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Time was when Ford was the model for corporatism and seen as a template for the State. But that was before we got to a situation where Communist China’s state media castigates the US federal government for wasting money on welfare programs and over-borrowing. I like the fact that Ford let Chris choose his own words to explain why he wouldn’t buy a government bail-out car. Very Post-Fordist. September 16th, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Correction: I mistakenly wrote in an earlier version of this that Hari was being sent on a course at the expense of his employer, but that is not so. He is paying for it himself. I am still not quite sure how this helps: do you need to learn how to be honest? Maybe he should read some books on ethics instead. Anyway, the error was mine. Reading this comment about the revolting Johann Hari, a journalist who fabricated interviews and, well, basically made stuff up, I am still stunned that he has not been fired by his current employer. Instead, the creep writes a sort of mea culpa and is attending a course to learn about journalism. He should have been fired, in my opinion. There are thousands of talented people trying to make a career in the media; why should this shit be allowed to stay in the business? Of course, in a free market, he should be able to do what he likes so long as he does so not at my expense, so I would, for example, object if he ever got a job working for the BBC, which is funded by a tax. But this sorry saga does rather suggest that if you are a leftie, self-styled preacher of idealism like Hari, that you can get away with a lot. Here is a blog, with the beguiling title of Splintered Sunrise, by a man who obviously swings to that side of the political spectrum who is rightly appalled by Hari and his antics. Sometimes it pays to call a spade a spade. Johann Hari is a conman. End of subject. Christina Odone, who was on the receiving end of Hari’s behaviour, is unimpressed. If this lowlife ever resurfaces in journalism, he should be referred to as “Johann Hari, the plagiarist”, in much the same way as Paul Krugman is sometimes dubbed “the former Enron advisor”. September 16th, 2011 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is interesting:
Via the Spectator’s “Coffee House” blog. I enjoyed this paragraph:
Someone explain to me why we are in the EU. I am sure there is a reason, but bugger me if I can remember now. Old age creeping in. September 15th, 2011 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have just posted the following review on Amazon.com of Paper Money Collapse. I only learned last night that the review embargo date had now arrived and that the time to be talking this book up is now, so this review was somewhat hastily written, although it is the result of quite a lot of thought. This was my very first review of any book on Amazon, and it shows, I’m afraid, particularly in my blundering attempts to italicise, which work here by those methods, but not there. Also, although I said I liked it, I didn’t tick the box saying that I liked it. Can I do anything about any of that? Probably not. (LATER: actually, I now learn that you can edit these reviews. The italics thing now makes no sense!) Oh well, blog and learn, review on Amazon and learn. I will be amazed if I don’t find myself wanting to say lots more about this book, but what follows is my first best shot. An effort but definitely worth the effort – could be huge I agree with the bit on the cover of this book where it says that this is not an easy read. For me, it has not been, and not just because the truths Schlichter spells out and explains are so not-easy to take. I am a huge fan of his, and have been ever since I first heard him talk about the analysis in this book in London about a year ago, but he makes me work hard. This book is heavy on logical exposition, much lighter on diverting anecdote. For the latter sort of Schlichter stuff, you must read his blog. One way to describe Paper Money Collapse might be to say that it is the sort of book that the great Austrian School economist and economic historian Murray Rothbard might have written, had he lived a bit longer. Last year I read Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State. While doing this, I kept hoping that I would read a theoretical analysis of our current financial woes, as opposed merely to Rothbard’s general take on Austrian Economics as a whole. I realise that this was a lot to ask of a book published several decades ago, and not surprisingly I was, although in general much educated, largely disappointed on that particular count. Well, what I was only hoping to read in that Rothbard book was what I did read in Detlev Schlichter’s much shorter book, which I heartily recommend to anyone willing to really get stuck into it. Here is a conceptual analysis, in very much the painstaking Rothbard manner, of how non-commodity-backed currencies behave when they collapse, and why they do collapse, always, inevitably. In other words it is about the times we now live in. I learned a lot from reading Paper Money Collapse. In particular, Schlichter has convinced me of the wrongness of the argument that since we want economic activity in the world to increase indefinitely, but gold is, barring a few trivial further discoveries, fixed in quantity, gold won’t work as the basis of currency. But non-elasticity is exactly why gold is such a good basis for currency. Totally elastic money, on the other hand, inevitably collapses, always and everywhere. Why should our elastic money be any different? Schlichter is not pointing the finger at individuals. This is not a detective story, where in the final chapter all the suspects are rounded up and Herr Schlichter points the finger at the guilty man. President Nixon’s decision to break the final link between the dollar and gold is deplored, and Ben Bernanke’s recent pronouncements are likewise disapproved of, but many of the decisions that lead to our current mess were made many, many decades ago, and by their nature they are the kind of decisions which are far easier to make than they are to reverse and clean up after. Nor does Schlichter believe that hyper-inflation now threatens us all because central bankers are unaware of the badness of hyper-inflation. They know that hyper-inflation is bad. Unfortunately, they also know that if the collapse that Schlichter describes occurs while they are in office, then that, for them, will be even worse than a bit more inflation or even quite a lot more inflation. So, they carry on printing money and postponing the resolution of the problem, which means that when nemesis does finally arrive, it will be all the worse. But, says Schlichter, they know what they are doing; they just don’t know how to stop. Schlichter telling them to stop will accomplish nothing. I suspect that Schlichter may be being rather kind about just how plain stupid some even quite high ranking central bankers now are, but clever or stupid, these people are now thoroughly boxed in by their previous decisions and by the decisions of their predecessors of earlier years and decades. I have been using the phrase “paper money”, as Schlichter himself does in his title. But as we all know, when central bankers now create yet more money, they are mostly putting numbers in electronically managed bank accounts. It is not the printing of bank notes that is the problem; it is the lack of a commodity base to control the process. By the same token, paper bank notes that refer to a currency that is solidly based on something like gold would be fine. But I am sure that Schlichter has thought long and hard about this phrase, and I gladly defer to his decision to call it “paper currency” in his title. I certainly don’t know a better way of putting it. “Fiat” money? “Elastic” money? (That’s the phrase that Schlichter switches to in the subtitle, also prominently displayed on the front cover.) Both are a bit more accurate than “paper” money, but are also a bit less attention-grabbing for the kind of intelligent and educated everyman whom Schlichter is trying to reach. “Paper” gets over the gist of the problem pretty well, I think. And you start learning what that means as soon as you read the sub-title. When it comes to Schlichter’s pessimism about him personally having any influence on the conduct of public policy, I agree with him, in the short run. But I think he may be proved wrong, in the longer run. I agree with him that there is nothing much he can say to the people now in charge of financial policy that will persuade them to do the right thing now, which basically means getting the collapse over and done with as soon as possible. But when this collapse starts seriously happening anyway, in just the manner and for precisely the reasons that Schlichter says, he could then become a very Big Cheese, as we say in my native England. In fact, if this book does half as well as I suspect it may, Schlichter will probably be accused, by various paper (fiat, elastic) money idiots who know only the title of this book but nothing of what it says, of having precipitated the catastrophe he describes. But other people, including politicians and central bankers, could also then be asking him: So, Schlichter, what the hell do we do now? I urge Schlichter to be ready for this moment. Suggested title for his next book: Now What? (Presumed answer: Let non-state controlled and non-state backed bankers supply currency, which they will back with gold. Get out of their way and let them get on with it.) Meanwhile, I urge anyone who thinks that he might find this book enlightening, and helpful for personally navigating through the mess, to go ahead and be enlightened. I think this book may become very big. It certainly deserves to. September 15th, 2011 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yes, Kevin Dowd’s Monday night tour de force for the Adam Smith Institute, which I wrote about here (and then some more here) has now been released into society in video form. Having attended the event itself I have not yet watched much of the video so I cannot vouch for its sound quality (what with all the extraneous mechanical noises on the night), but I hope and presume that it suffices. The ASI’s Sam Bowman says that Dowd’s speech is …:
Indeed. Looking back on it, the weirdest thing about that BBC Radio 4 Keynes v Hayek debate, which I attended and which Jonathan Pearce also wrote about here, is that the Keynesians at that debate were all assuming exactly this, that the worst was behind us, and that the argument was merely about which team would manage the recovery, assumed to be under way either now or Real Soon Now, in the nicest way. I don’t recall the Hayek team ever explicitly challenging this assumption. If that’s right, I think the reason was that the assumption was just there, but never spelled out. It was just being assumed that the worst was behind us. I think that, literally within the last few weeks, in other words since that debate happened, that assumption has collapsed. I don’t think it’s just Kevin Dowd, Sam Bowman and I (and Paul Marks of course) who are now thinking this way. September 14th, 2011 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
David Friedman (son of Milton F.) has a good post here in which he asks the question of why we don’t focus more on the possible positive impacts of man-made global warming, rather than always focus on the bads. If you live in Siberia or have endured the winters of Canada, the idea of a bit more warmth will, well, warm your heart. And assuming the net impact of AGW is to leave more people with climates that have positives, such as longer growing seasons, fewer deaths from cold, etc, then surely this is a good thing? I remember Bjorn Lomborg, in his book, Cool It, looking at how many people die every year from cold and comparing that with current deaths from extreme heat and projected deaths from more heat. The good thing about the way David Friedman poses this question is that he is not taking a view on whether AGW is bunk or not. Rather, he is saying that assuming X or Y is happening, we need to weigh the positive impacts as well as the bads before deciding on the right response. Of course, from a cynical point of view, the reason the bad effects of AGW get so much attention is because it is more fun for grant-seeking scientists and journalists looking for a good story to play up disaster. Greater crop yields in northern Canada don’t sell newspapers. Thanks to EconLog for the pointer to the Friedman piece. September 14th, 2011 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Or should we deal with it at all? Sean Duffy targeted the relatives of dead teenagers with defaced pictures of the teenagers and offensive messages. His victims were unknown to him. He has been jailed for 18 weeks. What is the opinion of Samizdata readers on whether he should have been jailed, and if not, whether there are any legitimate means of stopping him? (I trust it is already the opinion of Samizdata readers that he is a foul excuse for a human being.) If he had sent personal emails to the relatives, then I think most of us could, with a sigh of relief, invoke concepts of private property and harassment. Actually, having just written that I have become unsure about it. Moot point, anyway; as far as I can see he either posted his offensive messages on Facebook pages open to all or made his own websites. Some of his messages were also libelous – so much so that I cannot understand why he has not been prosecuted for libel – but others were not, despite their malice. It is the latter category that present the difficulty for believers in free speech. Or perhaps all I have done is demonstrate that I am not such a strong believer in free speech as I thought. Another possible get-out clause is that the web hosts, or Facebook, or the Internet Service Providers should ‘do something’. I am almost fanatically opposed to making them do something, but I agree they should. But what if they won’t, or can’t, or can’t quickly enough? Another line of thought: there has long been a catch all in English law of “conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace”. That could work, but I do not like the way it makes the test whether the victim of outrageous speech is likely to turn violent. It puts the most peaceable or timid victims at a disadvantage. Similar questions arise regarding the calculated offensiveness of the extended family cult known as the Westboro Baptist Church. One solution was an emergency law:
The law seems to have done the job it was intended for … but it and similar laws remain on the books setting a dangerous precedent. The common factor that takes Duffy and the Phelps family beyond the level of politically offensive speech (such as the Muslim provocateurs who disrupted the commemorative silence in honour of the victims of 9-11 held in London on Sunday) is the targeting of individuals. September 13th, 2011 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
Apropos that Kevin Dowd speech which Brian Micklethwait wrote about earlier, the name Paul Krugman came up when Prof. Dowd pointed to the absurdity of calls for ever more money-printing, government spending and debt as a way to solve our current economic malaise. Some readers will remember that extraordinary comment by Krugman a few days back when he suggested that policymakers should act as if they believed the Earth was under some sort of attack from space aliens. And of course he’s argued that the Great Depression was ended by WW2 (it wasn’t, or not in the way Krugman suggests). And a day or so ago, he seems determined to cause dangerously high blood pressure problems by comments such as this, apropos the commemorations of the 9/11 mass murders:
This is unhinged. Whoever Bernie Kerik is (information gratefully received, Ed), I don’t think that you can really say that the Mayor of New York was “cashing in” on the immolation of the southern part of Manhattan. If you want an account of how Guiliani and his colleagues dealt with those terrible days, here is an interview he did with Steve Forbes. As for GWB, I don’t think there was some crazy, cynical exploitation of a terrible event although some politicians, Democrat as well as Republican, used the understandably heightened fears about security to hit certain civil liberties, expand government power, and the like. Now by all means criticise the policies pursued at the time by governments in the US and overseas, and goodness knows, libertarians of various hues haven’t been shy on that score, but I detected no immediate “cashing in” on the crisis. When events of such enormity occur, any reaction from a politician, sensible or not, could with hindsight be slagged off as “cashing in”. Suppose Bush/whoever had done nothing other than mount a police operation, hold a few ceremonies of condolence and leave it at that, or go in for lots of vacuous platitudes. No doubt Prof. Krugman would now be foaming about the complacency of such a stance. Krugman is a man who, let’s not forget, was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics, and it would be nice if a certain gravitas could come with such a position. When I try to recall the way that Milton Friedman, that other Nobel Prize winning economist, wrote about world affairs to great effect for Newsweek magazine – succeeding the great Henry Hazlitt – there is simply no comparison in tone as well as content. The hatred that seems to pour out of Krugman is actually quite worrying. What is eating him? September 13th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
At a time when what are called “rare earths” – key ingredients in many of our high-tech goods – are becoming, well, rarer and more costly, here is an interesting article at the Wall Street Journal on how firms are looking to do without such metals via the use of substitutes. Substitution of one substance of nature for another, coupled with processes of minaturisation and use of smaller, lighter materials, is helping to deal with the supposed nightmare of how we are all running out of stuff. At this point, I must make my standard plug for that wonderful book, The Ultimate Resource, by Julian L Simon, and here also is the recently published and excellent The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley. As Brian Micklethwait notes below in his piece about a Kevin Dowd speech, we are likely heading for serious trouble on the monetary front. All the more reason, therefore, to bang on about the continued creativity and adaptability of people working in free markets. By the way, on the subject of rare earths, a good person to follow is libertarian blogger Tim Worstall, who makes a living from this area. September 13th, 2011 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Earlier this evening I attended a talk given by Kevin Dowd, organised by the Adam Smith Institute. It was being videoed, and although it may be of rather dubious technical quality (an air conditioning machine was making very strange noises), a video will, I was assured, be appearing on line. [LATER: Now available, here.] In the past I have suspected Dowd of failing to do justice to the gravity of the world’s financial circumstances, by being a little too precise in his reform proposals, but there was not even that sort of optimism in Dowd’s speech this evening, which spelt out in some detail the truly horrible scale of the catastrophe. There was a bit at the end about rejigging the banks, but there was no suggestion that this on its own would suffice. Dowd’s central message was that the economic life of the West is now well and truly eff you sea kayed. Currencies tanking, banks bust, governments bust, current policies hastening the stampede towards the abyss. (Our own Johnathan Pearce was also present, so maybe he will tell us a bit more of the details of the doom we are all staring at.) The odd thing was that Dowd’s speech made me strangely happy, and judging by the mood of the gratifyingly considerable throng that had gathered to hear Dowd’s prophecies of doom, I wasn’t the only one who was cheered up. Dowd himself understands this link between facing the truth in all its ghastliness and the strange elation that this can provoke. He even quoted a Noel Coward song which immortalises this sentiment: “There are bad times just around the corner. … Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!” The thing is, when your world is staring catastrophe in the face, the people you want to listen to, because you want them to exist, are people who seem to have a serious and really quite detailed understanding of the nature of the catastrophe in question, all of it. You don’t want to be told that things are fine and will sort themselves out with only a little bit of grief, because you know that’s nonsense and who wants to waste time listening to an idiot saying things like that? It is also necessary, if their audiences are to be made truly happy, for prophets of doom of the Dowd variety not to be total nutters, in the sense of being entirely disconnected from anything resembling polite society. Prophets of doom need at least some influence on events. Someone who is someone needs to be listening. Steve Baker MP has already been chosen by the fickle finger of fate, by history, or by whatever else you want to call it, as one of the tiny handful of British public figures who are going to tell Britain what the true nature of the problem now is, and what Britain must do about it, rather in the way that Winston Churchill warned Britain about Hitler in the 1930s. And guess what, Steve Baker MP was present in Dowd’s audience this evening. He even asked a couple of questions. After Dowd’s talk had finished I asked Dowd: Are you in fairly regular personal contact with Steve Baker MP? Is he getting his head around all this stuff, in the way that you already have? Yes, Dowd replied. We have had several meetings, Cobden Centre, de dum de dum. This made me even happier. LATER (Tuesday morning): More from me, with a photo, about Dowd and his performance last night here. September 12th, 2011 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
For those interested in the battles of classical antiquity, today represents an important date. And the name “Marathon” lives on for all those masochists who insist on doing those punishing runs in London, New York and other places. September 12th, 2011 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
“A pragmatist doesn’t keep pressing the same garage door button when the garage door doesn’t open. He gets out of the car and tries to identify what’s wrong.” – Michael Barone. The veteran chronicler of US politics is not given to harsh language, but he’s certainly not pulling his punches today. September 12th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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