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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Government is an institution that has evolved along with we humans as our best means of applying violence. When you want to break things and kill people, there is no better institution for the job. The problem comes when we attempt to use it for other purposes. Its true skills will out even when the goal is entirely different, as with the current attempts of States to ‘help’ the economy.
What I see happening in the US and UK and other places with maximally ‘helpful’ governments is much like what happens when you accidentally spill Nitric Acid on the rug. It steams, bubbles, gets hots and makes a bit of sound and for a short while it appears that ‘something is happening’. Then the smoke clears and you see that it has ruined your rug.
Government ‘help’ is like that.
Regular commenter here Nick M takes a wack at Vernon Bogdanor:
Progress occurs when free people do things. It just happens Boggy. It is retarded when retards like you try and gerrymander it. In 1900 the fastest growing economy on the planet was Russia’s. Look at the plight of the place now? There is nothing “progressive” about being progressive.
I was going to put that up as a Samizdata quote of the day, but I reckon the feline enumerator has his sneer quotes around the wrong “progressive” there. Still, good stuff, albeit sweary.
Talking of which, I do wonder about this swear-blogging thing. The bad news is that respectable bloggers who might give particular (swear-)blog postings of merit lots of new readers are put off by the swearing from linking to such postings. (Telegraph Blogger Alex Singleton recently told me exactly this.) On the other hand, a lot of people are very angry just now, not just, you know, in a state of respectful disagreement with the powers that, for the time being, be. Such angry persons deserve voices around which to rally, voices which communicate their feelings rather than just their thoughts.
Swear-blogging may also mean that, by assembling all the angry ones in a cursing, seething internet mob, in a way that completely alienates our present version of Polite Society, the angry ones will achieve a far greater degree of tactical surprise come the storming of the Winter Palace, or whatever will be the equivalent event or events during the next few years. Polite Society just won’t see it coming, because it simply cannot now bear to look. It will consequently swing in far greater numbers from lamp-posts (or again, whatever will turn out to be the modern equivalent) than would otherwise have happened. Which just might be a rather fucking good thing.
“If you have a mortgage and are celebrating record low repayments, then enjoy it for now. Ask what the consequences will be for your household budget of interest rates of 10 per cent or higher, which will be needed to tame the rising prices that will result from this mad experiment. But there is another great British consensus emerging around the idea. “It is essential,” say analysts. “No other option,” sighs many a fiscal conservative. “Everyone” is in favour of it, we’re told. I have just about had enough of “everyone”. It was “everyone” – most economists, politicians, etc – who thought that the bubble would never burst. They were wrong then, and are now. “
Iain Martin, on the Bank of England’s descent into monetary madness. Milton Friedman must be spinning in his grave.
Following on from this, is another theme that came out of that seminar with media/City luminaries I went to the other day. One point that Anthony Hilton mentioned was the “global imbalance” issue. This is all about how the West, which is in net terms, up to its eyes in debt, has been living high on the hog thanks to oodles of surplus savings generated by countries such as China and Japan. In looking to figure out how to play the “global financial crisis blame game”, one argument goes like this: China, with its cheap exports, kept cheap by its artificially low and fixed exchange rate, earned huge amounts of money by selling this stuff to the West; in turn, the Chinese needed to reinvest the proceeds – there would be no point earning money you cannot spend – and they reinvested those proceeds in things like US government securities. As a result, long-term bond yields in the US fell, which enabled Mr and Mrs Westerner to renegotiate their long-term mortgages, release equity from their homes, and spend even more of their inflated wealth on – yes you guessed it – Chinese consumer goods. Result: a whacking great housing and consumer spending boom that inevitably crashed.
This argument sounds quite convincing. If it is true, then it also suggests that, contrary to what some of the critics of the Fed or other central banks might say, that there is not much that someone like Alan Greenspan could have actually done to curb domestic US monetary growth if there were such enormous inflows of hot money coming into the country’s debt markets from abroad. Well up to a point, Lord Copper. Much depends, I think, on what proportion of monetary growth in the West was driven by Asian inflows, and what was basically driven by domestic factors. I haven’t seen a lot of commentary on this.
If you buy the “Asian connection” argument, a problem, it seems to me, is that it would not have been realistic, for various reasons, for the US to have tried to curb these supposedly dangerous inflows of Asian money by protectionist measures such as capital controls or exchange controls. If one believes that capital and trade flows are good things, then imposing such controls would and could cause more damage than it solved. Exposure to capital flows has, in many ways, driven beneficial economic change.
But the argument about Asian money does suggest that had the Fed, etc, raised rates to curb inflationary pressures, all that would have achieved would have been to suck in even more Asian money from investors seeking a higher yield. But presumably, with higher rates, it would have curbed, and did eventually curb, US consumer spending, and hence dent the demand for Chinese and other non-US goods. China is now starting to feel the effects of the global slowdown rather sharply.
Even so, the “global imbalance” argument highlights the fact that in a world of fiat money without capital controls, it is now very hard for state central banks, even those with powers as wide as the Fed or the European Central Bank, to set interest rates effectively. Of course, the idea of a central bank setting rates for a complex economy is itself a version of state central planning. Globalisation has exposed its limitations.
One of the things I really want to ask Kevin Dowd at his Libertarian Alliance Chris R. Tame memorial lecture next week is how this sort of issue can be addressed. The “Asian dimension” to our current predicament could be the proverbial big gorilla in the living room. Or maybe it is just a small and rather distracting rodent.
Brian Micklethwait, over at his personal blog, links to a sentiment that states that it is wrong to blame the private sector banks for the current problems, given that the underlying cause of the credit/property bubble was cheap credit as supplied, ultimately, by central banks. Central banks are not creatures of the free market and would not exist in a world of pure laissez faire. So obvious to us, it hardly needs to be said. But outside our little intellectual bailiwick, you’d be be surprised – or perhaps not – to realise that saying such things still gets you a funny look.
As purely personal evidence, let me cite an experience last evening. I went along to a financial seminar in London’s Bloomsbury district, where various folk, including Anthony Hilton of the London Evening Standard and Angela Knight of the British Bankers’ Association were holding forth. Q&A ensued. Yours truly asked a question about what the panelists thought was the role of central banks and governments in causing the current SNAFU. You could almost smell the palpable relief on Knight’s behalf that she had heard someone not try to pin the blame entirely on private banks. My god, she thought, here’s a guy who has not bought the statist line that what is happening was caused by big, evil private banks. I have to say I found her answer on how the central banks mucked up was quite convincing although she by no means accepts the idea that the existence of central banks as such is a problem. As a lobbyist for the existing fractional reserve banking industry, she is certainly no Ludwig von Mises, but still.
I sense that some of the banking industry’s more independent-minded figures are getting really angry at being pilloried for sins outside of their control. The banking industry, however, cannot win any battle for hearts and minds until they are absolutely transparent about their own financial affairs, and until some of the leaders of the banking industry begin to embrace genuine free banking rather than the quasi-statist mess that we have now. Let’s face it, given the reputation of banks at the moment, what do they have to lose? The current option – hope for the best and take taxpayer’s money – is not proving to be very successful.
This (which I just had trouble getting back to – it was linked to from here today, top left) is very strange:
The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn’t wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. “I don’t think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion,” he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.
Very strange because it seems to me that with about five seconds thought one can easily arrive at an evolutionary advantage associated with a belief in eternal life, and accordingly an evolutionary explanation of it.
Tribes of ancient humans often battled each other to death – literally to death, the losers being completely wiped out – and in these battles, a willingness to die might be the difference between victory and defeat, between your gene pool spreading, and your gene pool being wiped out.
Tons of stuff has been written about the prisoner’s dilemma associated with infantry battles. If you all stand together and fight, your side has its best chance of winning. Anyone breaking and running exposes all others to annihilation. Etcetera. Military cultures ancient and modern were and are suffused with ideas of honour and courage and self-sacrifice, all of which resulted and result in everyone in your army standing firm and holding the line.
In such a world, a belief in some kind of Valhalla of dead heroes is pretty much a certainty. Even now, effective military units do everything they can to ensure that their heroic dead-in-battle are treated with tremendous solemnity and never forgotten, giving them eternal life of a limited kind, and pour encourager les autres. Such notions have even greater force if eternal life is literally what everyone in the front line of battle believes in. I am amazed, absolutely amazed, that any academic could be unaware of such notions, or if aware, then unpersuaded.
It’s as if this guy Scott Atran has never seen a war memorial, and never even read The Selfish Gene, which is all about how our selfish genes cause us, in certain circumstances, to become raging altruists, sacrificing ourselves for the greater good of society.
You do not have to have to have any particular view of the truth of religion in order to see the force of this explanation. As an atheist, I am obviously on the look out for evolutionary explanations of the phenomenon of religious belief, given that I don’t think such beliefs are correct – so why do people persist in believing them or in their absence, invent them? But religious people often use such genetically-enhanced-altruism notions to argue for religion, on consequentialist grounds. In a similar spirit they also argue, perhaps rightly, that religious people are more inclined to have children, and hence to outbreed us atheists, childbirth being, for a woman, not unlike taking part in a battle, especially in earlier centuries. Religion makes your society stronger, because it make you more willing to sacrifice yourself for the collective!
Notice that if you didn’t care at all about the collective in the first place, the argument in the previous sentence would have no force for you.
It’s somewhat off topic, but this is one of the many reasons why I am, although an admirer of her in many ways, not a devotee of Ayn Rand. Her stated plan of saving the world by abolishing altruism flies in the face of the known facts of human nature. The trick is to do altruism well, not to try to abolish it. Which is easier said than done, as our current economic troubles illustrate well, and which is actually, I would argue, what most of Ayn Rand’s stories and heroic characters were really all about, despite what she and they insisted on telling us.
Following on directly from some of the things Johnathan says immediately below this, here is visual proof that surveillance cameras are not quite the innocent gadgets that some tell us:
The bloke who sent this in to Idiot Toys found it “somewhere on Amazon”, so we may never know where this scary camera is, who it is snooping on, and what its future plans might be.
Caption anyone?
Clive Davis, who blogs at the Spectator’s Coffee House site these days, reckons the concerns that civil libertarians have about CCTVs all over the UK are “over-hyped”. Well maybe they are but it seems that Mr Davis does rather miss the point slightly. CCTV may not, of themselves, be a threat to civil liberties in the same way as some of other vast collection of laws now on the statute books in the UK, but they are not harmless in this respect, either. True, society has always had its snoops, its “nosey parkers” – as we Brits used to say – and curtain-twitching neighbours. Sometimes such vigilant folk performed a kind of public service, even if unintended, by creating a social network in which certain kinds of delinquent behaviour could be spotted and dealt with. But clearly there are costs to this in that innocent people can find their actions being picked on by the hyper-vigilant. On a more practical level, the obsession with surveillance can crowd out resources better devoted to deterring crime in other ways.
In fairness to Mr Davis, I am sure that readers can come up with any numbers of contenders for laws that are far worse than CCTV. My personal favourite is the Civil Contingencies Act, which confers on government a whopping collection of powers to use in emergencies; this act received virtually no serious press coverage in the MSM whatsoever. But CCTV, and the sheer number of them in the UK, is all of a piece of a move by this country towards a Big Brother state. Yes, if one wants to be nit-picky about it, one could argue that CCTVs in privately-owned shopping malls, for example, are not intrusive since a person is not forced to go into such places, whereas cameras in public streets for which the public has a right of access are intrusive. Also, there is the sheer, practical issue of information overload: there comes a point where there are so many cameras that it is hard to know if the police can physically track all of their photos all the time. So maybe panic is unjustified.
But I think Clive’s sang froid on this occasion is just as mistaken as screaming hysteria. We have moved decisively towards a police state in recent years and on some measures, are already in one. CCTVs are part of this state of affairs. Trying to pretend otherwise is not very credible. I am not entirely sure why Mr Davis wants to take the line he does.
As an aside, Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, who is a man not to get hysterical about anything, is fairly scathing about the recent British love affair with CCTV in his book, The Rotten State of Britain. It looks like a good read and I will review it later.
The email I got today about it from Tim Evans of the Libertarian Alliance started “Dear All”, so I don’t know how many other bloggers have already noticed and linked to this. But like Tim, I strongly recommend it, having watched it earlier today. It’s an American banker (who is also a follower of Ayn Rand) talking about the financial crisis, why it happened and what to do about it. The circumstances he describes so confidently, convincingly and knowledgeably are American, but the message of the talk is universal. He uses the word “interesting” a lot, by which he mostly means “disastrous”.
Apologies for not having any time left over from watching it to add any thoughts of my own. But the thing itself is so good that I am sure I will be forgiven for simply recommending this remarkable talk. I daresay some may even prefer this.
Life for me is hectic right now – for all the right reasons – but I wanted to quickly put up this link to an excellent commentary by Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute, concerning the current US government’s drive against offshore tax havens, especially Switzerland. Governments such as that of the spendthrift US, UK and France are getting desperate for cash, and low-tax regimes which respect client confidentiality make for an easy target.
I can also recommend Dan’s recent book, co-authored with Chris Edwards, as a fine study of the whole case for tax havens and why they are a thoroughly good thing. Whenever you read someone arguing for ending “unfair tax competition”, what they really in fact want is to create a cartel. Most cartels, if not backed by states, tend to disintegrate in time, but are generally thought of as bad. Tax cartels are a prime example of cartels of the worst kind.
“What did you do during the recession, Daddy? I installed solar panels and wind turbines. If only Franklin Roosevelt had thought to put millions of Americans to work during the Depression doing make-work jobs that were gee-whiz futuristic…. Oh, that’s right. He did. And it didn’t work then, either. But this time is different, you know.”
– Nick Gillespie, at Reason’s Hit & Run blog.
If you are a Samizdata reader, you probably don’t have a lot of use for your Member of Parliament. However, now is the time to use them – especially if you have a Labour MP.
Here is Phil Booth:
At the Convention on Modern Liberty, I launched NO2ID’s request that everyone at the convention – and around the UK – tells their MP right now that they refuse their consent to having their information shared under any “information sharing order”, a power currently being slipped onto the statute books in clause 152 of the coroners and justice bill .
Please tell yours too. It’s important, and urgent – and something that only YOU can do. If you never have before, now’s the time to write to your MP – in a letter, or via www.WriteToThem.com.
Jack Straw has been making noises that could signal a ‘compromise’, but the only acceptable action is to remove clause 152 entirely from the bill. It is not linked to any other clause, despite being sandwiched between other powers and so-called safeguards offered to the information commissioner. It cannot be improved, and Straw can’t be allowed to merely “dilute” it. Clause 152 just has to go.
It’s imperative that in coming days every MP hears from his or her constituents. Please tell them you refuse consent to having your information, taken for one purpose, arbitrarily used for any other purpose. And ask them to vote clause 152 off the bill.
If you are skeptical about whether anything is important enough to write a polite letter to your Labour MP, then please read my detailed briefing for parliamentarians, here (pdf).
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Note: If you followed the link to Jack Straw and now feel sick, I am sorry. Here is the retired Law Lord, Lord Bingham, to make you a bit better.
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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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