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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Jonah Goldberg over at National Review Online’s The Corner blog makes the point that the election of Mr Obama, by a landslide, does rather crush the idea that colour is any longer a serious bar to achievement in the US. Well he has a point, although I am sure there are still plenty of racists around who might try to hinder the efforts of others on grounds of race. But as we free marketeers like to point out, outside the world intermediated via political coercion, being a bigot imposes a serious cost on the bigot, since being prejudiced against a smart, hardworking person on the grounds of their skin colour is stupid. A rational employer, for example, even if he is a bigot, will employ people if he or she can get a competitive edge thereby. That is why markets can have a general tendency, if they are allowed to work vigorously, against bigots, even if racial prejudices persist.
With the institutions run by the state, meanwhile, Mr Goldberg argues that with the election of Mr Obama, it is going to be much, much harder for defenders of racial quotas in things like university admissions to continue with the idea that reverse discrimination is required any longer. Hmmm. I personally am a bit skeptical: there is such a large vested interest in maintaining the politics of grievance that getting rid of reverse discrimination will not be easy. But I think one welcome aspect of Mr Obama’s election is that he will emphatically knock down the image of America as closed to non-whites. It has been nonsense for years of course, as a prominent, black economist like Thomas Sowell has been pointing out. Condi Rice and Colin Powell’s advancement to the summit of government hardly squares with the idea of a bigoted Republic, although having served under Republican administrations, they do not get much of a pass from the MSM. But the grievance industry, as an unintended consequence, just took a big hit with the election of the Community Organiser from Chicago. That is surely a good thing.
But what’s not open for debate, after tonight, is the sheer futility of trying to build a coalition from the center out. Because the center won’t stand still for any candidate.
– Dan McLaughlin, as pointed out by commenter Andrew X.
I attended a US Election Night Party in central London last night. It was wall-to-wall Obamamaniacs. They had badges (or ‘buttons’ as you Americans call them) on sale and while my first choice would have been Bob Barr, I chose a McCain/Palin one just to piss everybody off. Significantly, the Obama/Biden badges were on sale at £5 each while the McCain/Palin ones were going for a knock-down £3. A portent of things to come, I thought.
Anyway, since Perry has manfully tried to steer us all towards optimism this morning, I felt compelled to sink my hand into the mud, dredge up a big, smelly, greasy, filthy dollop of pessimism and smear it all over you. Oh come on, you know you love it really.
So, the USA has finally got its version of the Tony Blair/New Labour revolution and, if our experience is anything to go by, then ‘get ready for da pain’. I wish someone had had the foresight to slap an export restriction on it. It means (as if you have not already guessed) a whole heaping helping of new taxes and regulations but, most tellingly, a huge expansion in the public sector payroll. What better way to ensure future election success than with an army of loyal, grateful and dependent voters? That’s how they did it here. Welcome to the client-state. Can they do it? Yes they can. And they will.
The Republican Party (which I care little for) is probably buggered. Not only is it going to take them a long time to get over the now-universal loathing of ‘Bush and the neocons’ but they are also likely to paralyse themselves with an extended period of intra-party squabbling about which directon to take. Furthermore, it is very unsafe to assume that they will move in the right direction. We made that mistake here after the Conservatives got their clocks cleaned in three consecutive elections. “They have no choice”, we said “but to take the party in a more free market, libertarian direction”. Boy, were we wrong about that. Instead, they decided that what they needed was a big dose of what the other guy was having. Don’t be surprised if you find that the whole centre of American political gravity has shifted semi-permanently to the statist/left.
However, libertarian ideas (which I care a lot for) are also probably buggered. The Keynsians are busy priming their pumps which means that not only are things going to get worse, they are going to made worse. But do you think that Mr. Audacity and his chums are going to get the blame for that? Think again. “Unregulated, free market capitalism” (as if we have ever been within a cruise missiles range of any such thing) has already been fingered as the culprit for this crisis of regulatory statism and that gigantic lie has now become the accepted narrative. As I always say, its perceptions that matter. For crying out loud, the epidemic of violent youth crime in this country is still being laid at the door of Margaret Thatcher (“She created a greedy, me-first society where nobody cares about other people”).
Furthermore, we can expect to have to deal with an emboldened IslamoLeft. Regardless of whether or not there is any objective justification, they will see this as a vindication of their efforts meriting a redoubling of their political ‘jihad’. I’m not necessarily referring to bombs on buses here but, if I was them, I would be drooling at the sight of all those 20-something “Yes we can” chanters and gearing up to harvest a fresh crop of Useful Idiots (a Western commodity so reliable that it really ought to be the subject of a futures contract, like pork bellies or cocoa).
So, there we have it. Several reasons to be uncheerful. What do we do? I have no idea. Probably carry on doing this. What else can we do?
Have a nice day.
And come back soon.
Missing you already.
Unlike many, well, most of my compatriots, I am not filled with a deep sense of gloom and foreboding at the prospect of the most left wing president since FDR gaining the Whitehouse. In truth, I can see many reasons to think it may well be a far better outcome than if a Big State Republican like McCain won.
Of course Obama will bring an avalanche of policies that will be truly appalling and quite wicked, of that I have no doubt, much like his predecessors in office in that respect. As the global economy continues to come unglued, everything Obama does to deal with the mounting crises will in fact make things worse. Civil liberties will be hammered, all in the name of ‘fairness’, and the flood of regulations pertaining to every aspect of economic life will grow into a drowning ocean.
And that is actually the good news.
Why? Because in truth the Republicans under John “I support the bailout” McCain would scarcely have done much better. The economic global meltdown is only just starting to roll: if you think the sub-prime mortgage crisis was the biggie, just wait until you see the fallout from the fun and frolics of the impending mess in other areas, such as debt swaps. This is all going to get worse, a lot worse, and Obama is going to do absolutely everything to dig the holes deeper. Looking back on this period ten to twenty years from now, the Republicans crying into their beer tonight will be saying “thank Christ it was not us in office then”.
The lesser evil is not going to win this time and much as it may not seem that way now… or any time soon I suspect… in the long run this has a far far better chance of leading to the rebirth of a genuine pro-liberty, pro-market political culture, something which the gradual incremental surrender of recent times made impossible (such as the ‘pragmatic voting’ of people who want a smaller state for Republican candidates who ended up growing the regulatory state).
Many will find the glee of the statist left over the next few days and weeks hard to endure, but to be honest I have been walking around with a grin all day. Finally the era of gradualism is over and the masks are going to come off. The USA has voted for statism and it is going to get exactly what it voted for at a juncture in history where it will very quickly be impossible to hide the cost of those votes.
Obama is not the start of a new era, he is the death knell for the old one.
So I pop in to Guido’s, and at the top right, item (as of now) one in the Seen Elsewhere section, is a link to this short posting at the UK Libertarian Party blog:
The Taxpayers Alliance have reported that the Lib Dem Northampton Borough Council have awarded themselves a 7.7 per cent wage increase despite a black hole in their budget.
A Lib Dem Councillor on being told that the story was on the Taxpayers Alliance Website, said its ok we have had an expert in who said unless it was reported in Guido Fawkes we should not worry about stories on Blogs.
Alas, the writer of that posting, Guthrum, is unable to reveal his source.
Meanwhile, the comment war sputters along at the original TPA posting, tax cutters trading abuse with selfless public servants who argue that if councillors are paid only peanuts the results will be ever more simian. But I reckon the problem goes deeper than that. What with all the statutory obligations now piled upon local councillors, these people no longer actually make local decisions; they merely oversee the local versions of decisions made by others, in London and in Brussels. They are the local arm of a nationalised or EUropeanised industry. Few who are even sane would want a job like that. Hence the following, from a TPA commenter:
As one who lives in the very town itself, I have to say that one of the most upsetting of this mob is one Roger Conroy, a skeletal gnome with appalling teeth who sends out these sort of low-rent Pravda newsletters featuring endless blurry photos of himself hanging around public places looking like a mendicant, pointing at things which particularly offend him – holes in the road, paving slabs, squirrels, that kind of thing. The last one included him pointing at a tree stump, and proudly declaring that he’d forced the council to remove said tree as “a security risk”.
And nobody sane would want to spend all his spare time quarrelling with someone like that. Whenever anyone tells me that the Lib Dems are becoming semi-sane, I picture someone like Conroy and say to myself: no they aren’t. To Samizdata’s American readers, i.e. to most of them by the sound of the comments these days, let me add that not everyone in the UK behaves like Conroy, or thinks like him. Besides which, you too also have the occasional Community Organiser wandering around trying to get noticed, do you not? But I’m guessing yours have better teeth.
Blimey, those Atlas Shrugged themes keep on coming. Glenn Reynolds has a collection of reader thoughts about how, assuming Obama or for that matter, McCain wins, entrepreneurial vigour will be hit by any rise in taxes, particularly things like capital gains tax. Obama wants to raise CGT, which would be damaging to the US equity market, hence pension savings, not to mention curb new business formation. Way to go, Barack! Even so, the idea of entrepreneurs consciously choosing to cut back on any business plans while they sit out the first year or two of a leftist presidency is striking. Small businessmen and women are not getting much attention from politcians right now. No surprise: small businesses are disruptive; they tend not to be much interested in screwing subsidies or other benefits out of the state and are consequently not widely chased for campaign contributions. For sure, now and again a politician might talk about “helping small businesses” but there is a sort of going-through-the-motions aspect to it which means the pols do not really care that much. Just ask Joe The Plumber.
It is easy, in the current fears about the state of the world economy and what might be in store, to lose sight of what has actually been achieved in recent years. Fuelled by a mixture of education, supply-side tax cuts, a benign regulatory climate and the emergence of computers, small businesses in California’s Silicon Valley and other parts of the world have driven much of the growth seen in the past 20-plus years. Sure, big businesses get on the front page of Time or The Economist, but the small, or not-even-yet-started firms are the ones that matter. If the “animal spirits” of entrepreneurs are held back, we are all in a lot of trouble.
Anway, unlike some people who seem to want to torture themselves by sitting up all night to watch the elections, I shall be heading off to watch the latest James Bond film. Friends tell me it is not as good as the last one, with too much head-spinning action and not enough characterisation or jokes. But watching Daniel Craig blasting along in his Aston surely has to be better than watching Mr Magoo or The Community Organiser from Chicago. It is a shame Mr Fleming could not have written a novel where a bunch of crooked politicians wind up in a pool of sharks. Maybe that should be the next plot. Perhaps I’ll go ahead and write it.
Many of you will remember that back before the Democratic primary I was one of those who argued for a term of Hillary to help the Republicans understand that small government, liberty minded people won’t vote for the lesser of two evils indefinitely. My goal was and is always long term and I think four years of Hillary would have been a Carteresque setup for a popular swing in the direction of personal liberty and small government.
Three factors I didn’t anticipate have changed the dynamic since then. Any one of them would be an argument against that plan but, taken together, they add up to a veto. → Continue reading: I decided to endorse McCain/Palin
Free speech is about the state dictating what is or is not acceptable, not about free people freely expressing contempt for contemptible behaviour.
– Commenter Counting Cats
Formula One motor racing doesn’t usually excite me that much, because far too often F1 races are just tedious processions, in an order determined not by drivers but by mechanics, with far too much seeming to depend on pit stops and refuelling strategies. But the Brazilian Grand Prix today was something else again. On the very last lap of the race, Lewis Hamilton moved from 6th place to the 5th place that he had to get to be the champion, given that his rival Massa had just won the race. Minutes earlier it had started to rain, and Hamilton had switched to wet weather tires but the guy he had to overtake stuck with dry weather tires. It had to rain properly for Hamilton to win. It did, just enough for Hamlton to overtake on the second last bend of the race, in other words right at the end of the final lap of the entire season. Amazing. Youngest ever F1 champion, apparently. So, no credit crunch for him.
As for the big money that the England cricket team were chasing in the West Indies on Saturday, well … better luck next year. They will have to play very badly indeed to do worse than they did this time around. Plus, I thought that this headline was about the cricket, but it seems there was another English sporting fiasco this weekend, in rugby league. Oh well, win some lose some. It’s only games.
I was wrong. I thought I had already found the world’s most ludicrously named chain of clothing stores.
However, the world is full of things that one has not dreamed of. In Hong Kong last week I found this.
Charles Moore, writing in the Daily Telegraph, urges Britons compelled to pay the outrageous tax, sorry, licence fee to the BBC should refuse to do so following the recent episode over two radio presenters who chose to mock an elderly actor about one of the presenters having had sex with the actor’s grand-daughter. I urge readers to read the Moore article. It is devastating and gets to the heart of why the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross saga is not just a minor issue, but a brutal example of what is happening in the culture of the UK.
It is a lamentable fact about Britain that one of the things we are best known for these days is braying vulgarity, rudeness and cruelty, although certain issues, such as football hooliganism, seem to have become a bit less of a problem in recent years. For example, I tend to find US television far funnier, far sharper and yet also less cruel. Of course this is a generalisation – I am sure Samizdata readers living abroad can give me examples of cruelty-as-entertainment – but in the UK, it is becoming more and more the norm, not the exception. And the BBC, paid for by a tax, is at the heart of it. What is even more pathetic about the brutality of this culture is that its targets are not powerful dictators or scoundrels, since that might be dangerous. It is the sheer cowardice of these folk that appals.
As Sean Gabb has written, the BBC is part of the “enemy class”. As libertarians, we need to realise that privatising the odd bit of the state is not enough. The BBC, as part of the media class that is so interwoven with the political, corporatist class, must be destroyed, totally.
I must say that one of the few gratifying aspects of the current financial turmoil has been the way in which one of the UK’s biggest banks, Barclays, has decided to spurn any offers of help from the UK government – ie, the UK taxpayer – and raise funds from mostly private investors. In its recent raising of about $12 billion of funds to improve its capital position, Barclays made it clear that it wanted to stick with funding via the commercial market because, if it had drawn on the UK state moneys that have been provided for the likes of Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland, it would lose its freedom to set pay, among other things.
Now, free market purists may object that the Middle Eastern funds that have pumped cash into Barclays are not entirely private sector organisation and of course they have a point. But the fact is that as a taxpayer, I haven’t been asked to write a checque to Barclays, in contrast to other UK banks. Barclays has also kept its affairs away from the hands of such characters as Alistair Darling, the UK finance minister. Those banks which have taken state aid face the risk that the confidentiality of their clients, especially in the wealth management area, could be compromised. Of course, even before 9/11, banks have been required to compromise on secrecy due to things like money laundering laws and the like. But there is no doubt that once a bank becomes an arm of the state, such erosions of client confidentiality that have already occurred will increase.
And the reaction of certain parts of the media has been interesting. On Friday evening, the BBC economics correspondent, Robert Peston, told us in that extraordinary voice of his how Barclays shareholders would be penalised by having to pay a higher amount to obtain funding than if they had, like good little corporatists, gone along to the UK Treasury. Peston, as a corporatist himself and creature of New Labour, cannot fathom why a bank wants to stay out of the public sector. Barclays’ executive bonuses may be “obscene” as far as Peston is concerned, but at least Barclays avoided some of the worst excesses of the credit boom. It is, as a result, relatively strong as a bank. Barclays must be thankful that it lost a merger battle to buy ABN Amro last year. If its refusal to eat from the state table annoys BBC journalists – who of course are paid out of a tax – then the bank must have done something very right. One cannot exactly say that of a lot of banks these days.
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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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