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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“Yes, the Chinese put on a display of thousands of co-ordinated drummers, itself an extraordinary physical feat, but hey, WE HAVE DRAG QUEENS, DECAPITATION, AND A FAT SEX-SWAPPED JESUS.”
– David Thompson.
Of course, maybe the French organisers of the Olympic opening shindig wanted to bring a bit of Eurovision, or even better, Eurotrash, back into the limelight.
On a separate note, Ilya Somin has this thought-provoking post on how to fix the “dark side of the Olympics”.
And finally, gender fluidity comes for boxing.
Steve Baker, the former Conservative MP (he lost his High Wycombe seat in the 2024 general election), ex-RAF officer, and a business figure in the IT sector, drops some solid truths in his new Substack:
The evidence suggests that we cannot afford the state we have, not now and not in our lifetimes. Taxes are at historic highs and it is implausible to believe they can be raised usefully. Debt is heading into unsustainable territory and the National Insurance Fund will be exhausted in 20 years, putting a date on the currently inevitable default of the welfare state.
Moreover, the evidence is that currencies have been dramatically debased since 1971, manufacturing injustice on a vast scale in ways which are rarely and poorly understood, but which appear to be reflected in commonly-expressed grievances which have been leading to political radicalism.
The situation facing the UK and the world is extremely serious. When Rachel Reeves on Monday tells the Commons we cannot afford present spending, the Conservatives should make the most of it in the public interest.
Read it all. As Mr Baker writes, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is due to address parliament on Monday (29 July) on the state of the UK public finances, claiming that they are so much worse than originally thought (which is disingenuous, to be polite), and hence pave the way for even more tax hikes. Mr Baker’s essay contains some fairly eye-popping charts and data points about where the UK is in terms of its total tax burden.
“How will the service rebuild in the wake of its catastrophic failure? The agency might argue that it is striving to bulk up, adding personnel needed to thwart assassins. On Monday, the Secret Service advertised two openings. The positions could be found at the U.S. government’s employment portal, USAJobs. Those hired will each be paid $139,395 annually. With what essential mission will they be tasked? Counter-sniping? Evasive driving? No. The title of both jobs is “Lead Public Affairs Specialist.”
– Eric Felten, Wall Street Journal ($).
The humorous writers and mockers of government idiocies, such as the late H L Mencken and P J O’Rourke, would have had much sport with this sort of story.
Do people remember all those years back, at the time of the financial crash of 2008, about how so many wrote and spoke about dangers of an over-concentrated banking system, “too big to fail”, moral hazards of bailouts, poor risk management, etc? I do. I cannot count the articles, conferences, talks, books and videos about all this, and the lessons that must be learned.
Well, here we go:
There is, however, a bigger and simpler problem that financial-stability supervisors have been growing concerned about: The over-reliance of banks and markets on a limited number of third parties for things like cloud-computing services, software and risk-modelling tools. The UK, for example, found that 65% of British financial firms used the same four cloud providers. And earlier this year, the International Monetary Fund dedicated a chapter of its annual Financial Stability Report to cyber risks, noting that the world’s biggest systemically important banks were growing increasingly reliant on common information-technology providers. The IMF found a greater overlap in major banks’ use of the same IT products and services than was the case for insurers or asset managers.
The comment is by Paul J Davies, a writer for Bloomberg ($). He is writing about the implications of the Microsoft/Crowdstrike outage that slammed banks, airlines, healthcare providers and others last Friday and through the weekend.
Besides the level of “fragile” reliance on a few systems, is the fact that this saga, in my mind, makes it even more dangerous to proceed with things such as digital identities (an idea of Tony Blair), central bank digital currencies, and the rest of it. I think I need to re-read the Nassim Taleb book, Antifragile.
I wanted to reflect on how Mr Trump’s running mate – JD Vance (he came out of business and he worked in venture capital) – can nevertheless hold often anti-market views. (See his praise for the anti-trust stance of the Biden administration.) At best, Mr Vance seems to be a sort of “small business” champion with a dislike of bigness for bigness’s sake, conflating size with lack of competition. (Anyone who can understand the “Austrian” insight that competition is a dynamic process through time, and appreciate what Joseph Schumpeter called the creative destruction of capitalism, can see the flaw in this sort of prejudice.)
The problem is not Big Business per se. The problem is when businessmen lobby Congress or whoever for favours, such as for tariffs, exemptions from rules applied to others, tax breaks, subsidies, appointments of their people into government for leverage, cheap loans from banks, etc. Anti-trust is absurd and ripe for arbitrary assaults on property and freedom of contract because one can be guilty of “anti-competitive” conduct regardless of whether one charges higher prices than a rival, the same price or a lower one. Without an objective measure, it is a wrecking ball. (Insider dealing suffers from the same problem.)
That’s the sort of issue where Mr Vance needs to focus his anger. But has he? Has he made these points? Has he, for example, pointed out that central bank QE and the holding of interest below the natural rate creates “zombie” corporations, reduces investment into productive enterprise and reduces productivity, and hence wage growth ? Has he understood, and denounced, how finagling interest rates by central banks and politicians has distorted the capital structure of the West, and done so down the centuries, with ruinous consequences? Does he realise that all this monetary madness calcifies business, protects big firms, encourages financial engineering over investment, etc?
If Mr Vance can answer my questions about QE, for instance, with a “yes”, I would like to see evidence of it. (Commenters: please do so!) Because there is a long and honourable tradition of radical politicians – and I mean real radicals, not just people who claim they are – doing this. In the 19th century, in the UK, liberals and progressive political activists such as Richard Cobden and John Bright denounced artificially cheap money, as well as mercantilism. They saw those who want to clip the coinage, and impose tariffs, as enemies of the Common Man. They supported gold-backed currencies. That’s radicalism.
Mr Vance could, if he wanted, reacquaint America with that tradition. He could point out how tariffs favour incumbent firms and hurt small and medium sized firms with higher costs. He could point to a large and corrupting lobbying system that calls for all this stuff.
To be fair to the Trump campaign, it appears that Trump is quite sound – if you believe Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz (both former Democrat voters) – who say that Trump is much saner and better on encouraging tech startups and the like than the Biden administration has been.
“I’m not entirely sure what loving one’s body might mean, beyond the obvious off-colour jokes. But apparently, it’s something that one is supposed to proclaim as an accomplishment, a credential of progressivism. I have, however, noted that it tends to be announced by people whose declared triumph in this matter is not altogether convincing, and whose basis for doing so is generally much slimmer than they are.”
– David Thompson. As a take-down of nonsense, this article is brutal.
“After Butler, America has suddenly become a more Jacksonian nation. The shadow of Old Hickory looms larger than ever, and Donald Trump stands taller as his undisputed heir.”
– Walter Russell Mead, WSJ ($)
For those unfamiliar with the extraordinary politician and general, Andrew Jackson, check out this link for some biographies and studies.
Some people are just too “clever by half” or lack a basic level of human empathy, despite playing the moral outrage card. I saw this comment on my Facebook page. To spare the guy (who is in the US) embarrassment, and as his comments were not meant to be fully public, I will not name him, and I suspect he’s not alone in taking this sort of line:
“I’m sick and tired of everybody valorizing Donald Trump in the wake of the assassination attempt yesterday. Somebody tried to kill him and he got an injury to his face. How does that make him more virtuous? How does that make him somehow more qualified to be president? How does that make Biden LESS qualified to be president? Is it even possible to make either of them less qualified to be president? The fact that you endured an assassination attempt simply means you are the passive recipient of somebody else’s misconduct. It does not make you more virtuous or more heroic.”
The penultimate sentence contains the seeds of this writer’s error (such as his words “passive recipient”), and a key point is that, in the writer’s way of thinking, Trump/other shooter victim should only be viewed as a victim. But the writer missed the point, and here is what I wrote in response:
“It’s how a person reacts to an attack that counts. In fact, it’s about when people refuse to play the `victim card’ and behave in a particular way that’s important. It comes down to how composed and calm a person can be in times of stress. In all walks of life, we admire people who display those traits…And I think Mr Trump handled himself well after being shot and realizing that a shooter was trying to kill him. If you can’t give a person credit for that, then that’s odd.”
I would go beyond what I said to this person on FB by making a broader point. Today, we live in an age when it is often widely held among supposed intellectuals, scientists and the like that we don’t have free will, and that we are, in varying ways, the consequences of internal and external forces we cannot understand or control. As a result, it is – as the writer I responded to claims – no cause for praise in how anyone reacts to said forces.
To have free will is, according to this point of view, an illusion, albeit perhaps a necessary one for mental health and maybe also an aspect of biological evolution. (The latter has the risk of being a “just-so” story explanation.) But if free will is nothing more than a handy, surface appearance, then it is hard to see how it has much value, much cash value, from evolutionary terms. After all, knowing you are not the author of your actions might, for some people, be comforting, rather than a nightmare. And think of how certain well-known writers, such as Sam Harris, argue that free will is an illusion and that, for example, criminals are ill, primarily, rather than wicked. The flipside of this is that a person who shows courage, either physical or mental, gets no praise because, on the determinist view, he had no choice in the matter. Everything, including the words I type right now, I had no choice over. None. We are all in the Matrix.
But this is self-contradictory. If determinism is true and judgement is pre-determined, how can we know the truth of determinism if we had no choice but to do so anyway? I think we know from introspection that the sense that we are making a choice to focus our minds or not, to set the course of how we want to think about something (or not), is real as anything is in the universe from an empirical sense. To think is to choose; thinking and volition are intertwined so much as to be one and the same. If introspection is an illusion, then so is sight, smell, taste, hearing, etc. But oddly, determinists rarely in my experience challenge these senses’ validity in conveying reality.
Back to Mr Trump’s way of reacting to the would-be assassin and others like him: I think that Mr Trump, whatever else one can say about him, had the kind of character, a character that for better or worse he has developed, to want to assert himself in the face of danger. That’s not always smart or fashionable in these weird times, but it is there. There is a sort of Andrew Jackson-style baddass mind-set that came to the fore on Saturday.
(Here are some excellent places to look if you want to understand, as I do, why I think free will is real. See this book, by Christian List, for example, or this or this one by Alfred Mele. And finally this, by Lee Pierson and Monroe Trout, for those who want to burrow deep into the evolutionary argument.)
Addendum: The writer is also denouncing the idea that Mr Trump being shot is somehow proof of his virtue. However, I doubt anyone thinks that. Of course, Mr Trump does threaten the agendas of a lot of people, foreign and domestic, but that is not the nub of my point here, although I am sure commenters will want to mention these issues.
A conclusion is hard to escape: America suffers from an incompetent leadership class. Its problem isn’t ruthlessness but softness, its inability to deal with the world without a media that constantly lies to make it feel better about itself.
– Holman W Jenkins, Jnr.
What we are learning is that much of what Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds sometimes calls the “gentry class” is just not that good, competent, honest, or insightful. And more and more people have noticed.
Mark Champion, at Bloomberg ($) nicely skewers the solipsism of those who imagine that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “provoked” and therefore partly the fault of the West.
Russia is hardly the first empire to resist the loss of long-held colonies, so there’s nothing unique about its attempt. But few would suggest the Hapsburg, Ottoman, British or French empires had a right to hold on to, let alone restore, their imperial claims, or that the desire to do so was “provoked,” or that the world would be better off had they been able to cling on.
Understanding Putin’s outlook is key to grasping that the “neutrality” and “demilitarization” he demands of Russia’s neighbors is not his end goal. It is a prerequisite for rebuilding Russia’s state-civilization and Moscow’s status as the beating heart of a great power. Every peace proposal for Ukraine needs to keep that fact front and center. And if a once and future President Trump wants to play the role of mediator, by all means. But he should start by reading the Kremlin’s new college textbook.
He has a lot on his plate in the next few months, but Sir Keir Starmer, the new UK prime minister (gulp) will need to grasp this point, along with many others.
JD Tuccille articulates, brilliantly, one of the main reasons I am a classical liberal who belives in limited, constrained and small government:
But it’s easier to reconcile a fading, honesty-challenged presidential candidate with a desire for “a smaller government providing fewer services” than it is to credibly claim that an even more badly eroded politician and his unethical minions are exactly the sort of folks you want presiding over an all-powerful state. Frankly, a healthy cynicism about the competency and the decency of government officials is a credible response to what was on display on Thursday evening when Biden spent 90-plus minutes demonstrating that he and his supporters had been lying about his mental and physical fitness to not only run for a second term, but to carry out the duties of office right now.
The idea of an all-powerful, benevolent Daddy federal state is a lot harder to sustain if it appears the head of it is not playing with a full deck of cards, or even knows he’s in a casino.
And if Trump’s comparatively less-bad performance still didn’t fill you with confidence that he’s a person you want presiding over a bigger, more activist government, that’s the appropriate take, too. He didn’t face-plant like his opponent, but the former president gave us every reason to believe that, under his control, a smaller, less-involved government is preferable for reasons ideological, practical, and involving self-preservation.
Exactly. Let’s not forget that the size of the federal debt did not shrink under Mr Trump. And he’s no Calvin Coolidge. Alas.
The final paragraph is right on the money:
The belief that government should do more, provide more, and embrace us all in a warm and nurturing embrace requires an enormous leap of faith. At the least, those exercising such vast power must be wise and well-intentioned. As last week’s debate reminded us, that’s a wildly unrealistic assumption.
It appears too few in the commentariat seem to join the dots between the “aren’t the presidential candidates/political classes awful?” with “and perhaps we should constrain government and make it do less” sort of viewpoint.
I wonder how much the Founders thought about the problems of an ageing president who was losing his mind, of an opponent such as Trump, and other sort of characters, when they composed the architecture of the republic, with its checks, balances and principles. But at times like these, all the abuse that gets thrown at the Founders (some of them kept slaves, etc) needs to be put in context, and that people should be grateful for their wisdom and understanding of the need for government to be restrained. We could use a bit of that mindset around the world.
“However, the implication that a country seeking a Western-focused future can be construed as having brought its fate upon itself because of the assailant’s paranoia is an odd argument to be advanced by a champion of national sovereignty. The Russian bear may well have been poked, but history has taught us that despotic dictators cannot be appeased.”
An editorial in the Daily Telegraph (£) today. The author is bemused by Reform leader Nigel Farage’s continued assertion that someone (NATO/EU/West/insert as desired) are to blame for encouraging Putin to invade a sovereign nation state. As the leader writer observes later on, it seems rather curious that a champion of national sovereignty, as Mr Farage claims to be, should regard Ukraine as little more than buffer defence terrain for Russia, and that its own diplomatic ambitions as a nation should be dismissed. I find it more than a little odd, and it is one of the reasons I won’t vote Reform on 4 July.
Perry de Havilland wrote back when Russia invaded Ukraine that there is, on the Right as much as much of the Left, a curious desire to make things like wars to be always matters that are about us, which in a way also denies moral agency and choice to actors in many countries around the world. This is a reflexive thing, and ironically, often held by people who claim to hold hard-headed realist views on foreign policy, and yet there is a sort of naivete to it, in my view.
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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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