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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Russia can’t even offer any hope to Russians, let alone to anybody else. Russia today combines an authoritarian political system with aggressive ethno-nationalism and disastrous levels of corruption. The state suppresses or co-opts every expression of civil society, and the all-pervasive corruption relentlessly corrodes the natural moral sense of the individual. Lying, cheating and stealing becomes the norm, and anybody who tries to fight it gets crushed. Eventually, people forget how to live in any other way. The West is decadent but Russia is depraved.
– Commenter Andrew Z
Can Putin take any comfort from the advance of the populist Finns Party, which achieved its best-ever result to take second place? After all, Moscow has often looked to Europe’s hard-Right parties for sympathy. Only last week, more than 20 MPs from Austria’s Freedom Party staged a walk-out when Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the national parliament.
However, there’s a big difference between the Nordic populists and their counterparts in the Danube region. To put it mildly, Finnish nationalism is not known for its pro-Russian tendencies.
– Peter Franklin
For at least two of those three we have no domestic production at all. Rice and bananas simply do not grow on or in our sceptered and silver girt isles. So why does it take some grand and vast international agreement to stop taxing ourselves into poverty on these items?
Now that we have left the European Union such import tariffs are our own decision – as evidenced by this deal itself. But how did we end up with a polity that hasn’t, doesn’t, make us richer by doing the obvious thing that we’ve now the power to do? Make us all richer by abolishing import tariffs?
Answers on a postcard to Ms. Badenoch please.
– Tim Worstall
[Scottish] Nationalist ideology struggles to integrate debatable lands like this one. Humza Yousaf has taken charge of a party which has become addicted to its fictions. By introducing its gender recognition reforms in the knowledge that the High Court of Justice would probably quash them (as it did), and deciding to treat the next general election as a “de facto referendum”, it was acting out a fantasy. The best hope for Scottish nationalism now is to separate itself from the cause of independence and to fight for a less lop-sided and unrealistic United Kingdom.
– Graham Robb
The choice is between a quivering mound of turds who destroyed this country with their lockdown policies and a heap of wobbling turds who think the lockdown wasn’t destructive enough. I’d sooner lick the floor of my local A&E than vote for either of you.
– Burnside
Any significant public health threat from Covid was over in the early part of 2021, as my colleague and I have previously argued. However the administrative classes – politicians, MSM, ‘public health experts’ and so on – kept the charade going for another two years to serve their various agenda-driven purposes.
Now, though, most of these people have decided that it is expedient for the insanity to be over politically. As usual, the details we discuss in this article relate to the UK, but it is a similar story across the western world. So why now?
The disastrous fallout has finally begun to dawn on the same apathetic middle-class liberals who took their furlough money to enjoy an extended sabbatical at home – in the halcyon days when “lives were more important than the economy”. Apart from the most dedicated acolytes of the Covidian cult, reality can no longer be denied: The socio-economic fabric of Western society is crumbling, as was so obviously predictable, and predicted, by ourselves and others.
– John Sullivan
“Artificial intelligence in particular conjures the notion of thinking machines. But no machine can think, and no software is truly intelligent. The phrase alone may be one of the most successful marketing terms of all time.”
– Parmy Olsen, Bloomberg columnist. ($)
“A bank without a chief risk officer is a bit like a football team without a left tackle. It’s not the sexiest position on the field, and most fans couldn’t recognize him without a helmet, but what the left tackle does is crucial. He’s the guy protecting the quarterback’s blind side when a 250-pound pass rusher is trying to pulverize him. Silicon Valley Bank not having a chief risk officer for a brutal year in tech was the equivalent of that left tackle walking off the field during a blitz.”
– Ben Cohen, Wall Street Journal ($). He is reflecting on how Silicon Valley Bank did not have a chief risk officer in place for eight months. The reason why classical liberals should focus on this aspect of the bank’s demise is because at the moment there are calls for yet more rules and regulations on banks. But the problem in my view is that there are plenty of rules, but they aren’t often enforced consistently, or intelligently. (Apologies to non-followers of NFL football, but I think you get the point of it.)
But Cohen adds this important caveat, which is another twist on the whole “moral hazard” argument that we hear about a lot when banks fail: “The existence of a chief risk officer created the appearance of proper oversight and satisfied regulators, but having someone to police risk meant the traders actually taking those risks might have felt they didn’t have to be so vigilant.”
Hmm. So in the end, having a CRO in place might, ironically, make a bank even more cocky because of the assumption that there is a person there to keep everyone on-point.
To the majority of people who believe lockdowns were right and necessary, the Covid era was no doubt distressing, but it need not have been cause to re-order their perception of the world. Faced with a new and frightening disease, difficult decisions were taken by the people in charge but we came together and got through it; mistakes were made, but overall we did what we needed to do.
For the dissenting minority, the past three years have been very different. We have had to grapple with the possibility that, through panic and philosophical confusion, our governing class contrived to make a bad situation much worse. Imagine living with the sense that the manifold evils of the lockdowns that we all now know — ripping up centuries-old traditions of freedom, interrupting a generation’s education, hastening the decline into decrepitude for millions of older people, destroying businesses and our health service, dividing families, saddling our economies with debt, fostering fear and alienation, attacking all the best things in life — needn’t have happened for anything like so long, if at all?
– Freddie Sayers
“Deposit insurance is a cancer at the heart of the capitalist system, destroying its ethical foundations. Rich depositors should not be able to secure returns, in the good times, for investing in fundamentally riskbearing activities (which fractional reserve deposits are, by their nature) but then be bailed out by the government when times are tougher. And banks are the largest allocators of capital in the economy – so this fundamental injustice gets spread across the entire economic system.”
– Andrew Lilico, The Sunday Telegraph (£)
A problem in much of the West is that the large investors who have been bailed out, such as those who did so via Silicon Valley Bank, or Credit Suisse, etc, is that they tend to be politically quite powerful. A lot of the north Californian business class, for instance. And it tends to vote Democratic.
Oxfam has come a long way since it was founded 81 years ago. There was a time in the dim and distant past when its primary purpose was to raise money from well-meaning, relatively affluent folks and use their donations to assuage the hunger pangs of the poor and downtrodden across the globe. It was a worthy cause.
Those days are long over. For some time now it’s been more associated with Left-wing agitprop than famine relief. Indeed, you almost get the impression feeding the famished is now seen by some in Oxfam as an annoying diversion from the far more important work of political activism.
– Andrew Neill, of whom I am not a great fan overall but this is certainly true.
Why does everything have to be justified on the basis that it will help the NHS? Especially when the NHS is failing its patients so badly? UK healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP now ranks fifth highest in the OECD, yet the system isn’t delivering even the most basic forms of care. Some 2.7 million people are sitting anxiously on the waiting list.
– Kate Andrews
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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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