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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Tim Worstall justifiably gets angry about this plan to force owners of coastal properties to allow the public to have access to the properties, and without compensation. I weighed in with the comments on the board and deciding not to let the discussion go to waste, I wanted to quote a character called Kay, who comes up with what I might call the “brute utilitarian” argument one hears for compulsory purchase/eminent domain laws here and in other nations:
Allowing veto rights to every landowner and shareholder results in complete deadlock. That ridiculous stance may be taken by some who posted here, but the rest of us would rather live in an advanced civilisation with electricity, railways, roads, public limited companies, etc.
I sense that this argument is nonsense, but there may be something in it. It is interesting that the commenter mentions limited liability corporations – we have been over that issue before at this blog. But is it really the case that say, electricity could not be easily conveyed across the UK without coercing landowners into letting this occur? I assume, of course, that if many landowners refused point blank to do this, that the situation would result in lots of very small, easy-to-move electricity generators being built. But in practice, the vast majority of landowners want easy access to electricity, water and roads like everyone else, and with a bit of inducement – shares in revenues from tolls, rental payments for pipes and pylons – would agree to things being built on their land. There may be “extreme cases”, where landlords hold so much sway that they try to strangle beneficial technologies across a vast tract of land, and I suppose this is possible, but it strikes me as not very likely. I’d be interested to know, for example, whether the 18th century canal-builders required a lot of compulsory purchase laws to get their way. If memory serves from reading history, what happened was a lot of haggling and the odd bit of special legislation passed in the House of Commons.
I think the problem with the “brute utilitarian” argument is not simply its undertone of “We want – we take”. It is also its deafness to the fact that most people, most of the time, have sufficient rational self interest to act in ways that benefit not just themselves but most of the rest of us. The trouble is that once the enthusiasm for seizure takes hold, it is often hard for its proponents to even think about how things can be ordered differently. I have heard people express admiration for the Continental, Roman Law-based system which supposedly is so much less messy and fuddy-duddy than the Common Law one in this respect. When people start to invoke “efficiency” and so forth, guard your wallet and front door.
Meanwhile, for a good discussion on the tricky issue of how property claims can be arrived at justly in the first place, this book is worth a read. One thing that bugs me about discussions about property is when some character will argue that “X or Y stole the land from poor benighted natives in the Year xxxx BC so all property since is tainted”, as if that somehow justifies looting now. It does not.
As an aside, it is also worth noting that compulsory purchase laws, particularly when used to turf people off their property to create other, supposedly more valuable economic outcomes, is a vehicle for corruption.
Update and side-observation: it is only fair to say that some – in my view misguided – libertarians have tried to argue that land, because it was not created by Man, should be taxed more heavily than income or other things, and for some people, this sort of tax is a sort of “rectification” of any previous injustices inflicted by the acquisition of property. The name of 19th Century writer Henry George occasionally comes up. I was once quite taken with the idea but there are weaknesses to it. For a start, a person who makes more use of land than was the case before because of his entrepreneurial vigour should not, in my view, be penalised for thereby raising the value of that land, which is what a land-tax, if based on land values, would do. There remains this view, widely shared, that land should not be ultimately owned by any individual because land and minerals, or indeed the sea, is “just there”, an inert set of substances that we can manipulate, but not create new value from. That seems to undermine the very notion of wealth creation per se, in my view.
Oh, and here is an item from the Ludwig von Mises Institute on eminent domain.
Another update: Devil’s Kitchen shares my opinion but does so in a more, ahem, salty way. Check out the comments, where Samizdata regular Ian B takes on Kay Tie. In boxing terms, the judge would have had to stop the fight to protect Kay from serious injury.
I am deeply concerned about the sort of world we will bequeath to our children and I promise you, the minute I get back from my holiday I will write a letter to my MP demanding that they do whatever it is you want them to do. But please, for the time being, fuck off bastard hippies.
– A fictional character articulating the sane human response to PlaneStupid, courtesy of the Daily Mash.
I fear that for a lot of campaigners, being a nuisance is an end in itself, and other people’s annoyance is taken to signify how stupid and morally worthless ordinary people are – and thus as reinforcement by comparison of the overweening self-esteem of the campaigners themselves. Something similar is found in the shock-jockery of the blogosphere. I frequently spot the attitude in some NO2ID-ers but I do try to counteract it. People are entitled to want to get on with their lives in a way that is meaningful to them. If you want to persuade them, then give them a reason to care and listen, don’t bully and excoriate them. In the words of Dale Carnegie: “You can’t win an argument.”
I suppose it is a sign of advancing years, and having lost some close friends to cancer or having been scared by a close relative’s condition that the notion of a cure for the gremlin should weigh on my mind a bit more than it used to. (You are definitely getting old, Ed). I cannot help noticing, when reading Instapundit as I do every day that Glenn Reynolds has been putting up regular links to the growing use of nanotechnology in delivering cancer-busting chemicals to the body with incredible accuracy. Here’s another one. The more accurate the delivery of the drug, so the reasoning goes, the fewer the unpleasant side-effects associated with things like chemo treatments, and the greater chances of beating the cancer. The steady trickle of news items and articles has yet to become a flood, but I have this sense that the flood may be pretty close.
When I read Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler back whenever it was, the idea of tiny nanobots being used to treat cancer was, then, still on the edge of what folk thought might be possible. There is a way to go yet but it is a mark of how certain stories get below the radar of current events that nano-medicine has crept up on us so quickly, rather as the internet did about 20-odd years ago.
Faster please!
Not much information yet but a Marine fighter is down in a residential area on the approach to Miramar. No fatalities reported so far: the pilot ejected and there are no reports of deaths on the ground.
That might well change but I hope the worst result is only a destroyed home.
Unless things have changed since 1978 when I was doing a building automation system for them, the County of San Diego has its main building complex just off the end of one of the runways at Miramar, so one would presume services were quite rapidly on the scene.
It’s definite. No casualties.
Later reports indicate the early good news was wrong, sadly. There may have been three casualties on the ground.
I generally like the columns of William Rees-Mogg on economics; while he is no hardline free marketeer like the scribes here, he has a sharper nose for the errors of interventionism than many MSM writers. He also has a knack – which comes from a man who is of great age – for putting current events into a proper historical context. But he makes this statement in his generally admiring writeup on Roosevelt that is surely downright wrong. Not just a teeny-weenie bit wrong, but disastrously so for this whole argument:
In March 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated as president, he had to face the Slump. Unemployment was by then running at about 30 per cent. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, based on an extensive programme of raising employment through public works. Unemployment did actually fall to about 5 per cent by the time of Roosevelt’s second election victory in 1936. There continued to be stumbles along the way, particularly in 1937.
Well according to official US statistics referred to here, unemployment certainly did not fall anything like as low as that during FDR’s 1930s period in the White House, and then only dropped significantly once the Second World War started.
I do not know where Rees-Mogg got his figures from or what sort of statistical resource he is using, but this is not a minor discrepancy. To suggest that unemployment fell as low as 5 per cent in the mid-1930s seems to fly totally in the face of the official data.
As Brian Micklethwait noted the other day, the UK news satire quiz show, Have I Got News For You, is sometimes a quite accurate barometer of how opinion is trending among what I might call the self-consciously trendy chattering classes. The latest episode was compered by some comedian I vaguely recognised who looks like a slightly supercilious upper sixth former. Understandably, a lot of the quiz was taken up with taking the piss out of the disgusting Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, over his recent shambolic performance over the Damian Green affair. Like Brian, I am now going to recall the following bit of dialogue. There will be some words missing but here is the gist of it:
Ian Hislop: It is amazing, isn’t it, that they were were able to get 20 or so policemen to raid Mr Green’s offices and search his house. Where are all these guys when you need to catch a burglar or something?
Compere: Ah, yes, that sounds like the sort of drivel you read in the Daily Mail.
Hislop: So let me get this right – are you saying that is perfectly okay for a bunch of anti-terror policemen to arrest, search and hold an MP for asking annoying questions in the House of Commons?
Compere: I am in all in favour of putting Tory MPs in jail.
Hislop: raised eyebrows, obviously thinking to himself “I cannot believe this fascist prick, how did we get him on the show”?
Like I said, HIGNFY is an interesting temperature gauge on UK current affairs. And my impression was that Hislop regarded the Damian Green affair as an outrage, while a lefty “comedian” regards it is acceptable to crack jokes about locking up MPs just because of their views. These supposedly “edgy” or “cutting edge” comedians are nothing of the sort. They are, now, part of the establishment. I was not laughing, and neither was Mr Hislop.
Anyway, later in the show the poor compere was hopelessly inept at reading out the scores. Hislop made his life hell.
Their lack of imagination will also protect them from the apprehension that they have anything to hide.
It is only people who behave suspiciously who should – and quite rightly deserve to – fear. That is the purpose of having ID cards!”
“Like my friends and acquaintances, I cannot understand how a law abiding citizen
can object to the proposal or how they will limit or infringe my “civil liberties”.
– Unnamed members of the public quoted as endorsing the Home Office view in its consultation summary (2003) (pdf).
The national identity cards scheme will give people confidence, convenience and security in an increasingly vital aspect of modern life – proving and protecting their identity.
– David Blunkett, launching the Identity Cards Bill in 2004
Such views are surprisingly persistent. To tackle them, we (NO2ID) have produced what I suppose is the first NO2ID commercial:
Here is an interesting article about how Wal-Mart, the bete noire of the anti-globalistas, acted much more effectively and efficiently in helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina a few years ago than was the case with Federal or other state agencies.
What the article does not really discuss, however, is whether companies ought to be doing things like this at all. There is the old Milton Friedman line that a company has one duty only: to benefit its shareholders by making a profit. But of course if shareholders vote in company meetings in favour of allowing their company to spend some money in certain civic endeavours, then as a supporter of private property rights – of shareholders – then I have no problem with that at all. If a company whose shares I own starts to engage in all manner of “social” projects that I think show the firm is increasingly being run by twerps, I can always dump the stock or even, assuming it is not banned, short-sell the shares to punish the firm for not being professionally run.
That approach is, of course, very different from those advocates of what is called “corporate social responsibility” who might want to legislate to force firms into such activities, which blurs the political and business spheres. It enables politicians, for example, to bring about changes without having to explicitly say how these are going to be paid for. Such public-private partnerships are all too often about concealment of cost.
Un despote a toujours quelques bons moments ; une assemblée de despotes n’en a jamais. Si un tyran me fait une injustice, je peux le désarmer par sa maîtresse, par son confesseur, ou par son page ; mais une compagnie de graves tyrans est inaccessible Á toutes les séductions.
[A despot still has good moments; an assembly of despots never does. If one tyrant mistreats me, I can get round him by means of his mistress, his priest, or his page-boy. But a staid company of tyrants is impervious to temptation.]
– Voltaire. A remarkable characterisation of the monotonic puritanism of modern democratic government, but written in around 1760. I wonder whether C.S. Lewis’s better known pronouncement on those who torment us for our own good has its origin here. It is similar both in the thought expressed and the cadence of its expression.
In an electronics market in China last month, I found these intriguing items for sale.
Okay, “MP3” I understand. The MPEG-1 standard for digital media storage and transmission contained three audio formats. These were MPEG-1 audio layers 1, 2 and 3. Of these, layer 3 provided the highest audio quality, became the standard for compressed digital audio, and “MPEG-1 layer 3” became abbreviated to “MP3”.
“MP4” is slightly more problematic. The successor standard to MPEG-1 was MPEG-2. MPEG-2 is very important, but mainly because it contains much more advanced video formats than MPEG-1. DVDs and most digital television applications use MPEG-2 video. In terms of audio, MPEG-2 contains the three existing formats from MPEG-1 (including MP3) and a more advanced format called Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). Perhaps confusingly, AAC is very seldom used with MPEG-2 video, which is much more frequently paired with the MPEG-1 audio formats, or with Dolby AC-3 (which is not part of any of the MPEG standards).
However, AAC is also part of the MPEG-4 family of standards. (There is no MPEG-3). Due partly to AAC being the favourite audio standard of Apple, AAC is commonly paired with the video standards of MPEG-4, the two most common of which are the Advanced Simple Profile (MPEG-4 part 2) and the now favoured Advanced Video Coding (MPEG-4 part 10, known also as ITU-T H.264). This partnering between AAC and the MPEG-4 family of standards can mean that AAC audio is sometimes referred to as “MP4 audio”, with “MP4” as an abbreviation of “MPEG-4”, even though AAC as a format technically preceded MPEG-4. In addition, media of this form is often encoded using the MPEG-4 part 14 container format, which usually has the file suffix “.mp4”. Thus it makes a certain amount of sense for an AAC or MPEG-4 capable media player to be referred to as an “MP4 player”. In this case the “4” in MP4 means something different to the “3” in MP3, but there is some logic to it.
As to what an MP5 player might be, that is on a par with the European commission announcing that we must take steps to “put Europe into the lead of the transition to Web 3.0”, I fear. Sadly, I think it is unlikely that they are selling these.
Jane’s reports the following:
Thales aims directed-energy weapon at ground, naval applications. Thales Air Systems Division is working on a joint development project with the Ecole Polytechnique engineering school in Orsay, France, to develop a directed-energy weapon (DEW) for ground and naval applications. Project Director Philippe Antier of Weapon Systems, Thales Air Systems Division, told Jane’s that the aim of the project is to provide a capability against missiles, aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to a range of up to 10 km as a complement to very-short-range air-defence (VSHORAD) systems, with the goal of having the system operational by 2015
When it is steam boat time, you steam…
This book reviewer says the 1930s were, on the whole, a pretty good time to be British. It is a point of view one does not come across very much, that is for sure. The stock image of the 1930s is the era that saw the rise of the Nazis, the Great Famine in the USSR, the Great Depression, Roosevelt, the Royal Abdication Crisis, etc. But was there more to it than that, at least at home? The book says that British society was in some ways in pretty good shape.
In military terms, at least by the end of the 1930s Britain had evolved what ultimately proved to be a very well organised air defence system, with radar and nifty fighters like the Spitfire. The 1930s was stylistically elegant: the cars of that era looked absolutely glorious.
On the other hand, I would argue that the 1930s was a period in which limited government continued to be under siege and apostles of planning and greater government regulation were gathering momentum, to reach fruition – if that is quite the right word – in 1945 with the election of the Attlee Labour government.
Discuss.
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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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