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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Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of South Africa’s President, says that the private sector is key to modern economic development in Africa. But, he says, African leaders and Western donors are holding it back. On the website of his organization, the South African Institute of International Affairs, he argues that:
foreign donors could play a more constructive role than they are doing at present through their current efforts to sustain the political elites and African states with budgetary support and the like.
Instead of giving more money to African governments, Mbeki says donors should providing the expertise to help establish independent financial institutions like credit unions and savings banks and help shield them from political elites.
Moreover, African governments need less power and the private sector more:
Africa’s private sector is predominantly made up of peasants and secondly, of subsidiaries of foreign-owned multinational corporations. Neither of these two groups have the complete freedom to operate in the market place because they are both politically dominated by others – non-producers who control the state. Herein lay the weakness of the private sector in Africa that explains its inability to become the engine of economic development. Africa’s private sector lacks political power and is therefore not free to operate to maximize its objectives. Above all, it is not free to decide what happens to its savings.
→ Continue reading: President Mbeki’s brother: only the private sector will make Africa rich
The United States has imposed new quotas on textile imports in order to protect American textiles manufacturers from competition. The move is bad news for American consumers and it is also bad news for the world’s poorest. Some of the blame must be apportioned to the campaigns of protectionists like Britain’s Christian Aid which have been claiming – incorrectly – that textiles liberalization is not in the interests of the poor. They have helped create a worldwide feeling of unease about the end of quotas.
The result is that America has now taken action, not to help producers in developing countries, but to protect uncompetitive American producers. America’s move is unwarranted and unjustified. The former European trade commissioner and future WTO boss, Pascal Lamy, has attacked the new quotas:
Mr. Lamy said that the global trade body [WTO] had been easing out the quota system over the last decade and that all countries had been given ample opportunity to prepare for the changes.
“It is not the law of the jungle, and the W.T.O. rules were clearly set,” he said. “Why are some politicians now not recognizing that fact?”
Fortunately, the new quotas will have to go by 2008. But in the meantime, America’s move means that developing countries will have worse jobs, less wealth creation and less trade. Is this really what Christian Aid was aiming for?
Crossposted from the Globalisation Institute Blog.
Paul Staines writes:
New data shows that the developing world’s share of global trade has surged to a 50-year peak. Rising oil and commodity prices coupled with vigorous global trade growth meant developing countries saw their share in world merchandise trade rise sharply in 2004 to 31%, the highest since 1950, according to WTO figures released this morning.
The data provides clear evidence that trade liberalisation continues to play a growing role in economic activity and is increasingly important for development and poverty alleviation. More countries are engaging in international trade and participating more actively in setting and negotiating trade rules.
Just like with India and Hong Kong, trade liberalisation is key to African prosperity. If we truly want to Make Poverty History, the world needs free trade – not protectionism.
Much has been said about the Labour Party’s election catchphrase “Britain forward not back”. It has been claimed that the phrase was stolen from The Simpsons. As The Times pointed out in February:
[In an episode of The Simpsons] Clinton appears during a presidential debate. “My fellow Americans,” he proclaims. “We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.”
Last night Labour said it had not deliberately appropriated the slogan from The Simpsons, but MPs said it was another example of a Milburn faux pas.
At the time of the controversy, I watched Milburn on the TV saying that it wasn’t stolen from The Simpsons. I do believe he was right. It actually came from the Tories. When Michael Howard was elected leader, BBC News wrote:
He urged his colleagues “to look forward, not back” and to recognise that Britain had changed since the Tories first came to power in 1979.
The Line of Beauty is the name of the Booker prize-winner, a book about gay sex, snorting coke and a Thatcher-worshipping MP who indulges with his secretary. The book is a good read, and I’d recommend it highly. But The Line of Beauty also the name of a new cultural blog, inspired by the book. It is early days yet for the blog, but it is already showing some promise, with snippets about graffiti, Sotheby’s, and a discussion of memoirs written by ‘ordinary’ people. Do check it out.
Anti-liberal NGOs like War on Want and the World Development Movement are using World Water Day (today) to campaign against private investment in water infrastructure. The World Development Movement says that water privatization is: “making it less likely that clean water will ever get to the poorest people.”
Unfortunately the World Development Movement is mistaken. As Global Growth’s development economist, Paul Staines, says (pdf file):
Practical and technological requirements for huge sanitation projects on a metropolis-wide scale require the resources of big enterprises to implement them, the private sector can not only provide the capability but also the capital required. 2 billion people thirst for clean water, Western antiglobalisation NGOs who arrogantly put their ideological interest ahead of the interests of the developing world are full of **it, and if they succeed in their campaign the fast growing cities of the developing world will be as well.
Private investment in water is expanding access to clean, running water. It contrasts strongly with nationalized water systems where politically-favoured groups receive below-cost water, starving off future investment so that unfavoured groups go without. Private investment offers the best plan for increasing access to water.
Crossposted from the Globalisation Institute Blog.
My former flatmate Drew Johnson has been setting up a new think tank. It has just launched a website. Called the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, the organization aims to do for the US state of Tennessee the excellent job that many state-based think tanks have been doing elsewhere in the United States. So get to work with the Jack Daniels and Coke and give Drew some moral support by visiting his site.
Sarah, after her first day (as an intern?) at the Fairtrade Foundation:
I don’t suppose trade can ever be fair. Someone always has to lose. It’s just they lose less with fair trade than with the regular variety.
Milton Friedman:
Adam Smith’s key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do benefit.
A truly bizarre article has appeared in the American Prospect arguing that President Bush’s proposed social security privatization should be opposed. Why? Because social security privatization has happened in Britain and has been a disaster.
How odd. I live in Britain and work in an economic think tank, and I never knew that Britain had privatized social security. Indeed, the Inland Revenue (Britain’s equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service) wrote to me recently on the subject of my state pension.
Social Security Privatization was floated as an idea after Labour came to power, but it has never become government policy. It was advocated by Frank Field MP, then the Minister for Welfare Reform, who soon after left the Cabinet.
The Prospect article is, frankly, drivel. Social security privatization has not happened in Britain.
Dr Eamonn Butler has more on the UK’s pensions on the ASI Blog.
Dr Eamonn Butler writes on the Adam Smith Institute Blog:
Soon after 9/11, Britain introduced draconian anti-terrorist legislation that included the power to imprison suspected terrorists without trial. It required an abrogation of human rights laws, and was a denial of habeas corpus: but the argument was that in some cases, producing evidence in a trial might expose secret sources or prejudice the lives and safety of the security services and their informers.
Not surprisingly, the High Court objected. So last week, Britain’s Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, replied that instead of detaining suspects in prison, he would keep them under house arrest, bar them using the internet and mobile phones, and so on.
Home Office ministers said we shouldn’t worry about this, because nice Mr Clarke would keep all such detentions under constant review. And because it only applies to international terrorists. But then other ministers said it might apply to animal rights campaigners too, since they were pretty dangerous characters. Err…where is this going to end?
Sure, a liberal order must protect itself from those who would destroy liberalism itself. And maybe, at times, you have to act illiberally to do that. But you should still act according to the rule of law. If there is evidence, it should be produced in court. If the evidence is too sensitive to be made public, then it should be heard in private before qualified judges. At the moment we are jailing people, and soon we will be imprisoning them in their homes, on the say-so of a politician. That is scary.
The cities of York, Oxford and Norwich have all recently passed protest motions against against identity cards. Councillor Andrew Aalders-Dunthorne, a Labour member of Norwich City Council said:
Finger printing ordinary people and making them feel like criminals, then charging them for the pleasure, has no place in a supposedly free and liberal society. New Labour is becoming alarmingly authoritarian, to the point where even their own Council Groups cannot support them.
ID cards are an expensive white elephant designed to pander to the Daily Mail. Once people realise what the scheme actually entails and the charge they will have to pay personally, opposition will grow.
Apparently, Norwich and York City Councils – which have also affiliated to the campaign group NO2ID – have stated that ID cards will not be required for access to council services, and that the cities will refuse to cooperate with the scheme as far as possible within the law.
(Alex Singleton blogs here.)
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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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