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]
|
Adam Smith: Father of the Fringe on YouTube Incoming from Dominic Frisby:
The YouTube premiere of our feature documentary Adam Smith: Father of the Fringe will take place this Sunday evening at 7pm and you are invited to join. I hope you can make it. If you can’t fear not, the film will remain on YouTube thereafter, so you’ll still be able to watch. We’ll leave it on there until some broadcaster with deep pockets wants to broadcast it.
See also my previous post about this.
|
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.
|
No thinker is perfect, for example one can oppose Adam Smith for falling into confusion in the so called “paradox of value” (oddly enough when he was young Adam Smith understood that there is no “paradox” as, for example, people do NOT value all water and all diamonds against each other – they value a specific amount of diamonds against a specific amount of water in the circumstances-of-time-and-place) which led to the absurd Labour Theory of Value (later fleshed out by David Ricardo and James and John Stuart Mill) which led to the nonsense of Marxist economics.
One can also oppose Adam Smith for lack of understanding on land and landowners (again made much worse by David Ricardo – and not finally refuted till Frank Fetter in the late 19th century, indeed the “World Economic Forum” still comes out with these false doctrines as an excuse for its totalitarianism), and for his support for government “infrastructure” spending – the general fallacy that the “benefits” of government spending counter balance its costs (THEY-DO-NOT). The economic failure of the government financed infrastructure schemes in the Highlands of Scotland after the death of Smith (although these schemes were excellently built by Thomas Telford – their failure was economic, not engineering failure), and the horrible failure of the tax-and-spend welfare policies in IRELAND in the late 1840s (anyone who thinks that endless tax-and-spend “Irish Property Must Pay For Irish Poverty” is a “laissez faire” policy is away with the elves and pixies) should have refuted the idea that the government spending is beneficial or neutral – it is neither, government spending is economically harmful relative to the position (over time) if the government spending had not been done.
However, Adam Smith did a lot more good than harm (at least I think he did) – and Dominic Frisby is free of the errors of Adam Smith, like the rest of us Dominic Frisby has the benefit of standing on top of more than two centuries of thought and experience since Adam Smith.
I agree. When we stand on the shoulders of a giant, we can be taller than the giant. We have the giant’s experience, and his understanding of it (if we have read him and thought with care), and our own. There again, we may be slovenly readers or downright unequal to grasping the giant’s understanding, so may be using only some of the giant’s experience, and applying our less-than-giant understanding to our own.
I would go further, and ask which of any exemption to government-don’t-manage-the-economy that he allowed would not have been far more practiced by people who’d never read him?
Good point Niall – good point.