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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The only way that the proponents of the ‘liberal’ international order are able to process such criticism is to cast it as an expression of manifestly unreasonable character flaws. Ironically, then, angry Eurocrat Guy Verhofstadt took to X to proclaim that “America, as a liberal empire, is no more”, and that the “new era of US governance” is an “oligarchy”, “where billionaire members of Mar-a-Lago decide US policy”. But talk is cheap. Trump is obnoxious to the “liberal” order imagined by Verhofstadt, not because his administration is an “oligarchy”, but because it is a democratic departure from the green oligarchies that dominate in Europe and were installed without due process under the largesse of Green Blob billionaires.
– Ben Pile
So, to summarize: it turns out that the “deceivers” were never the energy companies to begin with. Rather, New York City attempted to deceive the legal system by taking information out of context in order to name and shame American energy companies. While unfortunate, this activity isn’t surprising considering the City’s law firm, Sher Edling, is currently under Congressional investigation for its dark money financing and questionable ties to activist-academics.
– Mandi Risko
Russell Roberts wrote this essay yesterday in response to the devastating fires in Los Angeles: “Profits versus Love”
A few years back we thought about building a deck or a porch on the back of our house. But we decided against it when the estimates started coming in. They were about double what the architect had told us it would cost. Double! Had the architect misled us as a way of encouraging us to proceed with the project? No, six months earlier the Mississippi had overflowed its banks and destroyed a lot of houses in the St. Louis area. Carpenters and builders had no time to build a back porch or a deck. They had bigger fish to fry. To get them to build a porch, you had to pay a premium.
We delayed the project for a couple of years, and prices came down. That delay was an example of the hidden benefit of high prices. When prices are high, the least-urgent projects get delayed, freeing up resources for more urgent projects. The porch just isn’t worth it. So the wood I would have used instead gets set aside to rebuild a washed-away house. The carpenter I would have kept busy now works on building that new house.
As you may have noticed, my claim that Russell Roberts wrote that essay yesterday was a lie. He wrote it twenty-one years ago in 2003. Unfortunately it might as well have been written yesterday because some people never learn. On 12 January 2025 the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, tweeted about measures he is taking in an effort to help the victims of the fires:
NEW: Just issued an Executive Order that will allow victims of the SoCal fires to not get caught up in bureaucratic red tape and quickly rebuild their homes.
We are also extending key price gouging protections to help make rebuilding more affordable.
The responses are full of people making the obvious point about red tape. A lady calling herself “Orange County MAGA” says, “So you’re saying California has too much bureaucratic red tape? Gee, if only there was an elected leader who we could call…”
Criticism of Newsom’s “price gouging protections” is much rarer, despite the harm they do being more immediate and severe than the long-term harm done by excessive building regulations. That is par for the course. Patrick Crozier’s post from 2015, “People are ignorant about economics”, contains this anecdote from Mike Munger:
…there was a hurricane in Raleigh, North Carolina. The roads were blocked, there was no electricity and there was a shortage of ice.
Ice may not sound that important but it is. Not only does it help to preserve food but it also helps to preserve some medicines like, for instance, the insulin needed by diabetics.
Some “yahoos” – Munger’s term – saw an opportunity to make money. They got themselves a truck, loaded it with ice and some chainsaws and proceeded to drive towards the centre of Raleigh. If they found the road in front of them blocked they chopped up the fallen trees and carried on.
When they got to the centre of town they started selling the ice. Usually, ice sold for $2 a bag. They were selling it for $12. Very soon a queue appeared. Then the police arrived. Citing price-gouging laws they arrested the men and impounded the truck.
And here’s the kicker: as the truck was towed away the people in the queue applauded the police.
Here are some more posts from the Samizdata archives about how “price-gouging” helps people hit by natural disasters:
As Hurricane Milton makes landfall, a reminder about price-gouging
“The good news,” Cuomo said of the promised 12 million gallons, “is it’s going to be free.”
A Quote of the Day from Tim Worstall
Or check out the entire discipline of economics.
Holman Jenkins Jnr, an opinion columnist in the Wall Street Journal, reflects on the mix of bad faith, moral cant and low protectionist nonsense that underpins so much Western policy on electric vehicles:
Subsidizing green-energy consumption is simply to subsidize energy consumption, including fossil energy. EVs are “strategic” only for China, to reduce its reliance on imported oil in anticipation of military conflict with the U.S. For the rest of the world, including the U.S., electric cars are a consumer technology, albeit a fast-emerging and promising one. Sensibly, they’re also a technology that should have been left to consumers and carmakers to adapt and develop without distorting handouts and mandates.
The result is finally in view: a colossal self-destruction of the Western auto industry, with Germany’s at the forefront. Volkswagen is in a panic about Chinese competition to the money-losing EVs that Berlin forces the company to sell. Germany’s export-led economy is in free fall. Its bellwether auto giant, VW, is pursuing its first-ever domestic factory closures and layoffs.
Likewise, Ford CEO Jim Farley sees his company’s survival in the U.S. threatened by Chinese EVs given the tens of thousands of dollars Ford already loses on each of its government-mandated electric vehicles. The author of Germany’s auto mess, Angela Merkel, is now reviled as an unprincipled bandwagon grabber. Don’t kid yourself. The same reputational fate is coming for Messrs. Obama and Biden. Mr. Biden’s EV protectionism is America’s admission of defeat. The U.S. went from “Americans must buy EVs to save the planet” to “Americans must be prevented from buying cheap, high-quality Chinese EVs to preserve a government-created domestic boondoggle.”
Jenkins also refers to the concept of “permission structures” and the malign legacy of the Obama administration. (He links to this article at The Tablet.) I like that term – it coheres with concerns about how an “administrative state” has evolved over the decades to impose policy outcomes at a remove from democratic oversight or the sharp and corrective blast of free market competition. Worth a read.
The UK’s Institute of Economic Affairs, the think thank, has recently opined about “mission-directed governance”, which is a sort of automated paternalism (I discussed this offline with Paul Marks of this parish). The IEA piece links to an interesting paper about East Asia and forms of authortarianism.
Update: From Guido Fawkes today:
The UK’s electricity grid came worryingly close to blackouts yesterday – just 580 MW shy of the lights going out – in what independent energy consultant Kathryn Porter described as the “tightest day since 2011 or before”. National Grid ESO had to issue its first Electricity Market Notice of the winter, along with a third Capacity Market Notice, though the latter was quickly binned. No surprise that cold weather means more heating and energy…
A sharp drop in wind output combined with limited electricity imports from Europe left the grid scrambling to keep the lights on. Yet Red Ed is still pushing to fast-track planning permission for a wave of new wind farms — despite the inconvenient truth that these turbines have to be switched off when there’s too much wind and the grid can’t handle it. Meanwhile Labour is ploughing ahead with their plan to make wind and solar the backbone of our energy system to hit 95% renewable energy by 2030.
“PAY UP OR SHUT UP” – “TRILLIONS NOT BILLIONS” – “Global North, PAY UP!” These are some of the signs being held up by climate activists in a photograph taken at the recently concluded COP29 conference in Baku. Perhaps the women holding the “Pay up or shut up” sign are unaware of how many citizens of the Global North wish their governments would take the second option. More probably these activists are well aware that, whatever the citizens of those countries might want, said governments are committed to taking “climate action” and are positively addicted to talking about taking climate action. The link takes you to a Guardian article that continues,
It was only on the last scheduled day of two weeks of negotiations at the UN Cop29 climate summit that developed countries put a financial commitment on the table for the first time.
In reality, this offer took not just two weeks of talks to prepare, but nine years – since article 9 of the Paris agreement in 2015 made it clear that the rich industrialised world would be obliged to supply cash to developing countries to help them tackle the climate crisis.
When it finally arrived on Friday, the initial offer of $250bn (£200bn) a year by 2035 was widely derided as too low. Early the following morning, the countries upped the figure to $300bn, which ended up being accepted, albeit amid acrimony and cries of “betrayal”.
The Telegraph‘s account says,
Cop29 ground out a last-minute compromise deal on Saturday night that offers at least $300 billion (£240 billion) per year by 2035 to help poorer countries confront global warming and allows China’s contributions to remain voluntary.
The sum demanded by the less wealthy nations had been much more following two weeks of negotiations in Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea capital of Baku.
Mukhtar Babayev, the Cop29 president, declared open the final summit plenary after midnight on Saturday, two days after the conference was officially scheduled to end.
A final text was released following several sleepless nights for negotiators, with tensions boiling over as small island states and the world’s poorest countries walked out of one meeting.
A last-minute deal in extra time! Who could have guessed that would happen? Answer: anyone who remembered COP28 in 2023, COP27 in 2022, COP26 in 2021… but I did not come here entirely to recycle my post from this time last year (though I thought the title was amusing), but to point out that rich countries explicitly paying poor countries “to tackle the climate crisis” may have unexpected consequences.
Here is how Wikipedia describes Jizya:
Jizya (Arabic: جِزْيَة, romanized: jizya), or jizyah, is a type of taxation historically levied on non-Muslim subjects of a state governed by Islamic law
Modern writing about jizya as levied in the Ottoman Empire, for instance, tends to emphasize that, for the times, it represented a relatively good deal for adherents of minority religions. It gave those who paid it definite legal status as protected persons. Other descriptions of jizya are less palatable to the modern reader: many Muslim authorities saw the jizya “as a symbol of humiliation to remind dhimmis of their status as a conquered people and their subjection to Islamic laws” and, above all, as an incentive to convert to Islam.
Only it didn’t always work out that way. Robert Hoyland’s book In God’s Path tells of a pious governor of Khurasan called Ashras ibn ‘Abdallah who sent a missionary to bring the dhimmis under his rule to Islam:
…the man they hired preached in the environs of Samarkand, declaring that those who became Muslim would be freed of the poll tax, “and the people flocked to him.” . . . When Ashras realized that a consequence of his policy was a sharp drop in tax revenues, he ordered: “Take the tax from whomever you used to take it from,” and so they reimposed the poll tax on those who had become Muslim, prompting many to apostatize.
Later Islamic rulers learnt from this and similar episodes that they could avoid the trouble such a sharp reversal of policy caused and keep their jizya revenue flowing by quietly discouraging dhimmis from conversion, while, of course, loudly proclaiming how utterly vital it was that they should convert.
Will Hutton: “Farmers have hoarded land for too long. Inheritance tax will bring new life to rural Britain”.
“Inheritance tax springs from the universally held belief that society has the right to share when wealth is transferred on death as a matter of justice.”
It is not universal.
“This is not confiscation, especially if the lion’s share of the bequest is left intact.”
It is confiscation.
“It is asking for a share.”
It is not asking.
“Some 35 years after the collapse of the 20th century’s most rigorous experiment in the failure of central planning, the fall of the Soviet empire, and comparative success of the capitalist West, it is hard to fathom how we’ve got into this climate communist mess. It should be self-evident that the planet doesn’t have a thermostat, let alone one easily adjusted by national leaders ordering technology to improve through a cascade of plans lashed to a target. Decarbonisation will happen regardless and is likely to go faster by inventing better solutions funded from the proceeds from growth, or bottom-up innovation. Rather than five-year battery-powered tractor plans, in the context of mission-led state direction – the latest reinvention of the language of failure by top-down socialist planners.”
– Andy Mayer.
In case you’re wondering, the apostrophe in the title is not a contraction for “is”. It marks the possessive and refers to the large amount of garbage in Puerto Rico. Apparently Puerto Rico’s landfill sites are overflowing, and this has been recognised as an environmental problem for years.
It would be amusing to do a whole post about the deficiencies of waste disposal in an unincorporated territory of the United States without ever mentioning what brought the subject to the forefront of my mind. I seek to amuse, so that is what I am going to do, although readers from the future who seek context might like to click on one or two of the names to which I link below.
I did a quick internet search for articles containing reference to “Puerto Rico” and “trash” or “garbage”, but containing no reference to “Hinchcliffe” or “Trump” or “Biden”. Here are some news reports from the last few years that demonstrate that Puerto Rico’s garbage problem is not new:
Trash Crisis Leaves Puerto Rico Near ‘the Brink’ – Global Press Journal, February 16th 2021.
Puerto Rico Landfills: Is the Problem Around Capacity or Noncompliance? – Waste360, August 7th 2019.
An island littered with trash: How Maria highlighted Puerto Rico’s poor waste management. Accuweather, 29th March, 2018 (“Maria” is a reference to Hurricane Maria.)
The following quite lengthy report was apparently published just today. I admire them for resisting the temptation to bring politics into it:
Puerto Rico Trash Problem: Understanding the Crisis and Working Toward Solutions – The Environmental Blog, October 30th 2024.
A good article by “The Liberal Patriot”, Ruy Teixeira: “The Progressive Moment is Over”. The four main points he addresses to his fellow Democrats are:
1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
Twenty-two years ago, alongside John B. Judis, Mr Teixeira was one of the co-authors of a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority”, which itself was inspired by a book written in 1969 by Kevin Phillips called “The Emerging Republican Majority”. Judging by the popular vote in US elections over the last two decades, Mr Teixeira wasn’t wrong, but all such theses have an expiry date. I would not care to place a bet on who will win the coming US election in eight days’ time, nor on the next one, but I would place a bet on the winners of the 2028 election not being progressives.
The news today is full of stories that laud the proposal in the Tobacco and Vapes Bill to ban disposable vapes. The first link takes you to a Guardian report, the second to an almost identical BBC report that says,
“Disposable vapes are difficult to recycle and typically end up landfill, where their batteries can leak harmful waste like battery acid, lithium, and mercury into the environment, the government said.
Batteries thrown into household waste also cause hundreds of fires in bin lorries and waste-processing centres every year.”
I am glad that the BBC has discovered that lithium-ion batteries can cause fires, but I think their focus on the tiny little batteries in disposable vapes might be missing a bigger problem. A report on the British Safety Council website says that,
“Batteries that power electric vehicles such as e-bikes, e-scooters and electric cars were responsible for almost three fires a day across the UK last year, according to data collected by [Business Insurer] QBE from freedom of information requests sent to UK fire services.”
After quoting the Circular Economy Minister (did you know we had one of those?) about how disposable vapes need to be banned to discourage “this nation’s throwaway culture”, the BBC finally gets round to talking about the original reasons that prompted Rishi Sunak’s government to table this legislation and Sir Keir Starmer’s government to continue with it:
“It is already illegal to sell any vape to anyone under 18, but disposable vapes – often sold in smaller, more colourful packaging than refillable ones – are a “key driver behind the alarming rise in youth vaping”, the previous government said when it first set out its plan.
The number of people who vape without ever having smoked has also increased considerably over recent years, driven mostly by young adults.
Vaping is substantially less harmful than smoking, but it has not been around for long enough for its long-term risks to be known, according to the NHS.”
So, vaping is certainly less harmful than smoking, but it might not be completely harmless. The reason I am confident that it is largely harmless is that vaping has, in fact, been around for twenty years at least, and if they had solid evidence of harm they would have told us faster than an e-bike explodes. Personally, I think people have the right to make their own judgement of risk against pleasure in their own lives, and hence should be allowed to buy e-bikes, disposable vapes, non-disposable vapes, and tobacco.
The Sunak/Starmer government disagrees. The long title of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, as stated on the Parliamentary website, is “A Bill to Make provision about the supply of tobacco, vapes and other products, including provision prohibiting the sale of tobacco to people born on or after 1 January 2009; and to enable product requirements to be imposed in connection with tobacco, vapes and other products.”
The British law is modelled after a similar age-discriminatory tobacco prohibition law passed in New Zealand in 2022 when Jacinda Ardern was prime minister: “New Zealand passes legislation banning cigarettes for future generations.” It was reversed by Christopher Luxon’s government. We should be so lucky.
The UK experienced a nationwide blackout after its main energy plant failed, officials said.
Its power grid collapsed at around 11:00 (15:00 GMT), the energy ministry wrote on X.
Grid officials said they did not know how long it would take to restore power.
This follows months of lengthy blackouts on the island – prompting the prime minister to declare an “energy emergency” on Thursday.
Other stories
Fuel in the UK to become five times more expensive
The UK laments collapse of iconic sugar beet industry
‘The violence is getting out of hand’: Crime grips the UK’s streets
Friday’s total blackout came after the UK’s final coal-powered fire station, the last on the island – went offline. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the situation was his “absolute priority”.
That’s all bunk, er, the future: Here is the real news, from the BBC:
Cuba experienced a nationwide blackout after its main energy plant failed, officials said. Its power grid collapsed at around 11:00 (15:00 GMT), the energy ministry wrote on X. Grid officials said they did not know how long it would take to restore power. This follows months of lengthy blackouts on the island – prompting the prime minister to declare an “energy emergency” on Thursday.
Fuel in Cuba to become five times more expensive
Cuba laments collapse of iconic sugar industry
‘The violence is getting out of hand’: Crime grips Cuba’s streets
Friday’s total blackout came after the Antonio Guiteras power plant in Matanzas – the largest on the island – went offline. President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez said the situation was his “absolute priority“. “There will be no rest until power is restored,” he wrote on X.
Earlier on Friday, officials announced that all schools and nonessential activities, including nightclubs, were to close until Monday.
Non-essential workers were urged to stay home to safeguard electricity supply, and non-vital government services were suspended. Cubans have also been urged to switch off high-consumption appliances during peak hours, such as fridges and ovens, according to local media.
Don’t worry folks, non-vital government services suspended? it won’t happen here.
In response to the CMN, Tom Greatrex, Chief Executive of the Nuclear Industry Association, stressed the importance of new investments in nuclear power. Tom Greatrex said: “Without fresh investment and decisions on new nuclear projects at Sizewell C and Wylfa as well as Small Modular Reactors, these warnings will become more commonplace and we will have to continue relying on volatile gas markets to fill the gaps in supply, threatening out energy security and driving up bills and emissions.”
Price gouging during disasters is good. It saves lives.
Think of it this way. When the hurricane is on its way do you want people to panic-buy double what they need “just in case”, causing the shops to run out? Why wouldn’t they do that if prices are artificially stopped from rising? Wouldn’t it be better if people limited the amount they bought because “it’s so expensive right now”, leaving more available for others?
When the disaster strikes, would you like businesses and individuals from hundreds of miles away to drop whatever they were doing previously and start transporting emergency supplies into the area affected – and keep doing it until there are no more shortages? Would you like factories hundreds of miles away to shift production to whatever the people in the afflicted area need most? You would? Then let them sell their stuff at a higher price than usual.
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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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