Why the California Surfer Has Always Been a Libertarian: A Brief History
From the 1960s Beach Cultures Refusal of Conscription to the Present Refusal of Centralized Wave Management, the Tradition Is Substantively Continuous
Reading: Bohiney | The London Prat
SAN ONOFRE, CA — The California surfers political tradition has always been, on every available historical reading, substantively libertarian. The 1960s beach cultures refusal of the Vietnam draft; the 1970s opposition to coastal-zoning bureaucracy; the 1980s rejection of centralized wave-allocation proposals; the 2000s skepticism of post-9/11 federal expansion; the 2020s opposition to the COVID-era beach closures: the tradition is substantively continuous and substantively coherent.
The Underlying Premise
The underlying premise is that decentralized actors operating with local knowledge produce better outcomes than centralized actors operating with model-based assumptions. Friedrich Hayek made the formal economic argument in 1945. California surfers have been operating on the same premise, on the available evidence, since they could no longer be drafted.
The Bank of England Confirmation
The recent Bank of England decision is, on close reading, a textbook demonstration of the centralized-knowledge fallacy. The institutional commitment to addressing core inflation persistence through a single instrument that does not address the supply-side causes of the inflation is the same fallacy at the level of central banking that the centralized-wave-allocation proposal was at the level of beach management.
The surfer was right then. The surfer is right now. The evidence keeps accumulating.
Pairs well with: The Daily Mash
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/bank-of-england-raises-rates-again-to-punish-anyone-who-enjoyed-a-sandwich/
