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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Tim Worstall asks: “Are We Still a Free People?“:
We have a Home Secretary who has been told by the courts that locking foreigners up and denying them their right to trial is illegal. The basic presumption is that one must either be tried and convicted, or be being held on remand while that process is put in train, for it to be allowable for the State to lock you up. His reaction on being told that foreigners have the same rights as natives was, quite amazingly, to remove that right for natives. Quite.
The most basic foundation of the relationship between citizen and state, that of the right to trial, Habeus Corpus and all the rest, has been altered. It is seriously proposed that the Home Secretary should be allowed to intern anyone at all, on no evidence that he has to reveal (and thus can be argued against), for as long as he wishes. We all know that miscarriages of justice happen, the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four being examples, even when there is an open system with judges, juries and the like. We’ll never know under the new system as no one will ever have to tell us.
Quite. The illiberal moves by this government are rather worrying.
Orange seems to be a pretty good colour at the moment. After all, the soundest thing to ever come out of the Liberal Democrats was called The Orange Book. Now there is a website by some classical liberals (rather than Liberal Democrats) called The Orange Path. The authors claim that liberalism is “bright, zesty and Orange”. They point out that:
Whether knowingly or accidental, some of the landmark texts of classical liberal scholarship have orange front covers – a curiosity easy to overlook. The University of Chicago Press published FA Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty in 1960, Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom in 1962/1982 and James Buchanan’s The Limits of Liberty in 1975 – all liberal, all free, and all undeniably orange
Well, whatever. The point is that The Orange Path is a useful resource, aimed at helping the left to understand classical liberal ideas. Take a look.
Regular readers of this blog will know that the student newspaper at the University of St Andrews was evicted by the student union after it fell foul of the union’s “Equal Opportunities Policy”. One of the principal student union officials responsible for the ban says that he is just trying to help students:
I am so close to resigning from the Union. I don’t think that people realise that I spend all my time working there and sit up at night working to represent students better. And with Preston [a member of the Liberty Club] trying his hardest to fuck people over, it just compounds the problem. I’m not trying to run a fatwah, I am trying to help students. But no. Let’s ignore that and blame me because we all love the Saint [newspaper], don’t we?
Believe it or not, this virtuous student censor’s job title in the union is “SS Officer”.
Winner libertarianism is about how to make the world better, and how the world is, at least in some ways, actually getting better. Winner libertarianism explains how I can make my life a success. I am free. Yes, governments do bad things, as do others, but they can be confronted, resisted, criticised, and sometimes – quite often actually – defeated.
– Brian Micklethwait (PDF)
I’ve been trying to take out The Motorcycle Diaries from my local video hire shop, but with no success. It seems that the film is particularly popular. It is based on part of the life of Che Guevara, a hero for many young people.
When I was at university, there were students who wore Che Guevara t-shirts or who put up posters of the man on their bedroom walls. People never said a bad word against this man. To some, he was their personal Jesus figure.
Problem was, no one really knew who the hell Che Guevara was. He was a revolutionary figure, something to do with Cuba. That was about all most people knew about the man. It always seemed odd to me that people wanted to associate themselves with someone they knew so little about. In reality, supporting Che was just about making a statement – of sticking it to companies, America and the West.
Making Che Guevara into someone worthy of admiration is the most successful thing the ‘Left’ has managed to do in the past fifty years. This is the man who had no shame in murdering innocent civilians, was a major human rights violator, and put gays (who were ‘deviants’), religious minorities and other undesirables into concentration camps. Some hero.
I was listening to Frou Frou‘s cover of ‘Holding out for a hero’, I could not but help think of British politics. Here’s part of the song, and the sentiment is what I think many Samizdata readers will feel, especially following of the Tory leadership’s shameful and unprincipled support of identity cards:
Where have all the good men gone
And where are all the gods?
Where’s the street-wise Hercules
To fight the rising odds?
Isn’t there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I toss and turn and dream
of what I need
[Chorus]
I need a hero
I’m holding out for a hero ’til the end of the night
He’s gotta be strong
And he’s gotta be fast
And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight
I need a hero
I’m holding out for a hero ’til the morning light
He’s gotta be sure
And it’s gotta be soon
And he’s gotta be larger than life
“We are not gods. We cannot create wealth out of thin air. Western wealth is just a function of colonialism or, in its current form, neo-liberalism – of taking resources from countries like Ethiopia. Neo-liberals then try to justify this by pretending that they have ‘created’ the wealth they have.”
– Left-thinker
The vast majority of the British public opposes the government’s nannying campaign, according to a poll released today by the campaign group Reform. It shows that 71% of the public think that “Too many infringements on personal liberty are being proposed on matters that should be for individuals to decide for themselves”, while only 27 per cent believe that “The Government should legislate on such things even if they mean restrictions on personal liberty.”
I have to say I got a totally different impression from yesterday’s blog event from Brian. The point that came across was that we needed to move beyond the hype – for example that blogs make politics more important to people’s lives and therefore all MPs should be given taxpayer money to blog. I once heard someone claim that blogs were great because they allow everyone’s views to count equally. But they do not. While the printing press permitted those with sufficient funds to vanity publish their thoughts, it did not enable worthless books to get read. With blogs, you have to write good content and build up a readership who come back because they like it. The blogosphere is a meritocracy.
It is precisely the virtue of the blogosphere that blogs act as a filter. Boring, uninteresting blogs do not get read. That’s a feature, not a bug.
When you cut away the hype, you see real uses of the technology. William Heath, one of the speakers, talks about how blogs really can help bring fresh thinking to policy problems. He spoke on how his blog Ideal Government has enabled dozens of diverse thinkers on government IT – including users and geeks, as well as purchasers – to share what they think about how government IT could be made to work better. That is a real use of blog technology to improve communication. It has been presented to and read by the government’s Chief Information Officer.
Stephen Pollard talked of how blogs are not replacing the existing media, but they are serving an important role in fact checking. His own blog is very popular, which I would suggest helps his ‘brand’ stand out further among newspaper columnists, and it also lets him talk about things he wouldn’t be able to sell an article on.
So the seminar’s theme was not that blogs are no big deal, but that we need to move away from the hype and look at real end uses of the technology. There has been too much sloppy thinking about blogs in the past, often by those who desperately want politics to count more. As Perry de Havilland said, blogs tend to be more anti-establishment, having severely tarnished the likes of CBS News’s Dan Rather in the US, and tend to open authority to more scrutiny than in the past. Blogs are starting, however, to be used as important tools, especially by those with views to express. As I pointed out at the event, the ASI gets a fair few media calls as a result of topical pieces that have been posted on its blog. So it answers a need to be able to publish quickly a position on something and get noticed by the mainstream media, by government departments and politicians and so on. Let’s forget the hype and look at where it does useful tasks.
“The flat tax makes sense” says The Daily Telegraph this morning, in an editorial which coincides with the release of the Adam Smith Institute report on this. In the US, President Bush has identified tax reform as one of his top three priorities – along with pension and court reform – for his second term. And many of his advisers are keen for him to tear up the thousands of pages of the federal tax code and replace it with a single tax rate of 17 per cent, and even that payable only on incomes over $36,000. Every time in the past that the US has slashed its tax rates – under Coolidge, Kennedy, and Reagan – it has enjoyed a boom, and the US Treasury has actually raked in more taxes, and with the richest taxpayers contributing a far greater proportion. So this idea seems like an all-round winner.
Bush must be cheered by what he sees in other countries, too. A number of the EU’s new members, like Slovakia and Estonia, have gone for the flat tax. So has Russia and the Ukraine. Hong Kong too. Even China is thinking about it.
There’s a good deal of interest here in Britain too. That’s partly because our clever Chancellor of the Exchequer has made the tax code so complicated that nobody understands it. Tolley’s Yellow Tax Guide, the professionals’ bible on the UK tax system, now runs to an unliftable 7000+ pages across four volumes. People are hungry for the change. And so, in both the UK and US, it’s worth pushing for.
Update: Poland is bringing in the flat tax too.
Anti-globalizers fail to look at the world in an aggregate way. Instead, they base their beliefs on anecdotal evidence. They find a worker in a factory who has been badly treated and blame this on globalization, and label all factories producing for Western companies as sweatshops. But they turn a blind eye to the big picture. They do not see the effect of inward investment in creating competition for labour, which pushes up wages and conditions. They do not know why the Asian Tigers are now rich. They do not see the economic growth rates of those countries – like India – who have liberalized, believing that globalization simply produces poverty. Indeed, they tend not to use any aggregate data at all. Because the big picture does not fit in their worldview, they junk it. They stick their fingers in their ears and then continue to argue against globalization with anecdotes.
The anti-globalizers are very good at confusing capitalism with absence of capitalism. They point to countries which have not liberalized and are therefore poor, and then blame this poverty on globalization. Because the facts do not fit their worldview, the facts must be wrong.
They want those in poor countries to become rich but without making the same ‘mistakes’ as Western countries. To the extent they support trade, it is a very odd form of trade. It involves people doing exactly the same type of work as their ancestors did, but with the wages being higher. They regard trade as a redistributive process rather than as a way of creating wealth. They do not see how wealth creation is anything more than a capitalist myth – after all, they say, we live in a finite world. All the evidence for the existence of wealth creation is ignored, because their worldview is trapped by the Fixed Quantity of Wealth Fallacy.
The anti-globalizers claim that the environment is getting worse. But the facts are not on their side. They look at the roads in London, see lots of cars and say that air pollution is getting worse and worse. They fail to look at the data – they do not need to because their worldview tells them that the environment is getting worse. The data however shows that the air quality in London is the cleanest since records began in 1585. On most measures, the environment is getting better.
Nevertheless, in the name of helping the environment, they promote the idea of a future Britain where we all live simpler lives, use local currencies, work locally and buy from local organic farmers. They have a romantic image of the Middle Ages economy, with people all happier, picking buttercups in the fields. They completely ignore that the economy of the Middle Ages was nasty and oppressive for the majority of those living under it, where people died at a young age. They fail to grasp that with wealth comes the ability to solve environmental problems. Instead they prefer to oppose the creation of wealth.
The anti-globalization movement is intellectually bankrupt. It is capable of shouting slogans and protesting international meetings. But in terms of providing solutions to the world’s problems, it has nothing to offer.
I was at the University of Paisley last week debating the subject of free trade. One of the other speakers was Martin Meteyard, Chair of CafeDirect plc, a corporation which sells ‘fair trade’ coffee. He had brought with him a packet of Mexican ‘fair trade’ coffee which he proudly showed to the audience.
I was a bit surprised that he had chosen Mexican coffee. After all, compared with other coffee producers, Mexico is a rich country. Granted, Mexico’s wealth is not at British levels. But with a per capita GDP of $8900, the country is considerably better off that other coffee producers like Kenya ($1100), Uganda ($1200) and Tanzania ($600).
Mexico also has much better trading terms than other coffee producers. It is part of the North American Free Trade Area and has a free-trade agreement with the European Free Trade Area (and thus the EU). Industry accounts for 36% of the economy and services 69%. Only 5% of Mexico’s economy is agricultural.
The fundamental problem in the coffee industry worldwide is that there is too much production. This means that the price is low. What is needed is for people to exit the market, and in Mexico it is easier than anywhere else to turn your back on coffee – after all, agriculture accounts for only 5% of the economy. (Yet, according to CafeDirect, 25% of ‘fair trade’ coffee comes from Mexico.) Is CafeDirect really engaging in a great moral act by helping Mexicans stay in the market?
Paying a few pence extra for a cup of ‘fair trade’ Mexican coffee might make you feel like a better person. Unfortunately, how you feel does not make the world a better place.
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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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