to information sharing in the public sector”. Those “barriers” are not mentioned in the document, but they are four, neatly pinned down by the MoJ when it was the plain old Department of Constitutional Affairs: 1) human rights law, especially the constructive privacy protections under Article 8 of the Convention, 2) the Data Protection Acts, 3) common law confidentiality, and 4) the fundamental rule of administrative law, ultra vires.
Pondering some of the recent stories about changes to UK inheritance taxes (the government’s ‘cut’ is in fact less impressive than it first appears), it occurs to me that there is one fairly respectable argument for worrying about huge inheritances, namely, that if people who work incredibly hard watch as other folk sail into positions of power and business wealth through the pure luck of having a rich family inheritance rather than through merit, it can be demoralising and encourage resentment against the broader capitalist system. Hence, so the argument goes, even though inheriting wealth per se is not wrong – it is the right of X to transfer legitimately acquired property to whomever he or she wants, period – it is sensible to foster an economic environment in which people feel they get a fair shake at what life has to offer.
I once was quite attracted by this idea of taxing inheritance to encourage some sort of ‘level playing field’, but I am no longer so sure. For a start, if an economy is expanding rapidly, it is hard to see how the presence of rich kids really demoralises less fortunate people. The economic process is not a zero sum game. Arguably, a sense of anger (“I’ll show those rich bastards”) may even spur the latter group to work incredibly hard to overtake the former. Rich kids may find they have to work harder, too, to impress people in certain ways who resent their wealth, and so on (I have seen this in action).
If a society is a closed one and the state controls most, if not all, of the key parts of an economy, then the existence of a small but influential case of rich people able to pass on their wealth without hindrance might also be a problem, but the solution to that is not to tax inheritance, but shrink the state.
A final point worth repeating over and over is the old example provided by the late Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher. He famously trashed egalitarian attacks on inherited wealth by rejecting the model that egalitarians use of society as a justification for their views. He said, if memory serves, that egalitarians tend to view life as a closed circuit, like an athletics track, and that if a person inherits a fortune, it is like an athlete starting a race 10 yards ahead of his fellows. But there is no fixed end to which people in society are racing, as they are in a 100m sprint. Instead, society is simply the short-hand term we use to describe the network of relationships between people exchanging things with each other to get what they want. To say that if I inherit my father’s dashing good looks or wealth means I have an “unfair” advantage over X or Y is meaningless in the context of an open society.
There are many practical, utilitarian reasons to object to inheritance tax (although other taxes are arguably even worse). But the moral case against it also needs to be made and the collectivist, zero-sum assumptions on which anti-inheritance views are made also need to be challenged for the errors they are. We cannot expect that job to be done by George Osborne.
(Update: over at the left-wing blog Crooked Timber, a contributor argues that the focus for inheritance tax, which is regarded as a good thing, should be on the beneficiaries, not the bequesters. But of course; if you are an egalitarian, it is natural to want to push the focus away from the right of people to dispose of their property to those that receive it. But the comment makes no reference whatever to why inequality that may arise from inheritance is in and of itself a bad thing. Such inequality is just assumed to be a bad thing, period. No actual argument, from first principles, is given as to why).
The prize for the most stupid comment of the debate goes to Senator John McCain for saying that he wished “interest rates were zero”. Senator McCain also said that he did not understand monetary policy, so he could just have been joking, but as he has previously expressed admiration for Alan ‘Credit Bubble’ Greenspan I can not be sure. Senator McCain also had problems hearing some of the questions – although no one else had a problem with this.
Ron Paul gave a good explanation of the bad effects of the expansion of the money supply by the Federal Reserve system. This explanation was clearly wasted on John McCain, who suggested in total seriousness that Ron Paul read Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ – which is absurd as Ron Paul has indeed read this book, and moreover because it showed that Senator McCain had misunderstood Congressman Paul to mean that the rich are rich because the poor are poor – when what Ron Paul was saying was that one of the bad effects of an expansion in the credit-money supply is that it tends to help rich people at the expense of the poor (which is not the same thing at all).
However, Congressman Paul did rather spoil things by waving his arms about and by the way his voice goes up and down for no reason. Still this is a matter of style – other people may like the Congressman’s style. What is not a matter of style was Ron Paul’s failure to mention Social Security or any of the ‘entitlement programs’. He even implied, constantly, that most Federal government spending goes to the ‘military industrial complex’ when most such spending has not in fact gone to the military since the 1960’s.
And whatever one may think of the present military campaigns, a claim that they are being fought to benefit the ‘military industrial complex’ merchants-of-death is absurd (even if one ignores the point that a lot of stuff is imported these days anyway).
Of course most of the other candidates did not talk much about the Welfare State either. They made ritual attacks on “domestic spending” but that was about it.
Tom Tancredo did make the point that most Federal government spending goes to the entitlement programs (those unconstitutional things that have been growing like cancers for decades), but he mostly twisted every question into an immigration question (for example to attack John McCain). I know that Congressman Tancredo is upset that there are sometimes no immigration questions in these debates – but twisting more than one question into an immigration question is not acceptable.
Fred Thompson said that the present entitlement programs were unsustainable in the long run and suggested (as first steps) people being allowed to use some of the Social Security tax to set up private investments, and that government benefits should be indexed to prices (not to wages). But he did not say much more than that. Senator Thompson also had the most stupid question of the debate directed at him (by some MSNBC moron whose name I did not catch) “who is the Prime Minister of Canada?” – “Harper” came the reply, but what was the point of the exchange?
Duncan Hunter gave me the impression, as he always does, of a good soldier who somehow found himself in the House of Representatives. He would be ideal man to be in a dangerous situation with, in that he would know what to do – and is also honourable (so he would not just save himself – indeed he would lay down his life to help the poor sap with him). However, his political policies (protectionism and so on) would have terrible results.
Senator Brownback was big on “family values” and being “pro life” (a not so veiled attacks on Rudy G.), but he also said he was in favour of an “optional flat tax” – so he did remember he was in a debate about economic policy.
Mike Huckabee, the Governor from Arksansas, told various folksy stories, which as usually did not seem to mean anything. But he also repeated that he was in favour of getting rid of the income tax. The Governor also said he would not have vetoed the SCHIP expansion. I suppose he squares the circle of no income tax and wild Federal government spending by supporting a sky-is-the-limit Federal sales tax.
Rudy G. did fairly well defending free trade and pointing out the tax cuts he made as Mayor of New City city. He also stressed his faith in technology and what human beings could do if freed from high taxes and regulations. However, he was rather vague in dealing with what government spending he would cut.
I am uncertain as to what Governor Mitt Romney said as I was distracted by the big neon sign saying “this man is dishonest slime” that I see over his head whenever he starts speaking. This may well be unfair to Governor Romney, who may be a very nice man in private life, but it is the impression I have of his public performances.
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
– General Charles Napier expresses a nineteenth century view of multiculturalism, quoted by Douglas Murray in the course of explaining that the West’s values are better.
I make no secret of my boundless admiration for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and so let me strongly commend an article in the International Herald Tribune called A refugee from Western Europe by Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie (the later of whom I confess I may have judged too harshly in the past).
It is important to realize that Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society, and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
Having recapitulated the Enlightenment for herself in a few short years, Hirsi Ali has surveyed every inch of the path leading out of the moral and intellectual wasteland that is traditional Islam. She has written two luminous books describing her journey, the most recent of which, “Infidel,” has been an international bestseller for months. It is difficult to exaggerate her courage. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in The New York Times, “Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him.”
“There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice”… truly words worth burning into one’s soul.
Given the craven dishonour of the Dutch government, whose promises to protect her wherever she went have proven to be worthless (as indeed the people of Srebenica discovered in 1995), if anyone knows if someone has organised a place for donations to pay for her security from the fanatical vermin who wish to silence her, I for one am certainly willing to put my money where my mouth is.
As Brian pointed out recently, when the Tories proposed raising the threshold at which Britons pay inheritance tax on an estate to £1m from the current £300,000, it would be denounced by the usual suspects as grossly unjust, etc, and once the initial furore had died down, the Labour government would copy it, up to a point.
So it has.
This proves a general sort of point that David Cameron, the Tory leader, should now pursue with all due vigour (although I doubt many of us crusty cynics will be convinced that Cameron has suddenly turned into Nigel Lawson, not that Cameron gives a damn about what a blogger like me thinks). It will have proved a general point that arguing for tax cuts, even supposedly middle class ones, is smart election strategy and can force the government of the day to respond. Frankly, if a politician like the Chancellor, Alastair Darling, acts cynically but it means people do not have to go through contortions to avoid paying some tax, that is progress.The government’s financial plans come with costs: the government intends to get rid of some old reliefs for capital gains, which could hit private equity, but at least it has simplified the tax code somewhat, which has become one of the longest and most complex in the western world.
Real progress, of course, will come when inheritance tax, along with other taxes, are reduced or in some cases, hopefully eliminated. And the situation will really improve when the next stage comes along – a general shrinkage of the state and the vast payroll of people living on public funds. Well, we can all dream, can we not?
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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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