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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Remember this movie?
One night a year, all crime is legal.
THE PURGE
Survive the night.
According to Wikipedia, The Purge posits that ‘In 2014, a political party called the “New Founding Fathers of America” are voted into office following an economic collapse, and pass a law sanctioning the “Purge”, an annual event wherein all crime is legal and emergency services are temporarily suspended. By 2022, the United States is said to have become virtually crime-free, with legal unemployment rates having dropped to 1%.’
Virtually crime-free and unemployment at 1%? That compares favourably with our timeline’s 2022, but nonetheless, this is not the the sort of policy proposal I usually associate with the Liberal Democrats – but it seems Ed Davey is ready to rock: “No one should lose their home this Christmas”, says the Lib Dem website. It continues:
Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has called for an emergency ban on repossessions and evictions this Winter. This comes after the Conservative Government’s mismanagement of the economy caused spiralling mortgage and rental prices.
These measures would stop banks from repossessing people’s homes who have been hit the hardest by soaring mortgage prices as well as bringing forward the promised ban on no-fault evictions, alongside a ban on evictions for arrears over the winter.
We are deeply concerned that both renters and homeowners could face homelessness during one of the most difficult Winters in living memory.
We are making these urgent calls on the Conservative Government as only days of Parliament remain before Christmas for the Prime Minister to take responsibility for the mess his Government has caused.
The Conservatives have failed time and time again to bring forward the ban on no-fault evictions they promised and have made no attempt to stop repossessions caused by their disastrous mini-Budget. They must act now before it is too late.
No-one should face losing their home this Christmas because the Conservative Government crashed the economy.
Why so tame, Ed? If it is a good thing that one group of people should be allowed to take what they have not paid for without punishment over the Christmas period, why not others? Discriminatory, I call it. Let us throw away the shackles of enforcement of property rights for everyone this Christmas!
It’s Christmas time
There’s no need to be afraid
At Christmas time
We let in light and we banish shade
And in our world of plenty
We can spread a smile of joy
Throw your arms around the world
At Christmas time
“Shoplifting isn’t the real crime, poverty is”, tweets Owen Jones.
The tweet links to this video excerpt from the Jeremy Vine Show, in which the host tries several times to get Mr Jones and the other panellists to give straight answers on whether it is wrong for shops to put anti-theft tags on commonly stolen goods. He doesn’t get any. The responses he does get are variations on two themes, firstly, the non-sequitur “Yes, it is wrong for shops to try and stop their goods being stolen because poverty is the bigger crime”, and secondly, “I don’t condone shoplifting, but here’s why I condone shoplifting.”
At 2:25 Mr Jones says, “The way to abolish shoplifting is to abolish the underlying cause, which is poverty and the cost of living crisis”.
So the answer was in front of our silly noses the whole time!
In future videos Mr Jones will tackle the shocking prevalence of “food deserts” and “health care deserts” in poor areas because so many supermarkets, corner shops and pharmacies have closed down.
“….it is more useful to see Liz Truss’s rise and fall as symptomatic of an identity crisis among free-market policy-makers across the West, as they wake up to a world in which can exist neither as competent technocratic administrators nor as a radical liberalising movement. This new world is one in which both Thatcherism and the Blairite Third Way are dead. What those commentators suffering from Brexit Derangement Syndrome appear to have missed is that the country is reeling from what many hoped was a transitory crisis, but now seems to be a permanent paradigm shift: one in which high inflation is endemic and the welfare capitalist model that has been propped up by cheap credit for the past 20 years is vanquished.”
– Sherelle Jacobs. Daily Telegraph (£)
I wonder if people will talk of these times in the way they once discussed the tumultuous Corn Law/free trade debates that led, eventually, to the formation of the Liberal Party (Whigs and Robert Peel supporters joining) and the Tories, led by Lord Derby and later Disraeli, languishing in opposition for 20-plus years. Stephen Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs (and a Manchester man who relishes the traditions of classical liberalism and economics in that city), argues that big realignments are going on. I think, contrary to his view, that economics is as important as “culture wars” stuff to what is causing politics to shift. The public has just had a big lesson in why economics matters. It matters a lot.
Right, who laughed? I don’t know if it was the nameless Associated Press reporter who wrote this story, or the Guardian editor who decided to run it, but someone connected with the publication of this piece in the Graun of all places was enjoying themselves: “New York changes gun buyback after seller gets $21,000 for 3D-printed parts”
The seller, who identified himself by a pseudonym, said he traveled from West Virginia to a gun buyback on 27 August in Utica, New York, to take advantage of a loophole in the program – and to demonstrate that buybacks are futile in an era of printable weapons.
At the buyback, the seller turned in 60 printed auto sears, small devices that can convert firearms into fully automatic weapons. Under the rules of the buyback, hosted by the office of the attorney general, Letitia James, and city police, that entitled him to $350 for each of the printed parts, including a $100 premium, since they were deemed “ghost guns” lacking serial numbers.
The seller, who declined to provide his real name, said in an email on Monday the prospect of making money was enticing, but that the big reason he took part in the buyback was to send a message.
He called the idea of buybacks “ridiculously stupid”, adding that “the people running this event are horribly uneducated about guns, gun crime and the laws surrounding the regulation of guns”.
James’ office said it responded to the loophole by giving buyback personnel more discretion to determine the value of weapons being handed in, and setting a standard that all 3D-printed guns accepted by the program must be capable of being fired more than once.
Now there’s a government-funded Technology Innovation Strategy I could get behind. I am sure the 3-D gun printing community will rise to the challenge set by this new standard.
“Labour surges to 33-point lead over Tories”, reports the Times.
Labour has surged to a 33-point poll lead over the Conservatives after a week of market turmoil triggered by Liz Truss’s tax-cutting budget.
The YouGov poll for The Times finds Tory support has fallen by seven points in the past four days amid fears the government’s plans will lead to spiralling interest rate rises.
It is thought to be the largest poll lead enjoyed by any party with any pollster since the late 1990s.
Labour’s lead is fuelled by voters switching directly from the Conservatives, with 17 per cent of those who backed Boris Johnson in 2019 saying they would vote Labour.
Just 37 per cent of 2019 Conservative voters said they were planning to stick with the party, suggesting a Tory wipeout.
Liz Truss now faces a choice. She can pull back. This might regain her a percentage point or two. She would then be 31 points behind instead of 33. Her place in history would be secure: as an answer to a difficult pub quiz question about who was Prime Minister between Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer. Or she can push onwards. She might still fail, but more gloriously. And if she succeeds, she gets to sit alongside Margaret Thatcher in the Told You So Hall of Fame. Even if, as seems likely, she loses the next election but hands Sir Keir an economy in significantly better shape, she will be remembered as someone who put country before party.
From the White House website:
President Biden often summarizes his vision for America in one word: Possibilities. A “digital dollar” may seem far-fetched, but modern technology could make it a real possibility.
A United States central bank digital currency (CBDC) would be a digital form of the U.S. dollar. While the U.S. has not yet decided whether it will pursue a CBDC, the U.S. has been closely examining the implications of, and options for, issuing a CBDC. If the U.S. pursued a CBDC, there could be many possible benefits, such as facilitating efficient and low-cost transactions, fostering greater access to the financial system, boosting economic growth, and supporting the continued centrality of the U.S. within the international financial system. However, a U.S. CBDC could also introduce a variety of risks, as it might affect everything ranging from the stability of the financial system to the protection of sensitive data.
To be fair, these remarks by Dr. Alondra Nelson, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Alexander Macgillivray, Principal Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer, and Nik Marda, Policy Advisor do acknowledge the existence of risks:
For example, these objectives state that a U.S. CBDC system should expand equitable access to the financial system, preserve the role of physical cash, and only collect data that is strictly necessary.
Given the record of the FBI, the CIA and the NSA, I would put very little faith in their definition of “strictly necessary” as a shield against the US government spying on its citizens.
A retired and now ennobled supreme court judge writes in the Times that the decisions of the government during a crisis were wise and good and that if, perchance, any slight errors were made, fear not, lessons will be learned.
Bzzt. Click. System error. Commence program reset.
A retired and now ennobled supreme court judge – Lord Sumption – writes in the Times that “Little by little the truth of lockdown is being admitted: it was a disaster”.
In a remarkably candid interview with The Spectator, Rishi Sunak has blown the gaff on the sheer superficiality of the decision-making process of which he was himself part. The fundamental rule of good government is not to make radical decisions without understanding the likely consequences. It seems obvious. Yet it is at that most basic level that the Johnson government failed. The tragedy is that this is only now being acknowledged.
Sunak makes three main points. First, the scientific advice was more equivocal and inconsistent than the government let on. Some of it was based on questionable premises that were never properly scrutinised. Some of it fell apart as soon it was challenged from outside the groupthink of the Sage advisory body. Second, to build support, the government stoked fear, embarking on a manipulative advertising campaign and endorsing extravagant graphics pointing to an uncontrolled rise in mortality if we were not locked down. Third, the government not only ignored the catastrophic collateral damage done by the lockdown but actively discouraged discussion of it, both in government and in its public messaging.
Lockdown was a policy conceived in the early days by China and the World Health Organisation as a way of suppressing the virus altogether (so-called zero Covid). The WHO quickly abandoned this unrealistic ambition. But European countries, except Sweden, eagerly embraced lockdown, ripping up a decade of pandemic planning that had been based on concentrating help on vulnerable groups and avoiding coercion.
At first Britain stood up against the stampede. Then Professor Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London published its notorious “Report 9”. Sunak confirms that this was what panicked ministers into a measure that the scientists had previously rejected. If No 10 had studied the assumptions underlying it, it might have been less impressed. Report 9 assumed that in the absence of a lockdown people would do nothing whatever to protect themselves. This was contrary to all experience of human behaviour as well as to data available at the time, which showed that people were voluntarily reducing contacts well before the lockdown was announced.
I find myself in the odd position of being slightly more in sympathy with the government than is a former supreme court judge. Frightened men make mistakes. I also find myself slightly more in sympathy with Rishi Sunak than I was yesterday. However, I have to ask why he did not voice his doubts at the time.
CEOs at prominent firms such as Apple, Tesla and Goldman Sachs have required employees to return to the office, curbing the working from home trend that got going at the start of the pandemic.
One point that jumps out at me is how this shows that skilled employees have a lot of market muscle today – firms need to persuade them to do certain things and don’t have all the power.
Consider: Labour is not homogenous and takes time to replace. We have seen a dramatic example of this in the airline sector, where thousands of staff, such as those working in security and baggage handling, were let go, creating a bottleneck problem when restrictions ended. Airlines are now scrambling to get people re-hired, but that is not easy as employees and contractors must go through security vetting. Hence the thousands of cancelled and rescheduled flights that have been a feature of the holiday travelling season.
What all this shows is how flawed Karl Marx was in his claim that capitalists have the superior bargaining power over “workers” and that business owners hope to create a “reserve army” of the unemployed who will put downward pressure on wages, hence creating the “surplus” that becomes profit.
Among the many things wrong with Marx’s idea is that claim that the majority of the risks and uncertainties are on the employees’ side. Hiring and retaining labour, including skilled labour, is not straightforward. There are search costs to consider in hiring, and employers know that it is often better to retain a worker, even if they could get someone a bit cheaper, than have the cost and time of hiring another. Also, a worker is paid a wage/salary, at least initially, whether a firm has made a profit or not, and that is a risk the employer has to bear (otherwise why else do firms have revolving credit facilities to manage cashflow?) Further, all workers are to some extent also “capitalists” – they have built skills and character (punctuality, agreeableness, ability to follow rules, get on with others and serve clients, etc) that take time and effort to acquire. A plumber, software programmer or security manager have capital sitting in their heads, and when a firm hires such a person, it is renting that capital.
There are of course of lots of reasons why Marx’s description of labour/capital relations is wrong and simplistic (example: his insertion of the idea of “socially necessary labour” begs the question of how one knows what that is, and it turns out that SNL is revealed by the interplay of prices in a market, rendering his idea circular). But the current working from home/office argument seems to bring home a particular point, which is that those supposedly evil capitalists don’t have all the power, and in many cases, have far less than even they might have hoped for.
Addendum: Thomas Sowell’s critique of Marxism remains one of the most succinct and effective that I have read. Also, there is a segment in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia where he demolishes the “exploitation” theory very effectively. Another good treatment of the issue is by Kevin McFarlane, an engineer and libertarian.
Mr Sunak…..explained how the minutes from Sage meetngs were edited so that dissenting voices were not included in the final draft.
(Report from the Daily Telegraph.)
In other words, the committee – Sage – that was created by the government to oversee COVID-19 policy deliberately suppressed views from one of the most important departments of state – The Treasury – because it did not go with the lockdown narrative.
I am not a particular fan of former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, one of the two senior figures running for leadership of the Conservative Party. We have the highest tax burden in 70 years, and he could, had he been so inclined, resigned rather than gone along with that. Nevertheless, his comments on how policy on Covid was driven over the past few years are shocking, if true. Maybe he is trying to justify himself after events – he could, of course, have resigned and explained why he was so appalled at what happened. We must not forget the efforts made by the scientific/policy “establishment” to suppress awkward voices such as the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration in their calls for focused action against the virus rather than indiscriminate lockdowns.
I am not particularly hopeful that the right lessons will be learned from the COVID-19 debacle, such as how dangerous it is to give power to a group of people with no wider appreciation of the damage actions can cause (assuming that said damage was not indeed part of the actual point). The dynamics of power being what they are, this sort of thing can and will happen again. Groupthink is killing people, in some cases, literally. A solid consensus in the banking/financial services sector before the 2008 financial crash held that central bankers had more or less cracked the problem of setting interest rates, running monetary policy and inflation, and that if banks got involved in odd-sounding derivative products, they’d be fine in lending sub-prime loans; we have had “the science is settled” consensus on global warming, and part of our current energy clusterfuck can be pinned on a determined drive against fossil fuels in much of the West. The response to covid was another dangerous “the science is settled” moment. The way that children are taught – or not taught – in schools is another example of a dangerous consensus.
Challenging these “the science is settled” mindsets is hard, but it has to be done.
You may think that mid-June is a little early for me to be saying that, but I do see signs that Britain, and perhaps the world, is not as green as it once was:
Ben Spencer and Harry Yorke in the Times: “Ministers quietly abandon ‘green crap’ as focus shifts to food security”
Boris Johnson has scaled back plans to rewild the country as the government retreats from the green agenda to focus on the cost-of-living crisis.
Ministers last year announced a post-Brexit scheme that would pay farmers up to £800 million a year — a third of the farming budget — to transform agricultural land into nature-rich forests, coastal wetlands, peatlands and wildflower meadows.
But the fund, called the landscape recovery scheme, has been quietly slashed to just £50 million over three years, less than 1 per cent of the budget.
Nick Cohen in the Guardian: “Why bankers close their ears to the ‘climate nut jobs’ talking about the end of the world”
If the future remembers any corporate villain from 2022, it will be Stuart Kirk. The satirically titled head of “responsible investment” at HSBC looks the part: shaven headed, tightly trimmed beard, hard, sharp eyes. Like all the best villains, the banker’s arguments are insidiously appealing. He says out loud what his audience thinks, cutting through polite society’s pious crap to reveal its selfish desires.
“There’s always some nut job telling me about the end of the world,” he told the Financial Times’s Moral Money conference – and I haven’t made that title up either. “Who cares if Miami is six metres underwater in 100 years? Amsterdam has been six metres underwater for ages and that’s a really nice place.”
A poll by Redfield and Wilton Strategies asked, “Would Britons support or oppose the Government suspending its environmental taxes to reduce the cost of living?” The result:
Support 49%
Oppose 18%
Neither 23%
A majority (58%) of 2019 Conservative voters and a plurality (46%) of 2019 Labour voters support the suspension of environmental taxes.
“To tackle big problems, we need more freedom, not less. Only world-leading entrepreneurs and businesses can stimulate the new discoveries and technologies that will enable us to deal with super-castropic risks. It is not collective sacrifice but a new wave of radical individualism that fuses classical ideals of liberty with a renewed sense of personal responsibility (not least when it comes to health) that will make our country more resilient.”
– Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph (£)
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Have a £5,000 cash injection every day.
Hell, why not have £10,000?
Now that’s compassionate!
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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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