Samizdata

Chris Bertram has taken Steven Den Beste to task for his ruggedly anti-tranzi views. Chris has pointed out that Steve’s attack on the tranzis for their promotion of ‘group’ rights over individual rights is flawed by the resultant support for the Nation State which, in itself, is an exercise in ‘group’ rights over individual ones.

I am not jumping to Steve’s defence here because I am sure that he is more than capable of fighting his own corner, but I think the real grist of the complaint about tranzi ideology lies not so much in its collectivism but its basis in Gramscian Deconstruction i.e. true equality cannot be achieved until people have been stripped of their internalised bourgeois values and reconstructed as ‘new’ citizens. A philosophy which later heavily influenced Pol Pot among others. This is what Steve may have been driving at and, if so, he is quite right.

But Chris’s counterpunch is not without merit. As a libertarian, I have mistrust of national governments hard-wired into every single one of my response mechanisms but even the likes of me is not so warped by disappointments and frustrations that I am prepared to leap from the frying pan and into the fire.

The fire I speak of is World Government and that is precisely the tranzi agenda (‘Global Governance’ is already on the curriculum of every UK law school); the replacement of sovereign countries with mere districts universally bound by one set of laws, one set of standards, one set of morals and (as sure as night follows day) harmonised taxes. Elected leaders would become nothing more than the Gauleiters of the Third Reich; equipped with some degree of autonomy but finally answerable to Berlin.

This is quite the worst idea ever devised by man, not just because that World Government is likely to govern on deeply unhealthy principles but because it will render extinct the one thing that keeps stupid and rapacious politicians (and are there any other kind?) in check: a means of escape.

I have lost count of the number of men and women I have met who were born behind the Iron Curtain and in every single case they recounted the stories of how they were dazzled and inspired by the increasing preponderance of images seeping in from the prosperous West and convincing them there was a better world out there that was being denied to them. A few years of that and bang went the Soviet Union.

Just like bad ideas need to be pushed out by good ideas, so bad regimes will eventually fall because of the existence of good (or better regimes). There is nothing more sobering for political classes drunk with power than the ability of their wealth-producing and ambitious citizens to up sticks and bugger off somewhere more conducive to their aspirations, leaving said political classes without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. Global governance will have no such impediments, having, in effect, a captive citizenry with nowhere to escape to improve their lives. One standardised world bereft of all diversity (and , ironically, diversity is one of the cornerstone principles the tranzis obsessively purport to promote). Yes, it will a borderless world in which you can roam freely but there will be no point in doing so. Different landscape, same old shit.

Besides, there is the no small matter of elections in nation states. David Blunkett may be a son of a bitch but at least he’s our son of a bitch and if he presses too many buttons on too many Britons he will rapidly become an ex-son of a bitch. Would that a similar facility existed for dealing with the likes of Kofi Annan. It doesn’t and it never will.

Free from any disincentives, it is only a matter of time before Global Governance becomes Global Tyranny. There will simply be no reason for it not to do so.

So Chris and Steve may have been having an eloquent argument but it was the wrong argument. Rather like a market in goods and services means choice and prosperity for consumers, so a market in governments, a diversity of different jurisdictions with radically different ways of doing things, gives choice and freedom to us all. For sure it means that some regimes will be rotten and vile but, equally, others will not and the latter will prevail over the former by sheer dint of their existence.

Until such time as our species has conquered the far reaches of the cosmos (an exciting prospect, but I ain’t holding my breath) then a world of sovereign, independent nations is our means of escape in case of fire. It is a universal slave railroad and an insurance policy for mankind that should be defended at any cost.

[My thanks to Patrick Crozier for the heads-up]

Patrick Crozier, over at his occasional “when he’s not thinking about trains” blog, asks: Why are modern houses so bad? Like him I don’t want to blame capitalism at all and do want to blame it all on socialism, but find the matter to be somewhat more complicated than that.

I can’t say too often how much I like the way that Patrick Crozier writes what he really thinks, rather than merely booming forth with arguments that he personally doesn’t quite accept, but which other people, being inferior idiots, might. He is, in short, honest. It’s only when you read someone like him that you realise how much pro-free-market rhetoric is of the other kind. And because Patrick isn’t merely trying to persuade, but to tell the truth as he truly thinks it, he is actually far more persuasive, because when he has a definite opinion (like his UKTransport mantra: Accidents Are Bad For Business) you know that he means it.

Patrick hints with deliberate lack of confidence at a few possible answers to his question. He mentions our obsession with home ownership (tax induced, although he doesn’t mention that), which is something I touched on here, long ago, saying pretty much the following:

Perhaps it’s our obsession with home ownership. As I understand it, in 1914, the vast majority of people rented. So, you had a cadre of experienced landlords who knew what to look for. In such an environment contractors had to be very careful to do a good job or else they would miss out on repeat business.

Patrick also mentions the problem of planning permission. I’m losing count of the number of libertarians who’ve told me that they consider this to be one of the great unchallenged unfreedoms of Britain now, and who promise that they’ll write something about it, generally something about abolishing it, Real Soon Now. Presumably they’ll all be elaborating on sentiments like these:

For instance that major housebuilders are firstly machines for obtaining planning permission and only secondly builders of houses. I also toy with the idea that because of planning controls, the market for property is so tight that people are prepared to buy almost anything.

Those points both sound right to me, and here are a couple more thoughts.

First, might part of the decline of the average house be a statistical matter? What I have in mind is that before about 1910 (the date from which Patrick dates the decline) very few people actually lived in this house. Quite a few lived in nicer houses. And many, many more lived in much nastier ones. And the ones living in the nastier old houses were cheap to hire, hour after hour, to slave away at making the materials for and doing the building of those nice old houses, hence all that nice brickwork and carpentry in the nice old houses.

To put it another way, what Patrick may really be doing is to point out that the really nice houses of yesteryear are nicer than the average ones of now, which must be built with much more expensive labour, earning average-or-above wages instead of low wages. That the average house now is pretty poor compared to what it might be is still a great pity, I do agree, and by capitalism’s standards this is a big disappointment. Could do better. But maybe it’s not quite so scandalous and puzzling as Patrick makes out.

How often does Patrick canvass in really posh but newly built suburbs, in places like Weybridge and in counties like Surrey, where I grew up? There you will surely find thousands upon thousands of really very fine new places, surely a lot better built than those “average” new houses he’s complaining about.

Also, bear in mind that older, very nice houses were big because they needed to include servants’ quarters. Now, the average house also has servants, but being mechanical these need far less space. There, capitalism has definitely done the business.

And the other general point I’d make is that the impact of the “Modern Movement” in architecture, which Patrick hints at via his complaints about the high rise, state inflicted housing horrors of the sixties and seventies, is a huge, huge subject, and central to all this. Our country is still littered with the failed solutions imposed by this huge folly, comparable in its damage to our country (and to many others) with the impact of the Second World War, not just in the form of idiotic and hideous buildings, but in the form of institutional and political follies, which persist despite the assumptions behind them having been long revealed as absurd, like … planning permission.

When I’ve got my fixed price adsl connected, and when I’ve got Brian’s education blog up and running, and if I still have a life left after all that what with carrying on writing stuff for this, then I’ll also start another blog called (something like – suggestions please) Brian’s art, architecture and design blog. Then we can all take the Modern Movement to the cleaners. Although I suppose Perry would say: why wait? Do it here.