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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There is a general election in New Zealand this weekend. The present Labour party government has done its best to reverse much of the half hearted reform that it inherited – and it looks like the Labour party will be re-elected (and continue to increase the size and scope of the state).
I found myself thinking (as I often do) “good, if people vote for statism they deserve to get it – good and hard”. However, the divine right of the 51% (democracy) is (as all libertarians know) quite immoral. There is no reason why those who vote against statism should suffer because of the people who vote for it.
Take the example of California. When I rub my hands with glee (which I do) at the latest example of California statism (“jolly good, the reckoning is brought forword and the collapse of California will be a warning to the rest of the nation to repent…”) I am overlooking a few important points.
Firstly the innocent (those who vote against the increase in government spending and regulations) suffer at least as much (most likely rather more) than the guilty. And secondly there is no reason to suppose that people in other areas will understand that the suffering is caused by the statism.
Take the example of retail price controls on the sale of electricity (in California this is known as ‘deregulation’). Such price controls created a shortage of power (no surprise there) and rather than letting the lights go out the Bush administration demanded that companies outside California sell power (at the government price) to California.
I have argued that the lights should have been allowed to go out until the Californians worked out “if we pay more money people will sell us power”.
However, (of course) people who opposed the price controls would have suffered along with the people who supported them. Also there is no guarantee that people would understand that the suffering was caused by the statism.
After all the famous “economist” Paul Krugman has explained that the Californian energy crisis was created by a plot by Enron and other wicked corps. Nothing is so absurd that it will not be argued for by the media and academia. It does not matter whether most academics and media people are liars or whether they believe their own nonsense, the effect is the same – millions of people are mislead.
When I argue that the bankruptcy of California would act as a warning to the rest of the United States, or that the bankruptcy of one of the European Welfare States would warn the other nations of Europe to reform themselves whilst there is still time I must come up with a reply to the above. And I have no great reply.
I suppose all we can do is to endlessly try and explain to as many people as we can the consequences of statism – sadly we have little access to such things as the mass media, but we must do the best we can.
Things are not formally inevitable and we must help when we can. For example in California if the people voted for Bill Simon to be Governor (the election is in November) there is a good chance that collapse could be avoided (almost needless to say – the Bush administration strongly opposed Mr Simon getting the Republican nomination for Governor). And even if Gray Davis is reelected (as he most likely will be) there may still be an election in 2006 (I do not think people will be eating each other by then) and something might be saved.
Yes democracy is immoral and it is inefficient (the innocent minority are punished for the votes of the majority and the majority are endlessly mislead by academics and media people anyway), but this does not mean we should ignore democracy.
Perhaps the world will collapse and isolated groups of libertarians (or semi libertarians) will have to try and rebuild civilization via a grim struggle to survive – but we should not just give up. To give up (or to treat each example of statism with perverted joy – as I often do) is immoral.
Paul Marks
Paul Staines thinks Alan Greenspan as a canny operator who requires some careful interpretation
Yep, the 80s are over, Gordon Gekko is dead and buried, Gordon Brown lives, the stock market is going to the Antarctic, CEOs are going to jail and now the high priest of central banking himself says greed got out of control in the 90s.
I admit to never understanding why Disney’s Eisner would be motivated to work Mickey Mouse harder if he had $300m in stock options instead of $100m, but hey, I thought it was up to the shareholders to decide rather than the readers of the New York Times. Enron was pretty bad, the accountants seem to have been looking the other way and the CEOs were acting like robber barons of yore.
Today the Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was giving his biannual testimony to congress. Markets stop and listen, particularly when they are in trouble – and boy are they trouble today – I had CNBC (“bubblevision”) playing him live whilst trying to figure out how not to lose money, I heard him say “the latter part of the 1990s … arguably engendered an outsized increase in opportunities for avarice. An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community..”
Guilty as charged. For a period in 1999 to 2001 whilst the NASDAQ got gloriously irrationally exuberant, I was completely infected with greed, my altruistic immunity system shutdown. Hot dot.com IPOs? “Gimme, gimme, gimme” I cried. “Yahoo! Lets go Cisco!” I wasn’t the only one, an old friend is currently staying with me. He is a private banker, he grew his family’s nest egg 2000% in four years, then wiped it out in one year. His wife is suing him, not for divorce, but for misadvising her in his capacity as her broker. (Memo to self, never marry an American lawyer).
Greenspan has been very clever in his testimony, he has defended capitalism whilst decrying capitalists and their avarice. He basically said the bull market gold rush of the 90s overwhelmed the checks and balances of American capitalism, but capitalism is good, just some capitalists are bad. I could further summarize what he said but why not click to the Fed’s own page for yourself?
Oh, one of the big insurance companies has just announced that it “is not a forced seller of equities”. Hmmm.
Paul Staines
Patrick Crozier sees that the railways are not immune to the same laws of supply and demand as everyone else
The news that the government is considering removing rail fare controls has, in media parlance “raised fears” of a massive increase in prices.
For once the fear is the right word. Allowing railway companies the freedom to set their own fares does seem scary. The man waiting for the 08:22 has to get to work. For him there is, to all intents and purposes, only one way of getting to work – the train. There is no choice. Buying railway tickets is not like buying bars of chocolate.
So, there must be controls, right? Wrong. Fare controls are amongst the most damaging forms of regulation that governments can impose on a railway. Here, there were very few controls and very few complaints until the 1920s. London and its railways expanded in tandem bringing suburbia to the masses, all at an affordable price. In the 1920s the state imposed controls on freight charges. Railway profits went for a Burton. Then, during the Second World War, the government froze fares while inflation let rip. The railways emerged in a parlous state, in dire need of a major overhaul. During nationalisation fares were constantly being held down while the industry gradually declined. It is significant, that British Rail’s happiest time was during the 1980s when it was allowed to increase fares more or less at will. Incidentally, the chief reason why Japanese trains are so overcrowded is, once again, state-imposed fare control.
But what of the man on the 08:22? What’s going to happen to him when he’s left to the tender mercies of the market? Well, the bad news is that, intitially at least, his fares are going to go up. Quite a lot in fact.
The interesting thing is what happens next. If fares are high and are kept high and passengers see no improvement in service they will start to make different arrangements. Some will move to somehere near a cheaper railway. Others will change jobs to somewhere nearer where they live. Slowly but surely the railway will start to lose revenue.
At this point the market starts to come into its own. Sure, some railways will exhibit a couldn’t-give-a-toss attitude, put up the fares, keep them high and do nothing in return but their profits will decline. But others will take an entirely different approach. They will use the price signal to improve quantity and quality. They will introduce lower fares for those travelling before the peak. They will introduce automatic fare reductions in cases of poor punctuality. They will increase capacity and they will spruce up stations (where they don’t rebuild them). They will do this because higher fares will tell them that there is a market out there waiting to be satisfied and satisfied markets mean nice, fat pay cheques.
When fares are set free the man on the 08:22 will see a step change in the quality of the service. It won’t happen at once (railways are not like that) and it won’t be without pain, but it will happen.
Jack Heald poses some interesting questions to Brian‘s views on science and religion.
Brian Micklethwait is spot-on in his analysis of the conflict between the claims of orthodox Christianity and the claims of Darwinism. Any Christian Church and any Christian person that believes orthodox Christianity and Darwinism can peacefully co-exist is deluded.
But I wonder why someone who posts to a “critically rational” blog would claim to believe that “creationism is bunkum”.
Is it because he is already a committed materialist and Darwinism is the only theory of origins which supports his beliefs? Is it because so many so-called “creationists” are such obvious idiots? Is it because the prevailing weight of public opinion is biased towards Darwinism? Is it because anyone who claims that creationism is a better scientific model is reviled as a bible-thumping fundamentalist, and he cannot bear to be lumped in with those folks?
Surely it’s not because he has carefully weighed the evidence and decided Darwinism is a better model. I have yet to find anyone who, after carefully reviewing the data, concludes that the evidence supports the Darwinian model and contradicts the creationist model.
Are the implications of creationism a little scary? Certainly. But are scary implications any reason to avoid studying anything? Only for the uncritical and the irrational.
Jack Heald
Evelyn Palmeri thinks the perspective taken by Paul Marks regarding British politics has resonance in the USA as well.
The only way ‘local control’ is good is if it financed by local taxation – then people can ‘vote with their feet’ by going to the area with the lowest taxes (ditto regulations).
– Paul Marks, Thursday, July 04, 2002
Absolutely true.
‘Liberals’ (in the American sense of the word) only got power over us when we abdicated financial control over our local communities. It all started during our late unlamented cultural revolution of the 60’s when in the name of ‘fairness’ state and federal government began taxing us and then redistributing our money in the form of state and federal grants to local schools, hospitals, public works, welfare, etc., etc. In a short time most of the money for these operations came from outside the community. In our little Florida city of 5000, commissioners routinely tell us that this or that scheme won’t cost the city a dime because the money will come from state and/or federal funds. No amount of argument will make them see that it is all our own money.
Of course, non-Liberals know that fairness has nothing to do with redistributing income. It’s power they want and as a result public schools and other public services are in bondage to powerful unions and are run to benefit their members. Although trillions (a trillion is a thousand billion, if you can imagine such a huge sum) of dollars are spent in social services, the results are painful to see. The public school system in the U.S. once a model for the world is now a third-world operation, public hospitals are snake pits, social services do very little to help those in need, etc. Most wealthy people and those who are not so wealthy send their kids to private school and seek medical attention from private hospitals at great financial sacrifice, eschew all social services except those unavoidable ones like driver’s licenses.
Life still isn’t fair, but now it’s a lot more expensive for those of us work and pay taxes. The non-productive still aren’t satisfied with amounts of their handouts and continue to vote for politicians who promise them more and more OPM (Other People’s Money), and cycle continues.
Will it change in the foreseeable future? Has September 11th thrown cold water on voters and caused them to wake up from the stupor of the last 25-30 years? Do we want to continue our drift to the ‘left’?
I think the November elections in the U.S. will give us a clue.
Evelyn Palmeri
Paul Marks has also been following what Tory great white hope Oliver Letwin has been saying… and Paul sees that Letwin is still trapped within the statist meta-context that ultimately undermines even the best intentions.
Having read Antoine Clarke‘s recent Samizdata article If the Conservatives have a Future… (and read a review by Dr. Gabb) I wish I had been at the Oliver Letwin meeting. However, I have two concerns about Dr. Letwin.
Firstly in all the interviews I have heard Dr. Letwin give (and I have heard many interviews – the most recent only a couple of days ago) his devotion to the ‘public services’ shines through.
It is simply not true that local control will make such ‘public services’ as health and education work. For example, my fellow inhabitants of Kettering, Northamptonshire have no more influence over the work of Kettering Borough Council than they do over the work of Whitehall – nor will some administrative reorganization change this. The only way ‘local control’ is good is if it financed by local taxation – then people can ‘vote with their feet’ by going to the area with the lowest taxes (ditto regulations).
Nor will “getting civil society involved” help matters – as this tends to mean either Blair government style ‘public-private partnerships’ (i.e. sleaze – with the taxpayers being robbed even more than they are by the state acting alone), or George W. Bush style government subsidies for such things as churches and private charities (such ‘help’ can only corrupt the institutions of civil society).
If the state must exist (and human beings of good will can argue well on both sides of this question) then the ‘wall of separation’ between the state and civil society must be maintained – any mixing of the two leads inevitably to corruption. The ‘public services’ CAN NOT work – if Dr. Letwin feels he can not say that (because the voters demand that they work) then he should remain silent. I do not know what the voters will accept – but I do know that telling them pleasing stories is unwise (as when the promises can not be kept the voters will be angry).
My other concern about Dr. Letwin is that he does not seem to understand the true nature of the economy. The economy is not basically sound with a few nasty problems. No – the economy is basically unsound.
Firstly the economy is based on a fiat money credit bubble. Some people (such as Antoine Clarke) may well be very bored by me banging about this so I will keep things short. The basic economic structure of Britain and all the main Western nations is in a state similar to (if not worse than) 1929. It is true that at least we have less chance of beggar-thy-neighbour tariff wars today – but the credit-money bubble must burst (and the collapse will be very bad).
Secondly the Welfare State ‘entitlement programs’ of the Western World continue to grow. Even without a credit-money collapse these Welfare State programs would bankrupt all Western nations (including the United States). As it is the Welfare State will collapse when the credit-money bubble bursts.
Dr. Letwin and the rest of the ‘Front Bench’ of the Conservative and Unionist Party give no sign of understanding any of the above. Their policy concerns are roughly of the same order as being concerned with the lay out of the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Paul Marks
Paul Marks responds to David Carr’s article Boiling Mad
I accept that some politicians have evil motives and are statist out of envy and/or power lust. However, I think most politicians are fairly normal people (not particularly evil).
The trouble is that that most people go in to politics to ‘help people’. If one does not have a good understanding of political economy one will ‘do something’ when confronted with a problem – for example, if people need better health care (‘look there are people dying over there’) the least difficult thing to do is to increase government spending on health. It is the same with all other human wants (so government spending tends to rise). It takes a good understanding of political economy to realize that increasing government spending is a bad thing.
It is the same with regulations. There is a problem – for example rents are high, so one imposes rent control. One wishes to help improve the environment – so one imposes more environmental regulation (and so on, and so on). It takes a good understanding of political economy to realize that government regulations are a bad thing.
As centuries of free market folk have pointed out, the seemingly good effects of government spending and regulations are obvious – but seeing the real effects of such things takes thought.
Many free market people put their faith in education to enable people to understand the effects of statism. Now here we have the real problem – the vast majority of education (in Britain or any other country) is statist. Whether one goes to a private school or a state school. whether one goes to a private university or a state university the concepts one will be taught (as regards political economy) will most likely be wrong.
It is even possible that someone may be better off not going in for say “higher education” at all. If a person sees that his line of policy seems to be have bad effects the person may change their policy. But if this person has been educated into believing that bad policy is good policy a change of mind is much less likely.
One must also remember that ‘education’ does not just cover school and university, such things as television and radio (at least the ‘serious’ programs) are also part of education – and the ideas of political economy that the television and radio spread are also mostly false. So even a person who is not formally educated is still more likely than not to be filled with false ideas – but it is not as bad as if this person had gone through the formal education process as well.
Of course there are such things as free market books in the world and one can encounter them in such places as university libraries. However, I believe that the vast majority of people who read these works were LOOKING FOR THEM (or at least had their minds open to this sort of work).
Take my own case. I often present myself as a conformist, however the objective evidence shows that I am in fact a pathological rebel.
Even in junior school (i.e. before I was 11 years old) I was already in revolt. The teachers asked us to bring food for a party to ‘share with out friends’, so I strongly objected when they stole the food I brought (they had tried to make me share the food with my enemies).
Nor was this an isolated incident. I disliked the way that lies and brutality were encouraged by people of power – they played lip service to being against bullying, but did nothing to fight it and did their best to work against people who did try and fight it (such as myself). Many (perhaps all) of the teachers where nice people – but they did not do their duty, the system did not work.
Nor was this just a matter of school. I remember going through reference works as a young child looking for countries that did not have Welfare State programs (and feeling great pain when I found out that nations that appeared not to have such programs really did have them). I also went through history books about various nations with almost the sole intention of finding out when and how various “reforms” (i.e. crimes) had happened.
To take one example. I was not convinced by E.G. West‘s book Education and the State (1965) that the idea that without government action most people would not be able to read and write was a false idea. No, I thought that already – and spent ages trying to find a book that would agree with me.
To take another example. When I read Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980) it did not convince me that such things as rent control were wrong (I already thought that), no it just upset me that even this proclaimed “free market” book seemed to be in favour of such things as government fiat money (such a concept being clearly evil, you see).
I do not claim that all libertarians are as mad as I am. However, I told hold that (in the present intellectual environment) to reject statism someone must have a mind with something odd about it. To be told (endlessly) by nice well read people that (for example) ‘anti monopoly’ laws are a good thing and to think “this is all nonsense, everyone is a fool – apart from me” indicates an odd personality type. It is not to be expected that most politicians (who I repeat tend to by rather ordinary people) would have this personality type – and it might not be a good thing if they did (as not everyone with this personality type is likely to be a libertarian – they might be the very power mad types that people are concerned politicians are).
Of course libertarians will not tend to like the above. I think that is why (for example) one gets so many silly ‘libertarian tests’ – you know the sort I mean, they have questions like ‘are you against a police state?’ or ‘do you think freedom is a good idea?’ and if you say ‘yes’ to such question (or ‘no’ to certain other questions) you ‘must be a libertarian’. I believe that such tests are created so that libertarians can think that there are more of us than there really are.
If the questions were things like ‘are you in favour of the abolition of Old Age Pensions [or ‘Social Security’ if it was an American test]?’ without loading the question by talking about Cato Institute style ‘Individual Retirement Accounts’ (or other such attempts to have free market reform, whilst pretending that no one will lose), then our true numbers would be revealed. It is not to be expected that politicians would think in the same way as a small minority of the population.
There really are no clever ways one can have reform. There are no painless options when statism is as advanced as it is in the world today. I would recommend Lew Rockwell’s recent article Freedom is not “public policy”, which explains this better than any other work I know of.
Paul Marks
Tony Millard sends in a Tuscan Weekly Webwaffle.
Much of life’s futile and circular debates revolve around out-dated totems and taboos, developed in times when laws were not universally enforceable. One of the Samizdata contributors has already written about incest – which by-the-by I don’t agree with for various non-totemistic reasons – and I have been most strident in the call to legalise and destigmatise all forms of narcotics. However, upon reading the Funny Old World section of the UK satirical magazine Private Eye, which concerns itself with bizarre-but-true news articles from around the world, I now have a new cause in mind.
The Private Eye story was an interview with an Australian brothel madam, complaining about the workload for her girls following the arrival of 6,000 sailors of various ships the US Pacific Fleet in the small Western city of Perth, and her suggestion to the US Navy that such large-craft visits should be phased to ease the strain on her employees. Knowing the Australian legal system reasonably well, the matter could also give rise to legal action against the US forces for inter alia unnecessary stress and suffering to the ladies in question.
To avoid such an embarrassing diplomatic debacle, I have a better suggestion. Why not make space on board ship for freelance piecework-remunerated female (and male) operatives, with full medical support, and ‘manage’ the problem away? Reduced time on shore for the sailors, increased efficiencies for the fleet, and no doubt reduced hormonally induced tensions on board on long tours of duty. And a minimal red light district problems for coastal towns as an added bonus. Now there’s a refreshing thought for the week.
Tony Millard
Alice Bachini enters the fray on the issue of altruism.
I don’t think that we need to define doing good things for other people for no clear personal gain as altruism. It just seems the rational way to go about things sometimes. Good things cause general improvement in all sorts of ways we can’t necessarily demonstrate or define, and knowing this is enough reason for doing them. If we don’t want to do them, then there must be a reason for that. But if we do want to, then presumably our egotistical desire is based on some sensible understanding of how things are. Preferences aren’t arbitrary things, they are based on reasoning to begin with (some of it inherited, or inexplicit, or too deep or fast for us to be consciously aware of it at the time).
On the other hand, irrational desires like the urge to murder someone or to chop off your own hands, are damaging precisely because they are irrational. So the fact that people’s preferences aren’t always necessarily good does not mean that they should not operate on the basis of egotism; it just means they should get more rational before doing things.
Basically, good things make sense and are morally beneficial, including me having a delicious burger for my lunch. Whereas bad things are irrational and morally detrimental. So I can’t see any need for altrusim at all. However, it can be very bad, if it means acting in a way that is contrary to one’s egotistical preferences, because a better thing exists. This is to reason out why we don’t feel like doing what we think we ought to do. Then we can change our preferences and do good things autonomously. Individual freedom is a good thing to seek out.
Alice Bachini
Paul Marks casts a jaundiced eye at real voodoo economics.
The latest crackbrained theory to hit the media is the “Brazil must win for Wall Street” argument.
This argument holds that if Brazil wins the world cup “confidence” in Brazil will improve, an Argentina style collapse will be avoided, the ‘Right’ will win the election – and the money lent to Brazil by various ‘Wall Street’ institutions will be safe.
Of course if the term ‘Right’ means anti-statist the argument is out of touch with reality – as the government of Brazil are a bunch of social democrats and the opposition ‘Workers Party’ are worse.
However. the problem with the argument is rather more basic than this. The argument is really anther example of J.M. Keynes’ theory that a change in ‘confidence’ (‘animal spirits’) creates slumps.
Actually government credit money expansions create the boom-bust cycle.
This may have been explained a long time ago (David Hume stated it in a basic way – and Mises explained it in detail many decades ago), but ‘Wall Street’ and the media do not have a clue.
Everyone reading this blog may be saying to themselves “why is Paul Marks telling us things we already know” – but the problem is that the powers that be in our world do NOT know these things. They are not evil – they are ignorant. Ignorant of the basic principles of political economy.
Of course if Brazil wins the World Cup its economy will still collapse, but will that lead the people of power in our world to do some real thinking? I doubt it.
Paul Marks
Logan Spector from the Department of Epidemiology at Emory University takes issue with a previous Samizdata article
I am a libertarian and an epidemiologist, and with these perspectives I must take issue with the statement made by Perry de Havilland that, “Except for communicable diseases, there is no such thing as ‘public health’.” The field of public health is primarily concerned with prevention of disease, so your statement is nonsensical. Of course we can prevent chronic ailments like heart disease or diabetes (though they possibly have infectious etiologies, as is increasingly being suspected for an array of conditions). The question is how- through force or persuasion??
Now, my colleagues in the field are by and large statists who look first to government mandates to improve the public’s health. In fact one of my professors, Godfrey Oakley, is a prominent folic acid researcher and was instrumental in making folate supplementation mandatory. It would give you a pounding headache to hear the list of things he think should be taken care of by government fiat. But just because practitioners of public health have so far relied on coercion for good ends does not mean that non-coercive means are not available or should not be tried.
The first method for improving health, as you imply by your personal use of folic acid, is education. If undertaken by private groups health education is entirely consistent with libertarian principles, no matter how bitterly some segments of libertarianism dislike being told what to do (see www.lewrockwell.com for this perspective). It is, however insufficient to rely solely on individuals’ initiative in improving their health. Folic acid is needed during a critical period very early in pregnancy, before a woman knows she is pregnant. If folate is lacking, neural tube defects (such as spina bifida) can result. Would that every woman with the chance of conceiving were taking folate, but such is not that case.
Well, if it is legitimate to educate, persuade, and cajole individuals to take folate, why would not the same apply to companies as well? U.S. bakeries put up almost no fight to the mandate that they supplement their bread with folate, mainly because the benefit was clear and the cost minimal. Had public health organizations gone directly to bakeries, rather than to the government, they would have had little problem convincing them to supplement. The companies would benefit by touting their altruism (thus negating their altruism but you get the idea), and the public would benefit from improved health. Note that if anyone objected to having folate in their bread, companies would be free to market folate-free bread.
I hope you don’t think that taking this position makes me a totalitarian.
Logan Spector
In a posting earlier today, Paul Marks said some nice things about South Dakota. It’s an interesting place — wide open spaces, low taxes and few people. You might wonder why in this place of rugged individualists Democrats consistently win public office. Perhaps the South Dakota website didn’t mention the large number of Indians (Native-Americans as they are now called) who vote a solid bloc for Democrats who continue to keep them in the bondage of federal handouts. This population has opted out of assimilation encouraged by the federal agency whose existence relies on maintaining this population literally ‘on the reservation.’
Driving through these reservations is a mind altering experience. Vast tracts of featureless landscape dotted with tiny habitations looking like a National Geographic documentary on public television depicting the deperate poverty of equatorial Africa. It’s a disgrace and the natural result of what happens when people are encouraged to believe that they are victims and can’t be expected to be responsble for themselves.
Evelyn Palmeri
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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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