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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Fraser Nelson, in a Daily Telegraph (£) column entitled “The Tories didn’t defend liberty in office. But it’s never too late to start.”
This is good analysis, if horrible in what it says about the UK public and where things are in terms of public opinion:
More bans and restrictions will be on their way. Starmer’s logic is clear enough: if sickness and illness cost the NHS money, then your diet becomes his business. Obesity, of course, costs the NHS far more than smoking. So there’s not much to stop restrictions on alcohol, fizzy drinks, bacon and life’s other guilty pleasures. If you let go of the principle of freedom, including the freedom to make bad health choices, it is hard to see where it all stops.
Indeed. A few years ago, people who went on about second-hand or “passive smoking” denied they wanted to ban smoking as such. That was a lie then, and now the mask is well and truly off.
Crucially, this is being driven by not by the nanny-statism of meddling politicians, but by public opinion. Over decades, there has been a shift towards wanting the government to ban more, to regulate more. The Sunak/Starmer smoking ban is backed by six in 10 people. Polling by the Health Foundation found a majority saying alcohol should not be promoted at sporting events, that salty and sugary foods should be taxed more. Another poll shows a third of the public wants smoking banned everywhere, immediately. When covid struck, there was a mass panic and huge demand for Wuhan-style lockdown.
Exactly so. Having said which, people in their actual behaviour – what economists and sociologists called “revealed preferences” – can act in ways that are rather more liberal than suggested by their answers to a pollster about banning X or Y.
For years, the jurist Jonathan Sumption has been pointing out how the empire of law is fast expanding, because the public seem to seek the state’s protection from a greater list of life’s everyday perils. And are prepared to accept ever greater curtailments of their liberty in order to do so.
Indeed. It adds to the costs and irritations of daily life.
It appears that there is some anger, even from the Labour side, about the Starmer proposal to ban smoking in pubs’ “beer gardens”, etc. So I hope that at least on that topic, the relentless urge to micro-manage life is meeting with resistance. But Starmer will not give up easily. Authoritarianism is his “thing”. Remember, the Prime Minister, when leader of the official opposition in the previous Parliament, wanted lockdowns to continue for longer than they did. His nickname, “Capt Hindsight”, was partly born out of that episode.
Given the complaints recently about “two-tier” policing of crime and disorder in the UK, I thought it worthwhile to set out this summary of the principles of policing as set out by former Home Secretary and reforming British statesman, Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), also renowned as founder of the modern Conservative Party (Tamworth Manifesto of 1834), remover of Corn Law tariffs, reformer of banking (with some remaining issues), and general all-round good guy of British history:
1, To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
2, To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
3, To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
4, To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
5, To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
6, To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
7, To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8, To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
9, To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
“Ms. Harris’s handlers should have enough respect for the voters, and for their candidate, to let her stand alone and answer questions by herself. Joe Biden was allowed to hide in his basement and avoid tough questioning during the Covid campaign of 2020. We all know how that turned out.”
Wall Street Journal ($)
One of my theories is that Harris is not allowing herself, or being allowed, to speak on her own in an interview not just because she is stupid, and a Leftist who might blurt out what she really might think. It is also the risk she is going to cackle halfway through answering a question. Imagine, if you will, she is asked about a trade deal with the UK, say, or defence and Ukraine and the Baltics, and she starts to get a fit of the giggles.
The handlers may also have worked out the Keir Starmer/Rachel Reeves (UK prime minister, Chancellor) strategy in the UK before the 4 July general election, which is to avoid talking in detail on policy, keep things as vague as possible, block requests for specifics, and then go in hard and Leftist when in power. Under the UK’s winner-takes-all system, with a split opposition and low turnout, this has been a successful gamble. In the US, where much of the MSM is covering for Harris, her approach may also succeed in November.
These situations make me wish for a more rigorous age. I recall from the 80s there was, in the UK, a Sunday current affairs programme, on ITV, a show called Weekend World, initially hosted by the late Peter Jay (son of a former UK government minister) and later taken over by Brian Walden (a Labour MP who went Thatcherite, as some do) and finally, Matthew Parris. Jay was good, Parris was okay and Walden was brilliant.
The first half of the programme would involve an analysis of a particular issue (striking unions, state of the economy, rise of the SDP, public finances, the nuclear deterrent, drug use, what to make of Gorbachev, etc) followed by a 25-minute interview with a senior minister or senior opposition figure (politicians such as Denis Healey, Margaret Thatcher, Peter Shore, Nigel Lawson, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Cecil Parkinson, Michael Heseltine, etc). These were political figures of gravitas, who were asked difficult questions, probed hard for answers, and not allowed to get off with issuing word salads. The analysis of a story was rigorous; the questioning was forensic, polite and as sharply revealing as that of any clever attorney. And all done on a Sunday lunchtime just after the roast lamb and glass of Cote de Rhone and before the afternoon film or the rugby. The show would be the talk of Westminster for the early part of the week. Walden could get a politician, such as Neil Kinnock, Roy Hattersley or Norman Tebbit to say more than, perhaps, they wished, but it was all done with such cleverness.
I don’t buy into the whole “in the good old days” line on everything, but in my view, some of the calibre of journalism, and the quality of those running for office, or in office, has declined, and on both sides of the Pond.
Back to Mrs Harris. I doubt her handlers (the fact she has such people makes her sound like a child) would let her within a mile of a journalist and recovering political figure such as a Jay or Walden, or, to give a more modern case, Andrew Neil and their American counterparts. Not. Going. To Happen.
And so here we are.
“Speech is not violence. Words cannot injure or compel a person to hate or riot. Consequently, the state has very little business policing it, and the outcomes are usually dire when it tries.”
– Institute of Economic Affairs, in an emailed newsletter it sends out. It refers to recent commentaries such as here and here.
I came across this Substack essay by someone called Mick Ryan about the Ukrainian invasion of the Kursk region of Russia, a move that seems to have taken Moscow completely by surprise:
This Ukrainian operation represents a very significant effort on the part of the Ukrainians to reset the status quo in the war, and change narratives about Ukraine prospects in this war.
It is the kind of strategic risk-taking that I don’t think is well understood in many Western capitals anymore. For nearly two generations now, Western nations have been able to cut military spending. None of them have faced existential threats, even though the War on Terror did require a significant response for more than a decade after 9/11.
The slow decision-making cycles in Western military and political circles, and in military procurement, is indicative of institutions that no longer understand the imperative to act quickly and decisively while taking major risks.
This is not the case for the Ukrainians. They have faced an existential threat since February 2022 (and more broadly, for the entirety of their existence as a people) and have a very different political and military decision-making calculus than those of their supporters. A nation and a people who face an existential risk from their neighbour tend to think differently from those who do not.
According to Tim Stanley (Daily Telegraph, 12 August): “District Judge Francis Rafferty said that anybody present at a riot can be remanded in custody, even if they were only a `curious observer’.
This leaves me (a journalist by training) wondering whether this means that, for example, someone such as Brendan Westbridge would be in trouble in being present at the scene such as this, if only as a “curious observer” who chose to share his observations on social media, a blog, etc. In the US, we have seen the case of the remarkably brave Andy Ngo, who covered the actions in places such as Seattle and Portland of Antifa, for example. He covered events that the MSM was less willing to cover, for various reasons.
The term “curious observer” is frighteningly ambiguous. For a start, what about the intent of the observer and the purpose of such action? Does this mean that a person who is walking nearby and goes towards a scene of commotion out of curiosity or concern for his neighbourhood counts as a “curious observer” as far as this judge is concerned? Does this mean that the instruction “nothing to see here, please move along” takes on added menace? Does it mean having eyes and ears is now potentially a criminal offence?
Suppose there were to be a disorderly and riotous gathering of, say, pro-Hamas demonstrators in a street, holding up placards calling for the extinction of the state of Israel (“from the river to the sea” etc). Imagine, say, you are a Jew, and understandably worried for your safety. Are you therefore a “curious observer” if you want to see what sorts of signs people are carrying, their emblems, what they are shouting? All very curious, if you ask me.
This leads me to speculate that we are moving towards the licencing of the media by the State in the UK. The only way not to be bracketed as a “curious observer” as far as this dimwit of a judge is concerned would, presumably, to have a badge and lanyard stating you are “press”, or a jacket of the sort they have in the police and FBI in the US, maybe (and therefore, a target for yobs who hate journalists.) Reporters would end up like official war correspondents in combat zones, forced to wear a garment with the word “press” on it and accompanied by the military or police.
And lest anyone thinks this is a narrowly Left-wing concern, I am sure there are supposedly more conservative politicians who would not be averse to such controls.
Here is an outline of the main political parties said about media regulation before the 4 July election. Not one of the parties came close to a full-throated defence, with no ifs or buts, about press freedom (subject only to the constraints of the Common Law such as libel, etc).
Reading this a few years ago, people might have assumed this was all satire, craziness, signs of the writer getting unduly hot and bothered. Yet here we are, more than a month into the administration of Sir Keir Starmers, on 35% of votes cast and on a 60% turnout, which is low by historical standards. On the basis of this loveless landslide, much mischief is being built. As he showed by his enthusiasm for lockdowns a few years ago, Sir Keir’s happy place, psychologically and politically, is authortarianism.
The idea of how the bottom-up, volantaristic forces drive a healthy society is a closed book to the prime minister. For Sir Keir, and many of his colleagues, they are always “seeing like a state”. The sadness is that in this regard, Sir Keir and is colleagues are far from alone.
Update: I cannot resist not putting up this splendid answer by Andrew Neil, former Sunday Times editor, TV presenter – and my former boss – to the idiotic question from an MP about what the State should do for the media. Play this, and enjoy.
Fraser Nelson, in the Daily Telegraph today, drops some truth bombs, in the form of educational attainment data, into the analysis of the mayhem in the UK this week:
Take GSCE results, due next week. Passing at least five of the tougher subjects is now called the `English baccalaureate’. Some 62 per cent of Chinese pupils took this challenge last year, as did 51 per cent of Asians and 47 per cent of blacks. White pupils finished quite a bit behind at 35 per cent. If you adjust for wealth, by looking at pupils eligible for free school meals, the picture worsens. Some 45 per cent of Asian pupils on free school meals achieve decent grades (grade 5 or higher) in English and Maths as do 40 per cent of black pupils. But just 25 per cent of white kids do so. in no other ethnic group does poverty seem to have such an impact on academic attainment. At the last count, 76 per cent of teenage girls with a Bangladeshi background went to a university, as did 71 per cent of poor black African girls. But it was just 15 per cent for poor white boys, of whom only 2 per cent ewent to a top university. (Some 42 per cent of poor Chinese girls did so.)
Nelson goes on to ponder reasons for this dispararity, a problem particularly for boys, rather than girls. This is a fact that also throws a wrench in the argument about how girls suffer from a “patriarchy” in terms of education. That seems to be long gone. The teaching profession appears to be largely dominated by women today. Richard Reeves, the British academic now working in the US, recently published an excellent book on the topic. And he’s on the liberal-left, which meant he was quite brave in pushing back at a few narratives.
Nelson:
“Lets take those who appeared in the dock of Teeside Magistrates Court after the Middlesborough riot. Each gave their address, from which you can work out neighbourhood deprivation. In the communities the accused came from, some 26 per cent were on out-of-work benefits, on average.” Further: “The British dream is working for a great many of those who came here to seek it – and we can be proud of that. But the British dream is not working out so well for working-class whites and we should be deeply disturbed by that. Now and again, politicians summon up the courage to talk about this…” Then….”nothing ever seems to be done….But as we look for the truth behind claims of British racial tension and inequality, we do see the problem of left-behind whites slowly becoming a crisis. If [Sir Keir] Starmer wants to pick an agenda from the wreckage of the last few days, he needs to look no further.”
The problem, of course, is that the Prime Minister and his colleagues are so stuck with conventional narratives that making that leap may be beyond them. But they should perhaps reflect, that having been elected to a landslide by just 35% of the electorate on a low turnout, and mainly because of anger at the Tories rather than anything for socialism, that if Labour does not make some credible moves, it is toast in a few years’ time.
Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) controlled more than $11.8 trillion in 2023, beating hedge funds and private equity firms combined, up from $1 trillion in 2000. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) had assets worth $45 trillion in 2020, the equivalent of half of global gross domestic product, up from $13 trillion in 2000. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calculates that half of the world’s 10 biggest companies and 132 of its 500 biggest are SOEs. The state is not only back. It has burrowed into the heart of the capitalist economy — running companies (often across borders) and shaping capital markets.”
– Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg ($)
I would argue that this issue is as big, or more serious, than the usual complaint that boards of large, mostly listed, companies have gone “woke”. Because as we have seen, as interest rates have risen to curb inflation, some of this wokery has gone into retreat. But sovereign wealth funds are a different kettle of fish. With a few exceptions (Norway), nearly all the countries operating SWFs are commodity-rich autocracies, such as those of the Gulf, of varying levels of opacity. As Wooldridge says, this creates a big problem because the healthy “creative destruction” of free market capitalism cannot so easily work its brutal, if necessary, magic.
Recently, there was an attempt – since thwarted, as far as I can tell – by an Abu Dhabi-backed fund to buy the Telegraph Group, owner of titles including the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. That caused a political storm. But many other acquisitions, such as of ports, sports clubs and infrastructure, go on and are routine.
A question I have is whether the current Labour government, full of managerialist/statist types with no feel for entrepreneurship and the healthy ups and downs of capitalism, will be tempted to do something similar, although the UK, unlike the oil-rich potentates of the Gulf, is short of funds. But even so, the Starmer government might be tempted, maybe in concert with other countries, to try and get into the state capitalism act. It is probably already doing so.
The question is whether any of the opposition parties have the fortitude and discipline to mount a coherent takedown of all this, and perhaps join it with a similar assault on the growing spread of the “administrative state”. In many ways, the rise of this state, and SWFs, are part the same, troubling trend.
The following article comes from Paul Marks, regular commenter here. Thomas Paine (author of Common Sense, The Age of Reason, and others) is someone who, at one point, would have been as familiar to an American or Briton of decent reading as, say, the Founders, or a character such as Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone. Paine’s books were read as avidly as any social media post today, and were arguably far more influential and profound. Paine was immensely influential in his time. But he had serious flaws in his views, as Paul Marks argues, and was foolish in the extreme about the French Revolution and where it might lead. He ended up nearly losing his life in France.
Another person who wielded great influence in the ideas of the Founders was John Locke, the English writer. Views such as the idea that Man is a “self owner”, for example, and of how property legitimately comes into existence, are often associated with Locke.
I can recommend this book by Yuval Levin, comparing and contrasting Edmund Burke (who supported the American colonists in their bid for independence), and Paine. See also this book about the Founding by Timothy Sandefur, which readers might enjoy. And one more is America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C Bradley Thompson.
Of course, this sort of topic might appear “arcane” to some, but at a time when the Founding, and the the origins of the greatest free nation on earth, are sometimes questioned and even attacked, it is never a waste of time to re-visit the territory and learn new lessons.
Anyway, over to the “Sage of Kettering”:
Thomas “Tom” Paine is mocked for holding that it was wrong for monarchies to have fiat money (rather than gold and silver coin), and high taxes and lots of government spending – but just fine for democratically elected governments to-do-the-same-things. His position was indeed absurd – but what was the source of his specific economic position that high taxes, specifically high land taxes, should fund lots of benefits, education for the poor, old age pensions, money for the poor generally – and-so-on?
Well Adam Smith implied there was something special about land taxation – and David Ricardo and Henry George developed this idea long after the death of Mr Paine – and the idea was not fully refuted till the American economist Frank Fetter just over a century ago, although experience in Ireland in the 1840s where the British government tried to run the Poor Law welfare schemes by a land tax, assuming that this would just hurt “the landowners”, should have discredited the idea that taxing land is somehow special – in Ireland the economy totally collapsed and between a quarter and a third of the population either died or fled the country. But there is more to all this than just taking a few, false, hints from Adam Smith and running wild with them.
As far back as John Locke there was a mixing (by slight of hand) of individual consent and majority consent. Gough (Oriel Oxford about 70 years ago now) showed in his book on Locke that medieval thinkers understood the difference between majority consent and individual consent – and that Locke, in his “Two Treatises on Government” mixed them up – in order to imply that a government is not coercive if it has majority support, that you as an individual are not being coerced, no matter what government does to you, if you had a vote – if only one vote out of millions (a doctrine that makes no sense – but a doctrine that both Mr Paine and Rousseau before him, later ran wild with).
Nor is it just the political side – there is also an element of economic thinking that Mr Paine may (perhaps) have taken from John Locke. Locke held, contrary to Hugo Grotius (the Dutch theologian and legal thinker) and other theologians and legal thinkers, that God gave land (the world) to humanity in-common – rather than land being unowned till claimed (the Roman or Common Law position).
As Locke held (by his interpretation of the Book of Genesis in the Bible – thinkers such as Hugo Grotius held to a very different interpretation) that the land was originally given to humans in-common, he held that private ownership had to be “justified” – either by “as much and as good left for others” (clearly impossible with a rising population) or by some sort of payment to meet the “Lockian Proviso” – see how Mr Paine might get the idea of a land tax and various benefits funded by it, from this position of John Locke? Although, yes, Thomas Paine rejected Christianity – and it was from his interpretation of Christianity (opposed by many other Christian thinkers) that Locke got his ideas, in this area, from.
John Locke even held that if a ship’s captain with a cargo of food refused to sell it in a port where there starving people, seeking a better price at another port, the captain was “guilty of murder” – seemingly oblivious to the fact that this would (given there have always been hungry people in some part of the world) bid the price of food down to zero, bankrupting not just the captain – but also the farmers. It is also just legally wrong – as the captain may (may) be a very morally bad person (lacking in the virtue of charity – mercy), but he is NOT “guilty of murder” as any lawyer (of either English Common Law or Roman Law) could have told Mr Locke.
So, in all this, if (if) ideas are developed in a certain way it is quite possible to go from John Locke (supposedly the founder of English liberalism) to the Collectivism of Thomas Paine or even Rousseau – and of the French Revolution rather than individual private property based American Revolution. This is one of the reasons why American Founding Fathers such as Roger Sherman and John Adams were so opposed to Thomas Paine.
This article by Tom Slater is worth reading in full, but I wanted to post these words in particular because they get to the heart, as I see it, of the current mayhem on the streets of certain British towns:
At the very least, elite identitarianism – with its crusades against whiteness and white privilege – has been a recruiting sergeant for a white-identitarian backlash.
Here is an excellent overview of the situation by Helen Dale.
This infernal dynamic is what will make tackling the new sectarianism in our midst so difficult. We have an elite that will almost certainly fight this identitarianism with more identitarianism – not to mention censorship. There’s already talk of clamping down on social media, perhaps even banning ‘Islamophobia’. The pundits are having another one of their McCarthyite spasms, demonising anyone who has ever criticised multiculturalism, mass immigration or Islamist extremism. All of which seems guaranteed to push these conversations to the margins, where blowhards can spew their bile unchallenged. All the while, the state will continue to ignore the myriad other forms of racial and religious sectarianism that have reared their head of late – not least the anti-Semitic, Islamist agitation that has been blighting Britain’s streets for 10 months now.
Those racist rioters must face the full force of the law. We must show our solidarity with the communities menaced by this violence. We also cannot allow the bigoted criminality of a tiny few to become a pretext to silence the concerns and corrode the freedoms of the many. But beyond the days and weeks ahead we also need a much, much bigger conversation about how to confront the racial thinking, ‘multicultural’ sectarianism and identity politics that have brought us to this point.
I also think that some, if not all, of the evil consequences of identity politics and the rest must be traced back to academia and what passes for intellectual activity. This situation has been brewing for years. There are a number of excellent studies about all this, but I think Cynical Theories, by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, is as good a place to start as ever.
Unpicking all this is going to take a great deal of work. Yes, reducing net immigration, particularly from certain parts of the world, is part of it, if only to give more time for those newly arrived (legally) on these shores to be assimilated. Restricting immigration is only part of it, even if I accept that my views on it are a good deal more libertarian than others on this blog. But far more work is also needed, in my view, to push back against the idea of turning everyone into members of a tribe. Tribalism, along with emotionalism, is the curse of our age. To that point, I also recommend this short book by Objectivist writer Nikos Sotirakopoulos, whose commentaries I follow.
And one way to start changing is not play the game, as so many in the MSM and political world do, of assuming that everyone has to be addressed as part of a “community”, with their self-appointed leaders. A person living legally in the UK is a British citizen, period. No need for hyphens, community tags, whatsoever. If you see newscasters, journalists, MPs or others engaging in this, call them out. Write to them (politely) to point this all out.
And we need to kill an entitlement culture, which I suspect is widespread among the wider public, if not more so, than those who have just legally arrived on these shores. The Welfare State – at least its modern manifestation – has played a part in creating an underclass of people who are prey to the temptations of violence and easy (usually wrong) solutions. In this regard I think of two books, written some while ago, that are worth re-visiting: Mind The Gap, by Ferdinand Mount (journalist and former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher) and Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, aka Anthony Daniels.
I get the daily posts from the Law & Liberty blog, and this struck me as interesting, because of the preamble:
Dozens of start-ups now offer Artificial Intelligence tools to help businesses set market prices. Assuming unlimited computing power to run such models and comprehensive data sets to train them, can AI replicate the way human actors make decisions in the marketplace? Socialists have argued for more than a century that enlightened bureaucrats can set prices as well as the myriad of private actors in the marketplace. Ludwig von Mises offered a celebrated refutation of the socialist case. Does the vast computing power behind Large Language Models give new life to the socialist argument? The answer is no, but Mises’ argument needs to be updated and sharpened.
The author of the article, David P Goldman, goes on to explain the problem. As the article is free to access, I won’t reproduce other paragraphs here apart from the two final ones:
AI can’t replace the innovative creativity of entrepreneurs. On the contrary: AI itself is an innovation whose outcome is uncertain. Some applications (replacing human beings on corporate help desks, for example) may turn out to be trivial; others, for example devising new pharmaceuticals, may be revolutionary. Only in an imaginary world in which no innovation occurs could we envision an AI-driven marketplace.
Artificial Intelligence isn’t intelligence in the first place. It can replicate the lower-order functions of the human mind, the sorting and categorizing faculty, and perform such operations much faster than humans. But it cannot reproduce the higher-order functions of the mind—what Immanuel Kant called Vernunft (roughly, critical reason) as opposed to Verstand (usually translated as “understanding”). It can mine data from past experience, but it can’t stand at a distance from experience and ask, “What if we did things differently?” Freedom is the freedom to create, and that is what free societies must preserve.
This seems right to me. I think AI is going to produce marvels, but I don’t see it removing the need for boldness, risk-taking and ability that all great businessmen have to “look around corners”. To ome extent I am a techno-optimist, as the likes of Marc Andreessen, the US venture capitalist, is. But I am not, I hope, Panglossian, or the opposite of a perma-doomster, either.
It is also interesting to consider how governments, for example, might seize the idea that AI makes it possible to co-ordinate human activity in ways that eliminate all that pesky free market exchange and messy entrepreneurship. This line of thinking resembles the view of certain science fiction writers who tried to imagine a post-scarcity world. (Science fiction often contains lots of economics, as this article by Rick Liebling shows.) Eliminate the idea of scarcity, so the argument runs, and then the underlying foundation of economics – “the study of scarce resources that have alternative uses” – falls away. It is easy to see the utopian attractions if you like to mould humanity to your will. I mean, what could go wrong?
Eliminate scarcity, then who needs enforceable property rights and rules about “mine and thine”?
In a post-scarcity world, where will the sense of urgency come – the sense of adventure, that drives great businessmen to create and innovate to push back against such scarcity? (This is also the fear that some might have of universal basic income – creating a world of indolent trustafarians who, like a couch potato, suffer muscle loss and mental decline because they don’t have to work or struggle to build anything.)
Karl Marx dreamed of a post-scarcity world – that seems the logical end-point of his communist utopia, to the extent he fleshed it out at all. (The irony being that his ideas helped inspire some of the greatest Man-made famines and loss of life in recorded history, in part because of the failure to understand the importance of property, prices and incentives.)
I am sure that some of this post-scarcity thinking might be encouraged by AI. But then again, AI uses a lot of electricity, and even without the distractions of Net Zero (no laughing in the class, people), producing the power necessary for modern high-potency computing requires a lot of stuff. And mention of science fiction reminds me of the “There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch” that came from Robert A Heinlein, and later taken up by Professor Milton Friedman.
“Economics without price theory is knowledge without wisdom. Any economist can analyze data to estimate how many lives you’d save by requiring car seats for toddlers on airplanes. It takes a price theorist to ask how many lives you’d lose when the resulting increase in airfares prompts families to drive—which is far more dangerous—instead of fly. Price theory breeds wiser policymakers and wiser voters. If we fail to teach it, that’s a tragedy.”
– Steven E. Landsburg
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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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