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]
“Britain’s biggest problem is a lack of economic growth – so much else is downstream from that. In per person terms, annual real growth averaged more than 2 percent in the run up to the financial crisis. From the crash to COVID-19, growth was just 0.6 percent on average. And of course these growth rates compound. Before the financial crisis, living standards were on course to double every 35 years; afterwards, it was every 120 years. This is a change with profound societal – and even civilizational – consequences.
“From tax and regulation to institutional malaise, demographic decline, and a culture that denigrates success – there are all sorts of explanations for our economic slowdown. But the way I see it is that we are suffering a progressive loss of economic dynamism, as we gradually replace market processes with bureaucratic ones – often to reduce risk or increase ‘fairness’. To many observers, every individual step along the road is reasonable and easy enough to justify. But over time, the effect is suffocating.”
“Some 35 years after the collapse of the 20th century’s most rigorous experiment in the failure of central planning, the fall of the Soviet empire, and comparative success of the capitalist West, it is hard to fathom how we’ve got into this climate communist mess. It should be self-evident that the planet doesn’t have a thermostat, let alone one easily adjusted by national leaders ordering technology to improve through a cascade of plans lashed to a target. Decarbonisation will happen regardless and is likely to go faster by inventing better solutions funded from the proceeds from growth, or bottom-up innovation. Rather than five-year battery-powered tractor plans, in the context of mission-led state direction – the latest reinvention of the language of failure by top-down socialist planners.”
“The necessity of finding a sphere of usefulness, an appropriate job, ourselves is the hardest discipline that a free society imposes on us. It is, however, inseparable from freedom, since nobody can assure each man that his gifts will be properly used unless he has the power to coerce others to use them. Only by depriving somebody else of the choice as to who should serve him, whose capacities or which products he is to use, could we guarantee to any man that his gifts will be used in the matter he feels he deserves. It is of the essence of a free society that a man’s value and remuneration depend not on capacity in the abstract but on success in turning it into concrete service which is useful to others who can reciprocate. And the chief aim of freedom is to provide both the opportunity and the inducement to insure the maximum use of the knowledge that an individual can acquire. What makes the individual unique in this respect is not his generic but his concrete knowledge, his knowledge of particular circumstances and conditions.”
With yesterday’s revolting annual Budget statement from the Labour government still ringing in my ears, I thought a bit about how this lot treats ideas of “merit” and what is considered “unearned” wealth. For instance, one aspect of yesterday’s measures from Chancellor Rachel Reeves is to add a deceased spouse’s pension pot to inheritance tax (threshold starts at £325,000); IHT is 40 per cent. Any money paid out from the pension will be hit, subject to certain conditions, at 45 per cent for top-rate taxpayers – an effective rate of 67 per cent. This sort of move stems from the idea that certain people don’t “deserve” to inherit X or Y, and must pay their “fair” share to the Moloch of the State. I urge people to read Hayek’s masterpiece, not least for its dissection, and demolition, of much of the argument put forward about why certain wealth is “unearned”, and why we should be paid according to some social formula of merit. That way totalitarianism lies.
“Britain’s deluded politics are downstream of a deluded public. This country simply doesn’t realise how poor it is; the gulf between public expectations of the state and the state’s means of financing itself has widened to dangerous levels. People on relatively high incomes don’t feel rich and therefore assume that there are plenty of actually rich people who could be squeezed to pay for stuff. Entitlement spending, in particular, is eating British democracy alive. Council budgets are increasingly consumed by social care and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) spending, with services cut to the bone. Meanwhile in Westminster, successive governments continually forestall capital investment to avoid tinkering with absurd commitments such as the pension triple lock.”
– Henry Hill, writing about the UK Budget statement of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves. (For non-British readers who want to know what the “triple lock” is, it is a safeguard that ensures the state pension increases each year by the highest of three measures: Inflation: The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the previous September; Average earnings: The average increase in total wages across the UK for May to June of the previous year; and a minimum rise of 2.5%.)
I agree with Hill that many members of the public, and not just the chattering class, are so economically illiterate they have little idea of how screwed the UK is financially, given demography, state bloat, over-regulation and tax, and the rest. And anyone who pushes against it is one of those sinister people known as “neoliberals”.
“It’s not too much to say that if Israel had taken Mr. Biden’s advice, Sinwar, Nasrallah, and the rest of the Hamas-Hezbollah leadership would still be alive.”
“When competence is rewarded, you get more of it. When the ability to play internal politics is what gets you ahead, then you get more of that. SpaceX has clear goals, short deadlines and clear lines of responsibility. Boeing’s culture, once one that revered engineering, has become one that worships byzantine corporate politics — where you’re more likely to get fired over DEI infractions than over job performance. And it’s not just Boeing; in Oregon, a top forestry official was put on leave after a DEI officer complained he was “seeking only the candidates most qualified for the job,” without emphasizing their “gender and identity.” Ditto the federal government, which has created a self-perpetuating culture of incompetence: It’s virtually impossible to get fired, and failures often bring more resources to the agency, not less.”
Well, maybe this is a sign of the times. A Communist dictatorship, which has gone after pesky entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma and many smaller firms, realises that this is bad for business. Who would have imagined that? It is a bit like Lenin realising, in around 1921, that shooting and jailing entrepreneurial people was not smart, so we had the New Economic Policy for a few years until Stalin turned the repression back on to full power.
The question I have, however, is whether this is a temporary change, and bad habits will resume:
China is cracking down on behaviours from law enforcement seen as detrimental to the ordinary function of private businesses, a crucial step in restoring confidence as the country embarks on a whole-of-government effort to ensure a steady, sustainable economic recovery.
One detail that perhaps got lost in the recent UK decision about the Indian Ocean group of islands containing Diego Garcia – taken very fast and over the heads of the Chagos Islands locals (which hardly fits with ideas about decolonisation) – was that President Biden applauded the move. In way this isn’t surprising. Pr. Biden doesn’t particularly like the UK, and like a certain kind of American politician, has a grudge about the old, post-imperial network of relationships and territories that the UK has, or had, around the world. More fool him.
In this transfer and lease deal (which is not, as far as I know, formally signed and there has been no formal debate or legislation about this in Parliament) the UK is transferring taxpayers money in a payment programme to a tax haven (Mauritius). If the Tories had done this, the tax haven angle would have been constantly mentioned.
It seems ironic that Labour, a party not exactly known for its love of tax havens (unless Tony Blair uses one) or such international conduits, feels it is okay to deal with Mauritius financially in this way. Don’t get me wrong, I am for tax havens, and the more of them the better, because they deter otherwise high-tax governments from going crazy when capital is mobile, although as UK finance minister Rachel Reeves is proving, that’s not a solid protection. Tax hikes are likely in the 30 October UK budget. People are leaving.
Biden’s support for what’s happened should give pause, given what a poor President he is on foreign affairs, in my view. Also, he hasn’t made much disguise of his distaste for Brexit and the UK’s independence out of the bloc, and neither did Barack Obama. There’s no enthusiasm from that quarter for the UK to engage in new trade and other deals with countries outside the EU. And Biden’s own recent judgement about foreign affairs is spotty at best: half-decent on Israel and Ukraine, and shockingly inept over Afghanistan, with the rushed departure and loss of billions of dollars of equipment.
Those on the Republican side are, apparently, far less happy about the Chagos islands deal, and the potential risk to security of the Diego Garcia airbase jointly used by the UK and US. They know how porous leasehold deals can be, and have seen that Mauritius has used all legal pressure to change the terms of its independence settlement with the UK of 1968. The US Air Force has used the base in recent conflicts; if it wanted to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, for example, and do so via Diego Garcia, the situation becomes dicier than it might have been. One has to wonder about the role of China in all this (Chinese money flows through Mauritius.)
This whole saga also shows that if the UK is to pursue a more “blue water” foreign policy in future as it expands trade links with countries outside Europe, particular in Asia, that getting its defence arrangements locked down is essential. And we need to lose our illusions about how special our relationship with the US really is at times.
Daniel Hannan has this excellent overview of just what a shockingly poor transaction the UK has made with Mauritius. Hannan argues that Mauritius has never exercised sovereignty over the islands, a fact that is so shocking it is hard to argue how on earth we reached this point and how the Mauritius government thought it could bully its way ahead on this. However, a future, different UK government should certainly revisit the terms of this deal, and press hard on Mauritius if, for example, that country’s anti-money laundering standards are questioned in future. Time for a bit of nastiness behind the smiles.
It may be too late now to change course on this specific, shabby deal, at least under the current Starmer government. I fear it is. And now there’s speculation about what happens to the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar. The UK has shown itself to be weak. People tend to notice.
“The past year has not been a Palestinian war against Israel, nor an Arab war against Israel. It has been an Iranian war against Israel, fought directly by Tehran’s own military and through its numerous terrorist proxies, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, and Iraq and Syrian milita groups. And behind the terrorist storm troopers lies Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.”
– John Bolton, Daily Telegraph, writing today on the grim anniversary of the 7 October progrom inflicted by Hamas on southern Israel last year.
My thoughts with those who grieve for the loss of their loved ones.
“Today’s censors wield cudgels with the word ‘information’. Content they don’t like they call ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’. The justification is fake. The protection is faux protection. Pretending to protect people from bad information by means of censorship may be called infaux thuggery. The cudgels are hidden, of course, but it is not hard to see through the pretence and discern the underlying message: knuckle under or we will hurt you.
The UK’s Online Safety Act exemplifies infaux thuggery, as does Brazil’s recent action against X (formerly Twitter). The Australian government is dominated by another gang of infaux thugs. The UK, sadly, not only practices infaux thuggery at home, it tutors the world in infaux thuggery.”
Earlier this year, Bruce Caldwell, a biographer of Hayek (and a sympathetic biographer, not someone out to traduce him), gave this Hillsdale College talk about the Austria-born economist’s arguably most famous book: The Road to Serfdom. This Youtube segment runs for just over 16 minutes. I think it is an excellent talk.
The book influenced a generation of politicians and intellectuals, such as Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Sir Keith Joseph. It came out at a time when a number of important writers were beavering away in illustrating the weaknesses and dangers of socialism and state central planning: Karl Popper, Ayn Rand, Joseph Schumpeter, Isabel Paterson, and Henry Hazlitt. They were seen as outliers at the time, but by the period of the late 1970s when the Keynesian/Big Government consensus was breaking down, a partial counter-revolution in economic and some political thought took place. (Looking back, the 40s was a remarkable time for good, pro-liberty/anti-tyranny writing. Harsh times can have that effect.)
As many of our readers know, this counter-revolution was incomplete. Sections of the public sphere, such as higher education, were not swayed by Hayek’s arguments, at least in their most profound sense. The State remains a bloated monster; in the UK, taxes are at post-1945 highs, and large numbers of work-aged “adults” (I use inverted commas for a reason) aren’t interested in working and subsist on the taxpayer instead. Regulation of business and human relations is a problem. But…it is also important to understand the gains made in the late 70s and during the next decade or so, and why they existed. They took place because people with good insights were able to find an audience when the shit hit the fan. The solid, smelly stuff is hitting many fans now, and this is a time for advocates of ordered liberty, to coin a term, to make the case aggressively, passionately and with a “happy warrior” mindset. Remember how bleak the cause of freedom must have looked when Hayek sat down to write this book, or when George Orwell wrote 1984.
The older I get, the more I think that it is not enough to be intellectually right; you also need to seize the moment, to have an argument to make that is digestible and understandable in any era. (Here are reflections on a book written about all this in the mid-80s and where we are now, by Kristian Niemietz.)
As the late Brian Micklethwait liked to write, to win an argument, you need to have one in the first place.
“The only appropriate responses to Israel’s gallantry, fortitude and skill from us—its nominal allies, especially in the U.S.—are “thank you” and “how can we help?” Instead, time and again Israel’s supposed friends, including the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have, while expressing sympathy over the outrage of Oct. 7 and uttering the usual support for “Israel’s right to defend itself,” repeatedly tried to restrain it from doing just that. Their early, valuable support has been steadily diminished by the way they have too often connived with the anti-Israel extremists in their own party.”
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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