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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The Daily Telegraph is the main conservative newspaper in Britain – at least that is how it presents itself and some of its content really is conservative, but often it follows the line of the left (the doctrines that Telegraph journalists will have been taught in school, including most private schools, and at university).
Yesterday’s print edition (which I read on a long journey from Northern Ireland) gives an interesting example (the online edition is arranged differently). Most people will see the assumptions in the article by Telegraph employee Mary Riddell – “Osbourn’s brutal cuts play right into the hands of the unions” (actually the British government spending review is not even published to October 20th – and I would not be astonished if, behind all the smoke and mirrors, government spending next year was even higher than it is this year) with language such as “slash and burn” and “destroys the very charities and community groups” (in Mary’s world, which is sadly very close to the state of modern Britain, a charity or community group is part of the government to be funded by the taxpayers) inflicting “maximum pain” and threatening a “concordant with the unions” … etc, etc. Propaganda of this sort is not really dangerous – everyone can see it for what it is and make their own judgements. However, it is not what interests me – I am interested in what people will not tend to spot, what flows into their minds without their even knowing it.
On the obituary page people will notice the obituary for John Gouriet (one of the founders of what became the Freedom Association in Britain), and some people will get angry at the scare quote marks around the word “oppression” in relation to the Soviet Union (as if Mr Gouriet was silly to think that the totalitarian Soviet Union actually was oppressive), but most people will just read without really thinking the little extract from “Great Obituaries From This Week In The Past” next to it – an extract from the obituary of the famous supporter of racial segregation Governor George Wallace (who died in 1998). → Continue reading: Distortions from the Daily Telegraph
I often get the impression – and that is all that it is – that much of the world of government is concerned with achieving stability of various kinds. But there are “good” forms of stability – such as safe and secure property rights, honest money, and laws to protect the person from violence – and “bad” kinds, such as the stagnation of a flat-lining economy (as in 1990s Japan). Consider, we used to hear Gordon Brown drone on, in that manner of his, about “economic stability” (he spectacularly failed to attain it); we used to hear critics of George W. Bush’s foreign policy claiming that he was undermining the supposedly marvellous “stability” of the Middle East; and of course when it comes to issues such as governments’ monetary and fiscal policy, “stability” and the smoothing of all that naughty market activity is taken as a public good.
Sure, the last few years have been frightening in some ways on the economics front, but the gains to living standards across the planet, by and large, have not been thrown away. And in a recent book by Deepak Lal, in “Reviving the Invisible Hand”, he notes that some, “unstable” economies such as Thailand have managed to chalk up much greater growth in wealth overall than those which have grown at a more sedate, less volatile way.
Of course, it might even be argued that it is difficult to distinguish total stability from death. A straight line on a graph, remember, resembles the line of one of those gizmos that tells a doctor that the patient has pegged out.
“Brooks and Krugman are on some sort of Thelma & Lousie like quixoticly suicidal journey to be the last guy off the bigger government meme. They’re going off the cliff, but they couldn’t be happier. At least their abusive small-government loving spouses won’t hurt them anymore.”
From the comment thread of this article about the absurd David Brooks. No wonder he writes for the New York Times.
I must admit to being a bit gobsmacked by this:
Israel and the Jewish people found an unlikely defender in Fidel Castro, the retired dictator of Cuba, on Tuesday, when he came out strongly against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust and supported Israel’s right to exist.
Over the weekend, Tim Evans, who has been a friend of mine for about a quarter of a century, and who is now part of the Cobden Centre ruling junta (listen to a recent and relevant interview with Tim Evans about that by going here), has been ringing me and emailing me about this, which is a so-called Ten Minute Bill (I think that’s what they call it) which Douglas Carswell MP and Steve Baker MP will be presenting to the House of Commons this Wednesday, just after Prime Minister’s Question Time.
Ten Minute Bills seldom pass. But they are a chance to fly a kite, put an idea on the map, run something up the flagpole, shoot a shot across the bows (see above) of some wicked and dangerous vessel or other, etc. etc., mix in further metaphors to taste. Were this particular kite actually to be nailed legally onto the map (which it will not be for the immediately foreseeable future) it would somewhat alter the legal relationship between banks and depositors. For more about this scheme, from Steve Baker MP (whom we have had cause to notice here before), see also this.
Basically, this proposed law says that depositors should get to decide whether they still actually own what they already now think of as their own money when they hand it over to a bank, or whether their money degenerates into a mere excuse to create much more degenerate money, out of thin air. Depositors get to decide, in other words, about whether their bank deposits will be the basis of fractional reserve banking, or not. Or something. Don’t depend on me to describe this proposal accurately, or comment learnedly and in detail on its efficacy, were we to live in a parallel universe of a sort that would enable this law to pass right now.
What I do know is that Austrian Economics (or, as I prefer to think of it: good economics), which is the theoretical foundation of the Cobden Centre, ought to have massively more sway in the world than it does now. Recently I have been trying to get my head further around Austrian Economics than my head has hitherto been, and I have also been watching the Cobden Centre as it has gone methodically about its self-imposed task of transforming Britain’s and the world’s financial arrangements, thereby massively improving the economic prospects of all human beings.
I have always been impressed by Austrian Economics, ever since I first dipped into Human Action in the library of Essex University in the early 1970s. I knew rather little about Austrian Economics until lately and I still don’t know that much, beyond the fact of its superiority over bad economics. And I am now also very impressed by the Cobden Centre. What this latest parliamentary foray shows is that now Douglas Carswell MP seems to have joined the Cobden Centre network. Or maybe, what with Carswell having been an MP for some while, the Cobden Centre network has got behind Douglas Carswell MP. Whatever, and whatever his rank or title within Cobden Centre pecking order, Carswell is now a senior member of that network. Good. I hope and believe that there are many others now joining too, of comparable weight and intelligence.
I could say more about all this, much more. And I very much hope that in the weeks, months and years to come, I will. In particular I hope to explain more about just why the Cobden Centre has so far impressed me so much. But the important thing now is to get something about this up here, now, so that the Cobden Centre crowd (Tim Evans in particular) will have one more little puff of opinion to point at, to help them suggest that the intellectual wind may at least be beginning to blow in their (and my) preferred general direction.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit does not lose his temper, or at least not much. He favours a fairly dry, laconic style. So dry, in fact, that the duller sorts can miss it. So when he does come out with something unusually sharp, I tend to sit up and take particular notice.
“Ah, but remember when you now-disappointed Obama supporters were lecturing us about the fierce moral urgency of change? With such overweening self-righteousness? Even as you resolutely failed to look at what was going on, or to inquire into what Obama was actually like? So pardon me, now-disappointed Obama voters, if I point out that you’re rubes.”
By the way, does anyone bother to read Andrew Sullivan these days?
Update: I see that Matt Welch, at Reason’s Hit & Run blog, has become unusually sharp about Sullivan these days. The latter’s blind devotion to TARP and the rest is driving even some people who are generally nice to Sully increasingly to distraction.
Here is part of a press release from the Institute of Economic Affairs, the London-based free market think tank. I could not agree more with what Mark Littlewood, IEA director general, says:
“An overstaffed and overpaid public sector should be the first to face cuts in government spending. It is complete fantasy to pretend that substantial cuts are not required, and it is the public who should feel angry at being expected to support a union campaign which would see their tax money continue to be squandered.
“Public sector workers earn, on average, over £2,000 more than their private sector equivalents1. This is in addition to the more generous pensions they receive and the enormously reduced historical risk of being fired.
“A reduction in the absurdly generous terms for workers in the inefficient public sector is long overdue. It is not an attack on the poor or oppressed, it is an attack on the privileged.”
In a nutshell, much of the UK’s present economic plight can be understood in the light of how, since 1997, the public sector payroll – including all those “private sector” jobs dependent on public contracts, exploded. Pretty much most, if not all, of the big spending rises over which Gordon Brown presided were gobbled up by this enormous rise in public employment. Now of course, if you work in the public sector, you will believe, or at least want to believe, that your job is of great importance, and that those selfish Gradgrinds in Westminster and Whitehall deserve to be attacked. But the point needs to be made that the private sector, increasingly weighed down by taxes and regulations, cannot support this state of affairs; it is an absurdity, as some in the trades union movement claim, to somehow argue that cutting all these public sector jobs will somehow threaten Britain’s economic recovery. Any recovery that relies on an artificial support machine of massive public spending and employment is not a recovery worth having. And remember that what we should be aiming for is to be better off, not simply employed in pointless or destructive “jobs”. If cutting such public sector positions frees up capital for something likely to generate greater wealth overall, that’s great. The question arises, clearly, as to whether this government has the stones to say this over and over. The signs are not particularly encouraging.
Can anyone offer any confirmation or contradiction of this observation, which is one of the comments on this posting about the rights and wrongs of smoking bans:
One of the things I learned when going through insurance sales training was that life and health insurance companies do not take exposure to secondhand smoke into account at all when determining risk categories. Insurance companies have all sorts of super-detailed actuarial information for use in setting rates. None of this information shows any health risks associated with secondhand smoke.
I am actually a bit surprised if that is true. One of the reasons why there has been so much talk of “passive smoking” is that it makes such perfect sense that if smoking is very bad for you, smoke near you day after day would also be somewhat bad for you. This suggests no badness for you at all. Can that really be right?
This comment concerns the USA. I assume there is no particular arrangement there which actually forbids “passive smoking” being inquired into by insurance companies.
LATER: As I should have included in the above, the author of that comment also has a blog.
I’m not quite sure what the moral of this report might be, but here is how it starts:
More than 230,000 Japanese people listed as 100 years old cannot be located and many may have died decades ago, according to a government survey released today.
The justice ministry said the survey found that more than 77,000 people listed as still alive in local government records would have to be aged at least 120, and 884 would be 150 or older.
The figures have exposed antiquated methods of record-keeping and fuelled fears that some families are deliberately hiding the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions.
It’s an interesting way of looking at countries to ask: What statistics do they get wrong, and in which direction? (Also, which countries admit they got things wrong? Good for the government of Japan for noting their own error.)
For instance, it is now a cliché of Russia-watching that life expectancy there has nosedived, especially among men. Rather than move on straight away to speculating about why that might be (alcohol being the usual suspect) I find myself wondering if at least part of that story might be that the incentives to report deaths, conceal deaths, invent deaths, and so on, have changed, while the death rates themselves have changed rather less. Is there now perhaps some government scheme in Russia to “support” those who have lost a breadwinner, with a cash lump sum, which causes many families to become, as it were, impatient? Did communism cause people to claim the dead to be still alive, like in Japan, and has that incentive now been switched off?
I definitely recall reading about how, in India, before they allowed something more nearly resembling a free market, the tendency was for everyone to claim to be poorer than they really were, to avoid tax, which skewed poverty calculations dreadfully, and made the rest of us feel even sorrier for Indians than we should have.
Publicly acknowledged suicide rates are definitely going to vary according to how much pressure doctors face to call suicide something that is less of a reproach to those who were caring for the deceased. A higher “suicide rate” could accordingly mean that, in that particular country, suicide is considered less of a scandal.
We in Britain keep being told by our rulers that property crime has gone down, and we tell each other that we don’t think it worth reporting crimes any more. Hospital waiting lists, and all the perverse incentives associated with them, are another current British bone of contention.
My preferred moral is that one of the good things about free societies is that they are somewhat less likely to perpetrate permanently bogus data sets, because falsehood is, eventually if not immediately, bad for business. Government, unchecked by power centres beyond government, is liable to emit such falsehoods for far longer.
But it could just be that governments, by their nature, just love to gather statistics and to publish them, as proof that, one way or another, government is necessary. And more published statistics inevitably means more mistakes.
I am very optimistic it will quickly become an established form of transport
– Patrick Döring, deputy chairman of the German Free Democrats, discussing the fact that long distance bus travel may be about to be legalised in Germany.
Christopher Booker in the Telegraph has another forced adoption story. Or rather he did on Monday, but now he doesn’t.
…Social workers were about to seize a newly born baby for no more reason than their claim that it might be “at risk of emotional abuse”. Just for once, because no court papers had yet been issued, I would be able to report this case in detail, naming names and explaining why it appeared to be yet another appalling miscarriage of justice.
I spoke at length to the horrified mother, who told me how the local social workers wanted to remove her child which, since it was born prematurely three weeks ago, is still in a hospital intensive care unit. She has already happily brought up three other children, the oldest of whom, a bright 21-year-old who has just got a First at university, is doing all she can to help her mother win the right to keep the new addition to the family.
The next day, however, the court papers arrived, imposing a complete blanket of secrecy.
Do you think in your heart of hearts that there must be something more to it than that? Surely these social workers, while twits, cannot be as malicious as this story seems to imply? Have you ever thought, when reading about such a case, “well it sounds shocking, but one can never tell”?
That is the point. One can never tell. One can never make an assessment of these stories because the ancient protections of open justice have been thrown away.
Since the secret system of the Family Courts has denied the press and public the opportunity to assess the evidence in any other manner, one must make a guess as to the likelihood of social workers really behaving in this appalling way based on other cases where details have leaked out.
Here are two accounts of similar cases, in which professionals – an independent social worker and a GP in one case, a judge in another, who were in a position to tell described the behaviour of social workers as “appalling injustice” and “disgraceful […] about the worst I have ever encountered in a career now spanning nearly 40 years.”
Oh, and a sample of the sort of evidence that is held to be damning, as if the Cleveland scandal and the others like it had never happened:
One particularly bizarre psychiatric report was compiled after only an hour-long interview with the little girl. When she said she had once choked on a lollipop, this was interpreted as signifying that she could possibly have “been forced to have oral sex with her father”.
Byron remarks in his Journals that Berne is “the district famous for cheese, liberty, property and no taxes.” He took liberty quite seriously. And also cheese.
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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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