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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Thanks to Instapundit, I came across this staggering collection of photo images of vandalised speed cameras – called “Gatsos” – on the sides of British roads.
The website I have linked to gives the impression that it is generally rather in favour of this practice, on the grounds that many such cameras are difficult to spot and hence set up as a sneaky way to catch out motorists to make money from fines, rather than actually trying to slow down speeds to cut the risk of accidents. A recent book by Christopher Booker and Richard North contends that the obsession with reducing speed limits on Britain’s roads has not reduced the amount of accidents, although it has made the driving process even more tedious than it can be already.
Frankly, I am not able to judge whether North and Booker’s analysis is correct, although they present a formidable number of facts to demonstrate their argument. Rather, what the extraordinary collection of images of vandalised speed cameras demonstrates is how far Britain has retreated from quiet deference to the rule of law. I think that society needs to have laws and certain laws need to be enforced and respected. It is a perversion of the argument for freedom to state that it implies a lack of respect for the law. Not so. But what is also clear is that in a society burdened with a rising weight of regulatory, nannying regulations, that a degree of blowback, if I can use the term, will occur. Which is a pity. Motorists who hammer along roads in streets near schools and houses are a menace.
Well, actually, no. For their information. You have been warned, however. Statewatch notes:
The European Commission is to put forward, on Tuesday 6 November, a proposal to collect personal data (PNR) on everyone flying in and out of the EU. … The data to be collected is almost exactly the same as that being collected under the controversial EU-US PNR scheme.
You recall that famous passage from The Wealth of Nations?
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.
It applies with even greater force when the ‘people of the same trade’ are states and their governments.
I was trying to think of something profound to say but in the end, what the heck………
I drive around London at weekends occasionally – I have a car but do not bother to use it to get work (I can reach my office in Westminster on foot, thanks to living nearby Pimlico). But when I do get behind the wheel, the congestion is terrible, not just at the usual peak times. Getting out of London often takes longer than on the open road. For example, whenever I go to visit my parents in Suffolk, at least half of the journey time is taken up by driving from Pimlico through the eastern reaches of London before actually hitting Essex on the A12. Pretty much the same dire situation applies if you head north, south or west.
Has the congestion charge, introduced by London Mayor Ken Livingstone, made much difference? I doubt it; it always looked like a revenue-raiser to me, whatever the spin. While in theory I have no ideological problems with the charge – if the roads are genuinely privately owned, that is – in the current context the charge seems like a bit of a con to me. Or at least it is unless we can get rid of the curse of the Bus Lane. But then the charge does not apply at weekends, so my view might be affected if I had to drive during weekdays. On those rare times when I have done so, I thought the traffic was pretty heavy.
This guy agrees with me. But what to do about it? Well, cutting down the number of buses – heavily subsidised – might be a start since they hog up so much space; some road widening might be workable in places but given London’s densely-packed streets and historic buildings, maybe not easily doable.
Maybe I should face the facts: if I want to drive without raised blood pressure, live in Nevada.
This glorious article in the BBC website appeared today. I’d love to know whether the person who wrote this has a sense of irony. There is just a hint that he might:
Britons are “addicted” to cheap flights and confused about the climate impact of flying, according to research.
Well, at least the writer had the good grace to put addicted inside scare quotes.
Britons want to fly for a cheap fare. The horror.
This is a public service announcement to save time for those who would rather get on with irrelevant vituperation and not bother digesting the point of my post: In a moment I’m going to say something positive about Gerry Adams.
First, consider this from The Washington Post:
The government’s terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list’s effectiveness.
A range of state, local and federal agencies as well as U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or even during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists, as well as a growing amount of information from various sources, including airline passenger data. The government said it was planning to expand the data-sharing to private-sector groups with a “substantial bearing on homeland security,” though officials would not be more specific.
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Jayson P. Ahern, deputy commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said focusing on arrests misses “a much larger universe” of suspicious U.S. citizens.
“There are many potentially dangerous individuals who fly beneath the radar of enforceable actions and who are every bit as sinister as those we intercept,” he said.
Gotta love those adjectives: “Potentially dangerous”, not “dangerous”. “Dangerous” would invite the question: How dangerous, exactly? And: What mayhem have these invisible pseudo-threats caused that the forces of security could not have created all by themselves? As for the visibly suspicious, the “sinister”, just how threatening they are is shown up by the US Customs and FBI’s own account – a “small” number of arrests, not necessarily related to terrorism, a number in the hundreds turned back at the airport. Which can happen even if you have been arrested without charge at some other time in your own country and didn’t realise that in consequence you need a visa.
Which brings us to Mr Adams. → Continue reading: State security theatre
The past weekend, I spent it the way that any islander should – sailing along England’s south coast in an all-too rare weekend of good, if at times blustery, weather. A good chance to practice some rusty sailing skills and practice some navigation. When the sky is a nice cobalt blue and the sea looks inviting, it is all too easy to forget just how violent the weather around the UK coast can be. (The same applies to places like the Med; I have seen some very stormy seas around Malta, for example). I tend to take safety on boats very seriously (there are some people I would refuse to sail with on the grounds that they think horseplay and boats go together). All the more reason to salute people who volunteer to save people in distress at sea. One charity that I have a huge amount of admiration and time for is the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
At Samizdata, we like to moan about how certain state-registered charities are being pulled into the maw of the state, and I am one of those moaners. The best way to try and keep the state’s hands off such organisations is to donate generously to charities and urge their organisers to spurn any state “initiatives”. If any charity deserves a bit of help, it is the RNLI. They seem to avoid striking certain platitudes and get on with a crucial task. Here’s to them.
I am certainly not the first person to state what a miserable process travelling by civil aircraft now is, unless one happens to enjoy the use of a private jet (a growing sector thanks to ventures like this one). Even before the latest terrorism problems, the security measures put in place added to the tedium of queuing, increased the tendency of staff to be rude and highhanded towards customers, and added to the cost and expense of flying. The budget airline changes wrought by the likes of Easyjet or Ryanair in Europe certainly have been a massive bonus for anyone who likes to regularly hop over to Porto for a nice weekend or buzz down to Malta to see in the in-laws, in my case. But the fun of flying is pretty much dead. (There is, alas, a similar problem with driving cars today). Airline food is terrible. The safey procedures are a joke – I have never seen any passenger take them seriously. Delays are considerable and getting worse, simply due to the massive amounts of traffic and the lack of airport space. And finally, in places such as London’s Heathrow Airport, the place is a nightmare: noisy, dirty, resembling nothing so much as a grotty provincial shopping mall. What can be done about it?
Well, part of the problem is that airport operators like BAA, now owned by Spanish company Ferrovial, operate more or less as a monopoly. There is relatively little competition in the sector and the state regulatory body lacks the market incentive to worry about improving the comfort and enjoyment of passengers. There is something to be said in forcing a breakup of the monopoly of the main airports and encouraging more competition. I personally make it a personal mission to avoid Heathrow Airport at any cost and fly from Gatwick when it is possible, or go to a smaller airport instead. Competition is urgently needed to shake up this industry and put a bit of glamour and excitement back into the business of flying.
Glamour is not a word one hears very often about modern aviation. For all that it is fashionable to bash him (his beard and toothy grin seems to drive some folk up the wall), Sir Richard Branson tries his hardest to inject some fun into the process. But not nearly enough airport/airline operators seem to have that spirit. This industry needs a few more Howard Hughes-type characters to kick it hard up the backside. If they don’t, more and more people like me will look for any alternative to taking to the skies in the future. Airlines may think that treating people badly will make them profits, but the long-term cost in alienating people who are seeking alternative forms of transport is bad economics and bad business.
Checking some details, I came across this rather interesting site. Well worth a look.
Scanning various news websites this morning, as is part of my routine, I came across this article over at Reuters. Scroll down and you will see that the item refers to a person commenting to the effect that car ownership is “immoral”. Think about that: ownership of a piece of metal, with wheels at each corner, that conveys people from A to B by the harnessing of controlled explosions in something called an engine, is immoral. Not unwise, costly, difficult or impractical, but “immoral”.
Maybe these creeps will next argue that Man’s possession of opposable thumbs is “immoral” too.
Somehow, I do not think this line of argument is going to work with my employer. I know this sounds harsh, but aspects of Greenery are starting to resemble a form of mental illness.
I have a confession to make. I love the French TGV train that recently set an speed record of more than 350mph – that is quicker than some of the fighter aircraft of World War 2. It is a brilliant, sleek example of engineering and no wonder the French are proud of it. French civil engineering is in fact world-class, a fact that Frog-bashers would do well to remember. The French also played a part in that other magnificently quick and elegant beast – Concorde.
I read an interesting article on the TGV business in the UK weekly, The Spectator, last week, by Neil Collins (subscription-only). In this week’s Speccie, old-style socialist Neil Clark (defender of Milosovic, to his eternal shame) pops up in the letter’s page of the print edition to poke fun at privatised railways, arguing that the TGV example proves how splendid nationalisation is. It is a superficially appealing argument, but wrong on a number of grounds.
First of all, the TGV train has most of its fixed costs paid for by the state, ie, the French taxpayer. Taxes in France are high, some of the highest in the western world. It is all very well for Collins or Clark to wax lyrical about the ability of Monsieur and Madame to travel from Paris to Marseilles for under 20 euros, but that rather ignores the heavy tax bill that the benighted citoyens of France pay to keep this ultra-quick train system operating. When anyone talks about the ‘profits’ that the TGV might make, it is an abuse of economic language, since the initial investment into the railway was not an ‘investment’ in the sense that anyone spending their own money of their free will would understand it. And France, a less densely populated nation that Britain with a rather less respectful attitude towards property rights, can more easily punch straight railway lines across the land regardless of the objections of anyone who stands in the way. These are costs that lie on the debit side of the ledger.
The truth is, that many big state projects are often awe inspiring and people will therefore conclude that we should model the rest of our activity on that. When emergency planning methods were used to make war machines during WW2, socialists and others imagined that we should turn to such ‘rational’ methods in times of peace. How naive they now appear, but no more naive than those folk like Al Gore who claim that the State should take the credit for the internet, for example, as if such things as Google, YouTube or this blog would ever occur to a civil servant. In fact, just imagine how crap the internet would be if it was run by a state monopoly, like British Rail in the 1960s and 70s.
UK rail privatisation is often held up as an example of the supposed limits of ‘free market fundamentalism’, but given the botched way in which railways were sold off, the constant interference with the railways in the early years of Labour, it is a nonsense to claim that only state monopolies can run rail networks.
An old refrain from protectionists and other fixed-wealth folk is that it is terrible that Britain does not have a major car manufacturer any more. Japanese and other nations’ car plants are in Britain, true, but we have little home-grown stuff. Jaguar is owned by Ford. Aston Martin has been taken over from Ford by a private equity firm. TVR has gone. Morgan is just about hanging on. Land Rover, Rolls Royce, Bentley, MG… they are all in the hands of evil foreigners.
This is largely a function of globalisation, with a bit of help from decades of restrictive practices, crap design and poor quality during the 1950s, 60s and 70s and early 80s. The car industry never really recovered. A whole generation of people learned to loathe British Leyland cars and bought Saabs, Renaults, Citroens and VWs whenever they could. Even though some gems remained – Landrovers and some of the Jags were fine – the reputation of the British car industry was devastated. The same nearly happened to Italian carmaker Fiat when Communist-run unions nearly destroyed that industry as well. But at least Italy had Ferrari.
However, the situation these days is quite bright. Many of the world’s top Formula 1 racing teams are based in Britain, like MacLaren in Surrey. And as this article demonstrates, while it may be cheaper to make cars in China or Brazil or Poland, many of the hottest car designers are still British. In the information economy, the value-added areas of design are what count, and it turns out that Britain is rather good at it.
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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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