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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“Putting Meryl’s performance aside – I’ve raved about it enough, plus it was only a pie, and there was no custard – you do not get any sense of Thatcher’s political coming of age. Why did she believe what she believed, and why so vehemently? Why go to war, for example, over an island no one in Britain cared about? You also get no sense of the human cost of her policies, how she disadvantaged the poor and took a hammer to the society she did not believe in.”
Deborah Ross, writing a review of the film, The Iron Lady (about Margaret Thatcher), page 88, The Spectator (behind the paywall). Here is the Spectator link for those who pay for the thing.
It is quite amusing, in a grim sort of way, to see how a writer such as Ms Ross is torn by her admiration for the film as a piece of moviemaking art and its sympathetic portrayal of Lady Thatcher, and her own leftist opinions concerning the alleged impact of this person on the United Kingdom (her remarks about the Falklands presumably indicate Ms Ross would have let the Argentine junta just take the Falklands, but she never tells us in the short space available).
As a free market liberal, I certainly do not revere this politician (the government share of GDP at the end of her time in office was barely different from at the start and some thumpingly bad domestic legislation, like the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, got passed), but it is nevertheless rather striking how certain film critics have had their heads messed by this film.
I am definitely going to see it. US-based movie reviewer Kyle Smith really liked it, and for the sort of reasons that, I suspect, upset Ms Ross.
Most readers will know about Detlev Schlichter and his book Paper Money Collapse. Some readers will know about Max Keiser who presents The Keiser Report on Russia Today. Yes, Russia Today. Doesn’t sound good does it?
Well, it is not all bad. Keiser does predict global economic collapse (the non-badness here being that his prediction is (I think) correct). He does blame central banks and their printing of money. He does point out that what we are seeing at the moment is very definitely not capitalism. He does interview a good number of libertarians such as Peter Schiff. And he does advocate the ownership of gold and silver.
But then things start to go downhill again. He forever blames the global situation on “banksters” and their “fraudulent” ways. While apparently being in favour of capitalism he still manages to lambast any attempt to control government spending. The UK coalition government’s austerity programme, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and the Tea Party have all been criticised by him. He also seems to believe in global warming or to be more accurate: CAGWIT (that’s my new acronym: Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Inspired Tyranny, by the way). And he interviews a whole bunch of nutters including Keynesians and anti-Israelis.
The other night he interviewed the distinctly non-nutty Detlev Schlichter. The good news is that Schlichter managed to get most of his main points across (now if only he were allowed to do that on the BBC!)…
…The bad news is that during the interview Keiser made his usual remarks about fraud (at about 20:00). And Schlichter said nothing or, at least, nothing in response. Now I appreciate that Schlichter is new to this kind of thing and that he has a book to sell but I think he should have at least said something. To acquiesce while Keiser makes his outrageous claims, to my mind, gives the impression of agreement.
“All corporate taxes fall on households in the end. Companies might be convenient places to get cash from but they are not the people actually carrying the economic burden. It is some combination of shareholders, workers and consumers that are carrying the burden: those getting the social services which they are unable to fund.”
– Tim Worstall, dealing with yet another piece of nonsense from that over-blown socialist buffoon, Richard Murphy. I have to admire Tim’s stamina in how he relentlessly mocks and refutes the rubbish from Murphy. But someone has to do it.
This afternoon I visited the office of The Real Asset Co, and talked with Ralph Hazell (CEO), William Bancroft (Head of operations), and Jan Skoyles (Economist). I have hardly begun to digest the lessons I learned from what they told me. But in the meantime, let me at least supply a link to this video interview that Jan Skoyles did with Steve Baker MP, our favourite politician by some distance here at Samizdata. Jan Skoyles is living proof that you can earn a living as an “economist” without knowing an enormous pile of things which are not so.
More and more, I find myself fearing that Baker is just too good to be true, and that some frightful skeleton will one day soon come tumbling out of his closet. I have absolutely no rational basis for such fears. It is just that the man is a politician.
I recall sitting next to Baker at a Cobden Centre dinner about a year ago, and rather rudely telling him that I expect from him: absolutely nothing, on account of him being a politician. He has already far surpassed my wildest fantasies. This video interview once again had me blinking in disbelief at the sheer uncompromising sensibleness of what he was saying. I did take a nap earlier this evening. Was I dreaming again? Apparently not.
A week and a half ago, I visited the Algarve and Atlantic Alentejo in Portugal. I left my rental car parked in Portimão for a few hours. I thought that the car was locked, but I cannot be one hundred percent certain of that. In any event, a few hours later, I returned to the car, unlocked it from a distance and got in the car. Shortly after this, I realised that a rucksack I had left in the car had been stolen. In it was my passport, a couple of lenses for my digital SLR, a pair of prescription spectacles, a (printed) copy of the latest Vernor Vinge novel, all my spare underwear, various printed travel information, and my Kindle. Things I did not lose included my wallet, my mobile phone, my camera, my favourite lens, and my iPad (all on my person), and my laptop, various cables and chargers, and all my other remaining clothes (in the boot of the car or in my hotel room).
This was highly annoying, and to have things stolen is always a personal violation, but one learns to be philosophical about things like this. If you travel as much as I do, things go wrong occasionally (as they do at home). Much worse would have been a car accident or (worst possible case) anything causing personal injury to me or anybody else. So, I made a visit to the police and the consulate, got replacement documents, and did my best to resume enjoying my trip. Nothing was lost that could not be replaced by spending some money. Annoying, but compared to the total amount of money I spend on rent, or food, or even on travel, a small inconvenience. (Getting to the stage where I can put such things behind me like this has taken some effort, and has not been quite as successful as I am pretending now.)
Places I have visited where I have had things stolen: Cannes; Prague; the Algarve. Places where people have attempted (unsuccessfully) to steal things from me: Buenos Aires; Prague (again); Belgrade.
Places I have visited without the slightest trouble: Moldova; Albania; Ukraine; Kosovo; Transnistria; Bulgaria; Romania; Laos; Vietnam; Kenya; Indonesia; China; Turkey; Mozambique; Most of these multiple times. In a couple of these places I have been overcharged by taxi drivers, but no direct theft has ever looked like happening.
What one learns from this is that tourism related crime goes where tourists go. Places that sound grim and dangerous are often quite safe (at least with respect to petty theft) when you get there. Places that are close and familiar can often be quite dangerous. Tourist resorts are much more of a problem than big cities. I was robbed on the Algarve, but I have never had the slightest problem in Lisbon or Porto. I was robbed in Cannes, but I have never had the slightest problem in Marseilles, even in neighbourhoods that physically look poor and dangerous. Take care in Malaga, but you are probably fine in Seville or Madrid.
One discovery is that rich and poor have nothing to do with it. I have been to places full of rich people in which one can barely walk out on the street without getting into trouble. I have been to extremely poor countries in the third world where one can walk down the road in the middle of the night with $2000 worth of expensive camera gear in plain sight without the slightest danger.
Of course, even when you are robbed, even in tourist resorts, good things sometimes happened. In Buenos Aires, I fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book: paint or some other liquid was thrown at me from behind. I had no idea what it came from, and someone then approached me to offer me aid. This is of course an opportunity for someone connected with whoever threw the paint to get close to you, offer you aid, and then steal your possessions when your guard is down. However much you know this and however experienced you are, it is still possible to fall for these tricks when you are tired and in unfamiliar surroundings.
In this instance, I fell for it completely. I was in one of the fancier parts of Recoleta, the most expensive district of Buenos Aires. Such a thing would never happen in Belgravia, which is perhaps why I was off my guard. However, I fell for it. I would shortly have had my bag stolen (which contained almost everything of value to me that I had with me in South America) except for the fact that a local couple saw what was going on from across the street, told the potential thieves to get lost, told me to be more careful, and went on their way. They were gone practically before I knew what was happening. I wish I had later been able to buy them a drink or otherwise thank them properly, but I had no such chance.
Last week, after I had my bag stolen in the Algarve, I got replacement documents from the consulate and came home.
Three days later, a comment apparently from me appeared on my Facebook account, consisting of “contact me please hi have your kindle pedroxxxxxxxx@hotmail.com”.
My Kindle is always connected to the internet. And the Kindle is synchronised with my Facebook account. Pedro presumably worked through the menus, figured this out, and then used this synchronisation to update my Facebook status. I sent an e-mail to Pedro at the given internet address. He sent me an e-mail the next day stating that his father had been walking his dog, and had found the Kindle in the middle of a road 16km from Portimão. He had given it to his son, presumably on the basis that the son had better tech skills and/or English language skills than he had. I sent Pedro my address, and he promised to post the Kindle to me as soon as possible.
I am struck by a couple of things here. Firstly, the kindness of strangers. There are a few people who will take advantage of you and steal from you, but a great deal more who will go out of their way to help you, even when they have no interest in doing so. I don’t actually believe in good karma, but one almost sometimes can. I am also struck by the fact that we are approaching the point where modern technology is almost a menace for the thief. A Kindle is locked to a particular Amazon account and is essentially useless to anyone without access to that account. It is easy to change the account from that account and so sell the Kindle legitimately, but not from the Kindle itself. (This becomes problematic if the manufacturer of the device wishes to use such a power to prevent the legitimate buyer from transferring that right to another subsequent user, but hopefully the market can deal with this.) More and more items that we own are connected to the internet, and more and more can be tracked remotely. Thieves apparently know this, which is presumably why the Kindle was thrown out a car window. (My camera lenses are lost, alas.)
There are privacy implications in this, but there are also good, keeping track of your property implications too. Individuals are often more helpful than large organisations. If you lose your phone, the mobile phone company will disable it to prevent the thief from being able to use it, but they care not at all whether the legitimate owner gets it back. Nor, generally, do the police. (A mobile phone that belongs to me was temporarily lost a year or so back. The mobile phone company immediately blacklisted it, the phone, even though I only asked them to cancel the SIM. The phone was subsequently returned to me, but I have still been unable to get them to unblock the phone despite multiple attempts. Thus I have a nice paperweight.)
However, if a kind individual finds it, they often do have the ability to return it to you. And very often they will. Three cheers for Pedro and his father.
In Ecuador in 2003 a trial began against Texaco who were accused of dumping toxic material in the Amazon. They were ordered to pay $18bn in damages. Chevron bought Texaco, and they are fighting back. Their evidence includes out-takes from the documentary movie Crude. Wizbang links to some of the video (via Small dead animals, via Counting Cats). One of the video’s protagonists talks of using smoke and mirrors and bullshit in the Ecuadorian court to explain away the fact that the scientific reports only showed localised contamination.
Chevron have some web pages with the background and more videos. I like it when companies bluntly defend themselves so publicly. None of this is to do with fracking, but it does shed some light on the opponents of oil exploration.
Meanwhile, an Investors Business Daily piece (via Junk Science) suggests that as of May, the Environmental Protection Agency was not aware of a proven case of water being affected by fracking, and that recent concerns about this may be due to contamination from the chemicals the EPA used when drilling its own wells. Update: Now Instapundit is saying that the EPA struck gas!
All of which suggests we need to be on our toes when faced with evidence of the dangers of fracking.
Here is an interesting article over at the Wall Street Journal about how Microsoft’s Paul Allen is faring with his own space venture. Rand Simberg weighs in.
All this private sector space stuff reminds me of this marvellously entertaining book by Victor Koman, although I agreed with an old American friend of mine that the book jacket design was a bit poor.
I hope Dale Amon doesn’t mind my writing about his chosen specialist subject!
This afternoon I attended an event in the House of Commons organised by the Adam Smith Institute, to launch their publication (published in partnership with the Cobden Centre) entitled The Law of Opposites: Illusory profits in the financial sector, by Gordon Kerr. Kerr himself spoke.
Alas, Gordon Kerr is a rather quiet speaker, and he did not use a microphone. Worse, after the talk had begun, I realised that right there next to me was some kind of air conditioning machine whirring away, in a way that made following Kerr’s talk difficult. Live and learn.
But I got the rough idea. Bad accountancy rules make disastrously unprofitable banks seem like triumphantly profitable banks, and those presiding over these banks are paid accordingly, even as their banks crash around them. And much more. The ASI’s Blog Editor offers further detail.
Good news though. I, like everyone else present, was given a free copy of The Law of Opposites. See if you can spot why I am reproducing the cover here. I am sure this will not take you long. I was interested to see if the effect in question would survive my rather primitive scanning skills. It does:
This publication is quite short, less than a hundred pages in length. Even better news. You don’t have to buy a paper copy like the one I now possess if you don’t want to. You can read the whole thing on line.
I am sure there is some anti-EU moral to be squeezed out of this strange song of worship for a big (and apparently real) German excavator built by Krupps, possessed of a artificial mind, feared even by Beelzebub and used for fighting Godzillas.
My title comes from a comment by one crashstitches79.
Perhaps there is more of a pro-EU moral? Or an anti-Godzilla moral. Awesome, regardless.
I rarely write about party politics as I think it is a waste of time, given that the two and a half main parties in Westminster are largely interchangeable and simply despise them all with an icy passion. But I will make an exception today…
Cameron, far from being a smart political operator, could not even gain a majority for his party against a detested Labour government at the last election. But by saying ‘no’ to Merkozy, he has actually done something that almost 60% of the country appear to approve of. And it has made his LibDem coalition partners publicly incandescent with rage… and therefore also uniquely vulnerable.
So the smart move is to finally tell Nick Clegg to get stuffed and to call a snap General Election. Go ‘nuclear’ and do it right now, whilst the advantage is for once very clearly in the Tory Party’s court. If the LibDems and Labour want a shot at forming a coalition, well give them what will be a ‘hospital pass’ and let them try.
But then this is the Tory Party we are talking about of course, and it would be fair to say they rarely miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. More likely he will just sit there looking smug and wait for the initiative to pass over to his political enemies once again.
I am on the Cobden Centre email list, and I have to be careful about confidentiality with regard to many of the emails I read. However, the one I just got today from Jamie Whyte is presumably intended to get around:
I’m on BBC’s Radio 4’s PM programme tonight, discussing the report on the FSA’s failure to notice that RBS was about to fail – up against some former official of the FSA. I am afraid they are going to edit what I said (fingers crossed on that) and also that I cannot tell you the exact time my item will come on the programme, which starts at 5pm, I think.
The FSA is the British financial regulator. RBS is the Royal Bank of Scotland. According to the man from the FSA, the Royal Bank of Scotland’s woes were caused by poor decisions.
I’m guessing that Jamie Whyte will be a bit more informative than that. I am out and about this evening, but it looks like there’ll be a recording available, for a while. If nothing else, this is further evidence that the Cobden Centre gang are putting themselves about.
LATER: I managed to listen to Jamie Whyte’s performance, and better, to record it. Here is what he said in his opening statement:
[The FSA] did fail. But I don’t blame it on the individuals of the FSA. I think that they have an impossible task. What’s happened in banking is that because of government guarantees to those people who lend money to banks, explicitly in the case of retail depositors – you and me with our ordinary money in the bank, and implicitly and pretty reliably in the case of wholesale lenders to banks, because they’re government guaranteed, there is no price mechanism any longer in the banking market for risk. So banks can take as much risk as they like and without paying a price for it. Normally what would happen in a free market is that it would become more expensive for banks to borrow money. And that doesn’t happen. There’s no risk premium for banks taking larger risks, because the people lending the money realise that the government will bail them out.
Now the effect of this is that basically the government is subsidising bank risk taking on a massive scale. And the job of the FSA is to counteract that. There are these rules – the Basel rules and so on about capital requirements. And then there are supervisors, regulators, people who go into the banks and check they’re complying, and their job is to counteract the massive incentive towards risk taking that the government has already provided. Now the question is: can they do it? They obviously failed to do it. Can they, if they do a better job? And I think they can’t.
And the reason they can’t is that there are almost infinitely many ways that banks can take risks. The rules will always specify some particular ways, and regulators will go in, looking at that stuff. Are they doing this or that? But the bankers are very clever and they can always come up with other ways of taking risks, and I just think it’s a hopeless task that they’ve been given.
Whyte’s opponent in the debate, a Mr Jackson, got off on the wrong foot at the start of his reply:
I think it’s very easy to blame the regulators.
Which many are indeed doing, but not Jamie Whyte. His point was that their task is impossible.
Mr Jackson went on to say that he thought that the regulators could do better, by, you know, doing better. And the BBC gave him the last word. Which was him saying that the regulators could indeed … do better.
But Jackson never really said why he thought this. There was talk of cats and mice, and of how the mice are very numerous and very incentivised and the cats unable to cope. The general idea was aired of making regulators less numerous, better paid and above all “better trained”, and of having these few regulatory titans apply only one simple all-embracing regulation, rather than lots of regulations (with lots of omissions), namely: Banks must behave well! Putting the regulators entirely in charge of banking, basically, although that was not quite spelt out. It was classic Road to Serfdom stroke Economic Calculation stuff, with one guy saying that calculation is screwed and should be unscrewed by the state retreating rather than advancing, and the other guy saying: we can still regulate better in the future (despite the evidence of the recent past), by making the arbitrary power of the state even more arbitrary and even more powerful (and hence even more likely to screw things up on an even grander scale in the future).
Just who “won” this argument is anybody’s bet. I think that Whyte made a much stronger case than his opponent, but I would, wouldn’t I?
More to the point, anyone generally inclined to favour free markets, capitalism, etc., to favour rational economic calculation and to oppose serfdom, would definitely have scored it a win for Whyte on points. Such a person might even want to dig further into the argument with some internet searching. At which point the fact that Whyte is spelt with a “y”, and that Whyte was introduced only as a “financial commentator” (rather than being from, say, the Cobden Centre) won’t have helped any.
Perhaps this posting will help such searchers after truth rather more.
“Yes indeed, Britain is on the outside: left out of this idyll of anti-competitive regulation and tax harmonisation. I can remember when the greatest Eurosceptic nightmare was a “United States of Europe”. They should be so lucky. The United States of America has nothing like this ferociously imposed central control over the budgets of its member states. Nor does it require tax harmonisation among them. The states of the American union have independent tax systems: apart from federal income tax, the taxes that US citizens pay are determined by the states they are in. Some of those states have high property and death taxes – others (like Nevada, where the revenue from gambling pays for almost everything) have low ones. Some have sales taxes and specific duties which others do not. Hence the great American tradition of driving across state lines in order to buy cheaper alcohol.”
– Janet Daley.
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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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