(14)

It is surprisingly easy to get the sign wrong when reasoning about quantities. Consider this old riddle:

Three ladies go to a restaurant for a meal. They receive a bill for $30. They each put $10 on the table, which the waiter collects and takes to the till. The cashier informs the waiter that the bill should only have been for $25 and returns $5 to the waiter in $1 coins. On the way back to the table the waiter realizes that he cannot divide the coins equally between the ladies. As they didn’t know the total of the revised bill, he decides to put $2 in his own pocket and give each of the ladies $1.

Now that each lady has been given a dollar back, each of the ladies has paid $9. Three times 9 is 27. The waiter has $2 in his pocket. Two plus 27 is $29. The ladies originally handed over $30. Where is the missing dollar?

To get the missing $1 in the question we have done this arithmetic: 10 + 10 + 10 - 1 - 1 - 1 + 2 - 30 = -1

The correct arithmetic is: 10 + 10 + 10 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 2 - 25 = 0

Positive numbers represent payments from the ladies to the restaurant, and negative numbers represent money received by the restaurant. The result should obviously always come out to zero. That +2 should be a -2. Okay, there is a 30 where there should be a 25 as well, but only because the +2 yielded an intermediate result of 29 which is close enough to 30 to cause confusion.

This getting the sign wrong is the same mistake that means Tim Worstall has to point out that jobs are a cost. The new widget factory will create 1000 jobs, we are told. If it produces 1000 widgets per year, that means we get one widget per man-year of time. The man-year of time is a cost. If we could somehow arrange for the widget factory to create only 100 jobs for the same output, we would have just as many widgets and 900 man-years left to spend on some other useful thing. We would be richer.

This mistake crops up in trivial ways all the time. My friend recently gave up full-time work to look after the children for various financial and logistical reasons. Think how the economy is losing out, she mused. Not only am I not producing widgets, I am not paying the nursery workers or buying train tickets for my commute. Well it is true that the widgets my friend used to make are no longer made, but the nursery workers do not count: the same amount of childcare is being done as was being done before. It is not correct to add the childcare previously done by the nursery worker to the childcare now done by my friend. At worst there is now an unemployed nursery worker who will go and do something else instead, but that is just a market optimising everyone's activities to match the level of demand. The train tickets were just part of the cost of getting the widgets made.

Ah, train tickets. We are going to get a new high speed rail link between London and Birmingham. The government is going to 'invest' £32.7bn in order to reap up to £46.9bn of 'economic benefits'. I wonder how many of these benefits have the wrong sign. Counted among the benefits are "hundreds of jobs", but these are already included in the cost figure.

Also counted are ticket sales. Which makes sense if the 'investment' was really an investment. But invest here really means to steal from the British public £32.7bn so that they can then pay, say, £40bn for train tickets in exchange for £40bn worth of train travel. I make that -32.7 - 40 + 40 = -32.7. Where is the missing £32.7bn?

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Recently some teacher acquaintances on Facebook were discussing the recent public sector strike. Some were annoyed at accusations that they had spent the day shopping. Others said they had enjoyed spending the day shopping. Someone posted a message pointing out that Jeremy Clarkson, who said rude things about the strikers, was more than welcome to do a hard job saving lives or teaching disabled children. It occurred to me that, among other things, not all and probably less than half of public servants do such worthy jobs, and in any case what is relevant is what is really going on, which is that whatever the job, public servants (including (heh) Jeremy Clarkson, according to NickM) get their salaries and pensions from money extorted from others.

I considered getting involved in the conversation. I mentioned it to Michael Jennings. "The problem is that they think we are mad," he said. Not only that, I thought, they will take offence and cast me out of society. "And they have the generally accepted narrative," Michael observed. "How did this happen?"

I have some ideas about that. They are not original, have probably been stated better by someone else, and a more erudite person than I might well be able to summarise this entire post by stating the name of some philosopher or linguist. But here is my train of thought.

The primary purpose of language is cognition. So says The Monster in an epic comment on Eric Raymond's blog.

I believe that communication is not even the primary use of language, despite the common belief that it is. That honor belongs to cognition. We use language to think; we produce names for groups of concretes that share certain properties and thereby achieve computational economy by not having to reason independently about the characteristics of every member of that group anew, as if we'd never seen any other members before.

This was in defence of an article by Eric Raymond in which he had used the same insight to seek to "undo the perversion of language that serves the enemy so well." Clever use of language can manipulate people's ideas. It makes sense: we put things into words to abstract big ideas and reuse them quickly and easily. I am a computer programmer. In software we write some code to, say, sort a list of items into numerical order, we give the code a name (sort) and then we just type 'sort' whenever we want to sort a list. If everything works to plan, we never have to think again about how that sorting code works. We have abstracted it. We might do some sorting of specific kinds of list mixed in with some other algorithm to do something complicated, like display a list of all the teachers in a payroll database whose salaries are greater than x, and give that code a name (GenerateRedundancyCandidates). In this way we build up layers of complexity at increasing levels of abstraction and get to do vastly complicated things with not as much effort as you might think.

Human language is the same. And therein lies a danger, because humans are not like computers: they are likely to forget that the word stands for something real, or get confused about what it stands for, or change its meaning half way through a sentence.

So, for example, a teacher in a discussion about the strikes can say, "I pay my taxes just like everyone else." And there are layers of abstraction beneath 'taxes' and 'pay'. What is forgotten is that 'tax' ultimately means to take money by force. And the 'payment' in this case is an accounting trick. Each month a teacher gets in the post a piece of paper listing salary and various deductions for 'tax' and 'national insurance', but what is really going on is that the salary comes from the money extorted from others and the deductions are immediately paid back. This is arithmetically no different from being paid the net amount from the fund of extorted money. The confusion arises entirely from the use of the word 'tax' written on a piece of paper. It takes a certain kind of thinking to drill down into the real meaning.

But just try explaining this to someone who has never encountered these ideas before. You soon find yourself painfully unravelling the layers of abstraction in a person's thought processes, all to get past one throw-away comment.

Richard Feynman talks of how his father would explain the difference between the name and the thing. Here he his quoted in his biography, The Beat of a Different Drum:

You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you are finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the world. You'll know about the humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early from my father the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

George Orwell noticed that political writing tended to be vague and wrote Politics and the English Language.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Alfred Korzybski invented General Semantics, which is an attempt to train people to be constantly aware of the abstractions they used. For example, he recommended avoiding group words such as 'society' (my example) in favour of a construction like 'person-1, person-2, person-3, etc.' In this way it would be impossible to forget that society is composed of individuals. He originated the phrase, "the map is not the territory" which is a reminder that the thing is separate from the name of the thing.

The rationalists at Less Wrong have a sequence of articles about map and territory. The Simple Truth by Eliezer Yudkowsky is sublime. It is a parable about the nature of truth and the dangers of metaphor, featuring a shepherd who devises a way to keep track of his sheep by putting pebbles in a bucket.

"You tried adding pebbles to create more sheep, and it didn't work?" Mark asks me. "What exactly did you do?"

"I took a handful of dollar bills. Then I hid the dollar bills under a fold of my blanket, one by one; each time I hid another bill, I took another paperclip from a box, making a small heap. I was careful not to keep track in my head, so that all I knew was that there were 'many' dollar bills, and 'many' paperclips. Then when all the bills were hidden under my blanket, I added a single additional paperclip to the heap, the equivalent of tossing an extra pebble into the bucket. Then I started taking dollar bills from under the fold, and putting the paperclips back into the box. When I finished, a single paperclip was left over."

"What does that result mean?" asks Autrey.

"It means the trick didn't work. Once I broke ritual by that single misstep, the power did not linger, but vanished instantly; the heap of paperclips and the pile of dollar bills no longer went empty at the same time."

"You actually tried this?" asks Mark.

"Yes," I say, "I actually performed the experiment, to verify that the outcome matched my theoretical prediction. I have a sentimental fondness for the scientific method, even when it seems absurd. Besides, what if I'd been wrong?"

"If it had worked," says Mark, "you would have been guilty of counterfeiting! Imagine if everyone did that; the economy would collapse! Everyone would have billions of dollars of currency, yet there would be nothing for money to buy!"

"Not at all," I reply. "By that same logic whereby adding another paperclip to the heap creates another dollar bill, creating another dollar bill would create an additional dollar's worth of goods and services."

The same author lists 37 ways that words can be wrong. Ways that a mis-use of the labels for things causes mistakes in reasoning about them. I recommend you go and read all the sequences. See you back here in a month.

All these ideas are related to my point: people are not in the habit of questioning the meaning of words. They believe that words have intrinsic meaning; that being told the name of something answers their question about what it is.

So they fall easily for propaganda, and fail to question every semantic and ludic fallacy they encounter.

When the police talk of stop and search not being an arrest, they do not notice that in important details, the two are the same. When Oxfam talk of net loss of zero to a developing country, they do not notice that money is being moved from private business to government within the same country, so someone is experiencing a net loss.

Furthermore, their thoughts quickly become constrained by language. Everything has to be fit into categories delineated by words already known. Hence ideas such as: "we need taxes to build roads". It is as if a road is by definition built by governments and funded by extortion. No wonder we sound mad when we talk of private roads; it is like talking of square circles.

Why is this? Not enough people have fathers like Feynman's. I suspect that parents want to appear omniscient to their children and end up hand-waving questions they do not know the answers to, with the result that children end up conditioned to accept low quality answers. State education systems are certainly not motivated to teach people to think properly, though individual teachers might try. Most of the good information I have found about critical thinking and rationalism is on the web, where it is found by people who already have an interest in it. It does seem that critical thinking needs to be taught; or at least curious people have to discover it. It does not come naturally: it took until the Enlightenment to really catch on at all.

Like William Gibson, I think I got my own head start from reading science fiction. Says he:

It gave me the idea that you could question anything, that it was possible to question anything at all. You could question religion, you could question your own culture's most basic assumptions. That was just unheard of—where else could I have gotten it? You know, to be thirteen years old and get your brain plugged directly into Philip K. Dick's brain!

That wasn't the way science fiction advertised itself, of course. The self-advertisement was: Technology! The world of the future! Educational! Learn about science! It didn't tell you that it would jack your kid into this weird malcontent urban literary universe and serve as the gateway drug to J.G. Ballard.

And nobody knew. The people at the high school didn't know, your parents didn't know. Nobody knew that I had discovered this window into all kinds of alien ways of thinking that wouldn't have been at all acceptable to the people who ran that little world I lived in.

I propose that if people were in the habit of of questioning the deepest meaning of words, that statism would be much less acceptable. For example, such questioning would yield the realisation that 'property' really means what Julie from Chicago described in a recent Samizdata comment: "One's property is untouchable by others because it is the product of a portion of one's life."

Imagine there were no word for tax, or you disciplined yourself not to use it, much as Korzybski recommends listing individuals rather than using group words. You would be unable to say, "I propose an income tax." Instead, you would have to say, "I propose that for every hour you spend working to provide for your family, we are going to demand that you spend a further hour in servitude to some men you have never met, and if you refuse to do this eventually we will send some other men round to your house who will drag you away from your family and lock you in a cell." It would be a lot harder to advocate certain statist ideas.

I imagine that libertarians are very much in the habit of questioning the deeper meaning of words. It is a necessary prerequisite for questioning the metacontext. And when we encounter those with a mainstream world view, one constructed for them by the mainstream media and politicians with everything in neat categories like 'left' and 'right', they find it very difficult to recalibrate their entire linguistic and cognitive framework in order to understand us. They find it very easy to think: he is mad.

(8)

As the scientific forester may dream of a perfectly legible forest planted with same-aged, same-species, uniform trees growing in straight lines in a rectangular flat space cleared of all underbrush and poachers, so the exacting state official may aspire to a perfectly legible population with registered, unique names and addresses keyed to grid settlements; who pursue single, identifiable occupations; and all of whose transactions are documented according to the designated formula and in official language. This caricature of society as a military parade-ground is overdrawn, but the grain of truth that it embodies may help us understand the grandiose plans [for a planned society] we will examine later. The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a "civilizing mission." The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and a landscape that will fit their technique of observation.
[...]
The more static, standardized, and uniform a population or social space is, the more legible it is, and the more amenable it is to the techniques of state officials. I am suggesting that many state activities aim at transforming the population space and nature under their jurisdiction into the closed systems that offer no surprises and that can best be observed and controlled.

- James C Scott, 'Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed' (1998)

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Here is a long blog post by Timothy Sandefur dissecting the collectivist economics and moral philosophy of Sam Harris. Harris is one of the "new atheists", who, along with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, have developed a bit of a reputation for bashing religion. I haven't read Sam Harris, and Sandefur does not make me any more inclined to do so. (Of all these men, Hitchens is the best, in my view.)

It is interesting that those who criticise religion on the grounds of reason and logic can, as in the case of Harris, make such basic errors on subjects such as trade, notions of self-ownership, justice and the like. It is as if they are craving a secular god to fill a gap left by the traditional one. I must say I was quite shocked at the incoherence of some of Harris's comments and his failure to examine and demonstrate his premises, such as when he talks about "fairness" without asking what he might mean by that. It is disappointing. On a related point, Greg Perkins, who writes at the Noodlefood blog, had a point about the big gaps in "new atheist" thinking a few years ago. (That link has been updated).

I suggest people brew up a coffee for Sandefur's posting. It is not a 60-second read. Another case, in fact, of how blogging is often where the quality writing is, whatever some sneerers might once have said about this medium.

Welcome, Instapundit readers! Meanwhile, Reason's Hit & Run blog has a related issue on how supposedly pro-science leftists can make utter tits of themselves.

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“Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer, willing to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because he is independent, self-supporting, and asks no favors. He does not appeal to the emotions or excite the sentiments. He only wants to make a contract and fulfil it, with respect to both sides and favor on neither side. He must get his living out of the capital of the country. The larger the capital is, the better living he can get. Every particle of capital which is wasted on the vicious, the idle, and the shiftless is so much taken from the capital available to reward the independent and productive laborer. But we stand with our backs to the independent and productive laborer all the time. We do not remember him because he makes no clamor; but appeal to you whether he is not the man who ought to be remembered first of all, and whether, on any sound social theory, we ought not to protect him against the burdens of the good-for-nothing.”

- The Forgotten Man, page 209 from On Liberty, Society and Politics. The Essential Writings of William Graham Sumner, Edited by Robert C. Bannister.

His idea that a large swathe of people who asked for no favours – nor received many – has its echoes, however imperfect, in such expressions as Richard Nixon’s “Great Silent Majority” or, in the UK perspective, “Middle England”, or perhaps, “the coping classes”. Sumner is a useful reminder that the great classical liberal thinkers of the 19th Century and before acutely understood the issues of class and the difference between the self-reliant and others, but without the tedious animosity and simple-mindedness of the Marxians or the patronising dreams of High Tories a la Disraeli or, god help us, David Cameron or the late Harold Macmillan.

I strongly recommend this book, although these reprints of old classics by Liberty Fund are not exactly cheap.

(21)

I am not entirely happy about an article, which is fine as far as it goes in defending libertarians from the idea that we are all callous brutes who would rather walk by the other side of the road, so to speak. I agree that that is wrong. Of course, there are one or two so-called libertarians who might not give a damn about anyone else but themselves, and they are happily avoided. In my experience, however, the vast majority of libertarians are not just right-thinking, they are fine individuals: generous, creative and benevolent to their fellows. But this is a rationally selfish thing. Think about it: if you believe freedom is a good thing because of the wealth and opportunities that it leads to, you will realise pretty fast that it is inconsistent to want freedom for yourself but not for anyone else. Not just inconsistent, but dumb.

However, for all that the article does make that sort of point, citing fine groups such as the Institute for Justice, the article is somewhat spoiled by this rather silly paragraph:

"There are a lot of libertarians working on issues that could be construed as self-interested - lowering taxes is the obvious example. There are even some hard core Ayn Rand sycophants who embrace little more than themselves. Find that repugnant? Have at 'em! But you're just misinformed if you think that libertarians as a whole care for nothing more than their self-interest. Countless libertarians are working to advance the freedom and fair-treatment of people other than themselves. Often they do so more consistently than some of the liberals who sneer at them."

He's making a fairly basic mistake here. The pursuit of rational, long term self interest - the words "rational" and "long-term" are crucial - is totally congruent with spending time and money to support the genuine freedoms of others. After all, as any Rand "sycophant" would argue, if we do not defend freedoms with a bit of effort, and go into bat to defend causes that are important, even if they are unpopular, or appear weird, then they will find themselves in a very lonely place if their own freedoms are attacked. A genuinely selfish person, who holds his own life and flourishing as his ultimate value and cultivates the virtues to achieve it fully (reason, independence, honesty, pride, productiveness, justice and integrity), will want to see freedom expand. The cost of spending a bit of time lobbying, arguing and campaigning is, for such a person, outweighed by the long term benefits. The individual benefits if the total sum of liberty is increased, in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. For the Rand "sycophant", the real stupidity would be to ignore the wider world and its problems. By the same token, libertarians understand the Law of Unintended Consequences: a lot of supposedly "altruistic" government interventions, for example (I use the word altruist in the usual, not Randian sense) make many real or imaginary problems far worse (examples: the War on Drugs, Prohibition, state education, etc).

One example of "selfish activism" might illustrate the point. For a long time I have been going along to events hosted by FOREST, the UK-based pressure group that defends the rights of people to smoke in privately owned places such as pubs. I don't smoke, in fact I dislike the stink of tobacco and ask people not to spark up in my apartment. But I defend the libertarian line on smoking because I realise that if such freedoms get eroded without protest, then things I want to do could be banned next. For similar reasons, I'll defend the right of people to publish hateful remarks (so long as they don't demand I have to republish them), or practice non-conventional lifestyles I might abhor (so long it is consensual), and so on. For me, the long-term payoff - more freedom - is the point. I don't see campaigning for justice or freedom as intrinsically good. It is much more important than that - it benefits me.

Another way of putting it is that life is not a zero-sum game. I obviously cannot spend all my time trying to defend freedoms or other issues; I have my own business and personal life and various interests to pursue. (My golf swing needs a lot of attention). But if I can, by my advocacy of hopefully good ideas and opposition to bad ones, make the world a marginally better place for myself and others, then I cannot think of a more truly selfish objective than that. In other words, I am not a classical liberal because it is an unchosen duty. I enjoy it and see the benefits.

And let's not forget, another reason why libertarians defend the causes they do is that, despite the odd glitch, we get to meet some excellent people and make good friends. Some of my greatest mates are those I have encountered through such networks.

(20)

I am a bit late to this debunking of a book called The Spirit Level, which I had seen on sale in paperback at a local bookshop. Via Kristian Niemietz - who writes at the IEA blog - I came across the essay attacking TSL's contention that egalitarian societies - where wealth gaps are small - "almost always" outperform societies in which governments do not seek to equalise incomes.

I must admit that I nearly bought The Spirit Level to see if it did say anything of value, but it turns out to be yet another call for controls on our terrible materialism and consumerism, perhaps in the same vein as works such as "Affluenza". Ugh.

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I have noticed from some libertarians, such as "left libertarians" such as Roderick Long, a hostility to the idea of limited liability corporations. I understand and even sympathise with such opposition to statutory limited liability. It can and does foster corporate structures that become so unwieldy that they are indistinguishable from the State in key respects. But the key word to remember here is statutory. Consensual Limited Liability of a sort that can be arranged without an explicit statutory power is, in my view, no different from say, other consensual commercial transactions that are recognised in law, such as via Common Law. Of course, limited liability firms may be far less common under such a system but it is unwise to bet on it disappearing. And given all the benefits of limited liability: the ability to get large pools of investors to finance large ventures, it seems an issue worth examining in detail.

The reason some free marketeers, particularly of the more radical sort, get angry about limited liability is that they see ownership and control torn asunder, creating a serious misalignment of interests. Case in point being an argument made by Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchinson, in their book that analyses the recent credit crunch, Alchemists of Loss. They take the view that listed banks, protected by limited liability, have, unlike old partnership-owned banks with unlimited liability, made dangerous bets. A problem that is, of course, made much worse by corporate welfare via bailouts, central bank funny money, the usual. In the same way, you could argue that limited liability companies in general exhibit negative behaviours when politics intrudes.

But one of the High Priests of libertarian capitalism, Murray Rothbard no less, made it clear that there is nothing in principle wrong with the idea of limited liability. His argument strikes me as pretty solid:

"Finally, the question may be raised: Are corporations themselves mere grants of monopoly privilege? Some advocates of the free market were persuaded to accept this view by Walter Lippmann's The Good Society. It should be clear from previous discussion, however, that corporations are not at all monopolistic privileges; they are free associations of individuals pooling their capital. On the purely free market, such men would simply announce to their creditors that their liability is limited to the capital specifically invested in the corporation, and that beyond this their personal funds are not liable for debts, as they would be under a partnership arrangement. It then rests with the sellers and lenders to this corporation to decide whether or not they will transact business with it. If they do, then they proceed at their own risk. Thus, the government does not grant corporations a privilege of limited liability; anything announced and freely contracted for in advance is a right of a free individual, not a special privilege. It is not necessary that governments grant charters to corporations."

(31)

To hang your head when you are not guilty is an immoral act.

(10)

“But I detect that the criticism [of big businesses] is increasingly out of date, and that large corporations are ever more vulnerable to their nimbler competitors in the modern world – or would be if they were not granted special privileges by the state. Most big firms are actually becoming frail, fragile and frightened – of the press, of pressure groups of government, of their customers. So they should be. Given how frequently they vanish – by take-over or bankruptcy, this is hardly surprising. Coca-Cola may wish its customers were “serfs under feudal landlords”, in the words of one critic, but look what happened to New Coke. Shell may have tried to dump an oil-storage device in the deep sea in 1995, but a whiff of consumer boycott and it changed its mind. Exxon may have famously stood out from the consensus by funding scepticism of climate change (while Enron funded climate alarmism) – but by 2008 it had been bullied into recanting.”

Matt Ridley, the Rational Optimist, page 111.

He's right, of course. While Hollywood moviemakers may delight in using bosses of large firms to be villains, which is rather ironic, given the importance of big entertainment firms like Time-Warner, Disney and Sony Corporation to the movie industry in recent years. The actual track record shows, as Ridley says in this excellent book, that firms have a far shorter shelf life than government agencies. This is hardly surprising. There is, in government, no negative feedback loop with a failed agency or an agency that has outlived whatever reason for its original existence. As we see time and again, a government agency will often look for new things to justify its continued existence, arguing for larger budgets, more staff, and so on. With business, on the other hand, any firm that does not adapt to the constant shifts of consumer habits will die.

Here's more:

"Half of the biggest American companies of 1980 have now disappeared by takeover or bankruptcy; half of today's biggest companies did not even exist in 1980. The same is not true of government monopolies: the Internal Revenue Service and the National Health Service will not die, however much incomptence they might display. Yet most anti-corporate activists have faith in the good will of the leviathans that can force you to do business with them, but are suspicious of the behemoths that have to beg for your business. I find that odd."

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The concept of positive freedom, therefore, is misconceived and cannot support the notion of welfare rights. The concept ignores the distinction between natural and man-made constraints on action. It ignores the distinction between failing to offer someone a benefit and imposing an actual harm. And the pursuit of positive freedom through state action violates genuine liberty. Someone who claims a right to a good that he has not produced (or acquired by some other voluntary means) is doing one of two things: either he is claiming a right to have nature supply him with goods without effort, which is absurd; or he is claiming a right to take goods from others against their will, which is unjust.

- A Life of One's Own by David Kelley, pages 76-77. I was prompted to dig out this quote following on from my posting just below about O'Rourke's views on the difference between "gimme" rights and "get outa here" rights.

(46)

Sometimes it is the reactions of people that really give me ideas about what to write about. On Tuesday night, I went along to a book-signing and talk featuring the one and only PJ O' Rourke, who has a new book out, entitled, "Don't Vote, It Only Encourages The Bastards". He was thoroughly charming and nice, and, I am glad to say, looks in pretty good shape after having beaten a recent cancer scare. I hope he's around to tickle our funny bones for many years yet. Tuesday night's event was put on by the Adam Smith Institute. This was appropriate: O' Rourke has written about Adam Smith and to great effect.

He gave a variant of a talk which has been heard at several places this week. Here is a write-up of another event he was at by someone called Ian Dunt. And it is clear that Mr Dunt is not a great fan:

The first thing I noticed was the age of the audience. O'Rourke is 63, and the average age of the people listening to him was around that. Noam Chomsky is 82, but most of the people at his gigs are in their 20s, which gives some credibility to the old maxim about people drifting to the right as they age.

Or quite possibly, what happens is that when people in their 20s realise that Chomsky, with his moral equivalence idea that there is no real difference between totalitarian communism and liberal democracy, is talking pretentious nonsense, they wake up. Having a family, running a business, paying taxes and generally living tend to have a sobering, but also enlightening, effect. That is not the same as saying that people necessarily get more cynical or pessimistic as they get older. In my case (44 years old, a few greys but still dashing good looks), I am what might be called a "rational optimist", to borrow from the title of Matt Ridley's recent brilliant book. And O'Rourke, all 63 years of him, is pretty upbeat about what happens when free men and women, operating under some pretty elementary rules of the game, are left to get on with life. The real reactionaries and grumps, it seems to me, are those on the "left" - sorry it is a loose term but it will have to do - who so distrust ordinary people to run their lives that they consider it necessary for people to be directed, "nudged" or whatever, in the general direction of Progress. The real old farts are those who think it is somehow not an outrage that the state takes at least 50 per cent of all wealth.

Then we get to this passage:

O Rourke brought up Isaiah Berlin's distinction between positive and negative rights, which is all-too frequently ignored outside of academia. In typical fashion, and rather usefully I thought, he turned them into "gimme" rights and "get out of here rights".

As he aged, the role of "gimme" rights, which, as a right-wing American, he termed "entitlements", diminished, while the role of "get out of here rights" evidently became more prominent. The argument, which is pretty topical given the debate over public spending, is that entitlements don't ultimately promote freedom and that political leaders have been cowardly in their reluctance to disassociate themselves from them. I've never found this a particularly convincing argument and there was little last night to bring me onside, despite its witty and eloquent presentation. Ultimately, "entitlements" like free health care for all maximise freedom because health is the prerequisite for all other freedoms. Similarly, universal free education allows people to assess choices. There is no real freedom under ignorance. There is also, I would have thought, a strict minimal benchmark of material possession, under which political freedoms become irrelevant. After all, what use is the right to privacy if you have to sleep on the streets? It's a crude example, but it highlights the difficulties conservatives have in completely disassociating economic and political rights.

This is a standard misconception; what the reviewer is claiming is that we need to have rights to things, such as education or healthcare, in order to also enjoy the kind of negative liberty that a classical liberal - as O'Rourke is - values. I am not so sure about that. The ability to act, to choose, or walk, lift your arms and so on is not the same as liberty. What we are talking about here is ability, capacity, or in other cases, wealth. A lot of people use the word liberty, and hence rights, very loosely. And in any respect, if we want more of healthcare, education and so on, it is far from obvious that saying that I have a "right" to something means that I do, or that I can coerce someone else to give me £X,000 to pay for whatever it is I deem I have a right to. Does this mean, for instance, that if Mr Dunt feels he has a "right" to an education for himself or his family, that the state should compel some people to teach him and his kids? Where does this presumption stem from? What happens if those told to teach Mr Dunt's kids tell him, ever so politely, to get lost?

Also, while it is undoubtedly true that being educated and healthy helps us to make choices, it is a fairly practical point that under liberal capitalism, with more wealth and so on, education and healthcare tend to proliferate. It is poverty that best describes the lack of such things, and capitalism, given the chance, tends to be very good in eradicating this. Of course Mr Dunt, if I sense his political views accurately, probably would then claim that a lot of poor people in rich countries don't enjoy this, to which I respond by saying that he should consider the role of non-state bodies (like Friendly Societies, etc) in delivering many of the things now presumed to only come from the state. And as a practical issue, O'Rourke could and did point out what a mess the State often makes of eradicating poverty, or even worse, in eradicating the habits that beget poverty. As an aside, a person who writes very clearly on the issue of conflating genuine rights from "gimme rights" is Tom G Palmer, in this recent book, Realising Freedom.

On we go:

So it was a little disappointing to hear O'Rourke end his argument with a defence of the free market, so dull and obvious that it did his considerable intellect a disservice. The free market merely communicates value, he argued, it was not an ideology or a creed. The reason for Communism's collapse was its inability to properly account for the value of things, which money does instantly. It's quite true, of course, but the only time it would crop up is when arguing against a Soviet economist. There are very few, if any, people today arguing for Soviet Communism. The current argument in the West is really about the appropriate balance of the mixed economy under a deficit, where merely promoting the benefits of the free market is something of a mute point. Given the combination of his intelligence and his position in a political culture where we usually hear only the raving lunatics, I was expecting something a little more rewarding. Something about this anti-Soviet argument reminded me of his age, and the age of the people around me.

The problem with this paragraph is that the case for the market is far from "dull and obvious". The mixed economy we have now, as Dunt acknowledges we do, has not exactly shown itself to be a coherent mixture, at all. If the benefits of the market were really "obvious", then how to explain why, in 2010, after a decade of what is sometimes called a period of "neo-liberalism (often as a term of abuse), we have a country with crippling public debts, a central banking system that operates more like Soviet central planning in how it sets the price of money, a vast Welfare State, high joblessness among much of the populace; a monopolistic healthcare system with problems of all kinds; rising regulatory burdens on business, and the rest? Something is clearly not "obvious" enough for people to realise there is a problem. Sometimes, banging on about the "obvious" is vitally necessary. And all the better if it comes with good jokes that make Guardianistas a bit uncomfortable.

And the line about the Soviet Union also jars. Reminding some people that we once were confronted by a vast, socialist empire, which, thanks to certain forces, collapsed, is a necessary thing. It may make a certain type of left-of-centre person uneasy to be reminded of the Soviet Union, in much the same way as it might make me uneasy to remember a youthful indiscretion. Leftists, when contemplating the terrible history of the SU, might want to say, "Oh, cannot we just move on and get over it?", but I think that lets people off too lightly.

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Chris Dillow, over at his Stumbling and Mumbling blog, writes this:

"A few days ago, the great Paul Sagar noted an asymmetry in the Tory attitude to "fairness" - that whereas they are keen to point to the "undeserving poor", they are silent about the undeserving rich. I was reminded of this by listening to Nick Clegg on Desert Island Discs.This provoked the question: why do the undeserving rich not recognise their undeservingness?"

The reason why they do not "recognise their undeservingness" is that they are not asking that the state, with its violence-backed power to tax, should give them something, only that they should be left alone to enjoy their wealth, whether it be undeserved or not. On the other hand, if we are going to have a state with these powers to make transfer payments, then it follows that people are more likely to support such coercive transfers if they are made to people who are considered, by some measure, to "deserve" these transfers. Seems a fairly simple argument to me.

More broadly, though, the idea of "deserving" poor or "underserving" rich is, in my view, loaded with ideological significance, depending on who is using the term. Clearly, people feel a lot more relaxed about handing out money - either from a charity or from a government department - to people who are down on their luck but of good character, than they are about handing it out to the feckless. Similarly, it follows that there is more support for taxing supposedly "undeserved" wealth than "earned" wealth. The trouble with such words, of course, as has been shown by FA Hayek in his famous demolition of payment-by-merit in The Constitution of Liberty, is who gets to decide whether our circumstances came about due to "desert" or not. Such a person would have to have the foresight of a god. It is, as Hayek argued, impossible to do this without some omipotent authority being able to weigh up a person's potential, and then being able to measure whether that person, in the face of a vast array of alternatives, made the most of that potential.

Another point for redistributionists of all kinds to remember is this: if person A does not, according to some yardstick, "deserve" his or her wealth, then neither does anyone else "deserve" that wealth, either, since why should they presume to grab the benefits of such unearned luck? The logical result, surely, would be to destroy that wealth, so that no-one receives it at all.

Of course, whether Nick Clegg or David Cameron would give such a comment is unlikely; I guess they'd go on about how their good fortune means they have an "obligation" to "society" in some form. That seems to be the view of a lot of those who come into the world with a lot of good advantages. It is by no means a fake or ignoble motive, at all; there is some sense, after all, that a lot of people are dealt a shitty hand by natture or Providence and that there ought to be a way that those down on their luck can get something better. But such a point of view in no ways sanctions state thieving (tax), in my view.

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"Once you accept the practical necessity of relying heavily on second hand information, you have to modify your view of what a reasonable person would believe to take account of what those around him believed. If you have no training in science and your only information on biotech comes from the popular press, it may not be obvious that a story on mice with human brains cannot be right. If you have devoted your time, energy, and intelligence to living your own life, doing your job, dealing with those around you, it isn't all that unreasonable to accept as truth what those around you believe about wider issues less directly observed, such as the existence of God or the weakness of the case for evolution. What applies not only to people in the past who couldn't have known the evidence for evolution but to people in the present who could have but in all probability don't. I long ago concluded that most people who say they do believe in evolution, like most who say they don't, are going mostly on faith. As I pointed out in a post some years back, many of those who say they believe in evolution, most notably people left of center, have no difficulty rejecting even its most obvious implications when those clash with their ideology."

David Friedman, speculating on what is the right way to decide if a person is, or is not, a nutcase.

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Watching the re-make of Battlestar Galactica I came across a thought-experiment in practical ethics that seems to me far more interesting than the rather trite runaway-train examples I knew from university ethics classes.

The situation for the thought-experiment is this:

The last remnants of the human race are fleeing their robotic exterminators. Owing to what the (human) military commander perceives as a poor tactical decision, the lawfully-elected civilian President has been incarcerated and martial law has been declared. With the support of civilian and enlisted sympathisers, the President has escaped immediate custody and is on the point of disappearing into hiding amongst the populace, supposedly accompanied by her immediate staff and a few abettors amongst the military.

Up until this point, by the nature of television drama, the focus has been on the President herself and senior military officers, both sympathetic and antagonistic. At the last moment, however, it is made clear that even flunkies and acting extras have an independent moral choice, when the President's principal aide unexpectedly reveals his personal moral dilemma.

"Madam President. I understand what you're trying to do...but, it's going to divide the fleet. At the very best it's going to create an insurgency against [the military commander]; at the worst, civil war. Taking part in that is a line that I will not cross."

This strikes me as troubling, but far from unrealistic. I am genuinely unsure what is the morally correct action here.

For the sake of this thought experiment, let us accept without question the idea that our protagonist fully believes the President is the rightful and best leader for the human race. Let us assume he is convinced that the best outcome, both morally and practically, would be for the military dictator to quietly step aside and reinstate the President. Let us also assume he genuinely believes that that will not happen, and that internal opposition will materially reduce the prospects of survival for the remainder of the human race.

If we left it at that, most people would agree that he had no choice but to submit to the military in the interests of the survival of our species.

However, this character is clearly thoughtful and reasonable, so let us add in another opportunity for dilemma. Let us suppose, as is strongly hinted at, albeit not explicitly stated in this drama, that although he genuinely believes all the above, he recognises the possibility that he might be wrong.

This creates a genuinely realistic and sophisticated moral dilemma. His best outcome would be for the President's insurrection to be swiftly and painlessly successful. The worst outcome would be a protracted civil war.

Should he give precedence to his admittedly fallible assessment of the President's chances, betray her, side with the military dictator he considers illegitimate, in order to swiftly put down the President's opposition, in the hope of avoiding the total destruction of humanity at the cost of casting humanity into autarky for the foreseeable future?

Or in the alternative, would it be better to be true to his convictions and back the President, in the hope of preserving a free society, even though he believed that in doing so he was placing the survival of our species at greater risk, but recognised that he might be in error in this assessment? In short, the question is not the commonly poses but simplistic one of "should the moral or the pragmatic choice prevail?" but its more sophisticated child: "Given uncertainty about the future, should we cleave to moral certainty despite grave fears of the likely outcome, or betray our preferences for fear of utter calamity?"

To me, these ten seconds in Battlestar Galactica seem far more interesting than almost anything in my undergraduate ethics course. But if this seems too obscure, or too adolescent, treat this posting instead simply as a comment that there is more serious ethical debate in ten seconds of a popular commercial sci-fi drama than in a month of 'Newsnight' interviews.

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"So Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid are all on Air Force One. Suddenly it malfunctions and crashes. Who survives? America."

From a commenter on this item.

Actually, the logic applies to most countries and their governments. Parts of our MSM like to believe that if the leader of X or Y has a problem, dies or whatever, that the nation will be plunged into chaos. Not so; it is a mark of a healthy country that the passing of a leader, even in tragic circumstances such as those affecting Poland recently, is not a massive blow to the country per se.

Tangentially, this book by Gene Healy about the "cult" of the modern presidency is worth reading.

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Bryan Caplan has some thought-provoking comments about Paul Johnson's "Modern Times" - in my opinion, one of the greatest works of history by a historian of any era, let alone ours. Johnson, a devout Roman Catholic who has written about, and met, many of the leading figures of post WW2 history, including Churchill, is a writer never afraid to let you know his point of view. He enjoys overturning certain stock images of historical "heroes" and "villains"; he memorably defended the reputation of Calvin Coolidge, a much underestimated POTUS, and tries his best to be nice about Richard Nixon (I think he does not quite succeed), and reminds us of what a great old fellow was Konrad Adenauer. Johnson is also merciless towards Ghandi, whose reputation he trashes.

The great thing about the man - now in his 80s and still going strong as a writer - is capacity for narrative, for making history a story; he is stickler for dates. You really do get the "sweep of events" from Johnson, in much the same way you would from an Edward Gibbon, Hugh Trevor Roper or a TB Macaulay (whom he some ways resembles). (Here are more thoughts on Johnson in the same blog.)

Like Caplan, I am not entirely sure that moral relativism captures the full nature of what went wrong in terms of the 20th Century, although I think Johnson does capture quite a lot of the problem with that concept. For me, the ultimate disaster of that century was the idea of the omniscient State and of the associated idea that governments, run by all-knowing officials, could solve many of the real or supposed problems of the age. The 20th Century was not unique in witnessing the growth of government, but it was an age when government had, like never before, the technology at its disposal to be immensely powerful, probably more so than at any time since the Romans (and even the writ of Rome had its limits). We are still, alas, in the grip of that delusion that government can and should fix problems, although there is perhaps, hopefully, a bit more cynicism about it than say, during the late 1940s when the likes of Attlee were in Downing Street.

Johnson is right, however, to point out that in a world where there is no stated respect for the idea of impartial rules and law, no respect for reason and for the idea of objective truth - or at least that it is noble to pursue truth - that terrible consequences follow; every irrationality, might-is-right worldview, will fill the vacumn. However, unlike Johnson, I do not think that morality requires the anchor of belief in a Supreme Being, and he tends to make the mistake, like a lot of devoutly religious folk, of assuming that atheists, for example, cannot arrive at a moral code, which seems to rather overlook the role of people such as Aristotle, who had a huge impact on views about ethics, and from whom other religions have borrowed (think of the Thomist tradition in Catholic thought, for instance).

Stephen Hicks, in his book on post-modernism, comes to a similar conclusion in certain respects. Another gem of a book is Alain Finkielkraut's gem, "The Undoing of Thought".

The sleep of reason really does bring forth monsters.

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I ran across this article on Thomas Paine tonight and thought our readers might also find it of interest.

There is a great deal of detail here about his life that I had never known before.

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“Mediocracy prides itself on being progressive. Its critics (to the extent they are permitted to survive, and allowed to express themselves) are derided as conservative, reactionary, and so on. However, the kind of progress that mediocracy promotes is rather specific. Curiously, it often takes tribal life as its paradigm. Movement ‘forwards’ is movement towards a model of a pacifist, egalitarian community, not exploiting the environment, sharing all tasks equally, with each member answerable to the whole community. Other kinds of change are considered inappropriate, and therefore not described as ‘progressive’: e.g., greater freedom from state interference, fewer restrictions on commercial activity.”

Mediocracy, by Fabian Tassano, page 142.

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Getting the institutions right matters. Many people simply don’t understand that issue. They don’t understand it because they still believe in magic. Few people believe that the chanting of magic words or incantations exercises power over the world. Most of us believe in cause and effect – in tracing out the effects to their causes. The scientific approach has been triumphant in such fields of enquiry as physics, chemistry, biology and geology. Unfortunately, when it comes to the science of human behaviour, many people – possibly most – still believe in magic, because they believe that a special class of wizards and magicians are called legislators, rulers, governors and presidents, and so most people believe, when they say such words as `It shall be the law that all shall have the right to good health care, or a good education, or a higher living standard,’ that those words carry the power to bring about the intentions behind them.”

- Tom G Palmer, Realising Freedom, page 207.

I strongly recommend this gem of a book.

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A quick link from me today to a recent talk given by Dr Stephen Davies at the Oxford Libertarian Society. Excellent piece, well worth your time. He absolutely nails the silly idea, put about both by communitarians of the left and right, that individualism is the same as lack of interest in a strong civil society. Quite the reverse.

Here's an interesting paper he wrote about crime and morality many years ago for the Libertarian Alliance. Also recommended. And he is giving the annual Chris R Tame memorial lecture for the Libertarian Alliance on 10 May in London. I'll be there and hopefully, put up a review on what he has to say.

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"The Pope? How many divisions has he got?" Joseph Stalin is reported to have said dismissively. And we all know how that turned out.

Ron Paul, the "Dr No" of US politics for his habit of being the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against some measure to increase federal government spending, debt or power, could witness the repeat of such a peaceful realignment.

Tim Evans, writing on the Cobden Centre's blog, has found that a Google search for "Ron Paul" will find over 28.8 million entries, whereas one for "Karl Marx" will generate a mere 6.26 million. As he concludes: "it is true that these things take a long time to play through, but as a sociologist I am excited by the long-term cultural, political and economic impact of these sorts of numbers" for the cause of a free world.

Presumably, a rise in online interest about Ron Paul, relative to Karl Marx, should translate into tangible results at some point. The election of Scott Brown the Republican challenger in the recent Massachusetts special election to replace Senator Edward Kennedy, was also preceded by a similar gap between the Google ratings of the various political parties' candidates.

The battle over Google and Bing search engines

Google - Scott Brown has been mentioned 53,200,000 times on Google, while Martha Coakley has been mentioned 50,600 times on Google, the appointed Senator Paul Kirk has more mentions than the current Democrat candidate for that seat!

Bing - Scott Brown has been mentioned 52,800,000 times on Bing, while Martha Coakley has been mentioned 219,000 times on Bing...

It seems that Congressman Paul could put together more divisions than the cause of Marxism. Seems like a cheerful note to end the week.

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Some words or terms are thrown about in casual conversation - but also have formal meanings, and meanings that still have practical (including political) importance.

"Common Sense" and "Pragmatism" are two examples of this.

The "Common Sense" School of philosophy (sometimes known as the "Scottish Philosophy" - see James McCosh's book of 1877 with that title) grow up in opposition to certain doubts promoted by David Hume and others.

"Common Sense" philosophers such as Thomas Reid held the following things:

That the physical universe actually existed - that it was not just an illusion in the mind.

That the mind itself (the "I") also existed that it was not an illusion (for if the mind is an illusion - who is having the illusion?), that thoughts really did mean a thinker. An agent, a being - that we exist and that (as agents/beings) we have the ability to choose (agency). And that our choices are real ones - not illusions hiding either a series of causes and effects going back to the start of the universe, or random chance. For choice is neither predetermined (for that is no choice) or random chance (for that is no choice either) - choice is what it is, neither predetermined or chance. Choice is choice.

And that as we have the ability to choose we can choose between good and evil - and that these are real things also, not just "boo and cheer words" (to take a line from the Logical Positivist A.J. Ayre - for a refutation see C.E.M. Joad "A Critique of Logical Positivism" London, 1950), but are objective things which we as subjects (not just objects) can choose between.

On all of the above the Common Sense school are in agreement with the Aristotelians. Both religious Aristotelians (such as the Roman Catholic scholastics who stretch from the Schoolmen in the Middle Ages right to people in our time) and atheist Aristotelians - such as Randian Objectivists.

Although the forms of words (the methods) are very different the Common Sense school were even in agreement with the Aristotelians are on what are good acts and what are bad acts - for example the Non-Aggression Principle was broadly accepted, as much by scholastics in the Middle Ages as by 18th and 19th century Common Sense thinkers as by modern thinkers of these schools of thought.

But why is the name important?

After all, for example, the 17th century Englishman Ralph Cudworth supported all of the above - without ever calling himself a "Common Sense" thinker?

Also the 20th century Oxford thinkers Harold Prichard and Sir William David Ross and others (have no fear I am not going to get into details over disputes over the exact difference between the "right" and the "good" - I am trying to deal with basic principles) held all the above - again without calling themselves "Common Sense" thinkers.

Indeed I think our learned friend Antony Flew would agree with all the above - the universe really exists (is objective), our minds (our selves) really exist as beings (we are agents - we have the ability of agency, we can choose), and good and bad (right and wrong) really exist - calling rape "good" does not stop it being evil.

However, I can not remember Antony Flew calling himself a "Common Sense" thinker. So, again, why the importance of the words?

Because they still have an impact - when a person who says they are offering "common sense solutions" it is likely they are going to support certain principles (all of the above) - it is even a sign (at least in an American context) what there political opinions are.

Pragmatism...

This term also has a deeper use than ordinary conversation might suggest (although even ordinary conversation does sometimes suggest it).

The "Pragmatist" school of American philosophy.

I must be careful here - after all Charles Pierce (considered the founder of the school) was more interested in logic than in ethics, and John Dewey (the best known of the school) had different philosophical positions in his long life, and towards the end of his life actually became rather hostile to what I am about to describe...

However, when one uses the term "Pragmatist" in ethics it is still the words of William James that define what one is talking about - "the right is just the expedient in our way of thinking".

No objective good and evil, no right and wrong. Whatever James intended it is not a streatch to go straight from "the right is just the expedient in our way of thinking" to the "good and evil are just boo and cheer words" of A.J. Ayer or even the ends-justify-the-means evil (for it is evil) of people like Saul Alinsky and his modern political followers.

Of course there are other streams than "Pragmatism" in this river of thought.

For example, the thinking of the Apostles Club at Cambridge and Bloomsbury Set in London was dominated by what J.M. Keynes called (and he intended it as praise) "immoralism".

Any tactic - any lie or deception (even in a formal academic work) was justified if it furthered the cause. And what was the cause - the rule of an "enlightened" elite. People like Keynes did not need American Pragmatists to tutor them - but only because they came to the same conclusions by different roads.

It is an old conclusion - the belief that right and wrong are for lesser beings, that one is beyond such things (they being just silly subjective myths anyway).

In politics the followers of "Pragmatism" wish to "get things done" - regardless of what wickedness must be used to do them, for they smile with contempt at the word "wickedness" just as they do the words "right and wrong, good and evil".

Their great strength is that they will do anything (anything at all) to achieve their objectives - and their objective is power, influence, control.

But this is also a weakness - in a way that they can not understand.

Lastly a warning:

It is sometimes said that we should "use their methods against them", this is often a terrible error. For their methods tend towards their objectives.

For the religious this indicates that God so designed the universe that evil methods tend towards evil conclusions - the atheist may reject the idea of a "God", but accept that the universe is like this. The result is the same - not only do the ends not justify the means, but the means have a way of influencing the ends (the results) to be in their own form.

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Helen Evans, who runs Nurses for Reform, a campaigning organisation dedicated to free-market options for healthcare in the UK, got to meet Conservative Party leader David Cameron a couple of weeks ago. The Daily Mirror [here, here and here] and the Daily Telegraph found out about the meeting and offered their own take on it.

Broadly, I agree that the proposals are in the right direction, although I have concerns about some of the tactics suggested and their formulation, which I deal with later. The bit that was not previously familiar to me was the idea that a barrier to entry should be at least lowered, by amending local planning rules to make it easier to open a new healthcare facility. I'm told the Conservative Party already favours this for schools, so the extension to clinics should not be difficult.

Having read the briefing document presented to the Leader of the Opposition, I disagree with one element of the strategy being proposed, specifically this passage: "the [National Health Service] NHS should be renamed the National Health SYSTEM and that under its auspices patients should benefit from a universal right to independent hospital care and treatment."

A "universal right" is something that a government could be justified in declaring war to defend, like "freedom from slavery" or freedom from the use of confessions extracted under torture in criminal trials. It could certainly be a pretext for new taxes, a new bureaucracy, more regulations, and the restriction of other "non-universal" rights. Sadly, this call for declaring that privately-provided healthcare is a right could become the very instrument for imposing regulations (such as US Medicare-style price controls, or French-style government control on where doctors can practise [link in French]) that violate patient and physician freedom. To give a specific example: could a private clinic be fined for not providing 24-hour accident and emergency access? I would expect a government agency to do just that. Meanwhile, of course, government facilities which operate "in the public interest" would be excused.

A second concern comes in a later paragraph: "health censorship must be outlawed and patients must be empowered with greater access to information." Outlawed? Must be empowered? By what agency, regulation, funded by what taxes or levies, with what powers of inspection and control?

These may seem like quibbles, but the law of intended consequences suggests that the wording of reforms can be as important as their spirit. Consider the US Constitution's First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Does it say that Congress cannot give money to the Food and Drug Administration to hunt down anyone making claims about the alleged benefits to cancer patients of drinking grapefruit juice? No it does not. It means it, I think, but can I prove it to the US Supreme Court? Probably not.

It might be more boring to do, but the best way to remove censorship would be to revoke the clauses of those laws and regulations that allow it. As for "empowerment," if this comes from the government it will mean a Department of Truth in Advertising demand for a quarterly report from all private providers as to how they inform the public, with fines for not reaching a wide enough audience.

On the positive side, Nurses for Reform finds that the ownership by a government department of most of the UK's hospitals is a potential conflict of interest. There is the temptation to hide problems, to restrict information about alternative (often newer) treatments, the cozy relationship between the government employees in the NHS and those of the Department of Health who are supposed to watch them.

Dr Evans is therefore absolutely right to suggest the immediate transfer of ownership of NHS hospitals out of "public ownership," and she is also correct that the "Secretary of State for Health must no longer have any say over when or where hospitals are built, opened or closed."

On the issue of advertising, or freedom to communicate with the public in general, the major benefit would be that people could get an idea of which were the better brands (either cheapest, or best quality, or best balance between the two). If we think of how Aldi and Lidl can co-exist with ASDA, Tesco, Sainsbury, Waitrose and independent grocers, we can see how variety of branding can lead to beneficial competition: new treatments, more options and probably less queues.

Personally, I see no point whatsoever in delaying the reform of NHS funding: it merely prolongs unnecessary suffering and provides more opportunities for opponents of change to mobilise, like Gorbachev's "perestroika" versus the liquidation of the soviet system. Having little expectation of any progress under a new Conservative Party government this coming year, it would be a pleasant surprise if Dr Evans' proposals came to fruition. But at least no one can now claim that the case was not made.

[UPDATE: corrected link for Daily Telegraph article]

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Tom G. Palmer has a new book out and he is one of those guys whom I read pretty regularly. He recently talked about the book, its topics, in a panel discussion along with Marginal Revolution blogger and NYT columnist Tyler Cowen. Definitely worth your time.

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"I can easily see how there's a connection between individualism and depression. Once you manage to throw off the social-collectivist hive-mind and think for yourself, you cannot fail to see how deeply into-the-shit 'society' has got itself."

Tanuki, a Samizdata commenter, writing about this.

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There is an excellent article in the Times (of London) today about the bitter fruits of relativism, of the pernicious idea, so beloved by our faux sophisticates, that there is no such thing as objective truth. That notion has done enormous damage; far from shielding us from the effects of bigotry and violence, the idea that there are no rights or wrongs has arguably achieved the opposite. Give up reason and respect for evidence, and monsters fill up the resultant gaps. Just look at the wasteland of much of our education system today, for example.

I am reminded of an outburst from a gentleman at a recent talk I attended by the University of Texas philosopher and Objectivist, Tara Smith (a very smart and nice lady, by the way). I blogged about it here. The person concerned - I do not know his name - became incredibly angry that she had dared present any argument that says that there is an external reality outside of ourselves, that existence exists whether we like it or not, that there are laws and principles one can discover, etc. What he did not realise was that his own certainty about his own opinion undermined the notion that one cannot be certain of anything. In the act of attacking certainty, he in fact validated it.

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This essay, written by the philosopher Edward Feser in 2005, contains much food for thought. I like these couple of paragraphs:

"The claim that we all own everything is more in need of justification than the claim that no one initially owns anything. Surely such a claim is not merely unjustified, but counterintuitive, even mysterious. Consider the following: a pebble resting uneasily on the surface of the asteroid Eros as it orbits the sun, a cubic foot of molten lava churning a mile below the surface of the earth, one of the polar icecaps on Mars, an ant floating on a leaf somewhere in the mid-Pacific, or the Andromeda galaxy. It would seem odd in the extreme to claim that any particular individual owns any of these things: In what sense could Smith, for example, who like most of the rest of us has never left the surface of the earth or even sent a robotic spacecraft to Eros, be said to own the pebble resting on its surface? But is it any less odd to claim we all own the pebble or these other things? Yet the entire universe of external resources is like these things, or at least (in the case of resources that are now owned) started out like them—started out, that is to say, as just a bunch of stuff that no human being had ever had any impact on. So what transforms it into stuff we all commonly own? Our mere existence? How so?"

"Are we to suppose that it was all initially unowned, but only until a group of Homo sapiens finally evolved on our planet, at which point the entire universe suddenly became our collective property? (How exactly did that process work?) Or was it just the earth that became our collective property? Why only that? Does something become collective property only when we are capable of directly affecting it? But why does everyone share in ownership in that case—why not only those specific individuals who are capable of affecting it: for example, explorers, astronauts, or entrepreneurs? It is, after all, never literally “we” collectively who discover Antarctica, strike oil, or go to the moon, but only particular individuals, together perhaps with technical assistance and financial backing provided by other particular individuals. Smith’s being the first to reach some distant island and build a hut on it at least makes it comprehensible how he might claim—plausibly or implausibly—to own it. This fact about Smith gives some meaning to the claim that he has come to own it. But it is not at all clear how this fact would give meaning to the claim that Jones, whom Smith has never met or even heard of, who has had no involvement in or influence on Smith’s journey and homesteading, and who lives thousands of miles away (or even years in the future), has also now come to own it."

He also beautifully undermines the claim, sometimes made even by pro-market people, that no-one has been able to prove that property rights can ever arise justly ex-nihilo, that they are all, in the end, derived from a sort of act of initial theft. He takes that point apart.

(9)

Matthew Parris, writes the following, in the course of pointing out what a total joke the UK government has become:

"The British electorate have an intuitive grasp of politics, but there’s one misunderstanding to which the generality is prone: to think driving a country would be like driving a car. Your eye would be constantly and intelligently on the road ahead; miss the brake, let your foot slip, jerk the wheel, or turn round to argue with the passengers, and you’d crash. The truth is different. As those who acquire power discover to their dismay, the controls are mushy and indirect, and the machine will run on, driverless, for some time. In the harsh light of experience, the illusion that a British Cabinet is in day-to-day control cracks."

If it is true that the UK electorate think that a country is like a machine, with an engine, brakes, headlights, gearbox, controls and steering wheel, then that surely only demonstrates how far the poison of socialism, or what Hayek called constructivist rationalism, has seeped into the consciousness of said electorate. A country is not a single vehicle, which has been created by some single designer or set of designers, and which is designed to perform a specific purpose - such as take someone on a road from A to B. To think of a country in that way also begs the question about the choice of driver. We hope the driver will be safe, alert, and not take dangerous risks. The analogy is completely wrong. A country in fact is, as we should have learned from Michael Oakeshott, an association of persons who form certain common institutions and abide by certain laws and customs for the purpose of achieving their diverse ends.

There are many bad ideas that need to be shot down, and the "country-as-designed-machine" one is high on my hit-list.

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About two decades ago, I gave a talk to an audience that included some devout environmentalists. In one of my answers to one of these persons, I said that if a technological fix could be found for, say, the hole in the ozone layer (a big topic in those days), by e.g. sending a rocket up into the hole and shovelling ozone out into the hole, thereby mending it, that would mean that we could be a little more relaxed about causing the hole to get big in the first place. In general, I argued, technologically fixable problems are less of a worry than technologically unfixable ones.

It was if I had said that, on account of a new kind of metal cleaner recently invented, it had become less of a problem if people broke into churches and pissed on crucifixes. It was, I was told in shocked tones, the very idea that problems could be solved with technology that was at the heart of the evil that humanity was facing.

So, I have long understood that environmentalism is a religion, and that the purpose of proclaiming the existence of environmental problems is absolutely not that they should be fixed, but they should be instruments to accomplish the transformation of people and how they live from what people actually are and how they actually live, to ... something else. Technological fixes are evil. The worst evil of all.

Which means that Dominic Lawson is entirely right to say that plausible technological fixes for the allegedly huge environmental problems that we allegedly face now will cause rage rather than rejoicing among all the true believers of the Church of Mother Earth. Technological fixes will deprive that church's devotees of their excuse to bully the rest of us into living different and less - in their eyes - sinful lives.

Even so, I enjoyed reading Lawson's piece, with its sensationally unequal comparison between how much the current measures now being put in place by the world's politicians to solve the alleged enviro-crisis, which are calculatedly and deliberately very hurtful to the world economy, compared to how absurdly cheap such technological fixes might be.

The significance of the ideas Dominic Lawson reports on (which are among those contained in this book) lies not in their ingenuity or in their political relevance in any immediately imaginable near-future. It is their irreverence - their sacrilegiousness - that is significant.

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What is the origin, importance and future of trutherism?

(64)

While I was pondering the ideas of historicism last week, my thoughts also chained through a number of associations and arrived at an interesting question: "Could humanity actually be sent back to the Stone Age?" I arrived at this question by way of cyclical history and thoughts on whether a single species could actually provide more than one data point on the sequence and timing of social, philosophical and technological innovations.

My own answer was "No". I will explain with a thought experiment.

First imagine a maximal disaster, whether natural or human caused, that does not wipe out the species. This means we must guarantee there is a large enough breeding population left over somewhere in the world such that after the event or period in question, the population is able to rebound rather than decline to extinction. My guess is we need somewhere in the range of 1000 individuals, with a typical age and sex distribution. They do not all have to be in one place, but they do have to be within a distance that allows intermarriage between groups. If there were 10 groups of 100 dispersed over some distance which is no more than a few days to a week travel by foot or horseback, I would consider that a viable population.

It seems unlikely any event would leave only one such pocket. Possible... but not very probable. I will be assuming for my baseline a surviving population on earth of perhaps one million, scattered about in small groups in out of the way places across vast distances. The Himalayas, the Andes, islands in the Pacific, places like some of the Outer Hebrides or the Falklands, small towns in the Rocky Mountains and such.

Even if a place starts out smaller than 100, we may presume that small groups of one or more survivors will tend to congregate together for safety and to reach a critical mass of manpower and skills for survival. In this, some of those isolated ancient villages may indeed have the edge.

Now comes the question: does this actually reset humanity to the stone age? I think the immediate answer is no. Most places in the world simply lack people with hunter-gatherer skills and even for people who do manage to figure them out in time to not die of cold and starvation it will not be enough. They will want more out of life. Most will join with others they run across and will rapidly transition to a more familiar lifestyle with farming at its center. Even amongst town and city folk there are those sufficiently skilled in growing things in garden plots. This will be much superior to life in temporary lean-to shelters where survival hinges on running down a deer in the dead of winter.

In the most likely scenario, the majority of survivors a year on from our hypothetical will live in such places, whether they are communities with a long history of self sufficiency or new ones which have learned the hard way, ie Plymouth without the friendly natives, is immaterial in the long run.

One might then presume we will fall back to an agrarian stone-age rather than a full on hunter-gatherer stone-age. If so, one would be very wrong. The survivors will at the very least have knowledge of the way things were and of what was once possible, even if they do not know how. The intelligence spread of the survivors will be no different than the intelligence spread of the general population today so effort will go into recovering capabilities that make survival easier. I suspect that some locations would be forging metals within a few years and some would be back to the iron age and even steel within a few decades at most. Trade would pop up very quickly because the survivors would be used to trade and specialization. One location might supply some quantities of one ore and another location a different one and yet a third location will specialize in mud brick oven smelters with bellows of wood and animal hide and molds of sand or clay. Tallow from animal fat might be used for wax to make lost-wax molds.

Now with the ability to make iron, steel is not very much harder. Labour intensive perhaps, but it has properties for tools and farm implements that will make that effort worthwhile. If you can make ploughs and tools, you can build a foot treadle lathe. If you can do that, you can copy a Lee Enfield rifle, just like Afghan villagers did at the turn of the previous century. Perhaps muskets are easier for a start: black powder is not hard to make and the materials are not that uncommon. Urine was a key ingredient and the source of a lively trade in London five hundred years ago for just that reason. Flint is not exactly rare and acquiring it will be the cause of yet more trade.

So we have rather primitive firearms almost as soon as we can make decent iron.

Now here is one you might not have seen coming... electricity. Humans knew how to make batteries thousands of years ago. All you need is a clay pot, an acid and simple materials for the anode and cathode. Good wire is a problem, but people will just deal with what they have until they can figure out how to do better. Iron is not great, but if you have nothing else? In any case, there should be loads of copper to be mined out of the detritus of the dead civilization. There will be loads more than are needed at first and stripping raw materials from the old cities will be the source of a lively trade and wealth for the traders.

If you have electricity from batteries, you can do electroplating. Of course, if you get your hands on copper wire, low quality motors and generators can be made by hand. I did so from a few nails and a bit of wire when I was perhaps ten or twelve. I am sure an adult with a lifetime experience of fixing broken farm implements could do much better. You can drive them with wind power. Windmills are not terribly taxing to build.

But wait... there is more. Radio! Somewhere someone is going to remember that if you can find crystals of Galena, you can make a cats-whisker receiver. As for the transmitter, a spark gap telegraph key might be enough to start with, and antennas are just wire.

What about transportation? Inefficient steam engines will not be difficult to make and boat building will not be forgotten; we will still have horses and the making of wagons using steel rimmed wheels and of shoes for horses will be well within the abilities of a local blacksmith shop.

What we would not have is a very large part of modern medicine as it relies on techniques that cannot be implemented in a blacksmith shop. What we would have is a true knowledge of anatomy, the causes of disease, the symptoms of all the now untreatable disorders, and some idea of what we could only do... if we could re-invent genetic engineering and manipulate DNA again.

So my guess is, the absolute worst non-extinction event that can happen to the human species will see us back to the 17th Century (plus radio, steam and a few other amenities) within a generation or two.

Lord, what a time of adventure it would be! Swords, muskets, sailing ships, radio and a nearly empty world with magical items scattered across it and there for the taking.

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As I proceed deeper into Popper, I have pondered his ideas on 'historicism', the idea that one can define a set of laws of history. Within the context he is arguing I must say that he is correct. Popper argues such laws are unscientific because they are not falsifiable. This is true for the case of all of which I am aware, whether several millinnia ago or within recent memory. But is it a true statement or is it an over-application of inductive reasoning?

I do not think we know enough to make that general of a statement about the possibility of historical laws. With the knowledge at hand we are probably on safe ground to agree that racially based, class-based and simple projections of past events onto future history are non-starters. So what would it take to really have a 'Seldon Theory'?

Science requires data. Hypotheses must be based on data and should be falsifiable by uncovering new data or effects which are sufficiently counter to the predications of theory so as to bring its viability into question. To do that with history we need not one history but many. True, we can analyze numerous Earthly civilizations from different times and places, but that is not enough. We simply do not have enough detail about many of them. Perhaps new developments in Archaeology will one day make such data available, but for the present we have only a small number of historical, independent civilizations from which to work.

Even worse, were we to generate a theory that was applicable to such pre-technological societies, those theories would still fall upon the same problem when looking at what comes after, because once technology arrives on a planet, the boundaries become fuzzy very quickly and you are back to having only one data point. You cannot build a theory on a single data point. Even worse, we are in a technological civilization in which the rate of change grows more rapid with each passing year. How can you generate any sort of prediction about a world with wildly different characteristics from your own, none of which are knowable to you? How could a Scientific Historian of, say 1950, predict much of anything about a world with global access to virtually all of human knowledge, blogs, twitterers, computerized phones more powerful than Colossus and a third world that is not quite so third any more?

The simple answer is: "They would not have had a prayer of being right."

So have I proved a Theory of History is impossible? No, far from it. I have simply framed the obvious limitations of the data available to us. It is insufficient to allow anything like a hard science of history to develop. That does not mean such data will never be available. Let us posit one possible future in which there might be true scientists working in such a field...

It would be some hundreds if not thousands of years hence. Humanity has gone to the stars and we have studied the histories of hundreds of other sentient races. We have put our AI's to work for some decades to analyze and categorize; we have looked at vast amounts of cross-galactic statistical data; we have framed the areas where mathematical Chaos reigns and know the likely set of outcomes. Our learned future historical scientists are arguing over what experimental data is required to falsify their theories: ie, can we find a civilization X in which Y occurred?

Then and only then could we say that history is a science. Of course we still do have a problem. Unless we run across an elder civilization willing to talk to us, we still cannot predict our own future at all. We can only do so for civilizations at earlier stages of development than our own.

Thus Popper still wins the argument against Historicism as a self-analysis tool even in the far future.

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After having it sit on my book shelf collecting dust for half a decade or more, I finally picked up Karl Popper's "The Open Society and It's Enemies" as I had nothing left that was less daunting in appearance for my late afternoon lunch/dinner/coffee break. Whatever else I may get from it, whether I find myself agreeing or not, I most certainly found it a generator of ideas and flights of wild fancy, some of which I will now impose upon you.

First, I have only ever read parts of Plato. A few chapters here and there over the years. I have tended to use my deep thinking reading time for people more like Hayek and the other free market economists and thinkers. Thus I was utterly and totally unprepared for the shock of the Platonic quotation that headed Volume I:

The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative; neither out of zeal, nor even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace -- to his leader he shall direct his eye and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matter he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals... only if he has been told to do so. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it."

I do not think I have ever had such a horrified awakening to such pure evil in my life. If this is what Plato's philosophy espouses, then nearly anything built upon him is likely to be totalitarian and I can easily see the direct line from him through the Hitler's and Stalin's and Mao's and Pol Pot's of well over two thousand years after his demise.

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Watch this outstanding commentary on political correctness in academia and the culture and naked lies in the media called MSNBC & The Great Liberal Narrative: The Truth About The Tyranny of Political Correctness.

And I know Bill and he is a really great guy, a true gentleman. But Bill... stop calling them liberal. We are the true liberals.

PJTV really is getting some truly great stuff up lately.

(33)

There is a subject that we often return to on Samizdata when discussing things, and that is 'meta-context'. This is the frames of reference, the unspoken assumptions, the underpinning world view if you like, within which people see things and discuss them. Context is usually explicit, whereas meta-context is implicit and very much in the background.

This is a useful concept for understanding why discussions get framed in the manner they do. When the meta-context of two people is widely divergent, they tend to talk past each other, because much of what they say will not be what the other person understands. A great deal of the success of the statist political establishment comes from their control of the meta-context, so that in the minds of many, much of what states do simply goes without saying... that is just the way it is, even if on a contextual level a person is not predisposed to like or trust the political establishment, the state's basic purview is essentially a given and thus not really pondered deeply, much like the sun rising in the morning.

So when David Cameron and Gordon Brown exchange meaningless ritual barbs in the House of Commons, we hear an exchange between two people with somewhat different politics and personalities, but they are as one at the meta-contextual level. Each understand the other completely on a great many levels and both understand instinctively what are the 'proper' limits of their political 'disagreement'.

So when someone comes along who does not share meta-context, all sorts of interesting things happen. Not only is there going to be a profound non-meeting of minds, there is going to be both misunderstanding and often great antipathy as people struggle to fit the opposing person's views within their own meta-context, assuming things that are actually not the case at all and imputing meaning that tell you far more about the person doing the imputing than the person they are discussing.

And so I present you with Randy Cohen, who blogs for the mainstream statist-left newspaper the New York Times as The Ethicist. The article which caused my meta-contextual antennae to start tingling a few days ago was titled How not to talk about health care.

Public discourse necessarily and legitimately involves the clash of interests and opinions: that’s what politics is. But that clash, rough as it may be, must still be conducted with intellectual integrity, not as the oratorical equivalent of Ultimate Fighting. This is a matter of honesty and thus of ethics.

I do not know if the public option is a wise law - health policy is beyond my purview - but I do know what it is not: unusual in its general approach. Public and private institutions have long undertaken similar tasks and without dire consequences. Private schools survive public education: Brearley and Bronx Science peacefully coexist. FedEx tolerates the U.S. Postal Service. Six Flags is facing bankruptcy, but no one proposes that we close down Yosemite or Yellowstone to protect it.

In his critique of the public option, Representative Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, invoked the inability of his 7-year-old daughter’s lemonade stand to compete with McDonald’s. (You’d think she’d thrive, incidentally, what with lemonade not being on the McDonald’s menu.) “It’s impossible to have a level playing field with a public plan,” Ryan said, asserting that private insurers could be driven out of business by the unfair competitive advantages enjoyed by a government-sponsored insurer (presumably much as the University of Massachusetts turned Harvard into a ghost town, or the New York Public Library system drove Barnes & Noble into the ground). Again, this is not to challenge Ryan’s conclusions about the public option: that’s politics. It is to demand veracity in his arguments: that’s ethics.

Here’s another sort of dodgy reasoning deployed on this issue. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove concluded: "If Democrats enact a public-option health-insurance program, America is on the way to becoming a European-style welfare state." This is a slippery-slope argument, the sort of thing that should set off warning bells. If we impose a 65 miles-per-hour speed limit, we’re on the way to a 55 m.p.h. limit, then down to 5 m.p.h., and ultimately to mandatory driving in reverse. If Rove was exaggerating for rhetorical effect, he was acceptably - delightfully - bombastic; if he meant that remark literally, he was deceptive and hence unethical.

This is almost a case study of IF THEN statements that spring from a very parochial conventional urban left meta-context, but it at least has the virtue of making no bones where it is coming from. The fact that almost every refutable contention is treated as if it is a self-evident truth is what makes this almost a pure argument from subconscious meta-context. A quick fisking of the 'money quotes':

Public and private institutions have long undertaken similar tasks and without dire consequences. Private schools survive public education: Brearley and Bronx Science peacefully coexist. FedEx tolerates the U.S. Postal Service. Six Flags is facing bankruptcy, but no one proposes that we close down Yosemite or Yellowstone to protect it.

Something many conservatives and almost no libertarian would agree with. Private schools tend to be tolerated as long as they submit to massive regulation of content, in effect becoming outsourced state approved education providers, with truly dire long term consequences for the culture. FedEx does not 'tolerate' the U.S. Postal Service, it is prevented from delivering letters under force of law. The last example is a non sequitur. Yet these are presented as examples because Randy Cohen cannot really believe anyone in good faith could think otherwise. No doubt he is surrounded by people who reinforce that feeling.

This is a slippery-slope argument, the sort of thing that should set off warning bells. If we impose a 65 miles-per-hour speed limit, we’re on the way to a 55 m.p.h. limit, then down to 5 m.p.h., and ultimately to mandatory driving in reverse.

Sure, the final bit is an attempt at reductio ad absurdum, which is not intrinsically unethical but the reason the whole thrust of the argument fails is that it is logicaly false, based on the meta-contextual given that states are free to impose speed limits. Stated more logically, an absolute prerequisite of having a 65, 55 or 5 mph speed limit is permitting the state to set speed limits. If you oppose speed limits, allowing the state to set speed limits is the slippery slope to having the state actually impose a speed limit. That is not a disingenuous argument, it is an indisputable fact.

This is the very argument used by Second Amendment defenders in the USA: allowing the state to restrict people's right to keep and bear arms is the slippery-slope to restricting that right completely, and so the very principle must be resisted in its entirety. To argue that is not true, regardless of where you stand on the issue, well that is disingenuous and therefore unethical.

So Representative Paul Ryan's claim that a politically directed, non-market sensitive tax funded alternative to the (already heavily regulated) market in health care will distort the market even more is not just his opinion, it is a truism, because such things are designed to distort the market in ways that are deemed politically desirable. That much is indisputable because that is the objective: these schemes are designed to make non-state directed health care less profitable and therefore 'more affordable' (so the reasoning goes).

This may be a good or bad thing, but the notion that it is unethical to take the view that a market-immune state funded competitor will damage some businesses is remarkable because that is, frankly, what it is intended to do.

Now one could argue that Randy Cohen is in fact the unethical one by trying to place perfectly supportable contentions beyond the bounds of ethical discussion as a political tactic, and for all I know that is true...

...but as I do not know the man and do not habitually read his blog, I am just looking at this article in isolation and offering up a possible alternative theory why he wrote what he wrote: he literally does not understand the premises from which this opposition to something he supports comes from. Thus he can only conclude unethical motivations because it just does not make sense to him. His meta-context simply prevents him from understanding the real reasons people do not think as he does.

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The other night I attended a talk by Tara Smith, a philosopher from the University of Texas who has written a number of good books, such as this one. Her talk was at a private event so I am not going to relate the exact details of what was said, but one thing that struck me during the Q&A session was when a guy in the audience, who clearly disagreed violently with Prof. Smith's views, began to state that she "did not get" certain ideas (which he presumably agreed with).

I really dislike this verbal tactic, although I occasionally find myself lapsing into it, and I should not. When we say that someone does not "get" something, such as not "getting" rock music, or clothes fashions, or a political creed, or whatnot, what they really are trying to say is that "X does not like or agree with this because he or she is an idiot or is blind to the wonderfulness of it." I remember, back in the days when he was cheerleading for George W. Bush, Andrew Sullivan was a particularly bad offender, writing about how X or Y did not "get" the threat posed by Saddam/etc and so forth. Even if Sullivan was right at the time, this tactic smacked of saying that smart, clever people like him understood what was going on but those who did not were in some ways deficient in their reasoning.

Jamie Whyte, about whom I have written before, has a great book debunking these lazy ways of thinking and arguing. Well worth the read.

(14)

Books that try to convey important philosophical ideas can sometimes be a bit of a struggle to read. Much as I liked Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged for the sheer sweep of the novel and the way it tackled all manner of topics, I'll be the first to concede that some folk out there will find that type of book a daunting read. But a shorter, and highly engaging, example of something rather similar has been out for a few months now: "Old Nick's Guide To Happiness", by Nicholas Dykes.

I will not give the plot away but to say that Mr Dykes' novel is based in the wilds of Scotland, focusing on what happens when a young man, who is shortly to head off for Oxford as an undergraduate, gets lost and hurt during a hiking expedition in the Highlands, and how he falls in with a rather unusual couple living there. There are lots of discussions of philosophy and ideas along the way, but is done in such a charming way that the reader, whatever their views, will not feel they are being lectured at. Admittedly, if you are a religious fundamentalist, deep Green or hardline collectivist, then this book will drive you nuts.

I have known Mr Dykes for several years and he has been a regular writer for the Libertarian Alliance, among other places. I liked this book very much and I hope Mr Dykes tries his hand at another novel. As he realises, abstract treatises are all very well, but if you can convey ideas through the medium of fiction, with strong characters, a good plot and plenty of engaging detail, it can be far more effective. The Left, if I can be permitted to use that term has long understood this - it needs to be understood by those who work in the broadly classical liberal tradition, too. And the same point applies even more, perhaps, to the world of TV drama and films.

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Many people say that the poll tax funded BBC no longer matters - but I do not agree.

The BBC matters less than it once did, but it (or rather parts of it) is still considered a source of serious discussion - and things said on the BBC go into the schools and colleges (via teachers and university lecturers - the sort of people who still actually listen to things like BBC Radio Four) and even into the entertainment media - as BBC money is still a major source of funding for comedians, and actors and even pop singers like to be thought of as "intellectual" so they follow what other people tell them are serious ideas.

The BBC is not all "Eastenders" and other soap operas; it still considers itself in the business of spreading ideas (although, of course, even the soap operas spread ideas and attitudes) and the Reith Lectures, named after the founder of the BBC, John Reith, is what BBC thinks of as the high point of its "High Culture" mission.

Of course the vile taxpayers may not actually listen to the Reith Lectures, or understand them if we did, but watered down and adapted forms of the ideas expressed in the Reith Lectures will be used to "educate" our children and even "inform" popular entertainers, so whether we listen or not is not really relevant from the point of view of the BBC.

The Reith Lectures this year are to be delivered by what the BBC’s advertisements describe as "one of the world’s great philiosphers", Michael Sandel, actually a Harvard professor who has spent his entire academic life repeating the statist mantras of the late John Rawls. In this context, see Antony Flew's examination of the ideas such men stand for, which Flew gives in such works as "Equality: In Liberty and Justice".

As for the "philosophy" the lectures will contain - the ads tell us what this will be. "The last 30 years has seen market mania and deregulation" leading to the present financial crises, says the "great philosopher". Of course, this is a mixture of economic history, a claim about the past 30 years and economics (a claim that certain economic policies have led to certain results) which is not "philosophy" at all - but lest us examine the case on its own "merits".

In the United States, I can think of one bit of financial deregulation over the last 30 years. In the Clinton years, the block on the same company being involved in both retail banking and merchant banking was removed. However, overall there has been a vast INCREASE in financial regulation in the United States - for example the Community Reinvestment Act forcing banks and others to lend money to people unlikely to pay it back, was past about 30 years ago but was only given real teeth in the years of Clinton and Bush, thanks to Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd. But it is not just the Community Reinvestment Act - there are thousands upon thousands of pages of financial regulation, every detail of operations (from the conditions of lending to bonus structure) is regulated by the government.

As for Britain there was actually very little internal financial regulation 30 years ago (although exchange controls were only formally abolished in 1979). For example "insider trading" was legal and the FSA (the British counterpart of the SEC) did not even exist. Thirty years ago the City of London still was governed by given word and handshake - not the endless regulations (and the vast corporations and ever present lawyers they lead to) that dominate the place today.

So are we to assume that the "great philosopher" is totally ignorant of the fact that his claim of vast "financial deregulation" is not just false but actually the opposite of the truth? I am sorry but I do not believe that it is ignorance - it is dishonesty, trying to spread a political message by deception. "Philosophy" based on lies.

As for the causes of the present crises these are no secret.

The statism that caused the present crises is exposed by such works as Thomas Sowell's "The Housing Bubble: Boom and Bust" and Thomas Woods' "Meltdown". Both best selling works in the country of which the "great philospher" is a citizen.

It was the expansion of the credit money supply by the Federal Reserve system and the "affordable housing" policy pushed, via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - "private" institutions under government control, by such people as Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd that caused the present crises. It was not caused by "making things object for sale that should not be a matter of money at all" - although the Harvard Prof is welcome to campaign against Federal subsidies (via the banking of student loans and so on) for Harvard.

After all, the "moral" thing to do would be for him not to take money for "educating" the young, a basic "right" no doubt, and to support himself by taking an ordinary job whilst lecturing and writing books (books that he would not accept payment for) in his spare time.

Actually I am not against the "great philosopher" be paid for his work, although I regard his work as being utterly without moral worth - not matter how much financial worth it may have, a distinction I am sure he would agree with, as long as there is no taxpayer support for his institution of for students who choose to go to the place. Let people go and listen to blatant lies if they wish - but let them pay for all this "education" themselves.

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There is a Reuters story quoting a survey suggesting that the recession could trigger a general increase in violence around the world. As is always important in these kind of claims, we need to be sure that correlation between two things - violence and economic uncertainty - is not being conflated with causation. Consider: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the early 1990s when the world, in general, was quite prosperous, albeit coming out of a short recession in countries such as the US and UK, when the price of oil had also been falling. The violence that broke out in the MEast later in parts of Africa (think Sudan, think USS Cole) took place in the middle to late-1990s, a period when emerging market economies were generally on the rise. The exceptions may prove the rule: what I think is true is that places that are felt, rightly or wrongly, to be unfairly excluded from a global prosperity are often likely to be unstable, and quite violent, but not always.

In fact, it is even arguable that greater prosperity might even cause some forms of violence if reactionary/religious groups regard such wealth as a defilement of whatever it is they want to protect. (I happen to think that explains why some anti-globalisation folk are often, in essence, reactionary snobs). That in part explains the argument of those who said that the West was attacked on 9/11 not for its supposed transgressions in the Middle East, but for its wealth and freedom per se.

Where I think economics does play a more direct role is where you have regimes that are financially busted, with few remaining resources, and where they greedily, and desperately, eye other, resource-rich nations nearby. That explains some, but not all, military campaigns. As in the case of Japan during the 1930s, a hunger for raw materials, coupled with a militaristic ruling ideology and elite, led to the Japanese conquests in parts of East Asia and the Pacific Rim. The same happened with Argentina and its invasion of the Falklands Islands in 1982 (the islands are supposedly close to some very big oil reserves). Ceasar's conquest of Gaul had a partly economic incentive (all that gold, slaves, etc). And so on.

There may also be some evidence that the more prosperous we are, the more tolerant we are, too. In fact tolerance, which is allied to liberty, and prosperity, are faces of the same coin. In the minds of the great Victorian champions of free trade, such as Richard Cobden and John Bright, free trade and peace went hand in hand. A bit naive, maybe - trade routes need to be protected against thieves and thugs - but it is a view based on an essentially benign view of how most of us live our lives, given half a chance.

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Mike Oliver (who blogs as 'Mr. Integrity'... currently off-line) spotted an interesting article over on National Review that for once does not try to give Rand a kicking.

BB&T - and its open defence of rational/individualist/objectivist philosophy, a credo that runs counter to 2000 years of Judea/Christian/subjectivist/marxist ethics and deeper subjectivist planks that link those categories. Explicit defense of reason - I say!

Yes, such businessmen do exist, they are not merely the stuff of a well-known novel. As opposed to at least a large plurality of "business leaders" who seek always to cultivate government/business linkages, contracts, and of course regulations that "rationalize" their sectors (with such government rules used to ossify the industry with them - the privileged businessmen- commanding a degree of non-market control over that business sector). In history classes the U.S. trends now massively underway was how Fascism was defined.

But modern lovers of the State seem to have conveniently blanked that out. Anyway BB&T stands out from the crowd. What is most curious on a meta-level about this online article is that it comes from NationalReviewOnline.

National Review has been and until now at least was always the most outspoken and spewing opponent of Rand & Objectivism. Denouncing Rand's rational philosophical base. NR has always been at its core, and explicity so - Buckley's first book was titled God and Man at Yale) a subjectivist, religiously-planked political credo, arguing that God and a belief therein is the basis of capitalism and individual rights, etc. No wonder over the decades so many young potentially-bright students have mistakenly linked (as their professors would have them do) capitalism, or such that we have had in the U.S. that is labeled "capitalism." with a religous or non-rational philosophical base.

Many of those students, not realizing the subjectivist, A-is-not-A base of Marxism, therefore sized-up the two choices - of an ethical code based on mysticism (the Buckley-type defence of "capitalism"... or Marxism... which to so many seemed a "scientific" or otherwise rational view of the world. And tended to opt for the later - either Marxism or many of its falsely-"humanist" variants.

Anyway, National Review was on the side of mysticism and held that banner high while viciously attacking Rand and her atheism - almost foaming in their attacks over the years. Well, perhaps even that changes with new blood at National Review? No, it's probably just the failure of one of their higher editors to notice that one of their writers slipped this article onto their online site. Well, in any case it is an interesting article about the current times and the role of ideas: ideas taken from reality then applied back to issues of dealing with reality.

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"There is no doubting that materialism can be a cause of spiritual emptiness and no doubt there are a lot of people who "starve for want of luxuries." But it is always easy to regard another man's things as superficial and another man's pursuits as greedy, while one's own belongings have sentimental value and one's own pursuits are profound (or at least harmless indulgences). It is even easier for self-righteous 30 year olds to regard older men with families as leading lives of desperation, while impressing themselves with the depth of their spiritual access."

- Timothy Sandefur. He subjects Henry Thoreau, darling of the back-to-nature types, to a ferocious take-down. Read the whole thing.

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"Even those who have never taken seriously utopias of classless societies and pure socialism have been seduced in the course of the last 100 years into falsely concluding that the critical role in society is the perogative of envious dispositions whom a single concession would supposedly placate...The time has surely come when we should stop behaving as though the envious man was the main criterion for social and economic policy."

- Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, page 427. In the light of last week's terrible UK budget and its levelling intent, his book repays reading. It often enrages egalitarians when they are told that much of their views are a rationalisation for envy, but that rage perhaps suggests that such a charge touches on a truth they would rather not contemplate for long.

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I think this is great, from regular commenter here NickM of Counting Cats:

The tale science tells about how we got here (and got to the point where we could ask such questions) is not just truer than the bronze-age claptrap of The Bible (or Qu'ran or stories about Marduk or whatever …) but more compelling. We are DNA on the right-handed scroll and it has taken four billion years to make us. We are that amazing. Isn't that more compelling than some old shit about talking snakes and a job done in six days? Is it not a truly grand narrative? The truth is so much more beautiful than the lie. It is also the truth and that also goes a long way on it's own.

Ah, c'mon folks … I have heard enough from creationists about how if we're merely risen slime we're still slime and that in some unspecified way we are therefore still tainted by the slime. But what slime! This piece of slime can be moved to tears by the music of Palestrina, this piece of slime can be amused by the plays of William Shakespeare, this piece of slime can parse HTML and FORTRAN. This piece of slime can factorize quadratics, do integration by parts and hold an opinion on the Copenhagen Interpretation. This is one hell of a piece of slime and so, dear reader, are you.

I am proud to be slime with post-graduate qualifications. I am stardust (so are you) created in the forge of supernovae (is that not cool?). I am atoms in motion (so are you). I am victory (so are you). I am almost everything you are and you are almost everything I am. We share half of our DNA with cabbages after all.

I entirely agree with all this, but I do not stick it up here to insist that all of you do. I know that all of you do not, which is fine by me. Especially if, from what you do believe instead, you draw political conclusions with which I strongly do agree. I stick it up here because it puts a particular point (call it the "glory of slime" argument) in answer to a common objection to Darwinian atheism (the "sliminess of slime" argument) with exuberant eloquence. Even many of those who think it tosh will at least agree that it is very well written.

The Cat Counter acknowledges the sliminess of slime, but then trumps it with the grandeur. But I bet, when he wrote his bit, that he had, rattling about somewhere in his head, this, which acknowledges the grandeur but then trumps it with slime, or in this case with dust:

What piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

While Hamlet emphasises also what fine and beautiful athletes we are, NickM concentrates only our mental glories. An interesting omission, maybe? There are all kinds of memes floating about now to the effect that although many of us dirt-bags are clever, we are not that beautiful, a blot on the world even, compared to many other more exotic looking animals, who now seem to us much more express and admirable in form and moving. Maybe this is something to do with how we have evolved to admire how we look only when young, yet are clever enough now to have contrived for millions upon millions of us to be shuffling on unattractively into old age instead of reverting to actual dirt at forty and being replaced by younger and prettier dirt-bags.

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They still don't get it. In what is a generally very good, readable account of the life and times so far of Andrew Sullivan and his role in driving the blog format, the author, Johann Hari, comes out with this:

Oakeshott believed we should be sceptical of all human institutions—including markets. He savaged Hayek’s market fundamentalist bible, “The Road to Serfdom”, as another rationalist delusion. He saw it as a utopian plan to end planning, yet another argument that a perfect system could be found, this time in markets. Sullivan’s scepticism, by contrast, has been lop-sided. He is highly sceptical of the capacity of governments to act, but he has often presented markets as close to infallible, if left undistorted by government action.

Well I cannot recall what Oakeshott - a writer that I have studied a bit - said about the Road To Serfdom (both men taught at the London School of Economics, by the way), but that strikes me as a terribly confused paragraph. The whole point about Hayek's demolition of the argument for central planning and socialism is that these ideas take no account of human ignorance, of the inability of any central planner, or group of planners, to have at their fingertips all the knowledge needed to co-ordinate supply and demand. Capitalism, and the "discovery process" of competitive markets, and risk-taking of entrepreneurs, works precisely because it does not require humans to be omniscient, but to capitalise on what they do know. Far from being a utopian, Hayek's brand of classical liberalism - he called himself an "old Whig - is premised on the very kind of doubts and skepticisms that someone like Andrew Sullivan professes to hold. In fairness to Sullivan - to whom I have been rather unkind because of his support for a Big Government man like Mr Obama - he understands this point, or at least he used to do so.

Hari then goes on to approvingly quote a bete noire of mine, Naomi Klein:

This belief has been at the core of the left-wing writer Naomi Klein’s criticisms of Sullivan. She says: “Where is this ideal capitalism of which [he] speaks? It reminds me of people on the very far left who, where when you present them with evidence of the real-world application of their ideology, say, ‘That doesn’t count, that was a distortion.’ Well, where’s the real version?”

The "real version" of free markets can be found in say, parts of 18th and 19th Century Britain, when wealth exploded by any historical precedents; in Hong Kong, a place with no natural resources other than the entrepreneurial vigour of its people, and in the US, for much of its history, etc.

The more free, the less distorted, such markets are, by such things as central banks, taxes and regulations, the better such places tend to be, although the public can be misled by the prophets of big government into thinking that further progress requires something different. As I unashamedly say over and over, the current financial snafu lies, at root, on the doorstep of central - state - banks. That is not just a quibble. It is at the heart of the issue. It is no good socialists like Ms Klein trying to compare free market critics of mixed-economies like the UK with socialists trying to claim that the Soviet Union did not work because it was not done right or was a bit oppressive. The two worldviews are coming from fundamentally different premises about the issue of how you deal with lack of complete knowledge by individuals who must still act and take decisions. The disasters of socialism are features, not bugs.

There is another point for Mr Hari and others to consider: when firms go bust, it actualy generates knowledge and encourages businesses to do something different, to adjust. When a government department fails, as the CIA failed in not stopping 9/11, or the SEC failed in not stopping Bernard Madoff, does the organisation suffer the equivalent of going bankrupt? No, of course not. Instead, there are calls for more regulations, more officials, bigger budgets. There is no negative feedback loop in government, apart from the highly unreliable process of the occasional general election.

At some point, I have to wonder whether simple ignorance can explain why such articulate writers can get it so wrong. A part of me wants to suppress the desire to say, "Because they are evil", since that clearly is not quite right. Why do such misconceptions stick, like barnacles on a ship's hull, so tenaciously? Perhaps such people have crafted a viewpoint for themselves that defines their very being. I guess even I might have to admit some of that.

Update: Sullivan asks some hard but fair questions about the Tea Party protesters. He's got a point. If opposing the bailouts means letting say, AIG go down the U-bend with all that implies, the protesters should perhaps concede as much. That is why the work of economists over in the UK such as Kevin Dowd is so important. We need to chart a course to a better, less imperfect, place.

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I would not recommend spending major chunks of one's only life helping to clean up the intellectual mess inflicted by post-modernism, but occasionally keeping tabs on the mess, and on those heroic souls who are part of this noble cleansing project, can be fun. In this spirit, I recommend this.

To start with I was merely going to do a(n) SQOTD, but the list of bits I found I wanted to recycle here from this conversation soon outgrew that plan.

Bit one, from David Thompson, in connection with a response to a posting he did about art bollocks (Thompson's italics are here emboldened):

One postmodernist commenter took exception to my criticism - first by accusing me of arguing things I clearly wasn’t arguing, then by saying I was holding “entrenched positions” in which “aesthetic values” (in scare quotes), “scientific reality/clarity” (again, in scare quotes) and my own “reliance on logical consistency” (ditto) were obstacles to comprehension. Specifically, they were obstacles to comprehending Shvarts’ alleged (but oddly unspecified) “arguments of power, control [and] dominance.” The tone was, of course, condescending and self-satisfied. I’m guessing the commenter in question didn’t pause to consider the possibility that one might find pomo bafflegab objectionable precisely because it represents the “power, control [and] dominance” of what amounts to a priestly caste.

Bit two, also from Thompson (the Windschuttle essay he refers to is here):

In the essay linked above, Keith Windschuttle names various academics and educational advisors who claim that truth and reality are “authoritarian weapons” and that disinterested scholarship is merely “an ideological position” favoured by “traditionalists and the political right.” This presents a rather handy excuse to dismiss political dissent without having to engage with inconvenient arguments. Presumably, if you prefer arguments that are comprehensible and open to scrutiny, this signals some reactionary tendency and deep moral failing. On the other hand, if you sneer at such bourgeois trifles, you’re radical, clever and very, very sexy. (Though I wonder what mathematicians and structural engineers would make of this claim. Is there such a thing as a rightwing calculation, or a rightwing bridge - I mean a bridge that’s rightwing because it doesn’t promptly collapse?)

This reminds me of a very funny bit in this book where John O'Farrell (his subtitle is: “Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter, 1979-1997” - here's hoping you ain't seen nothing yet mate), recalled that certain leftwing university radicals of his acquaintance used to regard smiling as rightwing.

Since Stephen Hicks is the grandee being interviewed here, let Hicks have bit three:

The function of language is to express one's thoughts. If you think truth is possible, then you work hard to understand the world clearly and completely. But if you doubt that truth is possible, that has psycho-epistemological consequences: you come to believe that the world is at best fuzzy and your mind incapable of grasping it - you come to believe deep down that all is fractured and disjointed - and your writing will tend to the fuzzy, the fractured, and the disjointed. And in consequence you will come to be suspicious of clarity in others. Clarity, from this perspective, must be an over-simplifying.

It's tempting to dismiss postmodernism as being such obvious and such obviously self-destructive intellectual junk as not to be worth bothering with. Just hold your nose and walk on by, don't complain about it, it only encourages them, etc. But postmodernism has had, and continues to have, a hideously destructive effect on the study of the humanities in universities (somewhat less so on anything with pretensions towards being in any way scientific), and it will only go away if the next few generations of scholars can be persuaded to treat it with the contempt that it deserves. So keep it up, Hicks, and thank you, Thompson, for talking with him so interestingly.

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"'Cant' is a four-leter word we don't use much now. Most people of my generation have never heard of it, never alone use it in conversation...to apply it to someone is to accuse them of sloppy thinking, if you are being kind, or, at the very worst, of a total lack of sincerity."

Ben Wilson.

Of course, when it comes to sincerity, one should remember as Milton Friedman once put it, that sincerity is a much overpraised virtue. People can sincerely believe in all manner of utter rubbish, while others insincerely pay tribute to things that are right and true. Oh, the crooked timber of humanity.

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"The idea that everyone is entitled to his opinion is one of those truisms so often repeated that it now goes without saying. Like many truisms, however, it is false. It is also usually irrelevant. Let us suppose that Jill disputes Jack’s opinion that free trade causes poverty in the Third World. Jack may defend his opinion by producing evidence connecting trade and poverty but he cannot help his case by insisting that he is entitled to his opinion. How could that show that free trade causes poverty in the Third World? The entitlement would be relevant only if it guaranteed the truth of your opinions. But it can’t do that, because it is an entitlement supposedly enjoyed by everybody. And people disagree. Jack and Jill are both entitled to their contradictory opinions about trade and poverty, but they can’t both be right. So insisting that you are entitled to your opinion cannot possibly give you any proper advantage in a debate."

- Jamie Whyte.

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Last night I heard an argument used in relation to the climate change argument and Man's alleged role in driving it, that went along the following lines: We have a responsibility to ensuing generations, maybe even those around 1,000 years or so hence, which means we should do X or Y to curb CO2 emissions etc to ensure that these future generations' lives are not blighted.

Now of course nothing is more likely to get your humble blogger annoyed than the "Do it for the children" line. The precautionary principle: do nothing if you cannot prove it will not cause harm - would have killed the Industrial Revolution at birth, prevented any life-saving drug from having been brought to market, been used to shut down scientific speculation, space-faring, advanced dental surgery, modern medicine, the whole 9 yards of human endeavour. And the problem with the argument that says "We have a responsibility to generations yet unborn" is that it demands a great deal. How on earth can I or others evaluate the proper limits or scope of such a responsibility? What about the Law of Unintended Consequences? For instance, if we adopt the PP, and we severely curtail the pace of industrial development, scientific advance or economic growth, will we not bring about disastrous consequences for our children, grand-children and so on? In fact, if folk want to bring up the issue of "Do it for the kids", I tend to respond that if we are to take this sort of multi-generational responsibility, then we should go for as much freedom and growth as possible, and not the other way around.

Another way to think about this is from the position of scarcity, both in terms of time and resources. I only have so much time in my life to make the sort of adjustments that I might hope to benefit my kids, or my grandkids, or whatever. I also only have so many resources at my disposal. And with that in mind, I think that governments - which after all are only collections of persons - have only fixed resources and time at their disposal too, and that there are major tradeoffs to be considered in stifling a technology A to benefit a technology B. Simply repeating that we "owe it to our children" does not take us very far. All too often, in fact, the line about protecting future generations can easily descend into a form of argument by intimidation, a sort of moral bullying.

When it comes to bad arguments used in conversations on topics like this, Jamie Whyte's gem of a book repays a lot of reading for avoiding pitfalls.

Of course, as a final point, the "Do it for the kids" argument frequently comes from those advocates of greater state controls who are blind to the damage that the state does, sometimes deliberately, to the institution of the family. The ironies abound.

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Darwin gave us hope, not God. We have an inbuilt Pandora's box that enables us to deceive not only others but ourselves. Deception is clearly linked to neural complexity and a positive perception of our environs is a deep-rooted drive. Without this, we cannot accomplish what we set out to do. Moreover, we have a tendency to deceive ourselves and deny the truth, since the alternative is depression and despair.

Evolutionary Psychiatrist Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan is a great believer in hope as a evolutionary strategy. According to Nesse, all emotions have an evolutionary basis, and for every negative emotion, there is a balancing positive one. Hope arrives on the coattails of despair, and without hope, we'd all be lost. Since everyone experiences bad stuff, and feels it deeply, our brains have adapted by also delivering hope. And without our inborn measure of hope, we fall into depression, where someone like psychiatrist Nesse has to remind us to be hopeful.

The rhetoric of hope adopted by Barack Obama and other politicians becomes more understandable as a strategy that draws upon deep seated biases within human societies. It is noteworthy that hope has formed a strong component of many religious messages: thus rendering the satirical embodiment of the Messiah in the President-elect more accurate in Darwinian terms.

Darwinian explanations add to the complex mix of our understanding of human action. They do not replace or simplify this complex cultural mosaic.

This small point does give us an insight into power: for those who truly love terror would deny hope to all. The true totalitarian states of the twentieth century tried to deny hope to all of their victims and even then, failed in their torture. Yet, the same horizons are also eroded and extinguished over the longer term by other systems, such as welfare. There is no comparison between the terror of the prison camps and the grey anomie of incapacity benefits. But both, I suspect, through different means, overturn this need for self-deception, acknowledging the primacy of politics and society over the weak orientation of our evolved psychology.

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Amid all the words that will be written about the UK government's Pre-Budget Report statement yesterday, many will no doubt focus on the utility, or otherwise, of proposed measures such as creating a new, higher 45 per cent tax band on people earning £150,000 or more. Maybe even some supply-siders will point to the destructive effects, the counter-productive consequences, and the likely exodus of entrepreneurs and wealthy citizens, if the tax hike becomes law - after the next election. And they will be right to do so, of course. Throw in the impact of cuts to tax allowances and rises in national insurance payments - a tax by any other name - and the real upper rate of tax is heading towards 50 per cent. I hope all those middle England Jeremy's and Fionas who voted for that nice Mr Blair and who turfed out the Tories are feeling suitably chastened.

But the core of the problem with resisting such egalitarian acts of robbery is that pointing out the bad economic effects of such measures is not enough. Large swathes of the UK public do not care, or assume that they will never be very rich anyway, so why should they be worried? The current government and public sector, with state, inflation-proofed salaries, could not give a damn either. What is lacking from almost all political and media analysis of the increased steepness of the progressive tax code is a moral element.

Progressivism is a looter's charter. There is no coherent, objective principle by which one can say that a person earning XXX should contribute say, 40 per cent of their income to the State while another person, on a higher figure, should pay 50, or 60, or even 80 per cent. It is about as scientific as plucking figures at random from a telephone directory. This is not just unwise, it is wicked.

The only reason I can think of for progressive tax is to offset the potential regressive impact of taxes on consumption such as VAT, sales taxes and the like. However, in practice the people who might benefit from any offset are not the same as those who get hit by a consumption tax in the first place. Far better, in fact, to cut through the web of complexity and introduce a flat-tax where the whole population, apart from the poor, pay the same percentage of their income, preferably at a much lower rate. Of course, the ultimate objective is not just flatter taxes, but lower, or no taxes, at all. But although this appears so much dreaming at the moment, anyone who wants to make the moral and philosophical case for lower taxes and against egalitarian thieving must do so in such moral terms and not expect that economic arguments will win the day. What Alistair Darling proposed yesterday was to clobber people for no other reasons than they happen to be well off and he knew quite well that his tax increase will garner relatively little revenue. But he does not give a brass farthing. This government is now acting out of spite.

I finish with this quote, taken from here: "The moment you abandon the cardinal principle of exacting from all individuals the same proportion of their income or of their property, you are at sea without rudder or com pass, and there is no amount of injustice and folly you may not commit."

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"I have met several people, who when explaining the extreme youth or old age of their parents, have told me, "Of course, I was an accident." Well, if they can admit it, why can't we all. Our existence is not due to the preference of some fabulous Being: it is just dumb luck. Why people should feel bothered by this I don't know. They have won the lottery of life!"

Jamie Whyte, Bad Thoughts, page 128

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Like a critical, if at times exasperated admirer of the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, I am interested to read books by people who are sharply critical of her work because it is a sign, as far as I can see, that she is starting to attract proper, scholarly attention. That is surely better than blind hatred or for that matter, Randroid hero-worship.

Hence I was quite intrigued when I came across the book, entitled "Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature." Unfortunately, as this review of it at Amazon demonstrates, the author of the book mirrors a trait of the woman he criticises in one key respect: he writes in a state of furious anger and sarcasm, whiich rather undermines his own effort to take her arguments apart. Rand, for sure, was an angry writer - she had a lot to be angry about - but she was often guilty of abrupt dismissals of philosophers one might regard as giants or at least want to consider more gently: David Hume, for instance. And some of her judgements on aesthetic matters make me rub my eyes in amazement. For example, she regarded Beethoven as "malevolent", which is a pretty bizarre comment on the creator of "Ode To Joy", about as unmalevolent bit of music you can ever hear.

But the fact is that in my mind, much of what she stood for and argued about is as relevant and useful now as it was half a century ago. Her impact on driving a libertarian movement, even if she spurned the term, cannot be denied. On art, for example, I find a lot of her ideas very fruitful in explaining why I respond to some works of art and cannot abide some others. I like the way that she understood, for example, the appeal of so-called "bootleg romantic" culture such as pulp thrillers and popular action film heroes and heroines. I think she played an important role in invigorating the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy and has encouraged me to follow this up by reading writers such as Henry Veatch and these fellows. Meanwhile, I keep coming across references from people saying that the present credit crisis and the governments' response to it is something out of Atlas Shrugged. So it clearly annoys leftists that she is still cited in this fashion. The fact that Rand is part of the current intellectual conversation is one reason why I am not quite as gloomy about the state of affairs in this world than I might otherwise have been. Let's face it, had one of her former acolytes, Alan Greenspan, stuck to his early disdain for central banking before he became part of the system, we might not be in this mess today.

This blog looks pretty interesting for critical fans of Rand.

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This week end I got caught up in re-reading a book which I come back to at intervals: L. Neil Smith's, 'The Probability Broach'. Even if you have read the full novel and the numerous sequels about that parallel universe where there is real freedom, I strongly recommend you try the graphic novel treatment by Scott Bieser. It is great fun and a pleasant read and re-read and re-re-read.

Smith explains libertarianism by showing you what sort of world it would be if America had truly gone down the path of liberty instead of bureaucratic state control. His alternate universe is an educational one... and enticing. Bieser's rendering of it in classic comic book format draws you in and injects our memes directly into your lower brain stem. Read this book and all your bases are belong to LP!

I always have it sitting in view, ready for me to thumb through at the odd moment.

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Glenn Reynold's has a review at Pajamas Media of Ron Paul's best selling new treatise, "The Revolution: A Manifesto".

He has beaten me to the punch as my copy is waiting for me in New York City and I will not see it until Thursday, No problem though: Glenn seems to have almost exactly the same opinions I expect I will have. This is not so strange after all. We are both Heinlein Libertarians with a long shared background.

I guess I will just have to sit back in my favorite upper west Columbia University hangout (a Starbucks) and watch some of the regulars go apoplectic. Some times I just like to be evil.

But you knew that.

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One writer I rate pretty highly is Ross Clark. As well as being a regular newspaper and magazine columnist in places like The Times (of London) and The Spectator, he is also the author of several good books. He has written a fine piece, with deliberate echoes of George Orwell, about the current mania for surveillance in Britain. His liberal views seem to be pretty robust. He has also written a short satire on life in Britain in 2051, a dystopia, showing what the country became when industrialism, liberty and associated individualism, modern technology, medicine, commerce and mass travel and communications were destroyed by a mixture of forces. Unlike the dystopias of Huxley which attacked modern technology, Clark's dystopia very clearly shows that, with all its occasional shallowness and gaudiness, life as we now enjoy it is pretty wonderful and to turn our backs on it would be to miss things such as mass communications and information sources; techniques such as modern dentistry and keyhole surgery; cheap flights; fast, relatively safe transport, cuisine from around the world; downloadable music of any type available for a few cents, the prospect of DNA mapping to cure many diseases... the list rolls on. Our society is still pretty free, on the whole - though the losses of civil liberties and the associated nanny statist developments are a part of the trend towards a darker society that Clark writes about. But if you think, gentle reader, that Gordon Brown's Britain is bad in certain respects, then Clark's version is vastly worse still. He imagines a society, fractured into tiny tribal units lorded over by thugs and religious bigots, in which all these things and more are banished, loathed. His nightmare prediction is one of a world in which scientists, doctors, engineers and bankers are attacked, even murdered, for what they do. It is not a book to read if you are suffering from a bad depression and need a bit of cheering up.

A question that occurs to me about this book is that Clark seems to have written it with the partial object of satirising reactionary Greenery, religious fundamentalism and technophobia, hoping no doubt that the loathesomeness of the dystopia he presents will remind readers of the dangers of what the Greens/others have in store. My problem, though, is that other dystopian novels have often not had much of a salutary effect. As Perry of this parish remarked some time ago, our capacity for satire has been so sated by real-life lunacy that even a hit TV show called 'Big Brother', taking a line from Orwell's 1984, does not inspire the same intended feelings of loathing that Orwell's attack on totalitarianism was supposed to elicit. Fair enough, there are signs of a fightback against this trend.

But I wonder whether Clark is only really preaching to the converted. I hope not. I hope some stray Guardianista who thinks that John Gray or Bill McKibben are great sages will pick up this great little book and learn something from it. And for undecideds, I would hope that this dystopia warns them off from the anti-Enlightenment trend in which part of our society seems to be moving.

Perhaps a another way to think about winning arguments for technology, capitalism and so on is to portray positive fictional accounts of such things, rather than to portray the opposite. One way to win an argument to is be positive, to give examples of how things are improving, and improving the lives of millions of people. Grumpiness is not really a great sales pitch. Alas, avoiding the error of slipping into grumpiness is difficult when there is so much to be grumpy about, so it takes quite an effort to avoid it.

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On March 18th, it will be two years since the untimely death from cancer of Chris Tame, founder of the Libertarian Alliance, bibiophile, and sceptic about many things, including the time spent (wasted?) on party politics. There is a plan to commemorate the academic approach which Chris always thought was a key to winning the battle of ideas against collectivism of all shades, with the Inaugural Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture, at the National Liberal Club, in London on Tuesday at 6.30pm.

The speaker is Professor David Myddelton, from Cranfield University. The title of the lecture is: "How to Cure Government Obesity," which sounds like the sort of obesity we really ought to panic about.

Admission is free BUT ONLY if you contact Tim Evans, the LA's president, by email: tim [at] libertarian [dot] co [dot] uk. Numbers are limited and there are some drinks afterwards. I expect a recording will be made and linked to on either the LA blog or website. I shall certainly be there.

I especially miss the wicked sense of humour and the fact that my office is above an Amnesty International second-hand bookshop. It's the sort of place Chris would have spent five minutes scanning ALL the shelves - even sport, in case a Tae-Kwondo manual showed up! Then he would have chatted for an hour with the Socialist or Liberal volunteers in the shop, discussing what he termed "the rape of the libraries" and (sincerely) pushing against climate change on progressive humanist grounds.

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Science is a matter of data, experiment and falsification. Nature has no interest whatever in your particular 'ism', whether it be liberal, conservative, left, social, commune, cannibal, left, or libertarian. The universe just is and it does not give a damn what you believe about it.

I happen to feel the science is on the side of human caused climate change, but that is not what I want to discuss. In fact, I am going to strongly discourage that particular debate to the point of removing comments arguing either "t'is!" or "No, t'isn't!"

The discussion I would like to see is about the answers we as libertarians have if climate change is indeed real. Now if you believe as I do that it will happen, then obviously you have already been thinking about this issue. If I am wrong and nothing happens, then so much the better. If you believe there is no change, as I am sure many of you do, and you are wrong... the end result could be a complete loss of credibility and a delegitimization of everything we hold dear. The populace will not suffer gladly those who are wrong, especially if they have lost their homes and livelihoods.

Greenists, leftists, socialists and so forth have policies to 'deal' with the problem. In many cases these policies are simply their same old statist wish lists intellectually applied to the problem at hand. If change does occur, and most particularly if it occurs and appears or can be claimed to have been ameliorated by those policies they will use it against us.

This need not be the case. I am quite sure there are answers (and better ones) to all, or at least as much of the problem from our framework as from any other. Here is a range of scenarios for our discussion:

• We get 1-2 degrees of overall warming.
  
• We get between 1 and 10 meters of rise in mean sea level.
  

• Fresh water influx from the Greenland icecap modifies the salinity of the North Atlantic deep current and this pushes the Gulf stream southwards, adjusting Europe's climate to match that of the same latitudes in Canada.
  
• A major iceshelf in Antarctica 'ungrounds' and causes really major sea level rises of 30 meters or more over a period of a several decades.
  

• CO2 output hits its maximum value in the late 2020's or early 2030's and then begins to fall, despite continuing population increases, due to technological changes in primary energy and fuel production. I do not know whom the market winners will be, only that some technologies will supplant our current way of doing things.
  
• Population peaks around 2060 and then tails off by several billion by the end of the century. This is based on a UN demographic projection whose trends have been roughly correct for as much of my life as I have been interested in such things.
  
• The total CO2 and other factors causing more energy to be absorbed by the Earth climate system lag the CO2 input maximum by some time and begin to trail off around 2050.
  
• No solar Maunder type minimum's occur, ie, insolation of our planet remains pretty much constant over this century.
  
• Most of the climate changes are neither dramatic nor sudden, although a change in the Gulf Stream might only take a few years if it did happen.
  

Some examples of the questions to ask are:

• How would we handle the disastrous consequences for low lying nations? Would we have a class action suit of the form: 'Individuals Residing in Bangladesh, Florida, The Netherlands, Pacific Islands et al v. Fossil Fuel Using Individuals', for recompense for loss of real estate?
  
• To what extent does amortization of property purchases write down the losses?
  
• There would be winners and losers. For example, the US breadbasket would move northwards into Canada; some areas would become arid that were not; some areas would become tropical paradises that were not. As I have said before, complex non-linear systems can do just about anything when you pump energy into them. We will have to presume the results will be surprising and unpredictable. Some places might become hell hole swamps and others find themselves under glaciers. Mathematical chaos moves in strange ways. How should people deal with these unknowns?
  

Given this set of possible worlds, what do you feel are libertarian solutions which would turn more people towards our ideas than against them? If we do not have and sell our alternatives we are going to see policy decisions by others that we are not going to like one little bit, climate change or no climate change.

As the Boy Scouts say: Be Prepared!

Remember, this is not a debate about climate change. Such comments will be deleted to keep things focused. I want discussion to center on how free individuals would deal with the worst, should it happen.

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David Mamet, the US playright who for most of his adult life thought of himself as a liberal in the US sense - ie, a leftist with a favourable view of government - has had a sort of epiphany:

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

He finishes thus:

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

Interesting. Sowell is primarily an economist - and a great one - rather than a philosopher, although he has written on the topic (his debunking of Marxism is first-class). Even so, Mamet joins that small but influential group of writers, like Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and others who have become disenchanted with the default mode of big government worship of their peers. Mamet deserves applause for writing this piece; it appears in the Village Voice, and I bet his readership will get a sharp dose of the vapours.

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Matthew Lynn, a columnist for Bloomberg, has a good and succinct take on the latest nonsense about actions by the German and British government to use information - obtained in highly dubious circumstances - to go after people who have put their money away in tiny European tax havens such as Liechstenstein. Philip Chaston of this blog has already touched on the subject. The difficulty that even any pro-freemarketeer politicians - if there are many - have in defending tax havens is defending the right of people to essentially flee from an oppressive but still-democratic regime. In chatting to people on this issue and reading the commentary, a lot of people make the assumption that wealth is collectively owned if enough voters wish it so and that therefore no-one has the right to flee from the looting intentions of such voters. In other words, non-domiciled residents who want to get away from the British taxman are not being good, democratic citizens by shirking their 'responsibilities'.

At its core, what this issue throws up, beyond the practical issues of how tax rates hurt economies, is a broader issue of the obligations, if any, that an individual has to his fellow citizens. If one believes the classical liberal idea that governments exist to serve the individual and not the other way round, that individuals have no apriori obligations to others, then the crackdown on tax-avoiders should be seen as the power grab that it is.

Another issue, of course, is this: democracy and liberty are not the same thing, a point that has been remarked at this blog many times before. For sure, democracy may - may - be the least-worst way to kick out a government and replace it with a hopefully better one, but the idea that freedom comes from letting 51% of the electorate steal from 49% of the electorate has precious little to do with liberty. The right to own property and enjoy its fruits unmolested is as important as freedom of speech or the right to self defence. Tax havens rile communitarians precisely because they are a standing reproach to the looters who use democratic mandates to justify their depredations. They act as a brake on the power of governments with a temporary majority in a democratic assembly every bit as powerful as other checks and balances such as independent courts and upper chambers. And as traditional checks and balances are eroded - as they have been in Britain recently - we need all the constraints on national and supranational power we can get. We should therefore see the efforts by EU and other nations to create a global tax cartel as being every bit as dangerous as the alleged cartel deals forged by the 19th Century "robber barons", except of course that this latter group were usually unfairly maligned. Compared to the tax-cartel zealots, Rockefeller and Co. were strict amateurs.

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Surveys about happiness also show that people say they are happier when they feel their circumstances are improving. They are less likely to profess happiness in a wealthy society that is static than in a less rich society which is advancing. It is the improvement which counts, not the actual level. Jefferson rightly pointed to "the pursuit of happiness" rather than to any given level of it.

Humans are not the sort to enjoy static contentment. They seek challenges and the thrill of achievement. The peaceful calm of the Lotos Eaters is not for them, and neither are the sheep-pen and the secure pasture. Those who think of happiness as needs satisfied fail to spot that those needs include challenge and change. Humans are aspirational, seeking much more than the provision of necessities. Better a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

- Madsen Pirie reaches 39 in his Common Errors series at the ASI Blog (he has today reached 42)

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Considering how many health-scare news items there are these days, it makes me want to smile in a wry way when I also read about the supposed problems caused by an ageing, greying, population. The first and obvious question is: if we are all at such risk from obesity, drugs, booze, stress, pollution or the angst of watching Jonathan Ross, why are we living so much longer than our parents or grandparents? If this is what happens when the sky is supposedly always about to fall in, then what must a healthy population be like? And yet there is something in the human psyche, or our culture, that rebels against the happy prospect of a longer life. We are told, or at least have until recently accepted, that three-score years and ten is Man's rightful due (perhaps a tad longer for women); it is almost a hangover from religion to believe that it is impious, even blasphemous, to want to live for much longer. Andrew O'Hagan, writing in the Daily Telegraph today in a moan about how the elderly are treated in Britain - a valid subject - makes this point:

Growing old is now considered more of an option than an inevitability, something to beat rather than be resigned to, something that is thought to take away from one's individuality rather than deepen it.

I don't really know how death, or its inevitability, adds to one's individuality. I think I know what O'Hagan is trying to say: We are unique, precisely because we are mortal. We cannot be replaced, or copied.

The trouble, though, is that I don't see how one's uniqueness is somehow reduced by living for 200 years rather than say, 100, or 50, or 30. Were the ancient Romans - average lifespan about 35 - more individualistic and unique than a 21st Century Brit? How on earth can one measure this? Also, the desire to keep the Grim Reaper at bay surely attests to a love of life, not a denial of its value; if one believed in a craven acceptance of the inevitable, then why do we have doctors and hospitals?. I value my life rather a lot and am in no hurry to see my hair go all grey, my face resemble tree bark, and my limbs to seize up. Sorry, Mr O'Hagan, but I'd rather not suffer that fate any time soon. I go to the gym and try to keep fit despite my enjoyment of red wine. I have not signed up for cryonic suspension or anything like that but I keep an eye on life extension research and have been greatly impressed by the work of people such as Aubrey de Grey, among others. (Don't be put off by the immense beard, he's not a nutter). I lost a good friend and intellectual mentor, Chris Tame, nearly two years ago to the horror of bone cancer - he was in his mid-50s - and I am pretty sure this most unique of people could and should have been around for many more decades among us. (I particularly miss his outrageous jokes).

I remain to be convinced of the idea that to value one's life, it must be short, or that we should resign ourselves to it meekly. Meekness did not build the space rocket, the Aston Martin DB9 or even produce modern dental surgery.

Update: Glenn Reynolds has interesting thoughts on this subject. He's been writing on this for some time. Ronald Bailey, whom I met over a year ago during a book tour of London, is also well worth reading on this and related topics. I read this Peter Hamilton novel which touches on rejuvination; it is not one of his best tales, unfortunately (the Amazon.co.uk book reviews are not very flattering).

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is the head of the Church of England and as such, is still - amazingly - considered to be a person of some eminence. Unfortunately, he does not lend weight to that institution. Although the Anglican Church is far less powerful than it used to be - and for good reasons, such as the removal of 19th century electoral discrimination against Jews, Catholics and dissenters - it is still regarded with affection by many of us, even atheists, agnostics or lukewarm Christians. It has given us great thinkers; its liturgy and music are among the great adornments of western civilisation. Alas, Dr Williams is not a great thinker, although he is no doubt a kindly man.

Dr Williams believes that aspects of sharia law - which aspects he does not explictly say - should be allowed to form part of the law of this country. He does not explain what tests should be used to decide what bits of sharia law are acceptable and what are not. For example, in some of the most conservative muslim lands, the death penalty is used for offences far less serious than murder, such as adultery. We are not told what the Archbishop thinks about this; or whether he thinks things such as arranged marriage, etc, are acceptable. But he needs to be clear about what he thinks is acceptable, otherwise, all we can assume is that the fellow is mouthing vacuous platitudes, nothing more.

I do not believe you can operate a polycentric legal order in Britain, at least not in ways that would allow one legal code to allow coerced marriages, sitting alongside the English Common law. How, for example, could one avoid westernised Muslims wanting to be treated under the ordinary law of the land and not to be ruled over by their co-religionists? Without the active support of the State, I suspect, and hope, that many Muslims, particularly women, will revolt and choose to live under the Common Law tradition of this country. I hope so.

Dr Williams means well; a lot of such people do. But frankly, he gives lapsed Christians such as yours truly plenty of reason for wanting the Church to be shorn of its state privileges.

Of course, if people can freely choose to live under a sharia code, and consent in advance to submit to its controls, then I can hardly object to that. An interesting area at the moment is sharia finance; a problem, however, is that a lot of what is called Islamic finance is re-inventing of the wheel: if it is immoral to charge for lending money because money is not considered a legitimate asset in its own right (which is mistaken, as money accumulated by saving has involved sacrificing consumption) it seems odd that sharia does tolerate things like commodities speculation, such as certain forms of derivative contracts. But at least investors can shop around; arguably, some western investors might want to own sharia investments that avoid banks as a way to avoid the impact of the credit crunch. That is an example of capitalism at its best: allowing people of all faiths or none to do business with one another. Voltaire noticed this when he observed the London Stock Exchange in action in the 18th Century. But allowing sharia law to operate in matters such as marriage, divorce or punishment of supposed wrongdoings, in ways that are at clear variance to the prevailing legal code of a country like Britain, is an entirely different matter.

I hope the Archbishop speaks more clearly in the future.

(Update: one commenter complains about my description of Dr Williams as "the head" of the Church; of course, that, strictly speaking, is the role of the Monarch, by law. In practice, however, the Queen, unlike centuries past, is unlikely to have any real authority over this character, although it would be fascinating to know what she thinks of him in private.

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This recent enraged attack on John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the LSE, recently linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, explains that Gray spouts an almost continuous gush of bilge. Gray is described as one who "flip-flops across the old right-left ideological chessboard". But this Samizdata posting by me from 2002 explains the method in this man's madness.

My 2002 piece does contain one error, however. I assumed from his accent when I knew him in the eighties that Professor Gray was from Wales. Apparently he is from the North of England. My apologies to Wales.

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This has been out a while and is now available in paperback so quite a lot of eminent historians have already gushed, justifiably, about this outstanding account of the religious turmoil that seized much of western, central and southern Europe between 1500 and 1700. Diarmaid MacCulloch, a senior Oxford academic, has written what I would chalk up as one of the best-ever accounts of this period. He is ruthlessly fair-minded and sympathetic, fighting the urge to make simplistic points (although there is a dry sense of humour throughout). He makes it clear that the Reformation should emphatically not be confused with liberalism; Luther, Calvin and Knox may have inadvertently set in train some of the moves that have led to a more individualistic society but that was not their primary purpose. And although he is justifiably scathing about the horrors of the Inquisition in Catholic Spain and elsewhere, he points out, for example, that the mania for witch-burning occured both in Protestant and Catholic lands (in my own native East Anglia, the witch-hunting obsessions of the 17th Century led to a lot of brutality, for example).

This is the sort of book I wished I could have read while reading history as an under-graduate. It goes without saying that it has relevance for our own time in figuring out what to make of Islamic fundamentalism, among other things.

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You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose free will.

- Rush.

It is my birthday, so a little personal reminiscence is in order. The man who introduced me to Rush, 29 years ago, subsequently turned down physics fellowships at both Oxford and Cambridge to become a Baptist missionary. I guess he took his instructions from the first part of the verse.

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I am not quite as vexed by the writings of former Living Marxism (a bit of an oxymoron, Ed) writers such as Brendan O'Neill, Mick Hume or Claire Fox as Stephen Pollard is - life is too short for such intellectual eye-gouging - but I kind of get Stephen's general point. Those of us who have toiled away exposing the idiocies of Big Government for decades and plugging the case for free markets, etc, find it a bit hard to take for a bunch of Marxists to claim to be such libertarian souls, when in fact they are just as hostile to the market economy as they ever were. No-one has ever proved to me that you can have a liberal, open society without property rights. O'Neill, writing in this week's edition of The Spectator, rather confirms Pollard's suspicions in what was quite good rant against modern "anti-capitalists":

Of course, Marx wanted to destroy capitalism because he thought it didn’t go far enough in remaking the world in man’s image and organising society according to man’s needs and desire. Today’s sorry excuses for Marxists and anti-capitalists think capitalism has gone too far in its development of the forces of production and encouragement of consumerism. I’m with Marx. Let’s replace capitalism with something even more dazzlingly cocky and human-centric. But let’s first deal with the luddites, locavores and eco-feudalists who have given anti-capitalism a bad name.

The problem, of course, is that the "dazzlingly cocky and human-centric" shiny sort of Marxist future is never spelled out. What would it look like? Does it come with a tester? Are there examples on eBay? Seriously, given the manifold failures of state central planning, and the various incoherent attempts by some thinkers to fashion "market socialism" (another oxymoron), it is not really quite good enough for a chap like O'Neill to pose as some sort of hip and clever critic of anti-capitalists, then to claim that he is still a Marxist, but then to leave a bloody great black hole of explanation of what his sort of society would look like. Consider, the various theories associated with Marx have been more or less destroyed, both by practical experience and logical argument: the labour theory of value (which ignores the value of ideas in wealth creation); the theory of the inevitable clash between the "workers" and the "bosses"; the historical "inevitability" of the collapse of capitalism, the immiseration of the proletariat, etc. While some of Marx's arguments about class had some interesting points, pretty much all of the central tenets of the Bearded One's ideas are plain wrong. I mean, as intellectual defeats go, this is the equivalent of a village pub football team being annihilated 10-nil by Manchester Utd. There's no way back.

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Mark Mills, makes some pretty outrageous comments about Ayn Rand in the course of how he prefers to defend free enterprise. I have often wondered what is worse: the cultish "official" Objectivists who cannot deal with the slightest criticism of the woman, or those who claim, with little plausibility or evidence, that she contributed nothing valuable apart from an assertion that it is fine and proper to be happy. I came across this piece of nonsense at a link mentioned at the Adam Smith Institute blog:

According to Rand morality is an illusion and truly great individuals act solely in their own interests without giving thought to their impact on others.

Nonsense. The fiction and non-fiction works of the late Miss Rand, which are widely available, such as Atlas Shrugged, are absolutely rammed with discussion - sometimes to the shrill point of tedium - about morality. One may demur about Rand's version of said, but to claim she had nothing to say on morality is so jaw-droppingly wrong as to wonder what Mr Mills has been smoking. Her view of morality, a code of values, was that morality was essential to the pursuit of life and human flourishing. Her ethical egoism was a kind of progression from the views of Aristotle and an attack on the idea, which stems from the dualism of certain religions, for example, that happiness on this earth and goodness are at war with one another. Rand said this dualism was fatal to both happiness and morality. There is now a large and growing literature on Rand's views on morality and the importance of it in all aspects of human life (an example is here).

As to the point that her morality gave no thought to the "impact on others" of certain actions, what on earth is he driving at? The pursuit of long-range self interest means that one does not aggress against others, hurt them, rob them, etc. Quite the opposite: as Adam Smith realised, it means serving the wants of others through voluntary exchange in the market makes sense because doing that makes you happier in the long run, gets you friends, riches, etc. Mills statement is bizarre. Of course, Rand was an early sceptic about the environmentalist movement and tended to dismiss worries about pollution, etc, but then there is nothing in her body of ideas as such that would mean that a supporter of her would be blind to the problems of pollution, which can be thought of as a property rights problem.

People will recall that when the USA was founded, the Founders spoke about "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". It says something about the state of ideas when a so-called defender of liberal capitalism regards a woman who championed the pursuit of happiness and attacked statism as some sort of nutcase. Oh well.

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The immense majority of our people consider economic freedom as radically immoral. It scandalises them in the fullest sense of the word.

- Daniel Villey, "Economique et Morale", in Pour une Economie Liberee (1946), quoted in Economics and Its Enemies, by William Oliver Coleman. The latter book is an astonishingly good piece of scholarship. Its passages on the persecution of economists in the former Soviet Union are harrowing.

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There are times when I almost feel sorry for conservatives and their confusion over libertarian positions on issues and why those positions appear to shift from time to time.

Our position does not actually change though... we just give pragmatic support to one group or another according to what we perceive is the current greatest threat to our principles. There may be disagreements and even splits amongst libertarians over "what should we be doing right now?" These are temporary because the disagreements are over strategy and tactics and fine points of philosophy, not the goals.

A conservative may look at the support of our particular faction of libertarians (Samizdata and friends) for the war and believe we are fellow travellers. They do not understand we see al Qaeda and the mad mullahs as such a grave threat to liberty and individualism in the world that we temporarily find common cause with the State. Defense is one thing most (not all) libertarians agree is a function of even a minimalist state.

There is a certain pragmatism summed up in the old Arab saying "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". The Islamic faction which clothes itself in blood and the Koran are most certainly something we can not ignore. The longer you leave them alone, the bigger the war will be in the end. It is easier to cut out a tumor than to go after a metastasized cancer.

That does not mean these fruitcakes will always be number one on our anti-hit parade. As their threat subsides libertarians naturally turn their attention to the long term enemy of liberty: The State.

I am ecstatic (guardedly) to see things working out in Iraq. Because of that, I too can turn my attention to the State.

The State has done much to undermine freedom over the last decade, all in the name of 'protecting us'. They really believe it. Sadly, they do not seem to have the same love of liberty we do. This has been brought home to me recently by conservative commentators who have denounced critics who took stands I consider obvious and courageous.

One woman wrote she would rather die in a terrorist attack, even see her child do so than give up their liberties. She did not like the surveillance state that is being put together in the US (and which is a nearly completed edifice in the UK) in the name of 'protecting' her.

Some years ago, not long after 9/11, I said pretty much the same thing to a CIA guy I once chatted with over beers. I told him I would rather die under a nuclear fireball than give up one tiny bit of my liberty. I stand by that. Those who fought and died in our wars did not do so for safety. They died to defend liberty and the essential character of America from foreign ideologues who hate individualism, hate liberty and hate the very idea of limits on governance.

I sometimes wish I could agree with the anarchist wing that we could completely do without a State. My decades of personal experience and historical reading say otherwise. We need that monstrous ravening beast on occasion. Our problem is how do we keep it starved, chained and caged in the interim? That is a question the founders of America wrestled with. All things considered, they did about as well as could be hoped. It is indeed as they said: the defense of Liberty is the work of every generation.

Our job now is to wrest freedoms back from the beast that were taken in the name of defense. (Am I the only one who thinks we should have a Department of War and make it damn clear what it is for?) I consider that excuse tedious and just plain wrong. Defense to me means going over there (like we did) and kicking the crap out of the enemy on their home ground. It also means people at home must defend their liberty by risking their lives on a day to day basis. They must take a personal responsibility for stopping terrorists or at least making them appear failures.

People who whinge and cry into cameras for The State to 'protect them' are simply weak and contemptible. One expects that from dependent children: not from free adults. An adult stares coolly at the distant watching enemy and shows them that killing a few thousand of us will accomplish nothing except get us pissed off and the enemy and his next of kin and entire way of life very dead.

As Heinlein said: "You can never defeat a free man. The most that you can do is kill him."

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There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

- Sam Harris, rebutting the daft charge that a denial of belief in the afterlife or a supreme being must open the doors to hell on earth.

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I started off wanting to cheer this article - an angry denunciation of the rich folk who often back Green causes - but I then began to wonder whether I was falling for what amounts to an ad hominem argument, and felt rather ashamed of myself. To be sure, it is true that many greenies are extremely well off, or comfortable members of a middle class that feels guilty about material wealth - the legacy of all kinds of crap cultural and political ideas - but is it really a killer argument that a cause X or Y is backed by rich folk like Zac Goldsmith or Peter Melchett? What counts in the end is are their ideas right or wrong? For instance, Bjorn Lomborg is a sharp debunker of eco-cant and I think his take on the more extreme forms of greenery is accurate, but what does it matter whether Lomborg is a middle class Danish academic, heir to a massive fortune, or a humble shop worker?

There is a broader point here. At the Libertarian Alliance conference last weekend, I could not help reflecting on the many posh, incredibly rich folk who were old fashioned liberals (or Whigs, as they used to be called). The walls of the National Liberal Club - a fine institution - are adorned with wonderful portraits of gentlemen in frock coats and women in elegant dresses, or stern-looking 19th century businessmen and industrialists. One of the benefits of having an independent income is that it gives a group of people time to think about certain issues that cannot be done by someone working long hours for a salary and who has to please a boss; independence of means also can encourage independence of mind.

So Brendan O'Neil is wrong on this occasion, although I share his skepticism on green scares 100%. I do not give a monkey's whether Jonathan Porritt is posh or not; it is his reactionary ideas to roll back the glories of modern industrial civilisation that bother me very much.

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He could have taken his article to this conclusion but perhaps he thought the baggage that would come with it would distract from his intended points. In order for my 'friendly amendment' to make sense, it is important to understand what "multiculturalism" really means. Multiculturalism is not a recent ideology. Only the name is new. Most of you are far more familiar with it as "separate but equal". Wikipedia says:

Multiculturalism is an ideology advocating that society should consist of, or at least allow and include, distinct cultural and religious groups, with equal status.

Separate but equal ... segregationism. Multiculturalism as an ideology is diametrically opposed to integration and assimilation. Some have noted a difference in the formation of terrorists in America as compared with Europe but without necessarily attributing it to America's still comparatively high cultural emphasis and expectation of newcomers to assimilate.

The absence of significant terrorist attacks or even advanced terrorist plots in the United States since Sept. 11 is good news that cannot entirely be explained by increased intelligence or heightened security. It suggests America’s Muslim population may be less susceptible than Europe’s Muslim population, if not entirely immune, to jihadist ideology. In fact, countervailing voices may exist within the American Muslim community.

So what does this have to do with Richard Miniter?

He wrote an excellent article published in The American Legion Magazine reviewing several researcher's findings on what traits terrorists have in common.

Miniter says [my underscore]:

Terrorism is an extension of politics by deadly means. Its goals are inherently political, not economic. The chief aim of most significant terrorist campaigns – from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka to al-Qaeda – is to force a government to yield sovereign control to the terror group over some slice of territory. ... These are not economic goals, but political ones.

I emphasized that point because wherever control is extended, whether in the banlieues of France, by withdrawal of troops from other regions by Spain, or communities anywhere in the first world where policing is stymied and made ineffective by a cultural barrier, terrorists have achieved their goal and are ready to extend their ambitions.

In his review of the studies, Miniter makes a list of three phases in the making of a terrorist.

Alienation. Sageman’s sample reveals that 80 percent are in some way totally excluded from the society in which they live. They are foreign students who do not fit in, or they are immigrants to Europe who do not assimilate. Seventy percent of the terrorists in Sageman’s sample joined a terror group when they were living outside their home countries.

This is where multiculturalism excels. By preventing pressures for, and benefits of assimilation, multiculturalism creates and entrenches precisely the metrocosms where terrorism best germinates. Healthy societies embrace newcomers. While sometimes sloppy or crude, this social embrace is always far better in the long run than encapsulating aliens in a cocoon of 'respect'. This misguided segregation and self censorship is the surest way to leave people from other cultures feeling alien and unwelcome.

Personal bonds. Eighty-eight percent of terrorists in the Sageman study are related by blood, marriage or friendship to other terrorists. Sixty percent worship at one of 10 mosques worldwide or attended one of two now-closed schools in Indonesia. "You’re talking about a very select, small group of people," Sageman concludes.

Like this one, perhaps? Once a mindset of terrorism has caught flame, it needs protection and encouragement to develop. It benefits from cultural isolation with highly constrained outside contact and networks independent of the host culture. There must be cultural barriers in place that confine bonding and loyalties to the like-minded. Terrorism cannot thrive in a diverse and interactive community where the structure of the society compels interaction with the larger community. We see this also in some communities in the US where it is considered preferable to shield a violent criminal than to 'snitch' to the outside police.

Group dynamics. Once a network of friendships evolves into a cell, certain group dynamics take over. Cell members feel they cannot betray their friends. The suicide bombers in Spain are a perfect example, Sageman writes. "Seven terrorists sharing an apartment and one saying, 'Tonight we’re all going to go, guys.' Individually, they probably would not have done it.

Once the mindset is established and the ambition is formed, it needs to grow, protected, so that it can finish its material and spiritual phase of preparation. It must be located in a place wherethe law and law enforcement is held at bay and, when it cannot be, is at least unable to recognize or understand the dynamics and significance of what little it does see. Terrorism comes from a social group that seals itself against outside discovery and investigation.

Multiculturalism allows each layer of protection to exist like a matryoshka doll. The inner most doll is the terrorist with each of the outer dolls representing another of the necessary shells protecting it. It is this final phase at which most of our interventions are occurring. It should be small consolation to us that we are catching terrorists only after they leave the protection of the many shells and begin taking position for their attack, when we are simultaneously harboring the incubation of a steady supply of them as a consequence of our multicultural policies.

We need to recognize Multiculturalism for what it is. "Separate but equal" in a politically correct wrapper.

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Jim Henley has kicked off a fair old discussion buzz on the blogs in asking the question: do animals have rights? My short answer right away is they do not as the term rights only makes sense applied to humans because humans, being actually or potentially rational creatures, need freedom to exercise that rational faculty, which is not automatic, and hence doctrines of rights have evolved. Humans, by their nature, need liberty to survive and flourish because of how our minds work. Dogs and bunny rabbits do not.

Well, that is what I have thought for a long time. But the fuzzy bits that you get with these sort of broad claims have started to bother me. A dog, for example, does not have a 'volitional consciousness' in the same way that a human being does, but the dog can respond to signals and its environment; it may not be able to form complex plans, but it can change its behaviour ever so slightly. So a dog needs an element of freedom to survive, too. So if rights are necessary for the furtherance of life, then perhaps they also apply to some other sentient creatures besides we humans. I still think the answer is no, since rights also entail the capacity to respect the rights of others: a vicious dog is not bothered about such things, let alone a white shark or even - may Perry forgive me - a hippo.

And then of course, if we start to cut off the application of rights for any creature that does not fully fit the Aristotelian concept of a 'rational animal', where does that leave the mentally handicapped, or very young babies that have not yet formed a rational capacity? I think the in the former case, we regard the handicapped as having lost or never acquired something that humans normally would have, but our sheer sense of solidarity and compassion for the frail means we treat the handicapped with respect and care and rightly so. But of course we do not allow severely handicapped people to perform potentially dangerous jobs and in practice, such people tend to be placed under pretty serious constraints about what they can do. The same goes for very young children, or aged people suffering from mental deterioration to do with age.

But I must admit that our attitudes towards animals are strange at times. I do not shoot or hunt animals for 'sport' - if it was sport, they would be able to shoot back - and I despise factory farming, think people who are cruel to animals deserve to have their gonads removed, and think that cruelty to other species diminishes us as human beings. But the problem is, I really, really feel in the mood for a big cheeseburger.

Tibor Machan, the libertarian philosopher - and thoroughly nice chap - gives the standard classical liberal argument for why animal rights do not exist. I strongly urge commenters to take a look at the links on Jim Henley's post I have linked to above.

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Is there an afterlife or is death the end?

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When Perry referred to the recent comments of US Presidential hopeful Barak Obama, we had another example in the ensuing comment thread of how people lazily refer to the idea that healthcare should be 'free'. Of course, unless Obama is a total idiot - and I doubt that - he realises that health care, like roads, clean water, defence or food is not free in any sense at all that matters in a world of scarce resources that have alternate uses (such scarcity and the fact they have alternate uses is a classic element of what economics is). Healthcare is not free - it must be paid for, paid out of the time and trouble of other people. The problem, however, is that a lot of people, not just socialists, think that some things in life 'ought' to be free although one often finds they are at a loss to say why. Indeed, if you challenge a person by asking, "Why should health, clean water or defence be free"? they will either change the subject, or go bright red with anger, or fail to understand the question at all.

To attack the idea that certain services and resources should be 'free' is not, alas, all that easy in today's politically dumb climate. However, I think I have a partial solution in how to frame the point. If you ever encounter a person who says that healthcare should be free at the point of use, and it should be a 'right', then point out that this means that someone else has a corresponding duty to be a doctor, a nurse, a hospital orderly or an administrator. Unless people can be forced to perform these roles, then all talk of health as something that ought to be free is meaningless. Of course, at this point the socialist will blather on about incentives and so on, but what if no one wants to be a doctor or a nurse, regardless of pay? Does this mean that anyone who shows an inclination to like medicine should, at an early age, be conscripted into a hospital like a draft for the Army?

I ask these rhetorical questions because I think that when we try to frame our arguments, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that actual flesh and blood human beings are involved in talk about "the right to free health care". Most people these days oppose the idea of military conscription so it ought to be possible to make the case against medical conscription. If we can point out that medical conscription would be a bad thing, then it would be a step in nailing the nonsense that healthcare is a 'right'.

Here is a book I highly recommend about the whole noxious doctrine of 'welfare rights' and how they erode respect for the original, far more coherent rights doctrine of classical liberalism.

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Following the brilliant 'straw man' quote below, I thought I would list a few regular straw man arguments that I come across in the comment threads of this blog as well as in the wider media/public world where the ideas of liberty, defence policy or the free market are mentioned:

Free marketeers do not believe in law and rules of any kind

This is often posited as a fact, when in fact law and liberty are necessary for each other. Without laws defining property rights, for example, much peaceful intercourse is impossible.

If you are against the invasion of Iraq, you are a peacenik

This boils down to a form of argument by intimidation. Even though many opponents of the operation to overthrow Saddam are stupid, evil or possibly both, quite a lot were against it for prudential reasons.

If you are in favour of the invasion of Iraq, you must be a warmongering lunatic

Many people from all parts of the political spectrum thought overthrowing Saddam, who was a bloodthirsty tyrant, invader of neighbouring nations, sponsor of terror, user of WMDs, was a humanitarian and necessary act.

If you are a skeptic about global warming and other alleged environmental terrors, you care nothing for future generations and might also be in the pay of Big Oil

This is not a start of an argument, but an attempt to shout debate down. It betrays the fact that Greenery is becoming a religion with its own notions of heresy. If anyone plays this gambit, refuse to take it up.

Libertarians believe in the idea that humans are born with a mental "blank slate" and hence pay no heed to inherited characteristics of any kind

I often see this argument made by bigots as well as more benign folk. In fact it is possible to believe that many human characteristics are inherited but also changeable. And just because we are influenced by genes, it does not mean were are driven in a deterministic way. Free will still exists. The more knowledge we have about human nature etc, the more power it gives individuals, not less.

For capitalism to work successfully, everybody has to be obsessed with making money all the time

All that is necessary is that human economic interaction is based on voluntary exchange, not force. How much people want to get rich or not is irrelevant.

Libertarians are uninterested in preserving certain old traditions and cultures

In fact, a free society is often much more able to preserve certain traditions, not less so.

Libertarians tend to be loners and discount the importance of community life

This is rubbish: liberals value communities so long as membership is voluntary and further, co-operation is a consequence of liberty, not its opposite. An individualist can enjoy group activities as much as anyone, such as being part of an organisation, club, football team, whatever. The key is that such membership is freely chosen.

I am sure that other commenters can think of a few more...

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I am quite a fan of the fiction and some of the non-fiction of Ayn Rand, but I am the first to concede that some of the people who call themselves Objectivists are an assorted bunch, to put it politely. I have little time for some of the "official" Big-O Objectivists, like Leonard Peikoff, although I enjoy the writings of Tara Smith very much. The group of folk who liked Rand's broad ideas but detested the narrow-mindedness and paranoia of some of the "official" group broke off, under the leadership of Dr. David Kelley, to form groups like The Objectivist Center. I like the TOC crowd and have corresponded with a few of them. I subscribe to The New Individualist, the monthly journal edited by the great Bob Bidinotto. What is so refreshing about it is that one does not get lots of shrilll lectures or dense philosophical treatises, but an engaging and assertive writing style coupled with an often impish sense of humour and enjoyment of the good things in life. It is a cracking read, in fact. Bob is also addicted to thriller novels, which puts him in the same bracket as me.

Okay, enough creeping from me, now for the nasty part. In the April print edition - the web version does not appear to be up yet - there are two articles that struck some decidedly jarring notes. The first, by Roger Donway, argues that basically, the late Milton Friedman was not a good advocate of capitalism and individualism, and in fact he used arguments that play straight into the hands of socialists. (I am not making this up). The second article, by Bidinotto, includes a defence of the use of torture in 'emergency' situations, although Bob does not define 'emergencies' very clearly and leaves begging the question about who gets to decide such matters. But I have pretty much argued on this torture issue before and will not repeat myself here. So I will focus instead on what Roger Donway has to say about Friedman.

To try to make this point, Donway argues that Friedman's attack on the idea that firms have "social" responsibilities itself rests on a sort of utilitarian basis. Does it?

Friedman argued that the executives of companies have a duty to create the maximum value for their shareholders, and nothing else. Donway thinks this means that Friedman was saying that a CEO must therefore be the cowering servant of his stockholders. Well, Roger, if shareholders own the company and not the CEO, then it does rather look as if the CEO should be bound by the wishes of those shareholders. Does Roger Donway imagine that if, say, the chief executive of BP or Wal-Mart runs these firms badly and is called to account by shareholders, that such a CEO is entitled to tell said shareholders to sod off? Of course not. If the CEO does not want to be a servant of his owners, then the solution is pretty straightforward: organise a management buyout. This is in fact precisely what has been happening in recent years. Emboldened by cheap credit and a strong stock market, firms have been taken off the listed stock market by private equity firms like KKR and Blackstone, and one of the incentives for businessmen is that they no longer are held account by all those frightfully common shareholders. Donway's argument seems to be an argument against mass shareownership. He seems to be saying that owners of a company should let CEOs run their firms as they see fit and keep their traps shut.

Consider this passage by Donway:

"By Friedman's standard, Walt Disney was not a creative genius who sold stock so that he would have capital to pursue his vision on a grand scale. He was just somebody who had been hired as an "employee" by his stockholders and thus was obligated to do what the majority of his stockholders wished."

Wait a minute. If I set up a company and later, decide to issue stock, I dilute my ownership of the firm. Dilution of ownership is the price one pays for tapping the capital market for capital. One hopes that the owners will appreciate that their own financial self-interest rests with letting the creator of the business run it how he or she thinks fit, but if I am investing in someone else's firm, then I acquire ownership in part of that firm, and a form of control. If a shareholder does not own the firm in any meaningful sense, as in being able to vote at AGMs and object to enormous CEO payouts for crap performance, then Donway is making an extraordinary claim here.

I do agree that Donway might have a point in saying that Friedman tends to make the case for private business and so on in largely consequentialist terms, although judging my Friedman's passionate advocacy of issues like abolishing military conscription, for example, I find it hard to believe that Chicago University's most famous academic was not also driven by a deep attachment to liberty and the idea of the sovereign individual. Just because a man makes the case for freedom on utilitarian grounds does not mean he might be blind to the other ways of defending freedom.

I believe that Milton Friedman is one of the greatest defenders of liberty in our modern times, just as Rand is, in a very different way. I think parsing a few sentences to detect some apparently socialistic or, horrors, 'altruistic' tendencies in Friedman is scholasticism gone mad. I don't doubt that Friedman admired the heroism, skill and creativity of entrepreneurs, but he also realised that businessmen best achieve their goals by persuading people to buy their products and invest in their firms. To persuade, you have to consider what people want. Sometimes, objectivists give the impression that this process is rather demeaning. Actually trying to figure out what people want is often quite difficult. That does not mean that those wants are admirable, of course. A brilliantly successful maker of soap opera TV is still producing what I regard as junk. Not all the products of capitalism are admirable. The point is that what is admirable and what is not does not get decided by the state. And no-where do I think that Friedman argued otherwise.

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There has been a bit of a backlash against what might be called the "self-esteem" movement in psychology and education in the United States and elsewhere. Here is an item. It is certainly true that a lot of intellectually vapid rubbish has been written about this. For a lot of the time, it seems, "self-esteem" is nothing more than a desire to be freed from judgement, hard work and effort.

I think there is a danger that in the backlash, that the baby gets chucked out with the bathwather, however. If you think about it, self-esteem is about the idea that as human beings, we are both competent to live and worthy of achieving happiness on this earth. This has nothing to do with a vague, dope-induced "feel-good" sort of sentiment, but is something quite different. Achieving happiness and believing that one is deserving of that is often quite hard. In a culture soaked in guilt about material wealth, where people are constantly told to feel bad about prosperity and "selfish individualism", it is actually quite gutsy for someone to stand against all this. If one thinks about it, self-esteem, properly understood, is a key component of the idea of human rights. If people are entitled to pursue happiness and the good life, then they need rights to protect and advance that.To believe in the idea of the sovereign individual, one has to believe that individuals are competent to decide their lives and also worthy of such. And a self-confident, happy and proud person is surely what a healthy, liberal civil society needs. I fear that a lot of the people now bashing the self-esteem movement are not just sensible skeptics about the latest fads to come out of academia, but also collectivists and authortarians who fear what might happen if people really do want to pursue happiness and self-fulfilment.

This classic on self-esteem is always worth a read, by Dr. Nathaniel Branden. And let's not forget the important Victorian tradition of "self improvement", starting with the great Samuel Smiles' Self Help, which is much more than just getting seriously rich. There is a lot of chaff out there, but a lot of wheat as well.

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The other night I had a look at the 18 Doughty Street internet-based public affairs TV programme. I quite like what Iain Dale and the others in that outfit are trying to do with internet TV: breaking into the arena now dominated by BBC, ITN and Channel 4, channels that are by and large infused with the meta-context of the liberal-left. 18 Doughty Street is unashamedly pro-liberty, pro-capitalism, pro-America and anti-Big Government in its thinking. My main doubt is whether it can keep going without being able to make hard cash. Anyway, it is also attracting guests from across the spectrum, and it is an appearance by a leftist blogger on the show the other night that got my attention.

Dale was interviewing three bloggers about events of the week, and one of the guests was Alex Hilton, the author of the blog Recess Monkey, a leftist site with a sense of humour that may or may not to be to one's taste. He recently got into a bit of a pickle by posting the 'news' that Margaret Thatcher, whom Alex loathes, had died. She is, of course, very much alive. Iain Dale phoned up the BBC after seeing the 'story' and promptly Hilton had to retract and publish a rather grubby apology, albeit one with a fairly nasty sting in the tail. What a nob, I thought. Then I saw his appearance on 18 Doughty Street. Fairly boilerplate lefty, I thought, a bit cocky, not a bit ashamed of spreading an untrue story, in fact, denying that that the death of Mrs T. would be a 'story' at all (any newspaper editor would turn him down on the spot if he thinks that the death of a famous politician, however old, is not a story. I certainly would).

Anyway, the interview went on. I was interested in how Hilton described how he came to hold the views he did, which is always interesting, in my view. His family background is working class - printing and coal mining, two industries that succumbed to the crackdown on subsidy and the trade union closed shop thanks to the Thatcher years (I strongly support both such changes, naturally). Hilton is a reminder, however, that a lot of people experienced the hard side of those changes, necessary though they were. I was a bit disappointed that Dale did not ask the question, "So Alex, are you in favour of massive coal subsidies and the old print union methods, then?", which was a pity. But at one stage we got a really interesting admission. Hilton was talking about leftist economics bloggers, and said it was a pleasure to come across such folk, because on the whole, "economics is an emotional issue for socialists", or some such. I certainly remember the use of the word "emotional". Bang. For a socialist to actually admit that their views on economics are driven, not by logic, factual evidence, by reason, but by "emotion" is a big admission. It is an admission of intellectual defeat if you do not say that you have reason as your main motivator. It is to run up a big, white flag in the battle of ideas. When Marx was writing about class and the rise of the proletariat, he did not present his arguments as "emotional" - though of course they were in many respects. He used the language of science a lot. The left used to talk about 'scientific socialism'. Their posters had big pictures of factories, machines and aircraft on them, all waxing lyrical about technology and the power of reason. The left is now a very different, post-modernist beast. Reason is out. Emotion is in.

Socialism just took another little step towards its coffin on that show. Nice one Alex. Keep up the great work. Just do not try to kill off Britain's greatest post-war Prime Minister ever again.

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Another episode of "The Trap' has been shown... I gave it a pass given the low quality of scholarship and the high level of 'argument by personal attack' in the first one. It seems this low brow method was used against other targets in the latest episode, this time with the author of Public Choice Theory as one of the targets.

First a basic primer for the recent commenter to my earlier article. The personal life of a creative person has nothing to do with whether their creation is right or wrong. That decision is made in the marketplace of ideas and in the appropriate research journals. Anyone who thinks otherwise has something brown leaking out their ears.

If we judged ideas by the personal life of the creator, we would toss Vincent Van Gogh's paintings in the bin. The man was a nutter who cut off his ear. Obviously his paintings must be garbage. Or maybe the whole basis of cybernetics is wrong! After all, Turing was gay! All those right wing conspiracy types must obviously think anything he created must be wrong! And Einstein? That wild haired fruitcake? Marx? A drunken womanizer!

Argument by ad hominem will get no one anywhere with anyone at Samizdata.

It also helps to have some knowledge of the subjects on which you expostulate, or to at least state your areas of ignorance out front. The idea that public workers do not work to make life better for their families just like anyone else is absurd: and that is what saying 'Public Choice Theory is wrong' means. Suggesting that markets will always 'collapse to a point' is absurd and counter-factual. It is not OFCOM that makes BBC 'better'. It is competition with the high production values of programs from elsewhere that are indeed (more) free market than the UK in this respect. The rhetorical concept which is thus indirectly espoused by our commenter that "REGULATION is INDIVIDUALISM" is just plain silly.

I invite you all to read the comment on that previous article and disassemble the commenter's argument into its weak component parts as I have not the time to do so at the moment.

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Since one of our readers has broached the subject... I too have just watched The Trap (a polemical on BBC2). This is an attempt at a deconstruction of individualism which uses some of the most heavy handed propaganda tricks I have seen in a very long time.

I am sure some of our other writers will jump in with extensive articles so I will just set the stage. A presenter, recognizable by their voice... and I will leave the filling in of identity as an exercise to the listener, did interviews of assorted luminaries of the anti-statist fight. He then added voice overs along with music with a very threatening low frequency bass sound and interspersed 'artistic' troubling images to associate them in the minds of the audience with the 'bad ideas' of those nasty individualist anti-state persons.

He goes after Hayek, Laing and Buchanan among others; he demonizes game theory and the 'Prisoners Dilemma'... without ever mentioning Dawkins and how individualistic co-operation falls out of the more realistic 'Iterated Prisoners Dilemma'.

Have at it angry commentariat! There is much raw meat ready to be ground into hamburger and seared on the barbie!

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I just picked up Tuesday's Guardian to do my clippings (everything is behind), and found an article by George Monbiot, an attack on loony-toon 'documentary' Loose Change, almost all of which I agree with. Even when he says:

People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil that runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos that really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose. This neat story draws campaigners away from real issues - global warming, the Iraq war, nuclear weapons, privatisation, inequality - while permanently wrecking their credibility. Bush did capitalise on the attacks, and he did follow a pre-existing agenda, spelt out, as Loose Change says, by the Project for the New American Century. But by drowning this truth in an ocean of nonsense, the conspiracists ensure that it can never again be taken seriously.

Shock of recognition: Monbiot and I are brothers under the skin. We belong to recognisably the same impersonal, evolving, rationalist civilization in which there are real contentions, even though we have extremely different takes on it. The screw-Loose-Changers, bin-Laden-ists, the creationists, all live in a personified universe where humans are ants: someone is permanently in charge of everything, and anyone who disagrees is not just wrong but marked for destruction.

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Who is speaking? Where? When? And of what political philiosophy is this an epiphany?

It is anticipated that recording an alternative address will be of benefit to the individual, enabling him or her to prove legitimate residence at that address.

Only the last question is really hard, but Googling the answer to the rest is cheating. More marks will be earned by creative guesses.

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A while back I had not read my email for a day or so and found several waiting in my 'IN' box. Two were from Perry. Oh no. What have I done now? In the halls of debate, I am not very house broken. Fearing a 'please cease and desist' is in store, I open one. To my startled surprise, Perry is offering me a byline and contributing privileges! Startled is an understatement. Apparently I am doing something that Perry actually wants to continue. But what?

I have one all encompassing principle. 'Reality.' This is a more complicated choice than it may first seem, but still an easy one..

There are very few guidelines for contributors to Samizdata. Basically, the content guidelines are simple. The key position statement is "liberty - good, big government - bad". Surprisingly, this is the one I will need to be careful with. For it is possible within my principles, to hold a collectivist position that is both philosophically consistent and morally sound. But while I am acknowledging that a collectivist can be morally sound and philosophically consistent, I am also mustering my defences and preparing for a 'debate' that can only be resolved by physical contest. I have made my choice and there is no middle ground.

Unlike many here, I do not believe morality is a continuum from collectivist - bad, to individualist - good. In my philosophy of morality, the middle ground is immoral. Relativism, subjectivism and pragmatism are my immoralities. Unprincipled decision making. Good morals are at my end of the spectrum. Evil morals are at the other end of the spectrum. But immorality is to be found in the middle. And to those on the other end of collectivist - individualist spectrum, I am the evil and they are the good. That is as it should be. Like matter and anti-matter, the legitimacy of each is not in question. But sustained contact is impossible.

I am not sure if this understanding of my outlook has been obvious. I have never explained it here to any extent, but this position has been the foundation of every stance I take. Though incomplete and sometimes misinformed, there is a coherent and consistent framework available for all of my rational decisions. With Perry's generosity, I will lay it out for those of you who are doubtful or curious. Digging into the essence of many years spent winnowing philosophies and developing my own moral base, I will try to clean some of it up enough to present a little at a time.

Two absolute moralities exist, and they carry contrary and absolute moral imperatives.

I am and will continue to be amazed that I am being offered this forum. I would like to say that I will behave and conduct myself with restraint and deference, but I think if Perry had wanted me to change, he would have said so. Or more likely, not have made the offer. Feel free to offer advice. In addition to the two bases for morality, I will occasionally post conversation starters that tickle my interest. Sometimes truisms of the 'why didn't I think of that?' sort. Certain topics, particularly actions that have irreparable consequences, will cause me to blow a gasket from time to time. And suggestions for any topics and themes you want me to pursue are much welcomed.

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Taylor Dinerman is a professional journalist and one of our long time readers. He has an ability to spur a lively dinner time discussion amongst visitors to North by Northwest in the upper west of Manhattan where he is often to be found. As you read on you will soon discover why!

For many years now I have subscribed to First Things, a monthly magazine put out by Institute for religion and Public Life whose purpose is to 'advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society'. Obviously not a very libertarian endeavour, but the magazine does, on occasion support limited or small government ideas and stands firmly against the totalitarian monsters of our age. The editor Father John Neuhaus is a Catholic, but a very American one and the magazine is full of great stuff that for a non Catholic and Non Christian like myself (I am a not very pious Reform Jew.) is a window into a culture that is an important part of the world around me.

For readers of Samizdata the December 2006 issue has an article on 'The Witness of Dietrich von Hildebrand' by John Crosby, that they may find interesting. Hildebrand, a philosopher and theologian, was an early and unyielding opponent of Hitler's who did 'battle with the Nazi ideology at the level of philosophical and theological first principals.'

He said 'the signature of the age' was a certain anti-personalism. One expression of this anti-personalism was collectivism, the philosophy that takes human beings as mere parts in some collectivity. Hildebrand held that each human being as a person called by God and answerable to God is always more than a part in a social whole; as a person each exists before God as his own whole and thus refuses to be completely contained in any social whole. Each is a person at a far deeper level of himself than he is a member of the German State or of the English people, to say nothing of some political party.

There is a lot more like this and despite it being densely argued it tends to enlighten some of our current dilemmas. With a German theologian and philosopher as Pope these kinds of arguments and ideas may get more and more circulation. The Regensburg speech which pissed off the Muslims so much is another example of these kinds of ideas.

Libertarians and small government conservatives may find that on some issues they have a fellow traveler in the Vatican. Of course, the Pope is always going to be Pope first , any comfort he may give to us free market types will always be secondary to that role, but if he moves the Church away from the statist and collectivist doctrines that have occasionally been promoted by the Church over the last couple of centuries or more it will be a monumental change.

If it is done it will be done in language that will be difficult for laymen or non theologians to follow. The good effects (if any) may take years or decades to trickle down, but we all should be aware of the possibilities. This may be overly optimistic, but who knows 'God'?

There is a link if anyone is interested.

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If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.

- Milton Friedman

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I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.

This is a quotation attributed to the Duke of Wellington, referring to the red-coated soldiers he led in the Peninsular campaign in the early 19th Century and later, in the Battle of Waterloo, in what is now Belgium. He would often remark in scathing terms about his own men while also praising their steadiness under fire and general courage.

I kind of feel the same way about a bunch of men - it seems to be male thing - called the New Atheists in this interesting article over at Wired magazine. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others are no doubt fearless in fighting against what they see is wilful superstition. You want to admire and like what they are doing and in general, I do. I recall reading Dawkins' book, the Selfish Gene many years ago and was greatly impressed. I felt the same way about Dennett's books. And yet and yet... Dawkins is so dismissive of there being any value to religion whatsoever that you almost end up feeling rather sorry for religious people - at least the ones that are not fundamentalists. For all that I have problems with religion and un-reason, I cannot overlook the benign side of religion or the contributions that the Judeo-Christian tradition has played in the West, for instance. It is arguable, for example, that notions of individualism, free will and dignity of the person have been greatly driven by that tradition, as well as other schools of thought. But Dawkins will have none of it. He is just as harsh on moderates as he is on the fundamentalists. He thinks the state should ban parents from trying to pass their views to their children (quite how this would be enforced is not made clear in the Wired article). I am not sure if he is going to persuade any existing religious people out of their views although he might, by his sheer boldness, encourage a lot of secret atheists to "come out of the closet".

Anyway, it is an interesting article and the associated comments, or at least most of them, are pretty good as these things go.

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Nature seems rather inventive in the creation of parasites. Virtually every species on the planet has several and they can be specialized to the point where a single species is almost an eco-system unto itself.

Life requires energy and there are quite a number of ways to get it. There are primary producers that take solar or chemical energy and use it to create biomass; there are species which eat the primary producers and others which in turn eat them. The most common terms for these are plants, herbivores and carnivores. There are animals which feed on dead plants or animals and there are animals which have discovered the trick of extracting energy from their host without quite killing it.

Parasitism has a number of advantages to a species. The host does all the work. Since the parasite does not kill the host like a carnivore it can continue feeding for so long as the host lives. It is clear the host would be better off without the parasite in the vast majority of cases, but since all of its neighbors are also hosts, it has no particular relative disadvantage to them.

As in any other biological niche, there will be competition. If a parasite extracts too little from its host, another which takes more will produce more offspring and take over. On the other hand, if it extracts too much, the host will weaken and a competitor who takes just a little bit less will again be able to extract more energy and produce more offspring.

In economics we call this the Laffer curve.

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Have you ever had trouble explaining to someone why libertarians are neither a funny sub-species of conservatives nor an odd sort of neo-liberal? People are so stuck in the Left/Right paradigm you can hardly get through to them about a different direction, one that is not left or right but.... up. [Apologies to Flatland!]

I have tried pointing out issues on which any libertarian will disagree with a conservative; and then of like issues on the other side. I have tried showing my "World's Smallest Political Quiz" card with the Nolan chart on it. That helps a little, but you still rarely see the light of real understanding.

A week ago, in conversation with a very liberal friend in New York, I found a parable that rewarded me with a look of sudden comprehension. I again tried it with someone on the airplane back to Belfast and was similarly rewarded. It was a parable-ized form of something which happened to me about twenty years ago in the Skibo Hall student union building at CMU:

If you put a Democrat, a Republican, and a Libertarian alone in a room together, the Republican and Democrat will eventually team up against the Libertarian. This is because both of them believe the power of government could be used for enormous good... if only they were the one controlling it.

The libertarian wants to destroy the machine.

I think this makes it clear why, in the end, both Democrats and Republicans are our 'enemies'. They like the machine, they believe in the machine... and they both will defend it to the death. Make no mistake: if we become powerful enough to be a real political threat, they will both turn on us.

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In all the acres of commentary in the press and elsewhere on those cartoons (death toll at time of writing, five, which is getting beyond a joke), I have not seen anyone mention this point, so I will get it in before I get bored of the whole affair.

There are two distinct reasons given in hadith why an image of Muhammad might be forbidden.

First, there is a general ban on images of living things as an attempt to rival God's creative power. That can not be what is at issue here, since it is generally ignored outside mosques, even in Saudi Arabia (though the Taliban appear to have gone more or less the whole hog, to use about the least appropriate possible metaphor).

Second, reinforced by the prophet's deathbed injunction not to set up a shrine or mosque over his grave, there's the idea that religious worship through icons of saints, in the manner of the christian churches familiar to the early Muslims, constitutes an idolatry, or worship of the saint rather than God directly. So images of the prophet are banned in Islam because they may be revered idolatrously.

So the objection to the cartoons cannot really be founded in the Islamic image-ban. They are clearly neither idolatry nor invitations to it. On the contrary, the insistance that a mocking representation amounts to a gross insult to the prophet is much more like idolatry in that sense: a demand that the man be revered as incapable of representation as God.

Is what is really happening that the 'insult' is actually felt by individual Muslims (either at first hand, or in reaction to hearsay)? Those who feel themselves outraged are themselves threatened by the mockery, but wrap themselves in religiosity as a defence. In effect they are setting themselves up in the prophet's shoes, attributing to him either primitive notions of honour that his disavowal of a shrine rather suggests he had surpassed, or God-like equivalence with the religion itself.

Now, remind me, who was insulting Islam?

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So if the United Kingdom is in the grip of a "Blairite Tyranny", what is the proper response?

After all, few would question the ethics of assassinating Adolf Hitler. The main complaint about the attempt on Hitler's life is that it took as long as it did to be set in motion.

Even today, the 'Third World' is full of dodgy dictators whose death by tyrannicide would not be condemned by many, least of all their own victims.

However, few would actually argue that Tony Blair's conduct of government, while authoritarian in operation and intention, merits his actual death by murder. If merit is involved, in my opinion, Blair deserves a sound thrashing from the Headmaster's office, and ostracism by civilised members of society, and in any case, violence should always be a last resort in political life as in everything else.

But this begs the question: at what point does a ruler's conduct become so vile and repulsive that tyrannicide becomes a morally plausible response? Does the democratic process increase the threshold, or lower it? Tyrannicides were applauded in ancient Greece; should we applaud them in this era?

[Editors note: please read this article carefully before commenting. It is NOT suggesting or even discussing whether or not Tony Blair should be assassinated, but rather is a discussion of how to deal with lesser variety tyrants. Comments suggesting Blair et al should be done in will be deleted as both unhelpful and seditious]

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There seems to be a lot of it about at the moment, as the late British comic writer and broadcaster Spike Milligan might have put it. "It" being atheism. The biologist Richard Dawkins, known in some quarters as "Darwin's Rottweiler", takes aim at religion in a current television series on Britain's Channel 4 station. And only a few weeks ago I watched a programme on BBC 2 with Jonathan Miller, praising the tradition of skepticsm and outright atheism.

What is going on? We live at a time when our post-Enlightenment civilisation is threatened by religious fundamentalism in the guise of radical Islam. It seemed for a while after 9/11 to be bad form to make harsh attacks on religion per se but now it appears some restraints are coming off.

Of course this may only apply to Britain. In the United States, notwithstanding the theoretical separation of religion and state, it is, as Salman Rushdie has said, all but impossible for any declared atheist to hold down a public office more senior than that of a dog-catcher. This may of course change in time. Such things sometimes move in cycles.

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As the report stage of the Identity Cards Bill approaches in the Lords, a reminder of one highlight from the first day of the committee stage Hansard, 15 Nov 2005, Col.1012:

Lord Gould of Brookwood: Both the previous speakers�the latter with great emotion�were arguing for freedom. We have to ask what greater freedom is there than the freedom to place a vote for a political party in a ballot box upon the basis of a mandate and a manifesto. That is the crux of it: the people have supported this measure. That is what the noble Earl's father fought for. But that is too trivial an answer. I know that. The fundamental argument is that the truth is that people believe that these identity cards will affirm their identity. The noble Lord opposite said that he likes to be in this House and how he is recognised in this House because it is a community that recognises him. That is how the people of this nation feel. They feel that they are part of communities, and they want recognition. For them, recognition comes in the form of this identity card. Noble Lords may think that that is strange, but it is what they feel. This is their kind of freedom. They want their good, hard work and determination to be recognised, rewarded and respected. That is what this does.

Of course it is right and honourable for noble Lords to have their views, but I say there is another view, and it is the view of the majority of this country. They want to have the respect, recognition and freedom that this card will give them. Times have changed. Politics have changed. What would not work 50 years ago, works now. It is not just me. I have the words of the leader of your party:

"I have listened to the police and security service chiefs. They have told me that ID cards can and will help their efforts to protect the lives of British citizens against terrorist acts. How can I disregard that?".

This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords' views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.

This is the sort of rhetoric that makes my blood run cold. Here's a prefiguring example:

In our state the individual is not deprived of freedom. In fact, he has greater liberty than an isolated man, because the state protects him and he is part of the State. Isolated man is without defence
- Benito Mussolini

Terry Eagleton (from a review of Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism in the New Statesman) elucidates the connection:

Conservatives disdain the popular masses, while fascists mobilise and manipulate them. Some conservatives believe in ideas, but fascists have a marked preference for myths. If they think at all, they think through their blood, not their brain. Fascists regard themselves as a youthful, revolutionary avant-garde out to erase the botched past and create an unimaginably new future.

All supporters of the old-fashioned conception of individual liberty, whether they think of themselves as left or right, conservative or progressive, must do what can be done. Resist. We should not expect any quarter for outdated ideas under a new kind of freedom.

[cross-posted from White Rose]

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"If you're determined to be altruistic about it, the only way you can be of any good to others is for you to be self-sufficient. The biggest burdens in a crisis are those who were so concerned about the welfare of everyone else that they never provided for themselves."

Harry Browne, How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation, pp. 199-200, Arlington House Publishers, Westport, Connecticut. I also recommend this classic by Browne.

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The great irony is that the most fundamental right to individual sovereignty�private property�is the one most highly questioned. Property rights are usually construed narrowly to cover only things that can be exchanged, given away, or abandoned. But since a property right is the right to use and dispose of something, it actually has a far broader meaning. One begins with a right to one�s own person, including one�s body and energies. Indeed, this is that basic right that gives rise to the right to appropriate unowned objects from nature and to exchange peacefully acquired property with willing traders. In fact, without property rights there are no no rights at all.

From the Independent Institute.

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Mick Hume has me worried, not for the first time. If I want to be gently scared, much rather a challenging column than a horror film (generally much less alarming than, and approximately as soporific as, the Shopping Channel).

He is describing Spiked!'s political position:-

We stand on the left as it was originally named, after those who stood on that side of the National Assembly during the French Revolution to champion reason, science, liberty and the secular values of the Enlightenment. We don't want to return to the past, but to see those gains of humanity defended and developed in the changing context of the twenty-first century.

Well that certainly sounds attractive. Except for the word "left". I have been defining myself as right-wing, by default, for 30 years. Any adherence to policies promoting human freedom (from atheisim to legalising cannabis to banning torture) out the conventional Left have always seemed to me adventitious, adopted only as markers of difference from reactionary traditionalists, not springing from principle. The basic principle, of subordinating individual lives to wiser-than-thou ruling class—and catering to the velleity of the mob—was always repulsive. Better identify, then, with the limited, pessimistic, ambition of the Right and find both a space to live and scope for pragmatic arguments for liberty.

The truth is, of course, the Left-Right division never made sense. It ought to be politics for the simple-minded, who can think only in one dimension. But everywhere serious, bright people are mentally enslaved by it.

My guess is Mr Hume has had a mirror of my experience: he has thought of himself as opposed to repulsive "right-wing" things throughout his life, and therefore is comfortable being Left, which I could never be. An acquaintance on The Salisbury Review once described me as having gone so far right to have come out the other side and being "practically a communist"—but I don't feel it. Red flags (red ties even, Mr Bush) make me shudder.

The truth is, of course, that the rationalists on Spiked! and the rationalists on Samizdata are both too sentimental to abandon the political labels they have had imposed on them and have grown up with. A bit of explicit redefinition of those terms, which we indulge ourselves with, will not help us.

The point of politics, and therefore of political labels, is not to explain the world, but change it. Meanwhile the utterly unsentimental are doing just that, by appeal to popular sentiment, and by changing the language implicitly. They do not worry about coherence or clarity of definition, because social reality is defined in institutional power, and in the popular stories that make up "common sense". It is not what we call ourselves that matters. It is what other people call us—and whether they can be persuaded to notice us at all.

Wanted: A new banner.

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Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of comment out there in dead-tree media and the electronic versions about religion and its relation vis a vis the state at the moment. (Full disclosure: I am a lapsed Anglican Christian who read a lot of David Hume, much to the annoyance of my old vicar, no doubt). There is a bracing essay in the Spectator this week about the nonsense spouted in the usual places about "moderate" Islam.

The blog Positive Liberty, which has become a group blog like this one - has an excellent piece looking at the religious, or in some cases, decidely lukewarm religious, views of the U.S. Founding Fathers. These men, to varying degrees, were acutely conscious of the dangers of religious fundamentalism, having seen within their lifetimes the human price of it. As we think about the dangers posed by Islam in our own time, the insights of Madison, Adams, Jefferson et al are needed more than ever. The linked-to article is fairly long but worth sitting back and sipping on a coffee for a good read, I think.

It is in my view essential for the west's future that the benefits of separating what is God's from what is Cesear's is made as loudly and as often as possible. Muslims must be made abundantly aware of this point for if they do not, the consequences could be dire. Maybe because of the role played by the Church of England in our post-Reformation history, we don't have the tradition, as in the States, of keeping a beady eye on the blurring of the edges of temporal and spiritual. Cynics have of course argued that nationalising Christianity via the CoE has helped the cause of fuzzy agnosticism and atheism more than the complete works of the Englightenment. Well, maybe. It may have as much to do with the relative openness of British society, our ironical sense of humour (religious enthusiasm has often struck the Brits as slightly silly or unhinged, ripe for Monty Python treatment) and desire not to give offence.

I fear that sense of humour is going to be tested for the remainder of my lifetime.

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I have been tipped off by Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber that he is taking issue with this post of mine. His post has the title you see above and can be found here. He writes:

The title, btw, is not meant to be a personal dig but rather a play on the title of Jerry Cohen's book (see the post). Still, I think there's a real question for you guys: granted, you think it would be wrong for the state to force you to do good, so why don't you do it anyway, unforced?

I anticipate a range of answers to that one, including that the good I'm thinking of either (a) isn't really good at all or (b) wouldn't be achieved by the means I'm suggesting. But I'm saving responses for a later post.

Bertram says that I was not entitled to assume that the protestors are strict egalitarians or that they necessarily believe that the Third World is poor because they are rich and that money transfer is the way to correct that situation. He continues, "They may, of course, believe the true claims that some Third-World poverty is attributable to the action of wealthy nations and that money transfer can be part of a solution to that problem."

I cannot resist saying that I am at least as entitled to my assumption that protestors at a protest agree with the rhetoric of the protest leaders as he is entitled to his assumption that libertarians do not do good unforced.

In his next paragraph he very neatly cites protectionist regimes such as the Common Agricultural Policy as an example of the action of wealthy nations that he correctly states I believe causes poverty. A little too neatly: if the protestors' foremost demand was the abolition of the CAP then I might head up to Edinburgh myself, but it is not. Where they do make that demand at all, it comes way down the list after a lot of actively harmful demands such as that Third World governments make their own people pay more than we do for food and fridges. (Or "Third World countries have the right to protect their farmers and infant industries" as they quaintly put it.)

Bertram then gives a quick summary of Bono's view that personal contributions are irrelevant contrasted with my view, and seems to largely agree with me. "Solent�s original post, though," he adds, "seems motivated by the thought that the protestors are in some sense hypocrites , that if they are true to their principles they should give much more than they are giving. "

Yes. It costs good money to go to Edinburgh, good money to find a place to stay, good money to buy six or so meals - especially if you are boycotting MacDonalds - and many of them will have forgone a day or two's pay as well. Very few will get home without having spent a hundred quid plus in dribs and drabs. If they think that money is needed, why not send it instead? (Or "as well", but since my original question implied "instead" I will stick with that.) If all the planned million protestors each gave �100 it would be a serious contribution. It might be less than the increase in the aid budget lobbied for but it could be targeted better and would arrive sooner. As an extra bonus, the millions of pounds due to be spent on protecting the G8 leaders against protestors would also be freed up! The protestors are acting like they think the money is not urgently needed.

Another thought playing around in my mind was the extreme indirectness of what the protestors were doing. They hope to influence one group of leaders to transfer more money to another group of leaders so that the latter will use it to do good in a way distinctly unlike their usual behaviour following previous transfers. Compare that to just giving money. How likely it is that the chain of causality that the protestors think will do good will actually break at some point. This is not the same as the argument above. There I was casting doubt on the protestors' sincerity. Here I am casting doubt on the correctness of their assumptions about the way the world works.

In the next part Bertram asks how much egalitarians should give. He says with approval that an author called Liam Murphy holds that we should calculate what our share would be in the collective project of morality if everyone did an equal share, and then feel strictly obliged to do only that, while being allowed to do more if desired.

From Bertram's summary of Murphy, I do not agree with him. Point one: to call morality a "collective project" sounds nice but it begs the question. I did not sign up to any project. Point two: the thrust of his argument seems to be "we work out what we would do in an imaginary world and then do that." Why not imagine no one went hungry? Then you will not need to do anything at all!

The next part of the post asks how much it would cost to bring everyone up to a minimum standard of living. Chris Bertram himself, I deduce from this and other things he has written, is not an egalitarian, more a nobodystarvesist. (As am I.) He argues that the required contribution is surprisingly small. But I repeat: this misses the point; people are starving. If one believes that being given government money will help, then so will being given your money.

Now we cut to the chase: "My view is that the state should enforce that duty. Instead of giving my share, with no assurance that others would do theirs, I would thereby be assured that everyone was making a contribution: a collective project of preventing serious harm would not be undermined by free-riders and curmudgeons. So I�m happy both to pay, and to try to get the state to force me and others to pay."

I respond:

1) I do not see why his preference for feeling that he is not paying more than others should be deferred to.

2) I take his objection about the "project" not being undermined by free riders much more seriously, despite my dislike of the connotations of the word project. I assert that the reduction in generosity caused by the resentment of free riders (that term is being misused by my lights: he means "persons not choosing to contribute as much as you") is far less than the reduction in generosity caused by everyone assuming that the government will see to it. This assumption also decreases the initiative, status and ultimately the wealth of the recipients. And force has high transaction costs.

Bertram finishes by saying, "... that doesn�t mean that others can�t raise questions about what she does choose to do, including, of course (and again), her own question: �Why is what you are doing better than just giving your spare money to the poor?�

Let us take my glowing description of the virtue of trade as a means of making poor people rich as already having been made. In fact, though, I do not agree with some of my more committed libertarian brethren in seeing no benefit in giving rather than trading. From what he has said Chris Bertram's actual behaviour and mine are approximately similar. I claim that the mismatch between words and actions in my case is slightly less than it is in his case and far less than in the case of those heading to the mutual admiration festival in Edinburgh. [Added later: On reflection, there is no mismatch between Bertram's words and actions, assuming he follows Murphy in both word and deed. I should have talked about the mismatch between ends and means.]

There is another contradiction as well. The reason for having a protest is that protestors do not think the government leaders are doing the right thing. In other words they think their judgement as to the best way to spend money is better than the judgement of their leaders. But if they think that, why are they keen to hand over more money to those same leaders to disburse rather than disbursing it themselves?

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In Milton and Rose Friedman's Free to Choose it says:

Of course, an egalitarian may protest that he is but a drop in the ocean, that he would be willing to redistribute the excess of his income over his concept of an equal income if everyone else were compelled to do the same. On one level this contention that compulsion would change matters is wrong - even if everyone else did the same, his specific contribution to the income of others would still be a drop in the ocean. His individual contribution would be just as large if he were the only contributor as if he were one of many. Indeed, it would be more valuable because he could target his contribution to go to the very worst off among those he regards as appropriate recipients.

I have a question for all the protestors planning to give up their time and money by going to Edinburgh for the G8 summit. Why is what you are doing better than just giving your spare money to the poor?

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Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite...If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right.

- Richard Dawkins, from a collection of brilliant essays, "The Devil's Chaplain", crushing all manner of shoddy thinking.

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A few weeks ago parts of the libertarian intellectual scene marked what would have been Ayn Rand's 100th birthday. Among a number of articles reflecting on her life and novels was this surprisingly conservative article by Reason magazine regular Cathy Young. Young is determined to present both Rand's great virtues alongside her not-so agreeable side, particularly her intolerance of anyone, who, however constructively, criticised her.

But the article contains a number of charges about Rand and her system of ideas which I think are unfair. I want to address them not as some sort of defence of Rand - a writer who had some serious faults, in my view - but because the points Young makes can be applied to classical liberal/libertarian views more broadly.

Young claims that Rand had no time for family life of any kind and that her main characters appeared to have no enjoyable family life at all. As a result, her value system is held to be seriously deficient, in that Young claims that a viable human society requires us to feel obligations towards our fellow family members even though a person has not chosen the family he or she is in. (The same sort of argument is used by conservatives to justify loyalty to a country). This surely overlooks the point that for Rand, the relationships in life that matter are the ones people choose to enter into, not those born of historical accident. I am lucky enough to have been raised by two loving and smart parents. Very lucky, in fact. But it is obviously not so great for many other people and I have no doubt that a few of my friends and acquaintances have been drawn to libertarian ideas as a way of rebelling against the sort of unpleasant experiences that many children can have. So I certainly don't condemn Rand because her heroes and heroines did not take out time from their adventures to change the kiddies' diapers. After all, many great works of fiction contain characters with no reference to family issues at all. Young does not address it, but for Rand, and indeed many others, there can be no such thing as unconditional love. The sense of obligation I feel towards my parents cannot, in my view, be divorced from my sense of gratitude towards them. If they had been monsters, I would feel quite differently.

Another charge that Young makes is that Rand (and presumably many libertarians) had no interest in charity and therefore a society created by rational egoists would have no base of voluntary organisations able to help others in times of distress. That seems odd. As David Kelley points out in this marvellous book, "Unrugged Individualism", rational self interested people have a direct vested interest in cultivating a benevolent, friendly disposition towards their fellow humans. In fact many people become firefighters, nurses, paramedic rescuers and the like precisely because it is an important value to them to do such things. In short, charity is not in conflict with enlightened self interest at all. What counts is that the actions concerned are voluntary rather than something that is imposed by coercive force.

Such drawbacks aside, Young's piece is well worth reading. I discovered, for example, that Rand did not have much interest in evolution, which seems a bit strange for a declared atheist and enthusiast for science. I would have thought that evolution is something that fits quite snugly into a pro-reason, pro-freedom political phiolosphy, as Daniel Dennett has shown.

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In one of his recent entries, Brian Micklethwait referred to that small but intruiging part of historical scholarship, the "what-if" variety, in which writers conjecture what might have happened if a particular event, such as a political assassination or piece of intelligence, had not taken place. What interested me was that one or two comments suggested that this was a pure "parlour game" of no significance and that grown-ups should not bother themselves with such playful nonsense.

Ah, play. The idea that history, philosophy or art could involve play and other frivolous activity is offensive to a certain type of person. I happen to think quite differently. Playfulness is in fact often very useful in the realm of ideas. When a good writer wants to illustrate a point or an argument, he or she can often do so highly effectively through such gambits as a "thought-experiment", or through borrowing from supposedly unrelated branches of knowledge.

A good example of this was the late libertarian author, Robert Nozick, who shamelessly borrowed from game theory, science and much else to make his arguments. He famously crushed egalitarian arguments for coercively redistributing wealth in his "Wilt Chamberlain" case by showing the injustice of taking wealth from a man who had earned it from the volutantary exchanges of people starting from a completely egalitarian starting point.

Maybe it is a product of puritanical Christianity, but our culture still revolts against the idea that ideas could, and should, be fun. I find that rather odd.

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Last week I spent an evening pubbing with Samizdata reader 'Spacer' who writes for the Wall Street Journal now and again. As you can see, he was fully prepared for the Arctic conditions of the Upper West Side.

Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved

At the second pub we stumbled upon a group of his friends and next thing I was deep into a Cambridge style philosophical discussion on the existence of God. I am sure most readers know I am not the least bit religious in a fundamentalist way. I usually deflect the topic by declaring myself a "nonpracticing atheist". This unusual label typically confuses the opposition sufficiently to allow me to make good my escape.

A correct explication of my beliefs requires far more explanation and odd looks than I typically care for when my pub intent is to be chillin'. In truth I am more agnostic than atheist. I do not believe I can prove one way or the other that there is a higher being. In and of itself that is not an unusual belief set. The difficulty comes when I attempt description of the God of whose existence I am unsure.

I do not believe in the supernatural God of scripture; nor in a God of the First Cause. No God created itself and the initial Universe, but the Universe may quite possibly have created a God or God's, any one of which would be utterly indistinguishable from the all powerful God of earthly religions.

You may ask yourself, "What the hell is he talking about?".

So I will tell you.

We can describe different levels of Godness:

• An entity with a command of all which physical law allows but which exists in a localized region of space and time.

• An entity which in addition is able to control space and time.

• An entity which exists at the end of space and time and can operate on any point in that continuum.
  

• God of the Simulation. If, as David Deutsch suggests in some of his writings, there is one reality (a multiverse) and untold numbers of simulated realities, then the initiator of a simulation is an all powerful God, limited only by the rules and initial conditions it chooses to follow.

• God of the Universal Mind. If Strong Nanotechnology really is possible, then any technological species will eventually gain the ability to build anything physical law allows. It will take control of its own shape, its own mind, its own destiny. Sentience may become a property of matter and the adage "God is Everywhere" become literally true.

• God of the Singularity. If we gain control of space and time, it may be possible to create an entire space-time universe bubble to specification. The creators may or may not be able to ever again interact with their creation, but they have set the parameters which define its evolution. The creator of such a bubble is a Creator, but not the Self-Creator of religious texts.
  

There are a number of different origins for these entities. Some origins do not apply to some God-types:

• The entity could be 'ourselves' from a future time, or from the 'end' of time if our space-time is closed.

• The entity could be a progenitor from pre-existing space-time.

• The entity could be an alien civilization that developed past some threshold before we did.

• The entity could be some combination of any of the above, for instance, a mass mind existing at the end of time made up of all sentient species which passed the threshold for membership.
  

• If there is a final big crunch, then the amounts of available energy per unit time and space increase exponentially as does the ability to compute. [This is from Deutsch].

• In a Freeman Dyson open universe scenario, a civilization has exponentially less available energy per unit time and space, but adjusts by exponentially slowing down the speed of its own thoughts. It has forever to play with, so why rush?

• Entities which come to a full understanding of Space-Time may simply end-run all of this and move their thoughts to a new bubble universe.
  

The only thing they are not beyond is our imagination.

(23)

Reading several pages of interesting reports and discussion on the BBC's website about Somalia, I wonder:

Is Sudan a better country to live in than Somalia?
Do refugees travel between the two countries (probably via Ethiopia) and which is the better place to live?
How would Somalia score on a human rights questionnaire? Compared with say North Korea. I think of the official line from the worker's paradise about homosexual rights: "There is no homosexuality in the Republic of Korea, it is a bourgeois disease."
How obstructive are Somali warlords of international trade compared with say, the EU's regulatory of tariff restrictions on agriculture? Is it easier and cheaper for a Kenyan farmer to sell food to Somalia than to Sudan or Spain?

I also note that multiple currencies are operating in Somalia, with US dollars, private currencies and old banknotes being exchanged in markets. Are Somalis really so much more intelligent than Europeans who had to be protected from currency choice?

The BBC reporter makes the mistake of comparing Somalia today with Holland Park in London today (except that some types of crime are probably more frequent in Holland Park). He is appalled that guns are for sale and that the entry fees finance qat instead of state schools and state hospitals. I think it is much more interesting to compare Somalia today with neighbouring countries today. On the face of it anarchy seems a lot like Robert A Heinlein's depiction in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Ken Macleod's The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal. Despite my quibbles with the BBC on this issue, full marks for going to Somalia eyes wide open, if not quite minds wide open.

(14)

I am happy and relieved by the result of the US election. I thank those who campaigned, volunteered or just plain voted to keep the right man at the helm.

All the same, I take literally the statement that democracy is the least worst form of government.

Many here argue that we do not need any government at all. It is not going away any time soon, though. Most anarchists and minarchists will concede that modern liberal democracy is fertile ground compared to the despotic wasteland that makes up most of history, even if it is not yet a garden of libertarian delights.

I figured out as a child that the least wonderful aspect of a modern liberal democracy is that it lets the majority decide: the tyranny of the majority is to be feared. Votes are a mechanism to deal with the fact that some administrative variables affecting many people (speed limits, for instance, or surrenders) must be set at a predictable value for a recognisable group, or bad stuff happens.

I also figured out as a child that the good soul of a liberal democracy, the thing that has made us the most fortunate human beings in history, is the idea that every individual matters. None of us can be made to stop mattering because we look wrong or do wrong. That's why every individual has certain rights that cannot be...

...OK, OK, I had better stop myself before I re-hash the Declaration of Independence in much inferior prose. You know all this. You can probably cite references. Please do!

It is a pity it ever has to come to voting. Votes by definition make some people sad. Yet we go on and on about majorities and mandates and elections and other things to do with the regrettable majoritarian aspects of our system. We talk much less about how the only reason that counting people matters is that people count. And, as we on this blog know, it is a constant struggle to defend individual rights against the majority.

I just wondered, is the reason that we so exalt the rule of the majority over the more fundamental principle of equality before the law simply because we picked the wrong ruddy name for our system of government? Everybody knows that we don't mean by democracy what the Greeks meant by it. We don't have ostracism. We don't have slavery. These prohibitions are not mere differences of custom but integral to the system. The difference between our 'democracy' and theirs is precisely that we believe in inalienable rights and equality under the law. So whose bleedin' stupid idea was it to call our system the Greek word for "people-rule?" It was sure to give folk the wrong idea. If we had just called it isonomy instead we would all be a lot better off.

(20)

This morning I was left deep in thought after a seemingly innocuous article in Scientific American about Ebola vaccines. It sent me off into a bit of internal philosophizing. I have long intended to explicate a particular set of thoughts here but have never quite found the time. I do not have it right now either, but will nonetheless dedicate an hour to it. The day it deserves will never come.

There are three worlds. Not worlds in the sense of planets or matter but of realities. The first one is the world as it is. You may subdivide it any way you wish, but no matter what you do, there is still a here and now and all of the events unfolding as we speak. Whether we can understand or agree upon the details of the objective reality of this instant makes no particular difference to my thesis.

Second is the world of dreams. The one across the dream bridge. The one of our imaginations. The place where all Utopias exist and prosper. The place where perfection is possible and things just work themselves out according to great visions.

Third and last is the world of becoming. It is the first world of tomorrow or the day after that or the century after that. It is one which will one day be an objective reality on which philosophers will debate.

I find all too many persons live entirely within one world. There are those who are so grounded in reality of the first world they cannot envision change and are continuously surprised, shocked and caught mentally flat footed by it.

There are those who live totally in the second world. They are the ideologues, the ultra religious, the dreamers without a tie down. They firmly believe the first world can be made over to exactly fit their dream and everyone can be made to see the 'rightness' of their way.

There are some small numbers who live much in the third world, or at least attempt to do so. They believe the world as it is moves deterministically into the world of the future following a linear or at least predictable track.

I have problems with all three ways of living. The first worlders may be solidly grounded, but they just react to events. Change will overwhelm them because they are unprepared for it. If you were an Eqyptian of 2000 BC, you could afford the stability assumption. As a citizen of the 21st Century AD the luxury of stasis is unavailable to you.

Third worlders are a little bit better. They at least can deal with linear change. While subconsciously stasis-minded, at least they do understand tomorrow will be somewhat different and that difference will grow from the current instant of objective reality.

The second worlders have glorious visions about worlds which are fundamentally different from what the first or third worlders see. They envisage a new world and believe it can be brought into existence if they can just convince enough people to join them. But the purity of dreams slips away as more people join in; the edges fuzz out, the concepts drift as the rhetoric inevitably mutates in the face of inconvenient facts.

One must take all three worlds into consideration. There is a real today and we must be ready to deal with it. There will be a real tomorrow that grows out of the unique decisions, creativity, actions and beliefs of 3 billion or more human beings - not to mention the odd curveball tossed by nature. Hurricanes, great earthquakes and giant tsunami's happen regularly. Really big events happen rarely and randomly but do happen: Yellowstone Park caldera could go up tomorrow and wipe out half of the USA; an unseen asteroid could send us back to day one; the Sun could burp a small flare and sterilize half the globe...

That is where the need for the World of Dreams comes in. We do not have to accept tomorrow will flow entirely out of the way things are. If one has a goal and enough people behind it one can change the course of history. If you could compute it you might have changed the way a butterfly waggled its wings in 1850 and decided the outcome of the 2004 US election. If you have a few thousands or tens of thousands of dreamers today, you can strongly influence the objective world of 2010.

Note I say 'influence'. This is where the pure dreamer falls flat. Because they have only a weak tie with reality they will begin with belief in an exact 2010. As a few years pass and reality diverges from the dream path, they will become increasingly desperate in their attempts to force the first world back onto the path to their second world. No matter how desperate, no matter how violent or how draconian their approach, when 2010 arrives it will not match their 'solipsist' dream.

The wise man knows you can never make the world over exactly as you want. You can only foresee directions and do your best to make the outcomes better. At each moment you have to recognize where you really are and start anew. You have to accept what is all the while you are trying to change what is becoming.

Most important of all, you have to stand back and take pleasure in each real moment of time. Those moments are the only ones you truly have.

(49)

Candida Moss, writing in the Spectator, suggests that 'presumed consent' ought to apply for donating organs. On the basis that my comments my not appear in the magazine, here's what I wrote:

Presumed consent is not consent. If it were, then minors or people suffering from dementia might not enjoy the protection from sexual assault that they do at present. Sexual predators could no doubt claim "presumed consent" for their crimes.

There is a difference between medical expedience and morality. There can be no doubt that there would be enormous medical benefits from performing vivisection on human beings, instead of on animals: dosages, differences in metabolic rates etc. would be far easier to calculate.

Rightly, we abhor this and consider controvertial using the results of Nazi experiments on Jews, because it can be considered the partial condoning of horrific actions.

Is it Candida Moss's wish that the state (probably at EU level) ought to nationalize our bodies and redistribute organs according to need? At least Gordon Brown only wants my money.

I might add that the issue of designer babies giving their own consent to being used as experimental animals is another current topic. It seems pretty sick to me.

(47)

As Mayday approaches and with it the traditional harbingers of summer, such as the sight of a freshly dug paving brick in flight, with its comet's tail of dirt particles, tracing an arc towards a McDonalds plate glass window or the contents of a looted Baby Gap whirling in the breeze, blue bibs and striped sleepsuits hanging off street lights, my thoughts turn to that strange creature who has emerged from winter hibernation, the anti-globalisation "anarchist". This creature represents a conundrum: While he professes to favour anarchy, he is more likely than not to owe his current indolent lifestyle to a most un-anarchical social welfare system. How to reconcile this contradiction?

The first thing I'd like to say is that I am not anarcho-libertarian. I do understand the arguments, I just remain unpersuaded. But my intention here is not to provide a rebuttal of anarcho-libertarianism, rather to compare it with the "anarchism" more prominent in the popular imagination, that of a Mayday protester. If you take such an anarchist at his word and grant that he will be happy to forego the benefits of a redistributive welfare state once his utopia arrives, where does his purported philosophy differ from an anarcho-libertarian or anarcho-capitalist?

It occurs to me that the principal difference lies in the respective attitudes towards private property. The anarcho-capitalist respects private property, his own and others. The "anarchist" considers all property to be theft and asserts a right to expropriate such property as he needs or wants from others. As a welfare state needs a state to sustain itself, the anarchist presumably imagines that the "needy", in lieu of state handouts, simply steal what they "need" from others. Of course if you are one of those "others" you may not be so keen on this happening. As there would be no state police force, the task of defending property devolves to the individual who may contract it out to private security services. Thus the anarchy favoured by the "anarchist" turns out strikingly similar to that proposed by anarcho-capitalists. Is this really what he wants?

I suggest that what the "anarchist" really wants is short term anarchy. An afternoon or so of mayhem, "for kicks", and then a return to an un-anarchical world where the welfare state remains to inadvertently subsidise his "alternative" lifestyle.

(25)

In May I am heading off to Las Vegas, where I am speaking at FreedomFest, the year's big libertarian event. Booking tickets today, and looking at lots of pictures of casinos, I was reminded of an article the Liberty Club published a couple of years ago about gambling, money and morals. The author, Conyers Davis, writes:

As I fought my way through the throngs of gamblers in Atlantic City, I could understand why Martin Luther reiterated the phrase that the love of money is 'the root of all evil'. Never in my life have I seen people treat money in so desperate a manner. Gambling on unknown odds, hoping to exponentially increase their wealth as if by magic. It quickly became obvious that the gamblers in Atlantic City do not love or respect money, despite their obvious desire to have more of it. Indeed, they have fallen into a trap that allows it to dictate life's terms to them. These gamblers see money as the answer to all their problems, yet cannot escape the fact that it has become the bane of their existence. Surely, money represents more than this greed of the gamblers. Despite the fallacies that these people attribute to power of money, a positive alternative does exist. Money is one of the greatest physical tools that man has produced and should be openly regarded as such.

As a libertarian, I obviously believe that gambling should be legal. Is it moral? Is there perhaps a difference, morally, between gambling for fun and gambling because of an addiction? Discuss.

(19)

I lunched today with our Great Leader Perry, and one of the things he mentioned was how he doesn't care for ploughing through the collected works of the Great Philosophers (something to do with preferring simply to find out "the truth"), and prefers instead to read � and I can't remember the exact phrase he used, but the one I use in such circumstances is 'Bluffers Guide'. I share Perry's tastes in this matter. However, like him, I do want to know approximately what these people did say.

I was thus particularly pleased to encounter this posting, by Friedrich Blowhard. It is number three in a series of postings he has done about Friedrich Nietzsche. (Something tells me that there may not be many more in this series of potted guides.) But since Friedrich B starts Nietzsche posting number three with a brief summary of postings number one and two, I reckon that means we can skip postings one and two and just read three.

There is a definite air of challenge in what Friedrich B says to the likes of us, especially in these paragraphs:

But by his example in putting forward the Over-man as the 'meaning of the earth' (whether you agree with him or find this ludicrous) Nietzsche makes it clear how intellectually flaccid it is to argue for or against, say, a social policy on the basis of abstractions like 'liberty,' 'justice,' and 'fairness.' I have nothing against such concepts, but clearly they are pretty vague and toothless in the absence of an explicit goal or a stated purpose. I mean, who really thinks they are here on earth to pursue perfect liberty, perfect justice or perfect fairness as ends in themselves? Aren�t liberty, justice and fairness valuable only as means to some end? But can we really be surprised that the average American ends up living a life of �mindless consumerism� when he or she can�t state a social goal more profound than �eliminating injustice�?

But I share Nietzsche�s skepticism about how long an era that remains agnostic about any higher or supreme goal can stave off the hunger pangs of meaning. As evidence of this, I would point to the rise of movements like sociobiology, and perhaps the aesthetic theories like those of Christopher Alexander. Although Sociobiology, for example, is too shy to come right out and admit that it nurtures such an ur-goal in its bosom, I think it is clearly implied: that we should live so as to maximize the odds that our descendants will survive and thrive. And since our biological 'nature' is the only possible basis for profound human 'meaning,' we must come to terms with it, if only in order to survive long enough to accomplish our goal.

These philosophies seem to me to the first signs of what I would term the emergence of post-nihilistic 'meaning,' but I doubt they will be the last. I look forward to seeing others arise as well. Let me announce my formula: Nihilism is dead.

Heh. Nice little joke that. But after that laugh dies away, I am left with the definite feeling that I am being got at.

My problem is that I think that the Nietzsche described by Friedrich (Blowhard), who identifies the twentieth century as the time when God died and the God gap got filled by a succession of philosophical/political catastrophes, is pretty much correct. However, I am also part of the God is Dead tendency myself. In the words of Michael Caine in The Last Valley (a movie which, it so happens, Perry and I share a taste for): "There is no God! It's a legend!" My sentiments exactly. And if you combine that with "You can't get an ought from an is!", you get that pretty much all 'meanings' you get nowadays are actually meaningless, other than the ones I make for myself.

Okay, well that's something for you all to think about. If your tastes are more in the direction of cool gadgets, Perry also allowed me to take a photograph of this.

(3)

Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers
David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Ecco, 2001

"Wittgenstein's reputation among twentieth-century thinkers is ... unsurpassed. ... A poll of professional philosophers in 1998 put him fifth in a list of those who had made the most important contributions to the subject, after Aristotle, Plato, Kant and Nietzsche and ahead of Hume and Descartes (p. 231)." Yet there is nothing in this book that is comprehensible to the layman about Wittgenstein's philosophy, or even, I have to say, much of an attempt to make it so. His eminence and influence and his credibility to other philosophers we have to take on trust.

On the other hand, Popper - the antagonist to Wittgenstein's protagonist - has two well-known and accepted achievements to his credit, his book The Open Society and Its Enemies and his "falsifiability" theory on the structure of scientific hypotheses (though I have often wondered if "vulnerability" would not be a better term). But in Britain and America, Popper is slowly being dropped from University syllabuses; his name is fading, if not yet forgotten ... a penalty of success rather than the price of failure (p. 230)." Or perhaps, being transferred from the useless category of philosopher to that of scientist? Far from turning his office there into a shrine, the LSE has had it converted into a lavatory.

The allusion in the title is, of course, to the famous incident with the poker on Friday, 25th October, 1946 about which none of the supposedly acute seekers after truth present could agree. This was the only time the two philosophers actually met, though both came from Vienna, both were of Jewish descent (though neither of religion), and both had to leave Austria when the Nazis took over. As far as I can make out, the dispute was whether philosophy, as a discipline, could or should deal with real "problems" (Popper) or merely with "puzzles" (Wittgenstein), say with language expressions. The meeting was of a discussion group at Cambridge University, called the Moral Science Club (MSC), of which Wittgenstein was actually the Chairman. He was, however, usually overbearing and difficult, tending to hog the discussions, often leaving meetings half-way through - something Popper probably didn't know.

Popper had been invited to give a paper and Wittgenstein interrupted and shouted his disagreement, making his point brandishing the poker that lay by the moribund fire, laying it down when Russell told him to, and then leaving. Smoothing matters down, someone asked Popper for an example of a moral principle. "Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers," was the reply, provoking a laugh and, I imagine, relaxing the tension. Popper later claimed that Wittgenstein was still present when he made this retort, but the general agreement is that he had gone, one witness even accusing Popper of lying. The poker itself disappeared.

The book, however, is much more than an account or investigation of this episode. Tracing the lives of both personalities, both of them combative and obsessive, the authors also fill in the background they grew up in - the increasingly anti-semitic Vienna of the post-WWI war decades, despite the efforts of those of Jewish ancestry to assimilate, including many who discarded their religion and became Christians. Wittgenstein's was an extremely rich family (though his grandfather had adopted the name of his aristocratic employer, to whom he was not related) but he divested himself of his own share of its wealth. He had served with distinction in the Austrian Army in WWI, volunteering for dangerous posts, being decorated several times and during it writing his seminal work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He ended the war in an Italian POW camp. On the other hand Popper, some thirteen years younger, came from a bourgeois but impoverished family. He had difficulty in escaping from Austria; with perhaps some exaggeration he claimed that taking a Chair in New Zealand left free for another (Waismann) an opening to a temporary lectureship at Cambridge (p. 221). His "war effort", he said, was writing The Open Society (p. 71), though he tried, unsuccessfuly, to join the armed forces as well. "Popper's impact on academic life [in the University of Canterbury, New Zealand] was greater than that of any other person, before or since," judged that institution; he acted as a kind of intellectual champagne after the dry depression years (p. 172)."

Wittgenstein died in 1951, Popper in 1994. The authors do not try to give much information on the later work of either, though there is a joint chronology (pp. 245-242). They do seem, in my view, to be somewhat biased against Popper, if only because he's left more evidence against himself; presumably also they cannot help but be influenced by the poll of philosophers given above (and in which, presumably Popper comes nowhere). Neither men come across as particularly pleasant, let alone lovable, though Popper seems to have kept friends as well as making enemies, while the impression is given that Wittgenstein despised everyone - no list of friends is given for him, though mention is made of disciples and acolytes who imitated his mannerisms. Although Popper died only six or seven years before the book was written and published, there is no indication that either author ever interviewed or even met him. It is also a little disappointing that no mention is made of any relationship between him and other thinkers on the right, such as Bauer and Hayek, who, in contrast with both Popper and Wittgenstein, was noted for his courtesy towards opponents. Perhaps these don't qualify as philosophers. Isaiah Berlin is mentioned, but once only to have his philosophical pretentions pulverised by Wittgenstein (p. 24), and twice in passing.

A minor but irritating typographical blemish is the close resemblance between 3 and 5.

(1)

An interesting post by A.E.Brain, an Aussie blogger, on contrasts between style and substance when it comes to governments:

The most reviled form of Government in recent times has been National Socialism. With Good Reason. The two most famous - or infamous - National Socialist parties have been the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei - National Socialist German Workers' Party) AKA "Nazi" party, and the ANSP (Arab National Socialist Party) AKA "Ba'ath" Party.

But... a bad form of Government executed by Good People is better than a good form of Government executed by Bad People. therefore present for you a contrast in styles, of two "National Socialist" movements, though one of them didn't call itself that. Judge for yourself.

 

I do agree with A.E.Brain that there are similarities in the ways that states, regardless of their ideology, usurp a prominent place in the social interactions. It is the desire for total politicisation of the civil society that makes Communism and Nazism such intimate ideological bed-fellows. Practically too, there is not much difference between a concentration camp and a gulag, except the fact that many more millions died in gulags. As a commenter in this thread put it:

The commie shoots 'em in the head,
The facist, in the skull.
Their ideological differences
For victims, rather null.

The US posters skillfully juxtaposed with their Nazi 'counterparts' use identical imagery and the similarities in style are meant to be sinister. But it should not really come as a surprise, since propaganda toolbox was not as 'diverse' in those days and both Nazis and Communists would have used and perfected the 'marketing' techniques of the day. The more subtle reminder is the pervasive hijacking by the state of the 'positive' collective sentiments that are transformed into a collectivist norm imposed by force.

A.E.Brain concludes:

What's important is the matters of Substance, like the very real differences that existed between the Franklin&Eleanor team and Adolf.

Absolutely. There is only one small fallacy in his argument. Propaganda does not equal style, at least not in any meaningful sense. So although National Recovery Administration (NRA) was no doubt bureaucratic and authoritarian in its nature, I cannot see the implementation of its policies being even vaguely reminescent of the ways of Nazi or Communist institutions. In the end, precisely because of its authoritarian substance (and style), the NRA did not last long enough to even fully implement its policies.

What the posters demonstrate is that States have instinctive tendencies to take over the society whether by force or ideology or a threat of external/internal enemy. Toxic ideologies will turn the state into an instrument of terror. Credible or fabricated external/internal threats will enable the state to expand its powers and effective use of force will make the state a frightening tool in the hands of those who wield it.

The difference is not just what those who are in power believe but also what kind of society they face. Both Communism and Nazism have taken over the societies where the rights of individual were not paramount. It is when individual is no longer valued as the corner-stone of the society and his freedoms protected from collectivist impositions, the state is unrestrained in its natural course.

(33)

Over at the Adam Smith Institute's Weblog, Madsen Pirie says:

There is another view which says that politics matters less these days. When the UK government provided houses and jobs for many of us, and ran the electricity, gas, oil and phone companies, together with steel, coal, ships and cars, it mattered who was in charge. With less coming from government and more from ourselves and the private sector, it is not as important. People tend to vote heavily in high tax countries such as Denmark, and less so in low tax countries such as the USA.

In other words, if politics (i.e. the scramble for the favour of the majority) becomes less important, voting goes down.

Many libertarians, notably Perry de Havilland of this blog, believe that the same idea in reverse is true - that by not voting we can reduce the politicisation of our lives. 'Let them wither away to irrelevance,' he says. I'm not so sure. It might be one of those nasty paradoxes such as the one whereby safety breeds lack of vigilance, which makes us less safe.

Perhaps the first to stop voting are those who have achieved relative independence, leaving disproportionate influence to those still at the trough. Have any studies been done on this? And does anyone know what percentage of those eligible to vote in, say, 1900 when the State was very weak, actually did so?

(6)

I am glad to see that the august publishing house, the Oxford University Press, has recently published a monster-length encyclopaedia of the Enlightenment. For those who can stump up more than three hundred pounds, this would be a most impressive addition to any library. From David Hume to Diderot, the book is a treasure trove of facts and articles about the folk who helped shape our world and mostly for the better.

Let's hope university libraries stock this book as essential item since it is bound to be beyond the financial means of most undergraduates. And perhaps the OEP could make a gesture of sending a few copies to the nascent academies I trust will be springing up in post-Saddam Iraq.

(76)

Here in the US, we have recently been diverted by the spectacle of a state Supreme Court judge defying the orders of a federal court in order to violate the Constitution. The state judge refused to move a gigantic copy of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse, where its prominent placement and enormous size at least arguably amounted to "the [state] establishment of religion" in violation of the US Constitution. Now, this is just the sort of topic that seems to exert an irresistible compulsion on people to wander off into the tall grass of irrelevance, so I will leave aside the legalistic arguments about whether the placement of the Ten Commandments actually violated the First Amendment to the US Consitution as applied to the stat