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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I’m now watching a video of Hans Sennholz, produced by the Foundation for Economic Education.
Sennholz is talking about the Great Depression, arguing that freedom didn’t fail, politics failed, and that “if we repeat these government polices there is going to be another Great Depression”. I’m typing while he talks, but that is the gist of it.
Until now, Sennholz was just a name to me. Now he is a name, a face, a voice, an attitude. And a prophet.
This video was made (or should I say this film was shot?) on February 29th (!) 1988. I was steered towards it by Richard Carey (whom I SQotDed earlier this week) of Libertarian Home, to whom thanks.
The First World War use to be called The Great War. Soon, The Great Depression is likely also to become known by a different title, which also includes the word “First”.
Catastrophiliac. I like it. I found this word, which is new to me, in comment number one (“Mailman”) on this at Bishop Hill.
I like it because, as I keep on saying, climate change on its own is not the issue. The issue is catastrophic climate change, of the sort that would-be global tyrants think is a good excuse for global tyranny.
But there is now no getting away from it. The catastrophiliacs are now on the run. Just how completely they are on the run, and just how quickly this fact will become obvious to all, even to most of the catastrophiliacs themselves, are of course matters for much debate, but the direction of argumentative tide is now clear, even to the less dense catastrophiliacs. Regular people and regular politicians more and more now think that C(atastrophic) A(nthropogenic) G(lobal) W(arming) is at best an embarrassment and, in ever more such regular minds, a total crock, a fraud, a hoax. Only the “climate scientists” and their pathetic would-be globally tyrannical fans are still yammering on about it.
It’s not that CAGW and all its related rackets have entirely ceased from doing the world any harm. Far from it. But, to use a commercial analogy, CAGW is now what a business strategist would call a “mature product”, a cash cow, a product whose days are numbered. Attention now needs to switch to the products that might succeed CAGW when CAGW finally runs out of puff.
So, next question, what will be the next Big Tyranny Excuse from the would-be global tyrants for the global tyranny that they yearn for? I believe it will not be anything to do with “the environment”. We anti-global tyranny people have now become just too good at arguing against all that stuff.
No, it will be something totally different, and when they finally arrive at it, it will be quite a surprise.
Meanwhile, the Darwinian process of kite-flying (please excuse the mangling of those metaphors) will now get seriously under way, to identify the next Big Tyranny Excuse. This new BTE will have to be something catastrophic, something that is plausibly arguable as the fault of “capitalism” (which rules out things like asteroid strikes or the sun misbehaving dramatically), something which suggests a plausible, pleasingly tyrannical, and actually doable – but only just doable, provided we all drop everything (especially our guard against tyranny) and act now!!! – correction mechanism, and too intellectually complicated to be obvious nonsense.
They will need to discover or establish a whole new academic anti-discipline to base their nonsense on. But what will that be?
Once upon a time it was theology. Then it was economics, as mangled by Marx and then by Keynes. Just lately it has been “the environment”. (Arguably it never stopped being theology, more loosely defined.) What next? Any offers?
In the aftermath of electoral defeat, a Labour MP and former minister wrote:
“The new Conservative Government is showing itself the most ideological and reactionary right-wing government that Europe has seen in two decades … Its commitment to lower public spending and its ideology of laissez-faire will mean more poverty, more inequality, a meaner social sector and a worse environment.”
As things turned out, once in power the Conservatives preferred “pragmatism” to an ideology of laissez-faire, and the commitment to lower public spending displayed about the same level of commitment as Ming the Merciless did in his marriage vows to Dale Arden:
PRIEST: Do you, Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe, take this Earthling, Dale Arden Lower Public Spending, to be your Empress of the hour?
MING: Of the hour, yes.
PRIEST: Do you promise to use her as you will?
MING: Certainly!
PRIEST: Not to blast her into space?
(Pointed silence from Ming)
PRIEST (hurriedly): ….Until such time as you grow weary of her?
MING: I do.
The election concerned was, of course, that of 2010 1990 1979 1970 and the writer was Anthony Crosland, MP. He concluded:
“Perhaps it did not need this lecture to demonstrate that our basic social democratic aims remain as urgent as they have ever been. If proof were needed, Mr Heath has provided it.”
– Anthony Crosland in A Social Democratic Britain, Fabian Tract 404, based on a lecture given in November 1970. (Price 3s / 15p.)
I do not entirely share Perry’s view that between Ruling Lizards Group A and Ruling Lizards Group B there is no difference worth a damn. By gum, though, when you think that Edward Heath was once seriously feared as a rampaging warrior of laissez faire, there is no difference worth much.
(I have updated the item with comments below after the Post-Libertarianism blog responded).
I suppose it is inevitable that people who are unconvinced by a supposedly strong “consensus” in favour of CAGW are going to be branded as conspiracy theorists, putting them into the same category as 9/11 Truthers, Holocaust revisionists, and sundry other people of varying levels of delusion, looniness or nastiness. (There is even a person – anonymous and writing for the “Post-Libertarianism” blog, claiming to be a bit of a supporter of libertarianism who says he is appalled at how so many libertarians are skeptics. This blogger seems to write in a permanent state of rage.)
At the Adam Smith Institute blog, Chris Snowdon makes this point about the value, or otherwise, of surveys of opinions about such matters:
“That being said, it would come as no great surprise if free marketeers were more likely to be sceptical of climate change than left-wingers since many of the most prominent global warming advocates are on the left and many of the proposed solutions involve encroachments on economic or social liberties. There is, therefore, a greater motivation for them to seek out alternative hypotheses. Conversely, one might conclude that socialists are more likely to embrace the issue than right-wingers, and for the same reason, but since the study did not use a control group, we have no way of knowing if free marketeers are over-represented in the sceptic camp or if the numbers are what you would expect from a random sample of the population.”
“The (considerably weaker) relationship between climate change scepticism and conspiratorial thinking is more interesting and it made me wonder whether the study also found a link between free market beliefs and conspiracy theories. The researchers do not say—although they must have the data—and I would be surprised if such a link exists. One striking aspect of David Aaronovich’s excellent book Voodoo Histories is how many conspiracy theories are of the left. The two biggest conspiracy theories of the last century—the JFK assassination and the 9/11 ‘inside job’—surely do not correlate with free market beliefs. More likely, they correlate with the politics of Oliver Stone and Michael Moore, both of whom have managed to keep their careers on track despite publicly promoting some quite outrageous drivel.”
“I dare say that free market views would also not correlate with the belief that the invasion of Iraq was a ‘war for oil’ with Halliburton pulling the strings, or that Hilda Murrell, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and David Kelly were murdered by the government, or that the 2000 US presidential election was rigged, or that the government blew up New Orleans’ levees during Hurricane Katrina, or, for that matter, that anyone who is sceptical about climate change is funded by the fossil fuel industry.”
On the subject of why people believe in conspiracies, Michael Shermer is usually very good on the subject. His demolition of Holocaust deniers is brilliant as an example of historiography and painstaking analysis.
Update: The blogger at Post-Libertarianism responded. He/she seems rather bemused by Samizdata and where we are coming from. I should have thought that the “who are we” segment on the top right hand corner of the homepage should provide a decent outline. Samizdata isn’t a sort of “hardcore” libertarian blog, by the way – there have, for example, been distinct differences of view by commentators about matters such as the 2003 Coalition overthrow of Saddam. Anyway, the blogger has elaborated on where he/she stands on the approach to CAGW. He/she argues that the word “skeptic” is inappropriate to describe people who, allegedly, are in total denial about whether any Man-made global warming of a potentially damaging nature is occurring. Fair enough. Personally, I think people who don’t sign up to the full CAGW point of view come in different flavours: some – like me, are skeptics because of how issues such as the “hockey stick” prediction have not only failed to materialise, but because some of the most prominent scientists involved seem to have a cavalier approach to evidence and criticism, as evidence by the University of East Anglia leaked emails issue, and other behaviours as recently chronicled by James Delingpole.
There is also no doubt, as Post-Libertarianism can see, that while it is perfect possible for a person to be concerned about CAGW and be a libertarian, favouring non-state measures to adapt to CAGW or prevent it, there is no doubt that in general, most people who are pressing the CAGW case are statists of various types, and are arguing for taxes, regulations and other coercive state measures to deal with it. There is, in other words, a natural inclination on the part of libertarians to treat CAGW as a version of a moral panic of the sort that have been used in the past to justify intrusive government actions down the centuries. The same applies to views about race, for example. While it is possible that some people who are interested in race and IQ might have benign intentions and wish to push the boundaries of knowledge and protect freedom, in my experience – and that of many others – most people who discuss such matters are often racial collectivists who are happy to use the power of the state to bring about outcomes they consider desirable.
One final point. Post-Libertarianism objects to my description of him as “a bit of a supporter of libertarianism”. Well, the writer says in this post: “My idea of post-libertarianism is that of a sane, philosophical, scholarly anarcho-capitalist libertarianism that has disengaged itself from the maniacs, sociopaths, and garden-variety crackpots of LRC, LvMI, ARI, LP, FEE, and other errorist organizations (except for ARI, which is a full-fledged terrorist organization).”
Well, leave aside whether all of the organisations mentioned deserve to be so described. The fact is that this person does, by his/her own words, appear to be a libertarian of sorts. I’d be interested to know who the author of that blog actually is. If you are going to throw rocks from the position of anonymity, it looks a bit slimy unless there are good, work-based or other professional reasons for doing so.
Another Update: Post-Libertarianism – I am now convinced the author is a he (you can just tell somehow) – is a regular charmer:
“As for your whining about my anonymity: if there is a need for you to know who I am, then please describe and explain that need. I don’t give a damn who you are; why should you give a damn who I am?”
Let me spell it out for him: unless there is a clear need for work reasons (some firms make it almost impossible for people to blog under their real names) it is surely best to say who you are, or, if you have a pen-name, develop it over a period of time so that one has a sort of track record (this is what I have done.) For a start, it encourages a basic level of civility. Also, if you are in the business of making harsh attacks on people about their academic qualifications (as PL does about some of the people involved at, say, George Mason University), or otherwise attacking the intelligence, objectivity or bias of people such as the late Thomas Szasz – as PL does – then it perhaps aids the credibility of such attacks if the attacker can explain who he or she is, what their own academic and professional qualifications are, and so on. This is not “whining”; rather, it is a call for a basic amount of civility and accountability. Of course, this person is free to continue blogging away anonymously. But I happen to think that this will hamper his efforts to clean up libertarianism effectively.
Anyway, enough of this. I actually like – mostly – what this person is trying to do.
There is something grimly amusing at reading Matt Yglesias, purveyor of conventional (ie, wrong) thinking on matters economic, getting a bit sniffy about the way in which certain commentators, such as Bryan Caplan, cite the great insights of the 19th Century French thinker, Frederic Bastiat (well known to this blog, of course):
“Bastiat’s alleged broken windows fallacy involves simply assuming that there’s no such thing as genuinely idle resources or an “output gap.” In that context, yes, it’s a vibrant intuitive depiction of crowding out. But this doesn’t counter any Keynesian or monetarist points about the viability of stimulus during a recession induced by nominal shocks, it involves assuming that no such recessions can occur even though they plainly do. In defense of Bastiat, at the time he was writing the modern industrial business cycle was a very new thing and the vast majority of economic ups and downs were caused by things like bad weather which—as you can see in the corn futures market today—is indeed a decisive consideration in an agricultural economy. But that’s no excuse for people sitting around in 2012 to be pounding the table with an old book that’s non-responsive to modern issues professing to be baffled why people don’t find it more persuasive.”
The point is that the issue of “idle resources” or an “output gap” only makes sense if you start from the position of assuming that there is an optimum amount of economic activity to be had, and that supposedly clever central bankers (try not to laugh please) know what this “gap” is and have the skills to fill it. Given the manifest failings of Keynesianism – and arguably also some of the cruder forms of monetarism – it seems those who want to push this approach are under an onus of proof.
Yglesias also writes about one of Bastiat’s most famous satires of businesses, the one where he mocks firms that ask for protection against competition: the “candlemaker’s petition”:
“The best example of this is probably “The Candlemaker’s Petition” which is a pretty hilarious satire of rent-seeking. And obviously rent-seeking is a real thing, worthy of being satirized. But there are no political controversies for or against pure rent-seeking. The candlemakers’ petition is a devastating satire of pharmaceutical companies’ endless lust for patent rents, unless you happen to think that pharmaceutical patents and the monopoly rents they generate are a crucial engine of R&D funding and life-saving research. Are the pharmaceutical companies right? I think it’s questionable, but I also don’t think you’ll find the answer in Bastiat.”
That is quite cute and he has a decent point – not all requests for protection of a business are, ipso facto, wrong, but this does not really work as a smackdown.
The argument for patents (and as we know, classical liberals have sharp disagreements about intellectual property rights, as shown by the likes of Greg Perkins, say, or Tim Sandefur, or this guy), is that they are incentives to capture the commercial use of an idea for a specified period of time on the basis that creating such property rights in commercial inventions increases the likely existence of said in total, which is different from tariffs, where there seems to be clear evidence that such things reduce the overall economic pie. (Critics of IP sometimes argue that it stifles overall innovation, but I have seen no conclusive evidence either way.) Thinking of Bastiat’s satire, it does not really, in my view, mean that I would scorn a firm or individual for seeking to protect an original idea from being copied by someone else without payment. In any respect, the presumed “rent seeking” failings of IP (and there are problems) can be seriously reduced by reforms, such as granting patents to independent inventors of a gadget, greater disclosure of invention processes in patent filings, an efficient secondary market in IP, shorter IP durations, and so on.
It is good that those of us who venerate Bastiat are forced to think through how his ideas apply to such matters, even to the point of working out if he has any weak spots. But I don’t see that Yglesias has landed the killer blow that he thinks he has. And he cannot just write Bastiat off as a witty Frenchman whose insights are out of date. They are screamingly relevant, just as Adam Smith and others of that vintage are.
I suppose it is good that Mr Bastiat is getting up the noses of some folk. That counts as progress. There’s plenty more where that came from.
(I realise that this is the second time in a row I have written something with a French angle. A pity that French president Francois Hollande does not share the wisdom of Bastiat.)
Update: Caplan responds with some more observations on how policy wonks live in the sort of bubbles that need to be pricked.
This is 1912 I am referring to (of course), when Britain had ended up behind the United States and Sweden, and not more recent times. A certain Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who you may have heard of) is particuarly upset:
All who have our reputation as athletes at heart owe a debt of gratitude to you Correspondent at the Stockholm Games for his very clear and outspoken comments on the situation. We can now see the causes of past failure.
But he has a solution:
1. The first is the formation of a British Empire Team…
Like the Australians know anything about winning at the Olympics. Ha!
Actually, Sir Arthur is kinda sorta touching on, what is, in 1912, for Britain, a worrisome issue. Britain’s lead is slipping. France, Germany and the US are all catching up. Meanwhile, the colonies, especially Canada and Australia, are becoming less dependent on the Mother Country. Britain wants to retain some influence without getting into the same mess it got into with the Americans. Hence ideas are being floated for a combined tariff wall, a combined defence staff and (in this case) a combined Olympics team. They won’t work, of course, but Britain does, at least, manage to avoid a war of colonial repression. And the colonies manage to show up on time for the world wars.
The Times, Tuesday, Jul 30, 1912; pg. 6
Earlier this week I watched a television show which was advertised as being about London’s underground railway system, and the technology that made it possible, but which was really about underground railways in general.
I really, really enjoyed it, when it was first shown on Wednesday night. And I am writing this in some haste because the show is being shown again tonight, at 7pm, Channel 5. If you love stuff about high tech engineering and the extraordinary ingenuity and cunning and (not least) bravery and physical endurance that goes into it, then watch it. Or (if you have a life) set your video, or whatever videos are called these days. (Or be twenty first century about it and watch it on the www, which I can’t do because of something about my computer blocking adverts.)
My favourite bit was when they explained how a noted French engineer with the delightful name of Fulgence Bienvenue put a tunnel through the bank of the River Seine in Paris. Problem: the bank was not made of proper earth. It was made of mud. How do you drill a big tube through mud? Answer: you freeze the mud, and then drill through it, insert the tube, and … well, job done. By the time the … I was going to say permafrost, but make that tempafrost … has turned back into mud, the tube is in there and train-ready.
Another major engineer whom I’d never heard of until now also got a well deserved pat on the back from the television. This was an American called Sprague:
Hailed during his lifetime as the “Father of Electric Traction” by leaders in the fields of science, engineering and industry, Frank Julian Sprague’s achievements in horizontal transportation were paralleled by equally remarkable achievements in vertical transportation.
In other words, Sprague didn’t just make underground trains work far better by replacing one massive steam engine at the front with lots of far smaller electric engines all the way along the train, which as I am sure you can imagine worked far better, not just because of all that steam, but also because it meant the trains could be as long as you want. He also pioneered electric engines for lifts, as we call them over here. As a result of Sprague’s elevator engines, skyscrapers scraped the sky a lot more than hitherto, as was well explained in this TV show.
The bit at the end about how they squirted a new concrete foundation under Big Ben, to stop it falling over when they were sticking the Jubilee Line extension right next to it, was not so epoch-making. But it was fun.
I live close to one of the great old cities of Britain, Newcastle upon Tyne. In two centuries it has been transformed from a hive of enterprise and local pride, based on locally generated and controlled capital and local mutual institutions of community, into the satrapy of an all-powerful state, its industries controlled from London or abroad (thanks to the collectivization of people’s savings through tax relief for pension funds), and its government an impersonal series of agencies staffed by rotating officials from elsewhere whose main job is to secure grants from London. Such local democracy as remains is itself based entirely on power, not trust. In two centuries the great traditions of trust, mutuality and reciprocity on which such cities were based have been all but destroyed – by governments of both stripes. They took centuries to build. The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle, in whose magnificent library I researched some of this book, is but a reminder of the days when the great inventors and thinkers of the region, almost all of them self-made men, were its ambitious luminaries. The city is now notorious for shattered, impersonal neighbourhoods where violence and robbery are so commonplace that enterprise is impossible. Materially, everybody in the city is better off than a century ago, but that is the result of new technology, not government. Socially, the deterioration is marked. Hobbes lives, and I blame too much government, not too little.
– A paragraph near the end (pp. 264-5) of The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley. Time was when the best popularisers of science were left wingers, and they bolted left wing conclusions onto the end of their popularisations. Ridley does a similar thing there, but in the service of capitalism, progress and freedom.
Ridley is a terrific writer, and there are dozens of quotes scattered through this book which I could have chosen for the SQotD treatment.
A few days ago I nearly photoed someone wearing one of those idiotic Che T-shirts, but I missed the shot.
This is the kind of thing such T-shirts ought to be saying:
Although, I’m not quite sure about the wording, the bit at the bottom I mean. Truly, I’m not sure. It looks to me somewhat like an admission of defeat, rather than an assertion of victory. It’s like the bad guys really have succeeded in burying the truth about this appalling person, and the good guys are conceding this. But the first bit digs up that truth and proclaims it, and that’s good.
I found it here.
More about the real Che in this earlier posting here.
I’ve just been listening to an interview, conducted by recently acquired Samizdatista Patrick Crozier. His inteviewee is John Butler, and they talk about the contents of Butler’s new book, The Golden Revolution. Access this interview at the Cobden Centre blog. It lasts just over forty five minutes, but to me it felt less.
I have not read Butler’s book, but judging by this interview, my immediate impression is that Butler’s strength as an economic commentator is his combination of an unswervingly market based understanding of economic reality with a far more detailed grasp of the recent history of the twentieth century’s big economic events and big economic policy decisions, more detailed than is usual among your typical unswerving market based understander of economic reality. Butler understands why the great policy mistakes of the twentieth century were indeed mistakes. But he also knows the detail of the circumstances that made these mistakes so attractive to the people who made them.
I won’t try to retell the story Butler tells. Suffice it to say that, like many of us here, he attaches great importance to the decision, by President Nixon, to abandon the gold convertibility of the dollar.
As for the resulting mess and what to do about it, Butler considers that a return by the world to gold as the basis of its currency arrangements is not only desirable, but possible and even likely, and he reflects on the various ways in which this change back to monetary sanity might soon be accomplished and by whom.
A strongly recommended listen, to anyone who has three quarters of an hour to spare and a desire to understand the state of the world somewhat better.
Tim Sandefur has done what looks like an excellent piece of historical detective work. He writes about some of the images that are sometimes brought up by those who want to claim that there was no real proof of any serious communist threat to the US and that Joe McCarthy was a deluded fool, etc, etc. The entry is quite a long one so it is worth reading over a coffee break. Here is how it kicks off:
“You’ve probably seen this amusing poster somewhere or other; a bookstore near my house has it displayed on the wall. It’s often cited as an example of Cold War hysteria—the evils of McCarthyism—how foolish our grandparents were, that they would believe such silliness! They must have been really backwards.”
We then are shown the supposedly sinister poster and told how it might have been created, and where from.
This period of US history fascinates me. When I was studying history at school and university, the standard line on the 1930s and subsequent decade and a half in the US was that a lot of the fears about the “Reds” were massively overblown, misused for various purposes, etc. And yet it turns out that even Joe McCarthy might have had a case, as our own Brian Micklethwait wrote some time ago.
It remains a notable fact of US politics that “socialist” is a pretty dire term of abuse. Even those who are, in my view, socialists – such as Barack Obama – seem to want to deny it.
Apart from history buffs, the conflict between the young United States and Britain in 1812 is a war – which ended in 1815 – that few people today know or care much about. The US Navy, justifiably proud of its performance in that campaign, is commemorating it, unsurprisingly as we are now in the 200th anniversary spot. The war was famous, among other things, for this doughty US Man O’War, the mighty USS Constitution, a ship that became known as “old Ironsides” on account of how British ships’ broadsides appeared to make little dent in its sides.
Among other things, the War of 1812 is a reminder of how “trade wars” can turn into military ones. This Wikipedia entry about the conflict seems pretty comprehensive in explaining some of the main causes and battles.
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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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