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.
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Clive Crook, a columnist in Bloomberg, does not mince his words about the new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, who appears to be of the view that the pro-market reforms of Mrs Thatcher and some of her successors (not nearly pro-market enough, in my view), were all a terrible mistake. We should, according to Mr Burnham, look back with fondness with what came before. (The Institute of Economic Affairs has this rather nice takedown.)
Crook is having none of this blather. Here are a few paragraphs from the article, which is paywalled, so I won’t quote the whole piece.
If all that’s holding the United Kingdom back is the country’s mood, then the arrival of Andy Burnham as prime minister might improve its prospects. Briefly. If the remedy also requires some particle of coherence and clarity about what the government needs to do, the prognosis is grim. The contradictions and absurdities that he’s ventured so far are remarkable even by the standards of modern British politics.
To start with the most bewildering, Burnham is apparently nostalgic … for the 1970s? He was alive in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power — but nine years old at the time, perhaps not paying close attention. A slightly older cohort recalls the immediate pre-Thatcher years as an unparalleled disaster, which helps explain why her party won that election and the three that followed.
The nadir was the “winter of discontent”: strikes in response to the Labour government’s efforts to curb inflation, shortages of food and fuel, trash piled 10 feet deep in London’s squares (Leicester Square was known as Fester Square; you could smell it from Downing Street), more strikes, pickets blockading hospitals, corpses stored here and there while gravediggers pressed for better terms, more strikes. Returning from a little downtime in Barbados, Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan sealed his party’s fate by saying he was puzzled by all the talk of crisis.
This was apparently the golden time that preceded the unforced errors of the 1980s and the following decades, when a global plague of market fundamentalism brought the country low and destroyed the dreams of working families.
Admittedly, despising Thatcher and her works will always be an article of faith for the British left. Burnham is hardly unusual in this respect. What’s more surprising, especially for a leader who says he means to unite the country and overcome factionalism in his party, is to extend much the same contempt to the pragmatic center-leftists led by Tony Blair, who resuscitated Labour after two decades of humiliating defeat and set the country on a more moderate, popular, social-democratic course. It isn’t just Thatcherism that Burnham aims to reverse, but “four decades of neoliberalism.”
Bring back council estates, cheap buses and organized labor. Nationalize a few industries. Maybe reopen some mines (though, obviously, people wouldn’t be allowed to burn the coal).
“Andy Burnham’s line about reversing ‘40 years of neo-liberalism’ – i.e. since the Thatcher government’s reforms – is beginning to grate somewhat. ‘Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s,’ he told us, while accepting the Labour leadership. We ‘surrendered control’ of water and electricity, while ‘large parts of Britain were deindustrialised’. It might have been an appropriate line for Labour when fighting the 1997 general election. For Burnham to deliver it today is a little ridiculous, given that Labour has been in power for 15 of those past 40 years. Indeed, Burnham himself was in the cabinet for three of those years. He appears to be confessing to having been part of the neoliberalist regime which ruined Britain.
Burnham is a substitute prime minister in a party which two years ago won 34 per cent of the vote in a general election, yet you would think from the tone of his address today that he had just won a large personal mandate. He has none, and that is not a great basis on which to announce a grand plan to reverse 40 years of anything: neoliberalism, socialism of whatever else. Moreover, Burnham appeared to confirm that he will not be seeking a mandate. After paying a warm tribute to what he saw as the great achievements of Keir Starmer – the man he has just deposed – he said that the people of Makerfield had spoken on behalf of all forgotten communities. Really? I don’t recall the people of Scunthorpe, Teesside or Barrow in Furness asking Burnham to speak on their behalf. In reality, Burnham simply held onto an existing Labour seat, and our new PM is going to treat that as carte blanche to reverse 40 years of economic policy.”
– Ross Clark, Spectator.
“The year 2026 brings four semiquincentennials that matter greatly to me, that I think are related to each other: the American Declaration of Independence; the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; the publication of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and the patenting of James Watt’s double-acting steam engine. Each event marks a profound shift in how human beings understood and interacted with the physical world and with each other. Before this cluster of anniversaries, we’ve just passed another related semiquincentennial, of the birth of one of our most influential applied moral philosophers. I am speaking, of course, of Jane Austen.”
– Lynne Kiesling, at the Knowledge Problem substack. The article came out on New Year’s Eve, 2025. Definitely worth a read.
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police.”
– A J P Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945. From the first page.
(Hat-tip: Institute of Economic Affairs at its new site. It manages to tie its insights about licensing laws and trade to the glorious English football victory over Mexico last night in the latter country.)
“The more big and active the state is, the more it is worth purchasing.”
– Deidre N McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State (page 97).
“Mathematics will need to develop a research culture that can accommodate AI as a partner. This will involve journals that require verification, hiring and tenure arrangements that reward exposition and checking, and collaborative practices for the verification of proofs. Checking and explaining AI-generated mathematics must count as original intellectual labor. The stronger AI becomes, the more valuable this human expertise will be.”
– Daniel Kipnis, Wall Street Journal ($)
“If everybody must be equally well-off all the time, there can be no significant movement up or down. That would rule out what might be seen as a natural trajectory from less successful to more successful, or from early struggle to affluent independence, perhaps involving personal resourcefulness or a climb up a professional ladder.”
And:
“Personal achievement and self-improvement are among the greatest satisfactions life has to offer. The possibility of moral agency and the scope for taking individual responsibility are probably the defining attributes of emotional maturity.”
– Janet Daley, Sunday Telegraph.
“The richest person in the world in the 1830s was Nathan Rothschild, whose personal net worth was around 0.6 per cent of national income. Despite this vast fortune, Rothschild died at age 58 in 1836 of an infection that $10 of antibiotics could likely cure today. Similarly, the richest people in the world today, such as Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, presumably have a marginal utility from additional consumption spending that is zero. Nevertheless, their utility still increases when new goods (smartphones or LLMs) are invented. These examples suggest that more consumption of a fixed set of goods eventually hits a marginal utility of zero while the invention of new goods or higher quality goods continues to increase wellbeing.”
As seen on a Students For Liberty comment on a Facebook page I follow. The quote was cited by this chap: Karthik Tadepalli, of the Becker Friedman Institute For Economics, University of Chicago. I don’t have the original link. There are some super-smart young classical liberals out there, and many seem to be coming from places such as Eastern Europe, India, etc.
The point about marginal utility reminds me of a comment from Perry Metzger on this blog on 2014, debunking the Thomas Piketty book that purported to claim that wealth rises faster than the overall economy and that the “rich” will eventually swallow up the world unless restrained by wealth taxes and so on. Perry M got in a reference to Douglas Adams, which is always the mark of a good article, IMHO.
“The return of the Right in 2016 and again in 2024 was not an intellectual revival. It was not driven by theory or political philosophy, but by visibility and reach: Jordan Peterson debating feminists, Charlie Kirk confronting campus socialists, Donald Trump dominating the podcast circuit. The Right returned culturally, but with an intellectual vacuum at its centre: most notably, a lack of serious economics.
For classical liberals looking back decades from now, this revival of the Right is unlikely to inspire them in the way Thatcher and Reagan still do today. The politicians of the 1980s were what George Will called ‘conviction politicians’: figures who entered politics with a coherent social creed. Politics for them was not merely about remaining in power, but about pursuing a broader mission of prosperity. That mission was not to control the economy toward a collective goal, but to empower individuals to make their own decisions.
Today’s Right, by contrast, is dominated by political entrepreneurs: figures highly skilled at attracting attention and mobilising voters. By nature, they are populists, and populism is the direct translation of public emotion into government policy. Without intellectual grounding, politics becomes purely oppositional. Today, lacking any clear sense of direction in economics, the Right is often effective at identifying problems but incapable of solving them.”
– Mani Basharzad
“In the pantheon of destructive, counterproductive laws of the last few centuries, Labour’s new Renters’ Rights Act, which starts today, must be up there with the worst. Perhaps alongside the Corn Laws of 1815, or the Trade Union Act of 1906 that allowed unchecked industrial unrest and economic decline, or the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 that constrained housing supply. It is that bad. The Renters’ Rights Act is sold as a moral crusade: a bold attempt to drive rogue landlords out of England’s private rental sector and protect tenants from abuse. As with the soon-to-be-implemented Employment Rights Act 2025, it is a cure that worsens the disease. Just as higher unemployment will come from the Employment Rights Act, so higher rent and fewer tenancies will come from this Renters’ Rights Act. Employment rights creating more unemployed people, renters’ rights creating more people that cannot rent. Classic performative socialism.”
– Tim Briggs on CapX.
One take-away from all this in my opinion is that this will seriously damage private landlords who own, say, one to five properties, and benefit larger, more institutional landlords, including corporations. Ownership of rental property will become concentrated into the hands of medium-sized and large companies, which I suspect is exactly what the existing government (and not just the existing one) wants. Such landlords will be more pliable when it comes to political pressure to adopt this or that new rule. Also, at the margins, it makes the rental sector less flexible, which also hampers the ability of people to move around in finding and obtaining new jobs. This adds to the baleful impact of the new employment legislation in the UK, which amongst its features is an attempt to re-unionise the workforce and shorten periods when an employee is on probation and can be let go. Even the BBC covers this aspect of such rules, referring to “unintended consequences”.
The point has to be made over and over that there is cause and effect. Make X more costly, or potentially risky (such as by making it harder to fire a person, evict a delinquent tenant) – there will be less of X. We impose speeding tickets on speeding motorists, so why should it be different if we somehow increase the cost of doing something, all else being equal? In fact, it would be honest if a politician said “yes, imposing these rules will reduce supply of X, so we will need to make up the difference in some other way”. But this hardly ever happens. There’s just this assumption that a new piece of law or tax will be absorbed. This is a species, in a way, of the magical thinking that we also get in areas such as around Net Zero.
“The people pursuing luxury beliefs are engaged in a kind of status competition. Who can épater la bourgeoisie with the boldest, most transgressive political statements? After Oct. 7, 2023, we saw this kind of status-jockeying on college campuses, where elite students vied to become the most fervent supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah. Keffiyeh scarves became de rigueur. Celebrating political murder is the next step on this progression. For most, it’s only talk. But there will always be a few who seek what they see as the ultimate status: actually carrying out a political attack.
“People who shrug off this violence chic as mere talk need to take a hard look at what’s going on. The foiled attack on President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was the third attempt on Mr. Trump’s life in less than two years. The 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was tragically successful. As was the hit on two Israel embassy staffers on a street in Washington, D.C., last year. We’ve seen hundreds of attacks on Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues. An anti-Israel extremist firebombed the residence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. The list goes on and on. And the pace of these attacks seems to be accelerating.”
– James B Meigs, Wall Street Journal ($)
His article also addresses how it is now considered chic for these poseurs and self-regarding halfwits to steal stuff.
One consequence of all this nastiness will be a rise in vigilantism, and I don’t at this point think anyone has an excuse for being surprised.
“Britain is running a live experiment in how fast you can drain a tax base before you start draining a country. This recent article in The Times reports on a freedom of information request by Wealth Club to HMRC has revealed that the top 1% of taxpayers (circa 500,000 people) contributed nearly £94 billion in tax in 2023/24. That’s a third of all income tax collected. The top 100,000 paid almost a fifth of the national total on their own. At the same time, Britain is losing those very people. The latest Henley Private Wealth Migration Report forecasts £66 billion in wealth leaving the UK this year as record numbers of millionaires move abroad. That follows 10,800 departures in 2024, the highest ever recorded.”
I got this on my Linkedin page, from a chap called John Russo.
Here’s more:
“Critics call this alarmist. They point out that only 0.6% of the UK’s millionaires are leaving. But this misses the point. It’s not the number of people that matters. It’s the volume of capital, the density of investment, and the influence of networks that disappear with them. When a founder, a fund manager, or a family office relocates, their employees, service providers, and charities often follow. The irony is that the UK’s tax system remains among the most progressive in the developed world. Those with higher incomes already contribute the majority of national revenue. But the politics of envy has become the economics of loss.”
Hard to dispute any of this. Read the whole thing, as someone once put it.
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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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