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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Since Detlev Schlichter is discussed frequently around here, I thought it might be interesting to write a summary of some of the arguments from his book, Paper Money Collapse. Of course I am summarising my understanding of the arguments, so caveats about my fallibility apply; errors and omissions are mine.
He begins with a description of money. It is the medium of exchange. It needs to be something people agree on. Ideally there will be a fixed supply which is infinitely divisible. Precious metals fit the bill. Schlichter distinguishes between exchange value and use value. It is possible to use gold for jewelery and electronic components, so it has use value. But as soon as it is used as the medium of exchange it is the exchange value that dominates. Money has value because it can be exchanged for goods and services.
When people say they want more money, what they usually mean is that they want more goods and services. Nevertheless there is a demand for money as a store of readiness to exchange, in preparation for near-future purchases or unexpected needs. Within the limits of his means, a person can hold exactly the money he wants at any time. If he wants more money, he stops buying stuff and perhaps starts selling it. If he wants less money, he buys goods and services.
If demand for money falls, then more people want to buy goods and services, so prices go up and the purchasing power of a unit of money goes down. This continues until the reduced purchasing power of money causes people to want more money. If the demand for money increases, then more people want to sell goods and services, so prices go down and the purchasing power of a unit of money goes up. This continues until the demand for money is met. In this way, the purchasing power of money changes almost instantly, so the demand for money is met almost instantly. There is no need to create money to meet the demand for money.
Does this cause prices to be volatile? Perhaps, but Schlichter argues that it is impossible for a central authority to control the supply of money quickly enough to counter changes in demand for it. The only way they can measure these changes is by observing prices. By the time the price has changed so that it can be observed, it is too late. He also points to empirical evidence that suggests that prices are more volatile when central banks control the supply of money. → Continue reading: Summarising Schlichter
In Ecuador in 2003 a trial began against Texaco who were accused of dumping toxic material in the Amazon. They were ordered to pay $18bn in damages. Chevron bought Texaco, and they are fighting back. Their evidence includes out-takes from the documentary movie Crude. Wizbang links to some of the video (via Small dead animals, via Counting Cats). One of the video’s protagonists talks of using smoke and mirrors and bullshit in the Ecuadorian court to explain away the fact that the scientific reports only showed localised contamination.
Chevron have some web pages with the background and more videos. I like it when companies bluntly defend themselves so publicly. None of this is to do with fracking, but it does shed some light on the opponents of oil exploration.
Meanwhile, an Investors Business Daily piece (via Junk Science) suggests that as of May, the Environmental Protection Agency was not aware of a proven case of water being affected by fracking, and that recent concerns about this may be due to contamination from the chemicals the EPA used when drilling its own wells. Update: Now Instapundit is saying that the EPA struck gas!
All of which suggests we need to be on our toes when faced with evidence of the dangers of fracking.
Recently some teacher acquaintances on Facebook were discussing the recent public sector strike. Some were annoyed at accusations that they had spent the day shopping. Others said they had enjoyed spending the day shopping. Someone posted a message pointing out that Jeremy Clarkson, who said rude things about the strikers, was more than welcome to do a hard job saving lives or teaching disabled children. It occurred to me that, among other things, not all and probably less than half of public servants do such worthy jobs, and in any case what is relevant is what is really going on, which is that whatever the job, public servants (including (heh) Jeremy Clarkson, according to NickM) get their salaries and pensions from money extorted from others.
I considered getting involved in the conversation. I mentioned it to Michael Jennings. “The problem is that they think we are mad,” he said. Not only that, I thought, they will take offence and cast me out of society. “And they have the generally accepted narrative,” Michael observed. “How did this happen?”
I have some ideas about that. They are not original, have probably been stated better by someone else, and a more erudite person than I might well be able to summarise this entire post by stating the name of some philosopher or linguist. But here is my train of thought.
The primary purpose of language is cognition. So says The Monster in an epic comment on Eric Raymond’s blog.
I believe that communication is not even the primary use of language, despite the common belief that it is. That honor belongs to cognition. We use language to think; we produce names for groups of concretes that share certain properties and thereby achieve computational economy by not having to reason independently about the characteristics of every member of that group anew, as if we’d never seen any other members before.
This was in defence of an article by Eric Raymond in which he had used the same insight to seek to “undo the perversion of language that serves the enemy so well.” Clever use of language can manipulate people’s ideas. It makes sense: we put things into words to abstract big ideas and reuse them quickly and easily. I am a computer programmer. In software we write some code to, say, sort a list of items into numerical order, we give the code a name (sort) and then we just type ‘sort’ whenever we want to sort a list. If everything works to plan, we never have to think again about how that sorting code works. We have abstracted it. We might do some sorting of specific kinds of list mixed in with some other algorithm to do something complicated, like display a list of all the teachers in a payroll database whose salaries are greater than x, and give that code a name (GenerateRedundancyCandidates). In this way we build up layers of complexity at increasing levels of abstraction and get to do vastly complicated things with not as much effort as you might think.
Human language is the same. And therein lies a danger, because humans are not like computers: they are likely to forget that the word stands for something real, or get confused about what it stands for, or change its meaning half way through a sentence. → Continue reading: The map is not the territory
Oh dear:
The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) is concerned that the Government has yet to make it clear how it will ensure that the UK has a seamless broadband infrastructure to avoid a divide between rural and urban areas, as figures show that for many small businesses broadband speeds aren’t adequate.
This is the latest incarnation of a story that has been running for years.
There are advantages to high population density. That is the reason cities exist. For telecommunications, the advantages are shorter wires and more customers per cell, so the per-user costs of broadband are lower. People in rural areas will have to pay more for such things. But why put up with such mathematical truths when there is subsidy to be shared around?
Here is what London’s Metropolitan Police say about stop and search:
Being stopped does not mean you are under arrest or have done something wrong. In some cases, people are stopped as part of a wide-ranging effort to catch criminals in a targeted public place.
A police officer, or a community support officer must have a good reason for stopping or searching you and they are required to tell you what that reason is.
Reasons include that the police officer thinks you are carrying drugs, or there has been violence or disorder in the vicinity.
It is safe to say that stop and search is a really bad idea. It is reasonable to expect to be left alone by the authorities when you are going about your lawful business. However:
Of the Reading the Riots interviewees, 73% said they had been stopped and searched in the past 12 months – they were more than eight times more likely than the general population in London to have been stopped and searched in the previous year.
Reading the Riots is a report by the Guardian and the London School of Economics who interviewed 270 rioters to find out why they said they rioted. One could argue that cause and effect are reversed; the rioters are criminals and that is why they get stopped and searched a lot.
Theodore Dalrymple, who I do not think is right about everything but is right about a lot, analyses what he calls the underclass in his book Life at the Bottom. Reading through some of the quotes from rioters in the Guardian, his analysis rings true. The essence of it is that people have decided that bad things just happen to them and it is not their fault. Their view of themselves as victims is reinforced by their social workers who get their ideas from articles in the Guardian.
From the Guardian’s report of the research:
Rioters identified a range of political grievances, but at the heart of their complaints was a pervasive sense of injustice. For some this was economic: the lack of money, jobs or opportunity. For others it was more broadly social: how they felt they were treated compared with others.
This sense of being treated unfairly is exactly the victimhood mind-set. As for jobs, Dalrymple writes:
the unemployed young person considers the number of jobs in an economy as a fixed quantity. Just as the national income is a cake to be doled out in equal or unequal slices, so the number of jobs in an economy has nothing to do with the conduct of the people who live in it but is immutably fixed. This is a concept of the way the world works that has been assiduously peddled, not only in schools during ‘social studies’ but in the media of mass communication.
So stop stopping and searching because it is a good idea anyway, but they will find other excuses to riot.
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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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