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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I am a busy person this weekend so I haven’t time to do much more than to link to this fascinating interview with a former CIA operative on his experiences of living in Iran. With all the troubles in the world right now, it pays to keep an eye on a country and a regime that continues to be a serious threat. More optimistically, though, if Iran ever did move towards genuine openness and democracy, the impact on the rest of the Middle East region would be immense.
This struck me:
“If the Iranian regime dared for one day, for even half a day, to allow Iranians to come into the streets and say what they really want, then you would see tens of millions of Iranians in the streets shouting “Death to the Islamic Republic!”
“If there were a free referendum today, “yes” or “no” to the Iranian Republic, more than 90 percent would say “no.” If there were a free referendum today saying “yes” or “no” to establishing ties with America, more than 90 percent would say “yes.””
Here is a good collection of some of the strangest looking bits of architecture in the world. Some buildings will be familiar – like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain – others, less so. Click on the link and scroll down. It’s a large collection.
The Left needs to defend the riots; not to valourise the burning of grannies’ cars, but to make clear that we reject the whole bourgeois construction of events, that we stand in solidarity with the oppressed and that, when it comes to it, we will, without hesitation, join the “rioters” to overthrow the legitimised exploitation, state-sanctioned violence and sham “democracy” that oppress us all.
– Ian Grigg-Spall
Notice how the loudest complaints about “broken politics” come from those who lost the debate. It’s understandable for sore losers to rage against the machine. But there’s no need for the rest of us to parrot their petulance.
– Charles Krauthammer.
Peter Oborne is not exactly one of my favourite commentators (to put it mildly) so when I saw people praising an article he wrote called The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom, I was expecting the worst. And sure enough, he falls at almost the first fence:
A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.
I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted. The same is true of the brilliant retailer Sir Philip Green. Sir Philip’s businesses could never survive but for Britain’s famous social and political stability, our transport system to shift his goods and our schools to educate his workers.
Yet Sir Philip, who a few years ago sent an extraordinary £1 billion dividend offshore, seems to have little intention of paying for much of this. Why does nobody get angry or hold him culpable? I know that he employs expensive tax lawyers and that everything he does is legal, but he surely faces ethical and moral questions just as much as does a young thug who breaks into one of Sir Philip’s shops and steals from it?
So Branson and Green get tired of having so much of their wealth confiscated that Branson moves some of his operation to Switzerland and Green takes his profits off-shore, and Peter Oborne sees that not as a sign of the confiscatory state’s moral decay but rather… Green and Branson’s moral decay?
That is a bit like saying the shopkeepers who defended their shops from looters were being ‘greedy’ because they did not want the product of their hard works taken by looters… or in Green and Branson’s case, the looting tax man working at the behest of the parasite classes.
Oborne gets it right when he describes the corruption and hypocrisy of the political looter class class, but his failure to grasp the difference between the looter classes and the people they loot means I will not be joining the Amen Chorus praising this article even if I agree with some parts of it.
It seems to me that he misses the obvious target. Sure, politicians are hypocritical and corrupt but when has this ever not been the case? Surely the real issue here is not the predictably dismal behaviour of the generally dismal sort of people who are attracted into politics in the first place, it is the de-socialising nature of the policies that have been followed by both Labour and Tory since 1945.
There exists a broad consensus between so-called ‘conservatives’ and the ‘democratic left’ across the western world that capitalist wealth producers exist to be taxed to fund ‘social’ welfare, which in turn produces a huge class of people benefiting from these confiscations and this, not the crapulous personal greed and behaviour of MPs, is the root of the problem from which everything else springs.
Moreover, it is worth noting that the looters were not in fact the primary recipients of the ‘largess’ (of other people’s money) being collected and redistributed by the state… it is the huge army of people who find their employment via the Guardian’s public sector advertisements who are the actual main beneficiaries.
Just as war, as is sometimes said, can be the health of the state, so can domestic civil disorder. One of the arguments we can expect to hear in the coming days, and are beginning to hear already, is how much of the recent mayhem has been driven by Britain’s evil “consumerist” culture, our “market-based materialism”, and suchlike. The implication being that we need to have more and more controls over our lives (that is not the same as saying people need to understand self-control and save rather than rely on credit. That is a separate argument). I am willing to stake a few pounds that there will be calls for some sort of National Service for youngsters, if not in the form of the military (who’d want these scum in charge of weapons?), but something else, perhaps. (Again, I have nothing against clubs and groups set up to help youngsters grow up a bit into adults, so long as this is voluntary.)
A random example of the kind of “if only we had powerful leaders” line comes from John McTernan, in the Daily Telegraph. He starts off with this:
“Churchill redeemed himself, and saved the world, during the Second World War. Margaret Thatcher defeated fascism in the Falklands war, and ultra-Leftism in the miners’ strike. We are a better and stronger country, at home and abroad, for her undeviating will and courage. It wasn’t just Britain – the post-war world was full of examples. Nixon and China. Reagan and the Russians. Gorbachev and perestroika. Mandela and de Klerk. These were big figures who made bold choices, shaped the future, called the shots.”
Well, maybe. I find the Nixon example dubious. Sure, he may not be the devil of lazy historical analysis and he unfroze relations with China, but he also, remember, imposed wage and price controls in a panic about inflation and was hardly a consistent advocate of small government, at all. I’ll come to Mrs Thatcher in a minute.
“Evelyn Waugh used to criticise the Conservative Party because it had never turned the clock back by a single minute. But at least it was properly conservative. Harold Macmillan would be shocked at the modern party’s Maoist commitment to revolutionary change, just as Tony Crosland would be aghast at Labour’s obeisance to capital.”
Harold Macmillan is a man who wanted Britain to join the EU; his essentially paternalist version of Toryism, and his deference to the legal privileges of the trade unions, helped breed the kind of complacent attitudes that saw the UK lose its industrial edge. In certain ways, “Supermac” and that whole generation of Tories up to Mrs Thatcher advocated a form of controlled retreat. As for the awful Tony Crosland, why praise a man who once infamously said he wanted to destroy those “fucking grammar schools?”. I hate it when a certain kind of commentator gets all misty-eyed for the political leaders of days of yore, such as the ghastly Nye Bevan, the Labour politician who saddled this country with the National Health Service. We can do without that kind of “leadership”, thank you very much.
“The connecting thread is that Left and Right have accepted not merely market mechanisms, but the market’s ultimate mastery. For more than 30 years, politicians have told industries, communities and voters that you can’t buck the system. In doing so, they have internalised their own advice, and ended up enslaved by these new gods themselves.”
One of the people who said you cannot defy market forces, or fail to heed what Kipling called the “Gods of the Copybook Headings”, was of course, Margaret Thatcher, whom the author of this article claims to admire. In fact, Mrs Thatcher’s greatness, in my opinion, in part stemmed from her willingness to tell people that water did not flow uphill, that if you want to distribute wealth, you have to create it, and that defying the laws of supply and demand typically made problems worse, as in the case of trying to fix the value of sterling. That was one of her best traits.
“George Osborne’s mantra is that if we don’t face up to austerity, then we’ll be like Greece, at the mercy of the markets. Would any Conservative politician, in any previous administration, have compared our great nation to a failing southern European economy (rather than a modern-day Athens or Sparta)?”
I have no idea. I think that pointing out that if the UK fails to get its house in order then we will have the kind of disaster as seen in another country, is a good thing for a politician to do. It is about describing hard reality, not coming out with some sort of guff about “we are a great nation and can do what we like” sort of line.
“Our former leaders would be shocked by the willingness of Cabinet ministers to talk down our country. Accepting your own powerlessness is a characteristic of weak leaders throughout history: always managing, never transforming.”
It is not about “talking down”, but facing reality. To change, you first need to accept where you are now. In the UK, many people, some of them holding quite diverse political views, have been slapped hard with that reality.
Approving comments that have attracted the pitiless attentions of Smitebot, a creature of tireless vigilance and limited brain, may take rather longer than usual over the next few days.
Tomorrow the primary bio-mechanical component of the intermediating data analysis buffer is going in for significant repairs once again.
As we say on the internetz… brb
Today I learned, from someone who was involved in the making of it, that:
The Radio 4 bosses liked the Keynes v Hayek debate so much that they are going to repeat it at 9 am on Wednesday 24th August. This sort of thing is very very unusual. This is probably going to add around 1.5 million listeners to the estimated 1 million radio listeners the programme has already had. (I haven’t looked at the podcast stats yet but it was in the iTunes News and Politics top 5 in the UK.)
My own personal reaction to the debate was that a true clash of archetypes was too often, for my taste, dragged off into nitpicking about who said what, when, and just what Keynes would have made of Q(antitative) E(asing), when the real point is that he wouldn’t have started from there. But then again, the show was flagged up as “Keynes v Hayek”, rather than as “Mainstream Economics v Austrian Economics”, so I probably shouldn’t grumble but should instead be counting blessings.
Which are numerous. Far more to the point, the above news makes me think, again, more so, this, which said that we are at least, at last, having this argument, beyond the confines of the Austrian Economics tribe and of the tiny few others who had until recently actually heard of it. Austrianism is now emerging from the great gaggle of alternatives to the present disastrous economic policies to take pride of place, at least in the heads of a great many of those who think seriously about economic policy, as The Leading Contender.
This is, in short, very good news, which puts an interesting slant on the ever ongoing argument about whether and how the BBC is biased.
People going to fancy dress parties do it. The blogger Old Holborn does it. I am talking about face masks.
Face masks have been targeted as one of the things that the authorities may try to ban in the wake of the riots. Enforcing such a rule, even if it makes sense, strikes me as difficult. Perhaps the only way to interpret and enforce such a law would be to say that anyone wearing an item obscuring most of the face during a time of public disorder would be at risk of prosecution. (Wearing a ski mask should be illegal in the middle of a riot, but not on the slopes of Chamonix, for example). But again, how to decide when to impose the rule? Perhaps a public official, preferably a magistrate, has to read out what used to be called the riot act and after the reading of said act, anyone wearing a mask or suchlike is in trouble.
But it may not be so cut and dried as that, alas. There is the issue of public versus private space to consider. Owners of private property, such as shopping malls and the like, are entirely within their rights to insist that people entering the premises should show their faces, and comply with whatever codes of behaviour might be stipulated, however rational or otherwise, just as private members’ clubs and other places ought to be able to insist on dress codes, for example. Banks will typically insist that motorcyclists take off their helmets, if I recall correctly. (That makes perfect sense, for security reasons).
But as I know some regulars will ask, how does this ban on face masks apply to Muslim women who cover their faces behind a veil or other such form of costume? If such a person enters a shop, say, does this mean the police will now insist they show their faces? I’d like to see how that’s going to work. What about Islamist demonstrators against, say, military actions in the Mid-East? I cannot honestly see how the cops are going to successfully enforce a mask ban without a serious ruckus.
Like a lot of ideas that sound good to politicians in the heat of the moment, the notion of banning people from obscuring all or part of their faces is difficult as a general aim of the law, even if owners of private spaces are entitled, as they are, to make such demands. I can see all kinds of issues of interpretation coming up: what about a guy who wears a baseball cap with big sunglasses – is that illegal, or not? What counts as a “mask”? Surely, any law would need to consider the full context here, but it is not always obvious whether wearing a certain item signifies intent to avoid detection.
Instead of such silly measures, the government must focus its attention, as has been pointed out ad nauseam here, on the following areas:
–T ougher sentences for crimes of all kinds, including theft, which in far too many cases is treated as a minor matter. Such punishments must include restitution of the victim(s);
— Drastic cuts to welfare benefits combined with a big rise in tax thresholds at the bottom of the scale to make work pay. Even the dimmest thugs operate under some sort of cost/benefit analysis. Make work pay;
— Lowering the compulsory school-leaving age; change to labour market rules to encourage apprenticeships, vocational training;
— Allow people to use force in self defence, including firearms;
— Legalise (most) drugs. Yes, this is probably the most controversial idea, and maybe I would not enact this until the moral hazard-machine of the Welfare State has been seriously changed, but it is a key issue. If gangs don’t control the drugs trade, it undermines the gang culture more generally;
— Tax cuts more generally so that married spouses don’t feel under such pressure to both work to keep a decent income. This may also reinforce marriage and provide a better environment for children;
— Scrap the various quangos, race relations organisations and other tax-funded institutions that far from alleviating tensions, often inflame them by the manufacture of various grievances for classic bureaucratic empire-building reasons;
— Zero tolerance policing. Get some guys from New York over to London for some rapid tutorials.
I am sure there are more ideas on how to strengthen the family, encourage positive behaviours and deter bad ones, but it seems to me that trying to regulate dress codes in the streets is one of the most pointless unless the conditions can be very clearly defined in law and avoid arbitrariness. Not a good idea, Prime Minister. There are other, more urgent things to do, and time is short.
“The public’s mood has changed irrevocably; on crime and punishment, social attitudes will have hardened permanently as a result of the past week’s events. Strong speeches from the prime minister are a step in the right direction, as is the much more effective policing of the past 48 hours, but the public wants real, permanent change, not just temporary, emergency measures. A YouGov poll found that 85 per cent of the public believe that most of those taking part in the riots will go unpunished – they have lost faith in the system. This is understandable: it also reflects the perception of the thugs themselves. Criminal activity is far more rational than people believe, especially in wealthy societies such as ours: there is a lot of empirical and statistical work that shows that criminals implicitly weigh up the costs and benefits of crime. A high probability and cost of detection reduces crime, all other things equal; a low likelihood of detection, a low likely cost (such as a negligible prison sentence or a caution, as has too often been the case in the past) and a larger payoff (flat screen TVs or expensive trainers) raises it. Many of those storming shops made that very calculation this week, albeit implicitly and in some cases incorrectly.”
Allister Heath, editor of CityAM. Read it all.
The political party that most intelligently grasps this change of mood, and responds to it by a re-assertion of the right of individuals to defend themselves and their property, and which unravels the disaster wrought by welfarism, supine policing and a hopelessly over-regulated labour market, should win the next election. The question, as ever, is which party has the nous and courage to do this. So far, the signs have not been very encouraging.
Taking a break from life in riot-torn London, I came across this item at the FT about some of the implications of longer lifespans. It is a mixed situation. Excerpt:
“Maxmin admits there are no miraculous solutions to the problems of a fast-ageing society. We will all have to work longer, save more and pay more in tax to cover the costs of a world with a greyer population. Even so, he thinks models like Elder Power can have a much wider application. Perhaps moments like the collapse of Southern Cross, he tells me, could (in the right hands) become moments of opportunity. More generally, models like Beacon Hill Village, ITNAmerica and Elder Power show glimpses of a future in which more elderly people can stay in their homes for longer. All three use innovative technology, make use of assets in their local community and bring together the resources of local businesses, volunteers and the state to solve problems none could have solved individually, at reasonable cost.”
How we deal with ageing, and the issue of longer lifespans, is of course intertwined with the current fiscal breakdown of many developed economies. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. And in that Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda book I have been linking to lately, about the impact of mass aviation, there is a segment on how said aviation can be used to dramatically reshape healthcare, such as by flying people with problems to cheaper, but arguably better run, hospitals in Asia. It struck me while reading this book that while automobiles and consumer electronics have been propelled by their Henry Fords, Michael Dells and Steve Jobses, we haven’t really had, in healthcare, a similar set of individuals to drive innovation and push things sharply down the price curve. The dynamics of Silicon Valley, allied with cheap Chinese manufacturing and just-in-time stock inventory systems, hardly touches healthcare at all, although this is starting to change, perhaps. Of course, much of this is caused by how healthcare is seen, wrongly in my view, as somehow “different” from such vulgar things as selling flatscreen TVs or cars. Healthcare is political. That’s the problem.
I am delighted to see that some people are ‘taking the law into their own hands’ and not just abandoning their communities to the barbarian thugs…
When the trouble came, hairdressers, sales assistants and butchers were among the scores of Turkish and Kurdish workers who stood outside their businesses in Green Lanes, Haringey, from 8pm having been warned by police to expect trouble.
The Guardian filmed others – some armed with baseball bats – on guard outside shops and restaurants in Kingsland Road, only a mile away from Hackney’s burning high street. Three workers from Re-Style Hairdressers were among those out in Green Lanes, after word spread that an attack was imminent at about 4pm
[…]
“We were outside ready and expecting them,” said the manager of Turkish Food Market, who asked not to be named. “But I felt very panicky because we are not safe from either the rioters or police. We put all of our efforts into this shop. It took 20 years to get it like this. But we do not know about our rights. I’m scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses. We are being squeezed between the two.”
Firstly, to those blaming ‘immigration’ rather than the welfare state, and the utterly grotesque way the state demands you do not protect what is yours, well people would do well to emulate the Turkish and Kurdish community in Britain. Indeed the looters we see on television and streamed over the internet are so multi-racial it must gladden the hearts of the Welfare Statists who created them.
So when the police decry ‘vigilantes‘, I would point out that communities can often do a better job at protecting themselves than the police can and the folks who got out on the streets, not to loot but to defend their neighbourhoods, well they are the real heroes here.
The safety of you and your property is only tangentially of interest to the state (certainly they want to tax what you own, so to that extent they do indeed care about your life and property), but as demonstrated starkly over the last few days, the state also created the conditions that led to these riots and is therefore rather uneasy about punishing people who, after all, only do what the state does every day only without having to smash any windows.
A community of few people with rifles and something worth protecting are not such a soft target to thugs, even armed thugs, compared to a disarmed general population looking vainly for the Plod to save them. But for all sorts of reasons, the British state has so effectively propagandised this country that to even suggest armed self-defence puts you on the lunatic fringe… so crowbars and cricket bats it is then.
If these last few days shows anything it is that when push comes to shove, only you and your neighbours can defend against what can only be called barbarian scum. Contrary to what the state would have you believe, you have the right to defend yourself and your property that morally supersede any law that would deny that right. The rioters ‘took the law into their own hands’ so I applaud those Turks and Kurds (and many others whom the Guardian would not be so keen to report on) who did the same… they took the law back from the barbarians with and put it where it belongs: in their own hands.
The state is not your friend, so do what you have to do and if you drive off some thugs, do not call the police after it is all over as nothing good will come of that.
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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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