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]
|
“In the absence of a gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good and thereafter decline to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as claims on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to be able to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
– Alan Greenspan, Gold and Economic Freedom, 1966.
“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default”
– Alan Greenspan, on NBC’s Meet the Press, 7 August 2011
(Hat tip for the earlier quote to commenter “El Tut” in the comments to the later one.)
“The US government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone” […] In the Xinhua commentary, China scorned the United States for its “debt addiction” and “short sighted” political wrangling. “China, the largest creditor of the world’s sole superpower, has every right now to demand the United States address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China’s dollar assets,” it said. It urged the United States to cut military and social welfare expenditure.
– Xinhua News Agency.
No kidding but hey, when a state run by a communist party tells the USA to spend less on… welfare, you start to get some idea just how strange the world has become and just how screwed the US actually is.
A year ago I wrote about the Chinese monopoly position in Rare Earths and how unlikely it was to last. It seems I was correct, according to this item Glenn Reynolds linked to today:
Elk Creek, Neb. (population 112), may not be so tiny much longer. Reports suggest that the southeastern Nebraska hamlet may be sitting on the world’s largest untapped deposit of “rare earth” minerals, which have proved to be indispensable to a slew of high-tech and military applications such as laser pointers, stadium lighting, electric car batteries and sophisticated missile-guidance systems.
And the best part of it? The deposits are not in California!
I got this via Pajamas TV. Well, it’s Friday:
“Warning: This segment contains graphic images of Matt Damon discussing tax policy.”
And the footage of Damon sharing his profound thoughts on the “upper class” etc is not for people of a nervous disposition.
Let’s not forget that magnificent movie and its treatment of Damon, Team America.
This has to have been one of the most interesting interruptions to my outdoor coffee break ever.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
August the 4th 1789…
The day when the serfs (the few serfs there actually were in France) were freed and the day that all the old taxes and feudal restrictions were abolished.
Yes I know that what went before this day was evil and what came after this day was evil – but the day itself was good.
The one good day of the French Revolution.
Although (before the pedants start to bash me) I know the repeals did not fit into exactly this 24 hour period.
But the 4th of August has become known for the pro liberty moves.
I see that some Democrat politicians in the USA have taken to calling Tea Party politicians terrorists.
I wonder if this is wise on their part. It is clearly wrong and nasty; that’s a given. What I now wonder is whether such insults will be politically damaging to the Tea Party, or rather to any politician who uses such wrong and nasty language. Is this some kind of concerted effort by Democrat bigmouths to badmouth the Tea Party? Or are they just very angry, and individually blowing off steam? Being the optimist I am, I suspect the latter, or that if it is more the former, it may be a serious miscalculation.
Recently, in a comment here (I apologise for forgetting to which posting this comment was attached and for being unable to supply the link that the commenter did supply – perhaps he or some other commenter can rectify that and I will be able to add the link (by turning those last two words blue)) to a theory that once a “convinced minority” (I think that was the phrase) reaches about ten per cent of the population, its success from that moment on cascades, and soon part or even all of the agenda that this minority is pushing becomes a given of conventional discussion and debate. (I presume that this book was involved.)
This makes a lot of sense to me. I think the key to such transformations of opinion or behaviour are that individual members of the population, even though mostly not themselves already members of the convinced minority in question, are almost all of them quite closely connected to people who are.
The Tea Party, for the purposes of such analysis as this, doesn’t just mean all the good (I think) people who are spending every spare hour and spare dime they have forcing, by impeccably democratic methods, Tea Party opinions upon that great and greedy bi-partisan tribe of Washington tax-and-spenders. I include also the (much(?) greater) group of people who, when they hear a Tea Party opinion about government spending, government debt and so on, nod their heads and say: “Yeah that’s right. They may be … (insert insult of choice involving religion, science, abortion, witchcraft, guns, four-wheel-drive vehicles, etc.) … but these people are right about government spending. It’s too much. It’s got to be controlled.”
And, I’m guessing, a lot of Americans now know people like that. A lot are even related to such people. They may not agree with such sentiments themselves, but they know, and like, maybe even love, people who do now believe such things. So, when some Democrat politician calls a Tea Party politician a terrorist, a great many average Americans respond, not by making a note to not join the Tea Party and to agree about how mad they are when next they come up in conversation, but rather, by reacting with a thought like: “Hey, that’s my Uncle Freddy you’re talking about! He likes those Tea Party people. He may be a bit of an old grump, but he ain’t no terrorist sympathiser. He drove a truck in Gulf War 1. Last Christmas he bought me an iPhone. He’s okay. Take it back!”
To put the above story another way, the key to all this is that once the population as a whole starts to have its own personal face-to-face take on what it thinks about that convinced minority with its previously off-the-chart-of-respectability opinions, no amount of political and media insults can change how they see things. They now have their own personal versions of the story, and they ain’t going to be told what to think by a mere politician on TV.
If that’s right, and if all this convinced minority stuff does now apply to the Tea Party, then bigmouth Democrats calling their Tea Party enemies “terrorists” is cause not for fear, but for rejoicing, among all those of us who want the finances of the US government to be something vaguely like sane in the years to come. Such insults are not evidence of an argument being or about to be won by such Dems; it is evidence that they are at least beginning seriously to lose this argument, and that they are starting to realise this. They know that a great many people will feel personally insulted by all this terrorist talk, but, … Grrrrrrrr!!!! What the hell is happening to the world, when a politician can’t spend other people’s money any damn way he likes? Screw the damn world!!! Screw you all, you bastards!!! When Dems call Tea Partiers terrorists, they are being honest, in the sense that they are truly saying what is on their angry, confused, wrong, nasty minds.
Does the above make any sense? It does to me. Or am I being, as I so often am, too optimistic?
By the way, while typing in this posting (on an unfamiliar computer) I noticed that I had at one point put the “Teat” Party. But actually, I quite like that phrase, to describe all the kind of people who think that Tea Partiers really are terrorists.
“Flowers begin arriving past night and bidding starts before dawn. To ensure their lilies and hyacinths are ready for the auction block, growers move them from cold storage onto carts in the early morning, or else rush them from Schiphol after overnight flights from Quito, Nairobi, and Tel Aviv. It’s impossible to see, much less make sense of, the Aalsmeer at eye level, as the floor of its central warehouse is a thicket of carts bearing blooms, all waiting their turn. This is the world’s largest commercial building at ten million square feet, more than twice the size of Chicago’s Willis Tower or Merchandise Mart….” (Page213).
“From a catwalk running above, you can study the crazy quilt of tulips, sunflowers, azaleas and hydrangeas bleeding into daubs of orange or pink on the horizon. The quilt constantly changes colors and patterns as burly Dutchmen at the wheel of one-man tugs trail daisy chains behind them.” (Page 213)
What is interesting about these passages, concerning the marvels of the vast flower-auction market in Holland, and the global reach of this business made possible now due to aviation and refrigeration, is that the author does not fall into the usual stale bromides about how all this aviation-led trade is killing the planet. I liked this passage, on page 232-3:
“Food miles cannot begin to compare in toxicity with flatulent cattle. Anyone who’s read the Omnivore’s Dilemma can recite chapter and verse on the perils of force-feeding corn to livestock in feedlots. Cows produce methane, a greenhouse gas thirty times more potent than carbon, as a by-product of digestion…..A breakdown of the Big Mac revealed that nearly a third of its [carbon] footprint stems from feed production, another third from storage, and much of the rest from slaughtering, frying, and baking. Food miles contribute 3 per cent.”
Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda. 2011.
I especially regret not having been called upon to answer Duncan Weldon’s claim that Hayekian’s are like dentists who have nothing to offer someone who is suffering from a rotten tooth. I might then have been tempted to point out, first of all, that it was pretty cheeky for a British proponent of greater government intervention to be bringing up dentistry.
– Professor George Selgin, discussing his preparation for the LSE Keynes versus Hayek debate, which is being broadcast on BBC Radio Four in half an hour’s time.
Update: The BBC has now put the debate on the internet, which can be listened to here. I am not sure if it can be listened to from outside the UK, as the BBC insist on their annoying iplayer crap rather than just posting an mp3.
Nick Gillespie, who when he is not pointing out how American politics is changing rapidly with his fellow Reasonoid Matt Welch, has an interesting essay up about how much of what passes for the “artistic community” was left looking pretty lame in how writers, painters, sculptors, film-makers and even poets responded to 9/11. (Yes, it is almost a decade ago). He makes a number of good points. Tim Sandefur weighs in with some thoughts of his own and makes this pretty blunt point:
“That is largely due to two factors: for one thing, much of the artistic community, and especially its elite, sympathize more with the perpetrators of the attacks than with a United States that they hate for its “commercialism,” “materialism,” dynamism, secularism, industrialism, and so forth. The artistic world is dominated by romanticist ideologies that see science, technology, free markets, and human progress as essentially evil things—precisely the ideology that produced the September 11th attacks. What is an artist, who has spent his or her career producing work to condemn capitalism, going to produce to mourn the loss of the World Trade Center at the hands of anti-capitalist terrorists? They certainly aren’t going to produce a second Mourning Athena. As Robert Hughes says, American artists particularly are obsessed “with creating identities, based on race, gender, and the rest. These have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement. You get irritable agitprop…. The fact that an artwork is about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than the fact that it’s about mermaids.” Relatedly, the artistic world is dominated by aesthetic notions that preclude powerful artistic commemorations of anything, really. The elite artistic world produces work that is simply not accessible to average people—the people who actually do mourn September 11th and rightly see it as an attack on everything America and they stand for. This is especially true in public monuments, which, since Maya Lin, have been minimalistic, sterile, and unmoving. (As is often true of art, Lin’s Vietnam Memorial is damn good—powerful and effective and brilliant; it’s her followers and imitators who have mucked it up.) Since the artistic elite have abandoned representationalism and powerful emotional appeal for cold abstractions, they also belittle the works of representational artists who might produce works friendlier and more moving to general audiences—and the political leaders are going to listen to the elite, not to the remaining believers in representationalism.”
For me, the only really telling film made about 9/11 has been Flight 93. I watched it several years ago and remember it as a powerful, if flawed, production.
As Sandefur says, the inadequacy of art in relation to a terrible event such as 9/11 is a broader reflection of how art has arguably, degraded in recent decades. For what it is worth, I am one of those old grouches who finds a lot of what passes for Modern Art to be mind-erasing garbage. But then again, my “modern” tastes in things like science fiction, and all the whizz-bang art that can come with it, don’t necessarily make me old fashioned, either.
As an aside, I came across these photos of Civil War memorial art. Worth a look. It adds to Sandefur’s point on representational art, I think.
It would seem that the government is about to amend copyright laws, so that it will be legal to “format shift” recorded music that you have legally bought to a different format. For instance, people will now be able to legally copy the music on a CD to their PC, or perhaps to an iPod or the music player of a mobile phone.
Ignoring for the moment the absurdity of the idea that government and a bunch of lobbyist lawyers could actually lead anyone anywhere, I am struck by the thought that the people such an amendment might have been most helpful to in 1997 were those in the music industry itself, which spent the best part of another decade attempting to preserve their existing business model of reselling people the same music over and over again every time there was a technology change. (As late as 2003, I heard an interview in which one such person stated that if the rampant piracy problem could not be solved, then the internet would simply have to be closed down. Alas, I didn’t preserve the details for posterity).
If the music industry had actually been willing to acknowledge that there was a complete paradigm shift underway a little earlier, then it might have done slightly less badly out of it. Or at least, it might have managed to avoid becoming Steve Jobs’ bitch, as ultimately happened.
Although another way of looking at it is that the industry managed somehow to find a fate that it actually deserved.
Tonight,BBC Radio 4, 8pm:
I’m told that it will sound a lot more coherent than it did on the night it was recorded.
More pre-publicity from the BBC here.
|
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.
|
