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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“Since apologies are now required. Challenging any consensus is fundamentally important to good science – especially that of an unproven intervention such as lockdown. The onus should have been on those proposing such a radical new policy to justify it, not the reverse. Sweden is the elephant in the room. A nation of relatively similar wealth and standing to us, it largely avoided lockdowns yet has emerged with impressively low excess deaths. Should the inquiry not be asking how? Anders Tegnell, the architect of their successful strategy, should have been a priority witness.”
– Prof Karol Sikora is a consultant oncologist. Daily Telegraph (£)
When the pandemic petered out and lockdowns were – with some reluctance from the powers-that-be – abandoned, there was some speculation about how there needed to be “a reckoning” over the damage done, that we should examine the Swedish case, and re-visit the Great Barrington Declaration’s arguments. But I feared at the time that this was unlikely to happen, at least for some time with the present political establishment. Simple reputation protection is part of it. Also, it appears the large majority of the public in countries such as the UK supported lockdowns. Maybe too many voters did not want to face the full, ugly fact that what had been done was a massive mistake, on a par with entering a war. In this day and age – and I suspect it has been like this since forever – soul searching and honest reflection is not encouraged. Parts of the media probably thought the same about lockdowns and in far too few cases has there been much reflection. You can almost detect a certain awkwardness. I mean, at any social gathering I have been at, among journalists and suchlike, the folly of lockdowns never comes up unless I raise it (I try not to make a habit of it, mind), and if I ever do, I get that “oh, look at that oddball” stare, or desire to shift the conversation to something less controversial.
On the Conservative and Labour sides, and across the public sector, most were invested into lockdowns; already, when I saw journalists have a go at the Boris Johnson government, for example, it was usually that it did not lock down hard enough and early enough. The whole “meta-context” was about repression, speed and duration of lockdown, and the need to throw the full apparatus of the State at it. The idea that ordinary members of the public were already acting to socially distance back in February and early March of 2020, that various methods, freely embraced, might have made a difference (I am not a doctor, so usual disclaimers), were ignored. Not just ignored, but as we saw over the GBD crowd, mocked and scorned.
It became clear to me that there is a clear overlap between the lockdowners, as I call them, and much of today’s Green movement. It was hard for me to ignore an almost pleasurable embrace of lockdowns by the Greens. I mean, we’d stopped most people flying! Look at how clear the canals of Venice are, daaaahling. The Net Zero phenomenon, whatever else it is, is about using the coercive power of the State to force people to change how they behave in ways they will find restrictive and unpleasant for some sort of supposed provable collective goal. The lockdowns were a trial run, in a way, for the sort of repressive measures that such Green activists seek. In one story, an academic suggested that lockdowns were actually a sort of “liberation”.
Clearly, it is possible to be alarmed by all this even if you are, for example, concerned about viruses, possibly cooked up in a lab, or Man-made global temperature increases. These are matters of empirical science. Just because freedom-loving individuals don’t like lockdowns or restrictions on fossil fuels doesn’t mean these fears are unfounded. (The correct approach is to accept the best evidence available without rushing to junk freedom.) But it surely does suggest that in so many cases, top-down responses to this or that threat need to be questioned more. To go back to the quote at the top of this article, there is a need for a burden of proof to sit with those who want to slam measures on the public, not the other way around. And there needs to be more willingness to embrace the solutions and tools to which a free, entrepreneurial society give rise to.
The recent and highly contested decision by London mayor Sadiq Khan to expand ULEZ (ultra-low emissions zone) from central to the outer London boroughs has already caused considerable political pushback. It cost the opposition Labour Party a by-election result. and played a part in encouraging Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to realise, perhaps rather late in the day, that the push to ban sales of new petrol/diesel vehicles in 2030 wasn’t a great one.
It is always wise to heed the Law of Unintended Consequences, and who better to raise that angle than the Institute of Economic Affairs, the think tank. A writer, David Starkie (not the right-wing historian, but another chap), has this:
“The extra ridership on the Tube due to the ULEZ is no doubt tiny compared with daily numbers using the network; this number, about 5 million people a day, is equivalent to more than half the population of the capital. Tiny the extra numbers may be, but these transferees from road vehicles will have their health risk increased as a result of the ULEZ-induced modal shift. Whether this was considered when calculating the statistical numbers of reduced deaths due to the scheme is unknown, but it is by no means apparent that it was considered.”
The article is written in the cool, measured tones of economics. Starkie talks about “modalities” and so on. To translate into blunt language, Starkie argues that people are being encouraged to avoid cars and take dirtier underground public transport instead. The deeper Tube lines are full of dust, such as metal particulates thrown up as wheels grind on the rails. The Tube also, so a friend who used to work for the Tube tells me, has a lot of poison to kill mice and rats. (Here is a page about the mice problem with the Tube.) Starkie notes:
Parts of the Underground suffer from serious air pollution, discovered following research in 2019 sponsored by the Financial Times. According to the newspaper, the deep Tube is by far the most polluted part of the city because of considerable particulate pollution from metal friction, clothing fibre, and dust in general trapped in the tunnels. And there is a lot of it. Using hundreds of measurements inside carriages within Zone 1, dangerously high levels of pollution were found, particularly on the deeper lines. All the deep lines (Piccadilly, Jubilee, Bakerloo, Northern, Victoria and Central) had particulate PM2.5 levels at least five times higher than the World Health Organization’s safe limit and much higher than average levels on the surface, (generally less than PM1.0) particularly in outer London.
In short, some Londoners and those entering or leaving the city on a daily basis are swapping their cars, and where air quality is pretty good, for the Tube, where parts of it have air quality that is far worse. Whatever else Mr Khan may claim about the the expansion of ULEZ, I doubt that a rigorous or honest consideration of air quality is what this is about. It is about raising money and bashing those who own cars.
More than 35 years ago, I recall when an old friend of mine (who died all too young in 2006), Chris R Tame, had been appointed the director of an outfit called FOREST. That acronym stood for Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco. The group was backed by sundry folk, including as far as I know, tobacco firms. It made no secret of it. Chris, much to the annoyance of various pressure groups such as ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), was a keep-fit guy, who went jogging (I joined him in runs around Regent’s Park), lifted weights, did not smoke, and drank in moderation.
Chris’s argument was that your life was yours, not the nation’s or the State’s. With so-called “passive smoking” and the “pollution” side of it, he argued that the risk was slight, but where possible, the issue was for owners of private property to decide. A person was not, on this reasoning, forced to work in a pub or restaurant, etc, and people were not forced to go to such places. In a vigorous economy, with lots of consumer choice, there would be non-smoking premises and those who disliked or feared tobacco smoke could patronise places they preferred. It was the sort of messy solution that a market would provide, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. (See a commentary here from the CATO think tank in the US.)
Over the past 30 years, Chris’s argument has lost ground. On a personal level, as someone who doesn’t smoke or like the smell of it, that’s fine by me. But I realise that this is short-sighted to value a loss of others’ liberties. It is nevertheless striking that, when considering how things were 30 or 40 years ago, we have gone from tolerance of smoking (look at old movies and TV shows) to almost total suppression. I still see a few people smoking a ciggie outside an office here in London, but that’s rare. In fact, I am more likely to smell weed than tobacco these days in London, or for that matter, New York.
Today, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, at the annual Conservative Party conference, outlined a few policies and measures. I was struck by how he wants to adopt a New Zealand-style measure to progressively raise the age at which people can buy cigarettes, up to the point where it is illegal in all but name.
I recall many years ago how ASH and others denied to Chris Tame’s face that they wanted to ban cigarettes. Oh no, they said, that’s just propaganda. Well, it turns out that the end-point for all their campaigns was indeed to ban cigarettes completely. They wanted it all along but lacked the cojones to say so honestly.
In his book, After America (published in 2011, which already seems a loooong time ago), Mark Steyn wrote this:
“Any visitor from the Fifties would soon discover, in a bleak comment on the limits of predictive fiction, our brains didn’t get bigger. But our butts did. If DC Comics had gone with the `Super-Ass of Jimmy Olsen,’ they’d have been up there with Nostradamus. `Our culture’s sedentary character – our strong preference for watching over doing, for virtual over real action – seems closely related to our changing body shape,’ wrote the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. `We now consume significantly more fats and carbohydrates than we actually need. According to the standard measure of obesity, the body-mass index, the percentage of Americans classified as obese nearly doubled, from 12 percent to 21 per cent, between 1991 and 2001. Nearly two-thirds of all American men are officially considered overweight, and nearly three-quarters of those between 45 and 64. Only Western Samoans and Kuwaitis are fatter.’ We are our own walking (or waddling) metaphor from consumption unmoored from production.”
And:
“Our `changing physical shape’ (in Ferguson’s words) seems an almost literal rebuke to the notion of republican self-government. Never mind the constitution, where are our checks and balances?”
Mark Steyn, After America, pages 225-6.
Steyn is connecting two things: a government/central bank policy mix that focuses on consumption, rather than production, and ties policy to that, including welfare policy (ideas such as Univeral Basic Income, etc). Also, the risk-adverse, Precautionary Principle of our time seems to go against humans being adventurous, taking calculated risks, getting up and going places, etc. For example, he notes how young adults today can go through their teens and early 20s without having a job. When, as I did, you worked on Saturdays and during the summer holidays (paper rounds, working on farms, in shops, etc) there were various consequences – all good – including the fact that you had to be physically active. (Glenn Reynolds writes in a similar vein on why teenagers should work before going to college.) Now, the idea of young people working is treated as being on the same plane as evil Victorian mill owners out of a Dickens novel. But Steyn is also making the point about production – and a very anti-Keynesian point. As the “Austrian” school notes (as in George Reisman’s book Capitalism), to consume, you have to produce and that means accumulate capital (physical capital, and mental capital, such as skills and habits). So much present policy seems to work against accumulating capital (taxes, regulations, inflation, the general demonisation of wealthy people, etc). And we print or have printed money to fill the gap. So our economy becomes zombified on ultra-low rates, and like someone who hasn’t taken a regular walk, lifted weights or performed physical work, we get bloated and sick.
Much of what Steyn wrote 12 years ago was accurate, and many of his predictions hold true. I think where the book is a bit off is that he thinks the threat from fundamentalist Islam was the biggest threat to the US while he did not write lot about China, although China does figure in this book quite a bit, to be fair. And the idea of Russia running amok in Ukraine or wherever, while he hints at this risk, it does not really figure all that much. I am quibbling, though. This is a book that holds up well. Its conclusion – that we have to shrink the State, remains as valuable as ever.
Right, off to the gym.
Hobbes was right. We must have government. If men were to try to live without ‘a common Power to keep them all in awe’, life would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, there would be ‘a perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbour’, and there would be adverts for cheese on the London Underground.
City AM reports,
TfL [Transport for London] has left a cheese company’s bosses feeling blue after banning ads depicting their products on the tube – saying the diet staple is too unhealthy.
London’s transport network has been cracking down on unhealthy food advertising on the tube, but according to The Times this now includes the dairy favourite.
The founder of Cheese Geek, Edward Hancock, said the ban was “crazy” and said he couldn’t understand why fizzy drink ads were allowed on the network but not artisan cheeses.
Hancock said cheese “has been shown in numerous recent studies to be beneficial for health.”
TfL banned high fat advertising in 2019. It was intended to capture fast food but appears to have widened in scope to high-end cheddar.
TfL said the cheese ads – which were to be part of a campaign run by Workspace, the office provider and consultancy – could not go on the network because TfL uses “the Food Standards Agency’s model to define foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt.”
I think Sadiq Khan got to the bit in Leviathan about “Power to keep them all in awe” and thought, “I like the sound of that”.
I’m sure that vaccination might be the right thing for some – assuming that we are talking about an effective vaccine that doesn’t do more harm than good. Oh, right… As you were. As they admit, it isn’t something we should be concerned about, URTIs happen every winter and every winter some people fall off their perch because it is their time and that’s what finally sees them off. No, I’m not being harsh, just recognising basic biology. If there was an effective, safe vaccine, then I’d say go for it. However, I no longer have faith in our vaccination programme, so I will not be partaking. That loss of trust is nothing to do with me. I didn’t lie, obfuscate and demonise anyone who dared to raise concerns and I didn’t rush something through before long term results were in.
– Longrider
Katie Morley is the Telegraph’s “Consumer Champion”. People who feel they have been mistreated by companies write to her and she puts their tales of woe in the paper and threatens the company with even more bad publicity if they won’t put things right. Her articles usually end with a line about how So-and-so company has issued a full refund and apologised.
Usually, but not always. Her most recent piece was this one:
‘I spent £27,000 on a cruise I can’t afford, and Cunard won’t give me a full refund’
Her anonymous correspondent says,
Back in early 2022, I had a serious health scare. While waiting for an operation, I decided that I needed something to look forward to. Both my wife and I love to travel and so, on the spur of the moment, I decided to use our savings to book a £27,000 cruise around the world.
I put a £1,500 deposit on a Cunard World Cruise in 2024 on the Queen Victoria. I thought a trip like this would compensate for everything we missed during the pandemic.
In the meantime, friends asked us to join them on a Christmas cruise in 2022, also on the Queen Victoria. We thought this would give us the opportunity to acquaint ourselves with the ship. However, the whole trip was a disaster from the moment we embarked.
After listing some of the things wrong with this ‘preparatory’ trip on the Queen Victoria, the writer finishes by saying,
We then realised that we could not spend three months aboard the Queen Victoria. Also, as a result of the economic downturn, our savings had reduced drastically and we no longer had the money to pay for the cruise. We are both retired NHS workers and live on our pensions so we decided that we would have to cancel.
As soon as we got back from the cruise in January 2023, we contacted ROL, which we had booked through, saying we wanted to cancel. We were shocked and disappointed when Cunard said that we could cancel without losing our £1,500 deposit, but we would have to book a future cruise for the equivalent amount of money (£27,000), or alternatively, a number of cruises adding up to this total.
Ms Morley did express sympathy for the writer’s health and financial troubles, but her sympathy did not extend to taking up the cudgels on his behalf. She wrote,
…you say you can no longer afford this cruise, yet when I asked, you said you and your wife’s NHS pensions were guaranteed defined benefit arrangements which are still in place. So what had changed since you booked the £27,000 cruise, I asked? You told me you’d invested a significant sum in Vodafone shares, which had tanked, causing you to lose half your money.
I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but your stock market misfortunes have absolutely nothing to do with Cunard and, as such, I was not prepared to ask it to break its terms and conditions because you had a disastrous flutter and can no longer afford the cruise you booked. If you really can’t go on the world cruise or book alternatives, then I’m afraid you’ll just have to swallow this £1,500 loss and put it down to experience.
What really interested me was the response from the Telegraph readers. I expected them to support Cunard, and they did, but I had not expected so many of them to specifically resent the way that the writer had attempted to garner sympathy by mentioning that he and his wife were retired NHS workers.
The most recommended comment was by Roger Sidney and said, “Love the bit about ‘we are retired NHS workers’. Come one everyone, give ’em a clap!” Someone called Mytwo Penneth said, “Former NHS workers booking £27k cruises and speculating on shares. Then they have the brass neck to get KM involved in an attempt to recover a deposit.” Brian Gedalla said, “Nice to see some backbone from Katie. You could have played “Entitlement Bingo” with this one. Like Roger below, I laughed out loud when I got to the “we are retired NHS workers” line.” There were many other similar comments.
Although I have long since ceased to believe that a command economy is a good way to arrange a nation’s healthcare, my own experiences with the National Health Service have been good. Those people I know who work for it are hardworking, and I did clap during the pandemic, and meant it. My view that it would be desirable to privatise the NHS is only shared by about 2% of British people. Even among Telegraph readers, the great majority still support the NHS model. I do not think that the anger in these replies was motivated by hostility to the NHS per se. But something has changed in Britain when so many refuse NHS workers the automatic deference that this pair clearly expected to receive.
“What strikes you when reading about any number of NHS scandals since then isn’t so much the systemic failures, it’s the instances of individual cruelty to patients. Bereaved parents repeatedly told the Ockenden report about a lack of compassion from staff and some even said they were told they were responsible for their own child’s death. All of this amounts to a sense that the health services continually privileges the institution over the needs of patients at the most vulnerable times of their lives. When you consider how utterly inhumane that is, it becomes easier to understand how the NHS could contain a monster like Letby.” (See here for details on the Ockenden saga.)
– Alys Denby, Editor, CapX, in a weekly letter to subscribers of that platform. Denby writes about Lucy Letby, a nurse convicted last week of murdering a number of babies in a NHS hospital.
Monsters can flourish in certain institutions, and it strikes me that those that are treated as near-sacred institutions provide cover for them. The NHS needs to be nuked from high orbit for various reasons, and these scandals surely add to the list.
“Scottish politicians have the courage to decriminalise drugs, but Westminster is too timid to let them” – Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian.
Returning from Htrae, I have to say that the SNP’s courage was the courage of desperation. Scotland has had the highest rate of drugs death in Europe for years.
While it seems likely that the problem in many countries is worse than official figures suggest, Scotland’s drug-related death rate is by far the highest.
It is more than three and a half times that of England and Wales.
It is said that when it comes to addiction to alcohol or drugs, sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can recover. I think this can be true of legislators’ attempts to find a solution for drug addition as much as for drug addiction itself. The Scottish National Party has not seen the light, it has merely run out of other options. And given that the SNP’s longstanding stance on alcohol contradicts its new position on drugs, they’ll probably make etizolam compulsory the day they raise the minimum price of alcohol to infinity.
Nonetheless, I think this is a good move on the part of the Scottish Government. I do not think it will solve Scotland’s drug problem. I do not think anything will solve Scotland’s drug problem, or humanity’s drug problem. I merely think it will work less badly than the strategy of prohibition, which Scotland and the UK as a whole has been trying for my entire lifetime without success.
“Covid Censorship Proved to Be Deadly”, writes Bret Swanson in the Wall Street Journal, but you could leave the first word off the headline and it would still be true. It is not necessary to agree with or even understand every one of Mr Swanson’s specifically Covid-related points to see the inevitable truth of what he says below:
Legions of doctors stayed quiet after witnessing the demonization of their peers who challenged the Covid orthodoxy. A little censorship leads people to watch what they say. Millions of patients and citizens were deprived of important insights as a result.
The worldwide system of individual doctors reporting and pooling their observations of how diseases progress and treatments work out has been a major factor in the spectacular medical progress of the last two centuries. For it to work, obviously, all must be free to say what they have seen and all must be free to see what others have said. I had thought this understanding was an unshakeable pillar of science, one of those innovations, like literacy and the scientific method itself, whose advantages are so clear that once discovered it is never abandoned.
This turned out not to be the case.
The most damaging paper of the pandemic has just been published in The Lancet and it makes stunning reading.
Youth smoking has increased six-fold in Australia since 2019 despite the highest cigarette taxes in the world.
That is what is shown by the orange line on the graph in Snowdon’s tweet. The graph is taken from page 8 of the Australian government’s own publication, “Current vaping and current smoking in the Australian population aged 14+ years: February 2018-March 2023”.
If you seek to understand why this has happened, cross out “despite” and replace it with “because”.
In an article called “Introducing the Snowdon Curve”, Tim Worstall explains further:
There is an optimal amount of regulation, taxation, meant to discourage an activity. Going further than this actually increases the amount of the undesired activity, not decreases it.
If, for example, spirits were taxed so highly that it was near impossible to afford them then how much would home distillation rise? It’s possible to think by more than the drinking discouraged. We do not insist on that particular example, it is just an example.
But here with smoking the thing that everyone wants to discourage most is the teen smoking of cigarettes.
[…]
Australia, as the news keeps reminding us, does have a large illegal tobacco sector. The taxes, the restrictions, are worth people working in and supplying it – which leads to the real price of smokes and baccy to be considerably lower – thus consumption higher, than the legal status would suggest.
There really is a curve here. Restrictions can be so onerous that the society simply declares “Bugrit, millennium hand an’ shrimp” as with this example of teen smoking and Australian tobacco restrictions.
It’s possible to generalise this further too. Some of us have lived in societies where everything is so tediously regulated that no one bothers to obey any of the laws. This explains the Soviet economy and Italian driving.
There really is this Snowdon Curve, it is possible to have non-optimal levels of tax and regulation which end up increasing the amount of the undesired activity. As with the base Laffer contention, this is unarguable. That we are now beyond this point in many aspects of society, well, let the arguments begin.
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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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