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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A new publication by the free market think tank, The Institute of Economic Affairs, “The Representatives of Business in English Literature,” Readings 53, takes a look at how businessmen have received a bad deal in fiction. In a nice review in the Financial Times (registration necessary for the article, via www.ft.com), writer Stephen Overell notes that Ayn Rand’s classic, Atlas Shrugged, was a ‘freak’ in that it celebrated business and the trader ethic.
And I had to laugh. For Overell starts his analysis by quoting the ‘sacred text’, as Adriana Cronin would describe it, of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the bit where Francisco D’Ancona praises the idea of ‘making money’. Overell goes on to show how Rand’s view of wealth creation stands in total contrast to 99 percent of literature’s portrayal of capitalism and businessfolk. Just so.
I like to think that this review, by a FT journalist not necessarily well disposed towards libertarianism, puts the recent jousting on Samizdata about Rand into some kind of perspective. It seems some of the biggest haters of Rand are libertarians, while non-libertarians seem quite intrigued by her writings, so much so that they could even turn people on to capitalist ideas. To quote Margaret Thatcher, it is a funny old world.
Boris Johnson, Conservative MP and editor of the weekly British magazine, The Spectator, delivers a furious serve down the baseline to the neo-mercantilists at the Guardian newspaper. He says that organ is getting all worked up about how tennis balls are produced by downtrodden workers in the Third World and made out of precious materials. (I cannot find a link to the story). What do the Guardianistas imagine workers making such things would be doing otherwise? Studying for MBAs? Writing software? Suffice to say that Boris subjects the Guardian’s flat-earth analysis to a superb take-down. Strikes me that the Member for Henley should get his own blog. Boris, come and join the party. We need more British bloggers.
Is the American brand of capitalism sick? Socialists and other opponents of the free market order are bound to assume so following revelations that American communications giant WorldCom hid nearly $4.0 billion of costs, a fact which now threatens the firm with bankruptcy. The story comes hard on the heels of the demise of Enron, GlobalCrossing, Tyco, and accountancy firm Arthur Anderson.The situation is a mess.
First off, what has happened in nearly all the cases mentioned above is fraud, albeit fraud on a scale to make one’s eyes water. In a capitalist system run by fallible, gullible and weak human beings, such fraud is going to happen occasionally, human nature being what it is. The law must take its course and the malefactors in these cases must be punished severely, and seen to be punished severely. Already the chill winds of the market are exerting their effect. Investors increasingly demand a premium for holding U.S. stocks and especially those in the technology sector, which has been at the centre of these recent shenanigans. The shakeout will be brutal for some, while those of us with stock portfolios are bound to suffer as well.
Such sagas tend to follow a pattern: rampant gains in a market, followed by a sharp drop; gradual revelations of corporate wrong-doing; shock among the public over the scandal, and then calls for a new set of rules or new watchdog to prevent things going wrong again. Except that they do go wrong again and the cycle is repeated. Similar scandals have happened before and will recur. The system is not fail-safe, which is why ordinary investors must never assume that just because there are rules or watchdogs, they therefore don’t need to be careful about their investments.
More generally, opponents of the market who cite present-day cases as proof of capitalism’s weakness overlook a key point. Namely, fraud is not peculiar to capitalism or indeed business as a whole. Finance ministers perpetrate precisely the kind of accounting chicanery of which a number of these U.S. firms stand accused. Think, for example, about the financial fiddling in which European governments engaged prior to the launch of the euro. If politicians were subject to the same rules on accounting honesty as businessmen, a good number of our political masters would be behind bars.
Finally, as Rand Simberg pointed out, the bulk of these offences happened during the 1990s, when a certain Bill Clinton was President, or so I recall. Makes it kind of hard for the left to taint George W. Bush with this, though that won’t stop them trying.
Ask most British people about what they know about Manchester, in north-west England, and they will probably name Manchester United Football Club, (“The Reds”), cotton mills, rave music nightclubs, or, if they move in libertarian circles, the city often associated with laissez faire economic thinking in the 19th Century. So it is a proud day for the city to be now put alongside Cape Kennedy as a centre of space flight excellence.
One of the things that bugs me about American ‘liberalism’ (meaning statism) is the proliferation of ever more forms of victim. The latest cause to weigh in, so to speak, is that of fat (woops, I meant “big-boned”) people. In a nice article for Reason magazine, Mike Lynch skewers activists who get all upset when American airlines charge extra for bigger passengers. In a free market, if an airline wants to charge more for people who, by virture of their size, take up more space, then gradually the cost of flying for large people will come down as competition for bigger customers takes hold.
In the U.S.A, which seems to produce more than its fair share of fat people, airlines could actually make a good living out of seeking out the chunky market, just as it could do so by seeking custom of people carrying small children, smokers, those who liked listening to loud music, watching adult movies, or whatever. (“Playboy Airlines”, anyone?).
But the fat lobby thinks in statist terms. As Lynch tells us, they claim it is discriminatory for carriers such as Southwest Airlines to charge an extra amount for those who cannot squeeze into one seat but need two. The idea of discrimination stems from the idea that as humans, we have some kind of God-given ‘right’ to fly from A to B for a set outlay, regardless of whether we are a svelt citizen taking up one seat or built like a Sumo wrestler and take up two seats. But no such ‘right’ exists. In a market, if an airliner is willing to give me ONE seat of size X in return for X dollars, then that is the end of the matter. And if the lardbuts among us find it harder to fly in the meantime until the market provides a solution, they might like to consider going down the gym.
Mick Hume, the leftist commentator with a sharp nose for humbug and an often refreshingly libertarian streak, hits a home run with an excellent column about how the anti-globalisation movement has gotten into bed with some very dubious characters indeed by adopting a “bash-Israel-first” stance related to the current violence in the region. The whole article is worth a read, but I particularly liked this paragraph:
“Western society is infected by a powerful sense of self-loathing and a rejection of its political, social and economic achievements. It was this spirit of self-loathing that led some, of the left and the right alike, to suggest that America got what it deserved on 11 September. Those sentiments are no more progressive when aimed against Israel as a symbol of the West than when they are directed in irrational campaigns against GM crops and the literature of Dead White Males.”
I could not agree more. What Hume is really saying is that the types who attack Starbuck coffee shops, bash Israel for trying to defend itself and who want the global free trade system to be closed down are in fact, reactionaries. They broadly reject the Enlightenment heritage of liberty, reason, celebration of Man’s mastery of nature, self-criticism, open markets and the spirit of enquiry. They are flat-earthers.
Hume’s article appeared in the left-wing weekly magazine, The New Statesman (can be found in Samizdata’s ‘havens of fluorescent idiocy’ links section on our links page). That publication has offered up some pretty vile views on September 11 and the aftermath, so Hume’s article is a welcome detour into sanity. On the other hand, maybe just a rare flash of gold amidst the dross.
As soon as I started writing for this blog, I got the impression that in some form, blogging is going to affect my journalistic working life and not just my private, ideological, libertarian part. A good article in Tech Central Station by Dominic Busulto makes for an excellent overview of the phenomenon and how writing about business and analyzing companies will change as a result.
Certainly, in my brief experience, the arrival of the weblog has already started to affect how I work. When I get in to work in the morning I usually scan my firm’s website (www.reuters.co.uk) before looking at various websites pitched at the financial world to see what other news organisations have been reporting on. But I also click on to certain blogs for current affairs and related financial news. Very often I find that a blog, like that of prolific Glenn Reynolds will have unearthed an important news story or theme which would have been missed by the mainstream media. And this surely beats the hell out of trawling through acres of newsprint, although I do have an incurable need to read the printed sports section of the Daily Telegraph.
Very soon, I think, blogging will be the accepted form of business analysis by economists and journalists in the City and Wall Street when it comes to checking out company results, mulling over future trends, or trying to figure out what investors think. Analysts, who have been chastened by the collapse of U.S. energy giant Enron and concerns about the financial results of leading companies, will increasingly not be able to get away with issuing grand press releases giving their views, but instead have to see their ideas challenged, chewed over and discussed through the vibrant medium of the blog. The same goes for news columnists who like to make guesses about the future.
Journalists are going to have to become blog-savvy. I guess this puts yours truly in a nice position. Still, I haven’t yet figured how we get to be millionaires out of this. Let’s just say I am working on the notion.
I came across this neat invention by a company calling itself Moller International which looks rather fun and a great way to beat those traffic snarlups which are getting worse and worse in London. It looks like something out of a Robert Heinlein science fiction novel from the Fifties. Terrific.
Hard-line socialist journalist Paul Foot Paul Foot waxes indignant in the Guardian newspaper on Wednesday about what he sees as the systemic sickness of capitalism, as demonstrated in his view by the demise of such U.S. corporate behemoths as Enron Corp and conglomerate Tyco. Foot quotes the Goldman Sachs chief executive Hank Paulson, who warned last week that “Business has never been under so much scrutiny. To be blunt, much of it is deserved.”
These words, which will hardly strike readers of this blog as controversial, come in for the following Foot broadside. Let’s quote the man in full: “The problem with this argument is that it overlooks the central feature of capitalism: the division of the human race into those who profit from human endeavour and those who don’t. This division demands freedom for employers, and discipline for workers; high pay and perks for bosses, low pay for the masses; riches for the few, poverty for the many.”
In other words, life is a zero-sum game. If I profit from selling you a pair of shoes, a newspaper or a motor car, then you have “lost”. If you are poor, your poverty must be caused by my wealth, and vice versa. No-where in Foot’s mental universe is the idea entertained that both sides in a trade gain, since why else would they trade in the first place? In his world, no wealth is really ever created, just redistributed or grabbed by one group from another. His world is essentially closed. It is not surprising that a world fashioned according to such beliefs will be marked by stasis and decline. If we were to accept Foot’s take on capitalism, the history of mankind and its staggering increase in wealth at all levels would be incomprehensible.
I have no quarrel with the many commentators who have blasted the U.S. financial system for the bad lapses in recent months. The demise of Enron, the faltering faith in the quality of corporate accounting and the shenanigans of analysts secretly trashing stocks while plugging them in public have damaged the U.S. economy. But surely what these sagas show is that capitalism, often with brutal power, punishes malefactors and ultimately puts a premium on honesty and fair dealing, and at the same time educates the masses into investing carefully. In short, capitalism works because it embraces a form of feedback, as mis-judgements and crooked behaviour get punished. This is something one won’t readily find in the socialist world of which Paul Foot dreams.
Robert ‘I don’t blame them for hitting me’ Fisk makes a rare intelligent point in the UK daily newspaper, The Independent. He points out that the U.S. government’s proposal to finger-print certain Arabs and Muslims from a set of Middle East countries will not apply to people travelling from Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that the men who attacked the U.S. on September 11th were mostly Saudis.
He is right to point out the absurdity of this. While I detest much of Fisk’s reflexive anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric, on this point he is right. Saudi Arabia is the country which has contributed the lion’s share of terrorists waging their war against the West. The sooner that Western policy-makers recognize that fact and reduce our reliance on their oil, the better. (This is already starting to happen due to growing ties with oil-rich Russia). Of course, whether fingerprinting will make an iota of difference to catching would-be terrorists is another point entirely. Predictably, Fisk does not object to the U.S. government fingerprinting persons on a matter of principle, but mainly to use it as a stick to hit Bush.
Several comments stuck in my mind that were made by speakers at the Liberty Conference on Saturday in central London at which I was present along with David Carr and some other Samizdata and Libertarian Alliance members. The following will not be forgotten easily:
“Er, Mr Chairman, we live in a managed society. We all manage each other. We cannot have a world where we just have freedoms and certain rules”.
This was uttered by a man who claimed to be a member of Liberty, the civil liberties lobby. Perhaps he should lobby to have that organisation’s name changed to something more appropriate to what he thinks should be its true values, such as ‘Nanny’.
As David said, it was not a particularly encouraging event, although a few half-decent contacts were made and a lot of Libertarian Alliance pamphlets were taken away.
As with many such events, the best course of action is to behave like a decent human being. However, and at the risk of sounding arrogant, most of the people there did not have the intellectual equipment to figure out the exit route from a damp paper bag.
In my quest for unearthing new clever ideas on how to slake one’s thirst, it seems an inventor has cracked the problem of how to drink a mug of tea or coffee and chew on a biscuit at the same time while using only one hand. This could prove a handy invention for Brian Micklethwait’s end-of-the-month Friday libertarian get-togethers where drink and biscuits are consumed in vast quantities. Could such a nifty idea ever get the nod in a socialist state?
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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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