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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“Both Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter were much more realistic than Marx about the bourgeoisie’s political wisdom. Smith regarded capitalists as short-term actors who never gathered together other than to hatch a conspiracy against the public. Schumpeter regarded them as idiot savants who might be brilliant at building businesses but who were frequently fools when it came to dealing with politics. It’s not clear who can save us from the world of trouble that seems to be brewing. But anybody who is counting on the business elite to fill that role is making a dangerous mistake.”
– Adrian Wooldridge. Bloomberg ($)
“In the UK, the Financial Reporting Council has just opted against including ESG requirements in the UK Corporate Governance Code — these were to have increased the role of audit committees in overseeing ESG and expanding diversity and inclusion. BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink rarely mentions ESG any more. Elon Musk reckons that “DEI must DIE.” Bill Ackman (whose money matters) has called DEI the “root cause” of the sharp rise in anti-semitism at US universities. Donald Trump has promised to cancel all DEI initiatives across the federal government. The courts have already called a halt to race-based affirmative action at US universities, and last year the Attorney Generals of 13 US states wrote to Fortune 100 CEOs to let them know they would face serious legal consequences if they were to treat people `differently because of the color of their skin.'”
– Merryn Somerset Webb. She argues that much of the driving force is not just the absurdities of much environmental and “diversity” policies, but the brute fact of rising interest rates. Companies’ balance sheets and cost control issues are taking more urgency. ESG/DEI or whatever other piece of fashionable stuff is a lot harder to justify when capital is no longer “free”.
I trust and hope that interest rates remain around current levels for many more months to come, so as to force firms to compete harder for capital, to put it to genuinely profitable uses, reward long-term saving and habits of thrift and competence, and other generally good things.
As an aside, I can recommend The Price of Time, by Edward Chancellor, which demonstrated the great harms caused by artificially low interest rates over the centuries.
“There were no marches for Adam Smith or posters of Milton Friedman at Davos this year, but the applause for the combative defense of free markets by Argentina’s new libertarian President Javier Milei was more than polite. Citing the contrast between ages of stagnation and the miracle of accelerating progress in the modern era, Mr. Milei reminded his audience that `far from being the cause of our problems, free-trade capitalism as an economic system is the only instrument we have to end hunger, poverty and extreme poverty across our planet’.”
– Walter Russell Mead, WSJ ($)
A couple more from the paywalled article:
His words resonated because, as one heard in panel after panel, the empirical foundations of the fashionable statist view appear to be crumbling. For now at least, the China miracle seems to be over. Beijing isn’t only suffering one economic shock after another. Its worst problems—demographic decline, a property bubble, overinvestment in manufacturing, and fear of arbitrary state actions against both foreign and domestic businesses—are the result of government planning gone wrong. As China doubles down on repression, its economic problems get worse.
Fifteen years after the financial crisis, meanwhile, tightly regulated Europe has fallen behind the U.S. Using chained 2015 dollars to minimize the effect of currency fluctuations, total European Union gross domestic product in 2008 was 81% that of the U.S. In 2022 it was 73%, hardly an argument for the European way.
The final point is a good one. These days, only the more ardent fans of the Brussels machine really claim that EU membership has had, or could have, a transformational impact on economic growth. That argument, to the extent it made sense, is a dead letter.
As the Samizdata quote of the day has been taken already by an excellent candidate, I thought I would add this quote for your delectation and discussion:
Public consultations have been sold as a way of increasing transparency and the quality of government. In reality they have often become Potemkin exercises where the Government is able to signal that it is doing something without actually doing it; or, worse, a policy colonisation process by a self-selecting public-sector clique of lobbyists, charities, and interest groups.
Fred De Fossard, head of the British Prosperity Unit at the Legatum Institute.
The way that these consultations are handled, often to give ministers the “right” answers and cover for what they wanted to do anyway, also speaks to how, as the writer notes, much of the supposed opportunities from being outside the EU are not being embraced.
With the Conservative Party so far behind in the polls, one might assume ministers would utilise the sovereignty of Parliament in what time they have left to do a few popular things, and legislate for the views of Tory supporters. There is still no sign of this happening; indeed quite the opposite, if the legislative agenda in the recent King’s Speech is any guide.
And there’s this zinger of a point:
The Government seems intent on eroding democracy further, by handing more powers to arms-length bodies, so the state will get even bigger, but less accountable. The Competition and Markets Authority is soon to be given new powers to regulate the digital economy; a brand-new regulator will oversee English football, despite the country boasting the most successful footballing economy in the world.
Needless to say, as or when we get a Labour government, I expect little change on this issue of “arms-length” bodies taking key decisions and arrogating more power for themselves. The fiasco of the Post Office and the wrongful convictions of hundreds of people might put a dent in this, but I am not optimistic.
These are deep-rooted problems, and for all that I am concerned about the direction of politics in the UK right now, I don’t see the Conservative Party as providing any sort of solution. My thoughts are increasingly mutinous.
The author concludes:
If British conservatism has a future, it must stop government-by-stakeholder, re-democratise the state, and end our recent experiment in the banal tyranny of process.
“Banksy is a billboard, promoting a product, and a set of ideas, that are as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola and as dangerous as Greggs. We need a new set of discordant voices, able to articulate ideas that challenge the consensus view of the new Establishment of the Banksies and Cold War Steves. Voices from neither the left nor the right, but coming from a place of originality, united by a desire to reveal the ludicrousness, and moral bankruptcy, of those who refuse to see it in themselves. And perhaps, in 2024, the most subversive voices would be offering us hope, not despair.”
– David James, CapX.
For non-British readers, Greggs is a purveyor of meat pies and other marvellously unhealthy food.
“If the NHS is so wonderful, why do its staff keep threatening to emigrate?”
– Daniel Hannan, Sunday Telegraph (£).
As an aside, while a lot of media and political commentary these days is about immigration, the emigration of talented people from the UK is likely to be a problem that becomes more significant, with potentially political effects. I am just about old enough to remember the “Brain Drain” that was a Thing in the 70s.
“In recent years, businesses have been shaped by the beguiling mantra of ‘win-win’. When confronted with any difficult choice – sustainability or efficiency? excellence or equity? stakeholders or shareholders? – their chieftains have kidded themselves into thinking that you can have both. Sustainability leads to efficiency in the long term; equity is the best way of securing excellence; pleasing all the stakeholders leads to higher share prices. This will be the year that finally brings an end to the idea that you can have your cake and eat it. Companies will have to make tough decisions that they’ve been putting off as long as possible. Consumers will no longer wear the idea that, say, the green transition is cost free.
“Win-win was an affordable luxury in an era of free money and rampant virtue signalling. But higher interest rates will make both companies and consumers more cost conscious. And virtue signalling is far from cost free, as several chief executive officers have discovered. Companies will tell their young recruits to put their noses to the grindstone rather than working from home. The yoga classes and pizza parties will be cancelled. The Business Roundtable will soft pedal the talk of stakeholder capitalism.”
– Adrian Wooldridge. He is writing in Bloomberg ($), a business news and information service that at times seems to have bought into sometimes fashionable ideas, but the need to make a profit tends to keep that in check.
I recently read Economics In One Virus, by Ryan Bourne of the CATO Institute in the US, and an excellent account it is. (It was published in 2021.) It is a good overview of how people should think about the economic issues involved in a pandemic.
The current farcical “inquiry” into the UK government’s handling of COVID-19 (see my recent posting here) got me thinking about some of the more admirable things I noticed during the nightmare. One of them was the way that the supermarket industry, and associated logistics sector (warehouses, lorry drivers, ports, shipping, stock inventory platforms, etc), worked. Suddenly, everyone became familiar with the term “supply chain”. I recall a few years ago meeting a person who introduced himself as a “supply chain specialist”, and others in the room made rude comments about how “dull” this sounded. (I make a point of avoiding jerks like them, by the way.) Well, his field of expertise came into a very bright spotlight, and to an extent, there it remains. Getting supplies right is about as non-dull as you can imagine.
Global capitalism gets a lot of silly criticism, and yet those who presume to champion it often fail to note the triumphs when they occur. They would do well to point out how much better the bottom-up, entrepreneurial, market-based way of doing things is than the top-down, government approach.
I recall that when the news first broke of a virus in Wuhan and what to do about it, the conventional (ie, wrong) wisdom seemed to be that we should copy the Chinese in their lockdowns and restrictions, and this was seized upon, it seemed, by those itching for these controls for various other reasons, such as harsh “Green” policy. What got drowned out was the case for how enterprise could provide solutions, from rapid development of ICU unit technology through to better management of supplies, treatments, vaccines, etc.
In the months since lockdowns ended, we have forgotten these lessons, and I fear that the wrong ones have been learned. Not enough is being done to point out how inventiveness, enterprise, intelligent risk-taking and experimentation are what’s wanted, not the often oafish fist of the state.
“Few phrases are as reliable as ‘my truth’ for identifying seasoned purveyors of cant and doubletalk. Truth isn’t something that can be identified or modified by a possessive pronoun. If my truth is different from your truth and your truth is different from her truth, these aren’t truths. ‘My truth’ is the device deployed to elevate the particular viewpoint of a member of a particular group or identity, by claiming the validation of the ‘truth’ for a narrow ideological cause.”
– Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal ($). He was writing about the views of the President of Harvard, Claudine Gay. As of the time of writing, Gay is still in a job, but for how long?
“Never in the history of Britain have politicians so clearly abandoned their own policies and instincts at the behest of the technocrats. This was made plain day after day as the scientists took the airwaves and stood behind podiums, saying nothing different from the politicians who echoed and praised them.”
And:
“More and more, it looks as if this inquiry, set up by the Blob, staffed and run by the Blob, sees its job as blaming the politicians and excusing the Blob.”
– Matt Ridley, Daily Telegraph (£), writing about the farcical covid enquiry in the UK.
By the way, I remember watching The Blob, a movie starring a young Steve McQueen, years ago. It was quite scary. Fortunately, McQueen turned to more realistic fare to achieve greatness in films such as The Great Escape, Bullitt, and Papillon.
In the face of the endless garbage being churned out in US higher education, and the plight of Jewish students, it is good to know that new structures are taking shape:
Most university departments, therefore, are now under the control of professors who are very unlikely to hire scholars interested in non-radical perspectives on their disciplines (let alone conservatives). The solution for donors, though, is not to withhold all donations but to use their money to create new colleges or units within universities that will hire professors without prejudice. Trustees and presidents have the authority to set up new centers or colleges within a university and to appoint academically qualified people who will not engage in discrimination. We have excellent examples of such centers and colleges: the James Madison Program at Princeton, the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State.
This observation comes from John O. Mcginnis, the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University.
He concludes:
Universities today are at a crossroads. Externally, they are losing support among the public. Internally, they cannot perform their primary function of sifting and diffusing knowledge because of the intellectual orthodoxies that have seized control of administrations and inspired the faculty. The massacres in Israel and the response on our campuses might spark reform of these essential institutions, but only if they decisively break with the identity politics and bureaucracies that have led them to their present state.
In my view a broader and deeper problem is the sheer size and scale of higher education that is funded, in whole or in part, by the taxpayer. Yes, it is true that even private universities and colleges have been infected by some of these horrors, but no serious change in my view is likely until the state gets out of higher education.
The story goes that Frank Lloyd Wright was once summoned to testify in a lawsuit. When he took the witness stand, a lawyer asked what his occupation was. He answered, “I am the world’s greatest architect.” Afterwards, his embarrassed wife told him he should be more modest. “You forget,” he replied. “I was under oath.”
– Timothy Sandefur, from his article: Frank Lloyd Wright: Rebel Architect.
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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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