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While Daniel Antal‘s poor farmers and street traders demonstrate for free trade and deregulation, here is a British business perspective on government regulation, from the letters page of yesterday’s (August 29 2002) Times:
Sir, The UK Government places a strong incentive on industry to monitor the amount of packaging it produces, by means of the Packaging Waste Regulations. Under these regulations, everyone from the producers of the packaging to those who sell it (for example, the supermarkets) has to pay a levy for each piece of packaging handled.
These regulations can be quite complex, and many members use compliance schemes to help them to meet their obligations. Valpak is the UK’s largest compliance scheme, with over 3,200 members from throughout industry. Our philosophy is not only to ensure that our members achieve compliance, but also to ensure that the money generated by meeting the obligations is used in a responsible manner, to aid and encourage recycling.
All of us, both industry and consumers, can help to increase recycling and reduce the amount of packaging produced in the UK.
Yours faithfully,
J. Cox
(Chief Executive Officer),
Valpak Ltd,
Stratford Business Park,
Banbury Road,
Stratford-upon-Avon CV37 7GW
August 23.
I’m sure we’d agree that recycling is a fine thing, if anyone can make of it a profitable business that doesn’t depend on anyone being compelled to do it. Millions in the third world do scratch a living from genuine recycling, although no doubt there are all kinds of Transnazi plans afoot to forbid such activities, based on the notion that the way to get rid of poverty is to make it illegal.
But Valpak is just the expansion of the public sector, done slightly differently to the way we’ve been used to. They’re civil servants tricked out as businessmen. Try to imagine what Mr Cox thinks about deregulation.
We cannot rely on capitalists to defend capitalism (sprinkle inverted commas to taste).
Katherine Senzee emails to ask if Mark Something, of somethingnews.com, who did so well on Newsnight, might perhaps be Marc Morano (scroll down until you find him – he’s there) of CNSNews.com.
That’s got to be the guy. Thank you Katherine.
Next question: Who is Katherine Senzee?
…The time to worry would be if he stopped attacking us.
John Gray used to defend freedom and free markets; now he denounces all such stuff. He used to be one of us, but now he isn’t. How come? Have we changed our minds? Has he? Is the fellow some sort of traitor?
There is nothing inconsistent or treacherous about John Gray. He was never more than a useful ally of the libertarian movement. He hasn’t changed the way he thinks. He hasn’t, in Tom Burroughes‘ words, “declined and fallen”. Nor have we. It is the times that have changed. These now place John Gray in opposition to us rather than in alliance with us.
The circumstance which enabled me to start seriously understanding what goes on inside John Gray’s head occurred about fifteen years ago.
Remember the AIDS scare of the mid-to-late eighties. Remember when we all made lists of our bed companions, and when they all did, and we thereby constructed vast but, as it later mostly turned out (provided that you were a non-drug-abusing heterosexual), entirely imaginary networks of deadly contagion. Remember when millions were going to die, and everyone and his lover besieged the Sexually Transmitted Disease Clinics demanding to be tested. Remember when AIDS was trumpetted to the world as an equal opportunities killer. Of course you do, even if, like me, you could not now put an exact date to that terrible moment of apparent doom.
Well, I happened to meet up with John Gray, with whom I was then acquainted, just when this moment was at its most scary. He it was who conveyed to me the full horrors of the sexually transmitted doom that supposedly then awaited us. He had just come back from America, he told me. And in America, he told me, they were predicting deaths by the million. Something like, if I remember his figure rightly, twenty per cent of the American population were going to die hideously, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, they could do about it.
There wasn’t much talk of the strength of the evidence for all this, merely the assertion that it was definitely so.
And he loved it. He wallowed in it. Just when the world was ceasing to make sense to the rest of us, it was making perfect, wonderful, glorious sense to him. Disaster is just around the corner! Yes!!!!
Now what’s going on here? The simple answer is that John Gray is, as Tom Burroughes says, a pessimist. But he is a consistent pessimist. He has always been a pessimist. He always will be a pessimist, until the moment he dies – another moment which will also make perfect sense to him. He never has and he never will betray the camp of pessimism. His coat will always be deepest black, and he will never turn it. He can be depended upon to see disaster around every corner.
Disaster, in John Gray’s world, is the result of optimism and enthusiasm, of “constructivist rationalism”, as Hayek put it, of some formula which lots of people are getting excited and happy about. All such formulae, for John Gray, will inevitably end in tears.
I don’t know why John Gray is such a pessimist. Perhaps when very young he had his one episode of manic, insane happiness and optimism, and he ran joyously around his Welsh house shouting hosannas. The world was a happy place. He had just proved it, just read a book about it. It was progressing. Every day, in every way, it was getting better and better. Hallelujah!! And then just as the graph of his joy was reaching idiotic heights, his gloomy Welsh uncle dropped by with the news that his favourite Welsh aunt – who was in fact his favourite human being in the entire world ever and who had only that morning been telling little John that the world wasn’t all misery but in fact a happy smiling place full of joy and love and good home cooking and nice clean houses with indoor plumbing such as there didn’t use to be in the bad old days – had just been killed horribly in a car smash
→ Continue reading: The consistent pessimism of John Gray
I’ve had BBC2 TV’s Newsnight on while doing other things, and two little overhearings reached out and grabbed my attention.
First, someone called, I think, Mark something, of, I think they said, csn.com (but it can’t have been that because csn.com doesn’t seem to exist), talked from Johannesburg about how George Bush should have gone to this Earth Summit beano and taken, quote, “a principled stand in favour of free market capitalism”, unquote. You don’t usually hear language like that on the BBC, which I suppose is the fault of people like me for not contriving to be on it enough. Most “principled stands” over here are for things that are bad. Mark Something is, inevitably, an American, and his point was that George W, by remaining silent about, e.g. his real opinion of “global warming”, he leaves it wide open for a successor US administration to cave in to the Transnazis. Quite right.
And the other soundbite that got my attention was from Home Secretary Jack Straw, saying in very grand looking clothes in the middle of a very grand looking speech that the European Union now “creates the impression that power is draining away from” … and then it was either Westminster or national parliaments generally, I didn’t catch which.
“Creates the impression.” I love that.
Everywhere else in Europe they know that power is draining away from national parliaments, and those who favour this, as the majority of people who matter do, say so. They know it’s happening and they’re for it. Only Britain’s pitifully mendacious European Unionists still bash away with their ever more obviously lying lie that Europe is fine because it isn’t going to change anything. We’re just going to, you know, huddle together a little.
In the long run, it could cost them the entire argument. Britain is half-joined to the EU already, and this is already having huge consequences which Britain’s Parliament can do nothing about unless it is willing to contemplate non-membership. Yet at no point in the last five decades have any big arguments in favour of what is actually happening actually been put to us, because the pro-EU line was and still is that this stuff never would happen and is still not happening.
Which means that the British people might, any decade now, decide to get out of the thing. Except that: our anti-EU politicians are no better. They don’t say what they think either.
No “principled stands” can be heard from either side.
On the Libertarian Alliance Forum there’s been a lively debate, among several, involving Chris Tame and (make that versus) Dale Amon, among several, on the rights and wrongs of alternative medicine, sparked by some vile Transnazi scheme involving the control of vitamins by the World Health Organisation or some such in a way that either protects or threatens the US vitamin industry – I couldn’t work out which in the time I had to spare for this.
I mention this argument because I spotted a fine soundbite in among it, which I think deserves wider circulation, from Kevin Carson:
In the 1830s handwashing was alternative medicine.
Perry doesn’t like us to end our postings with quotes, so I won’t and don’t, but to this gem I don’t want to add anything.
It is a sad fact that one of the things that causes the libertarian movement to get stronger is other groups in society getting weaker.
Consider Britain’s gun owners. Until recently they were very content, using their guns to attack targets, animals, and even the occasional bad human being. Most of their intellectual effort went into discussing amongst themselves which guns were the best, how to hit targets even more accurately, how to make sure that the only other creatures they shot were creatures they were trying to shoot, and so forth.
Then suddenly the government (worse, almost the entire country) held the gunners responsible for a couple of gun massacres of good human beings and decided to take their guns away from them. Somebody had to take the blame, and the actual perpetrators were already dead.
Suddenly a sublimely apolitical group got politicised. Suddenly they found themselves trying to persuade others of the wisdom and rightness of them being allowed to go on using their guns, which you can’t do only by talking about the technicalities of guns, although God knows they tried that. They found, far too late, that they would have to learn about politics, and in particular about whatever political principles might allow them to keep on owning their guns, or failing that, might one day allow them to own guns again. Thus many persons who formerly cared only about guns, suddenly started to care about things like libertarianism also.
I believe that another group which is about to be policised are the home schoolers, and not just of Britain but of the entire Anglosphere. Everywhere you look, in Britain and in the USA certainly, and I’m sure everywhere else where “education otherwise” is still allowed, efforts are being made to end what appears to professional state educators as a strange and scandalous legal anomaly. → Continue reading: Guns, the attack on home schooling, and the growth of the libertarian movement
I’ve been unsure about this war in Iraq that hasn’t yet happened but which everyone says will, Real Soon Now. Am I a de Havillandite ‘Get In There And Liberate Everybody’ libertarian, or a Cato Institute/Rothbardian ‘Don’t Mess With Them And Then They Won’t Mess With Us’ libertarian? Both positions seem to me to have major merits.
But now here’s an argument that has really impinged upon the Micklethwait cranium. In yesterday’s Sunday Times (Aug 25 – no links but the thing summarises itself well), at the end of the leader article on Page 1.16 headed “It’s Iraq or the euro”, the ST says that Blair …
… could not unite the Labour party behind both a war and a referendum. He will have to choose between the two. Since there is no compelling reason for Britain to join the euro, it is clear where his priority should lie.
So go for it President George W. Drag Tony away from his hideous plan to turn Britain into a bunch of European provinces. Win the war, but give the British army things to do in it which are chaotic, embarrassing, trivial, ridiculous, which expose the sorry state of the kit they now have to make do with, but which, although daft, are nevertheless entirely safe. Don’t get them killed in any big numbers. That would be too solemn, not farcical enough, not silly enough. Keep them all alive, so that they can then come home and tell everyone what a twat Tony is, and make him unable to drag us into Europe, ever. I know you can do this.
This Europe business is horrible. The natural state of an intelligent Englishman is to be telling the world what it should be thinking and doing, with no thought for the mere narrow interests of England. These can be taken care of as the separate and smaller matter that they are. How else is the world to know what it should do, if not guided by intelligent Englishmen such as me? Yet now I find myself deciding the fate of the world entirely according to whether its plans will or will not suit England. Dreadful. Utterly, utterly dreadful.
There’s another of Patrick Crozier’s “world in a grain of sand” pieces (the sand this time being the use of a portable phone while driving a car) over at UKTransport today, this time about the assumptions, all of them mistaken, underlying the epidemic of legislation that is now sweeping the hitherto civilised world. These assumptions are:
· That if something nasty is happening then the government should do something about it
· That that something is new legislation
· That legislation will be enforced
· That enforcement will be effective
· That legislation will have no adverse side effects.
I realise this is not exactly original stuff. But some things must be said again and again. And when someone else says them well, I’ll link to them, and then say them again for good measure. Copy and paste at will.
Over at TBHN, there are two further comments from readers about modern housing, one being of particular interest because it is from an architect.
Alistair Twiname confirms an inexpert impression I have long had, which is that while the finish of modern buildings is indeed fairly tacky, because of this being a craftsmanship thing and craftsmanship now being either worse or more expensive than a century ago, anything in a building where modern industrialisation techniques can work their magic is now improving steadily.
(The above direct link seems dodgy. The blogspot archive thing again? To get there by hand, it’s www.tbhn.blogspot.com – August 22nd 2002.)
I remember, when I worked as a junior functionary for a house builder many years ago, being very impressed with how clever the hidden bits of the buildings often were, and how rapidly such things were progressing, underneath the twee and conservative exteriors, which just looked like cheap copies of past glories with added garages. That being because they were.
Any man-made, mass produceable object small enough to be moved easily is improving fast, in quality, price, cunning, everything. Why can’t houses be as good as cars and aeroplanes? Because you can make cars and aeroplanes in convenient indoor factories, and then move them easily to where they’re wanted. A house is a hell of a lot harder to move, and to make it movable, you have to build a self-supporting structure into it which will only be used once (unlike the equivalent car and aeroplane structures, which get used throughout the machine’s life). But with a house, for the rest of its life, the ground will support the house. Doesn’t work. So, the thing has to be assembled on site, in the rain, by those now reasonably well paid building workers. Thousands have tried, but nobody has cracked industrialised housing yet.
The other thing Twiname’s comments confirm for me is the enormous value of specialist blogs, and specialist debates and discussions on blogs. These draw specialist people, who might have no interest in or agreement with general pro-free-market bombast, into debates and discussions of genuine interest to them in which our questions and concerns still set the agenda. And, such people educate us.
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.
Yes, I’m ba-ack. Hard disk problems, and then as soon as this was semi-sorted to the point where I was able to start reading Samizdata again, and to think about writing for Samizdata again, I was commanded by the Sunday Times (to whom our editor-in-chief forbids links because they require subscriptions) to write an article about, and I love this, Ayn Rand.
I told them I wasn’t really the person to be doing this, since, how can I put this, I don’t agree with her about, you know, her philosophy. But they were adamant, and my efforts – somewhat shortened and rewritten and re-arranged and with some tiny factual errors added and opinions that I don’t quite hold stirred in, and some anti-Rand insults kept in but with the small but perfectly crafted prior justifications of them cut out, but nothing drastic enough to matter what with it only being the newspapers – did appear in the day before yesterday’s Sunday Times (August 18 2002), and I may even be getting some money.
All those who really, really want to read the full article as printed should email me, and I’ll send it in full. For the rest of you, be happy that some worthwhile points were made, and some ideas approximating to libertarianism were plugged.
For most people, acting on behalf of others is good and acting selfishly is bad. Rand turned such talk on its head and glorified what she called “the virtue of selfishness”, thus providing a moral justification of capitalism; not because of what may be done with its proceeds, but because of the very nature of capitalism itself.
The story told in Atlas Shrugged is of the sovietisation of America, of the New Deal taken to its logical conclusion of outright state centralist socialism. In this world the capitalists, dispossessed of their fortunes by the new regime and yet still utterly depended upon by all to keep the world ticking over, go on strike. They choose to stop carrying the world on their shoulders in order that the world may realise what a responsibility it is that they bear. Atlas, in other words, shrugs and the country feels the consequences.
In my original version there was then a bit about how Howard Roark, the architect hero of The Fountainhead, is an impossible character who had swallowed the nostrums of the Modern Movement in architecture whole. He is presented by Rand as omniscient, which is impossible. In other words, the following assertion was not merely asserted; it had been explained and justified.
There is something adolescent about the defiantly bad-mannered intellectual self-sufficiency of Rand’s heroes. So although we pro-capitalists often start by getting excited about Rand, we usually move on to other and better explanations of the superiority of capitalism, supplied by the likes of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and David (son of Milton) Friedman.
I should have included Murray Rothbard there. Sorry Murray Rothbard. However I didn’t want to say that Rand is total rubbish, so thank god they also kept this next bit.
But we do hold fast to Rand’s proclamation of the moral excellence of capitalism and of the wrongness of those who would destroy it.
But …
… capitalism is indeed moral, but not because it is “selfish”. It is moral because it’s based on consent. Consent is good because when it rules, the only things that happen are things that everyone directly involved likes better than any available alternatives.
The piece then continues that “for the Tories”:
… Rand confirms rather than contests anti-capitalist prejudices about how “selfish” and hence how unhelpful capitalism is to everyone other than capitalists.
Actually that was me stating my own opinion, not reporting on any Tory opinion.
Does the consent principle, as the “libertarian” Tories believe …
No they bloody don’t! That last bit was, again, added to make the piece about Tories rather than about merely hardcore libertarians like me, who don’t count, and whose opinions won’t stir up any rows.
… also justify drug taking, bare-knuckle boxing, prostitution, polygamy, lowering the school leaving age to zero, euthanasia, gay marriage? They would argue that it does; people who take the consent principle as seriously as this are called libertarians.
Quite so. Not “libertarian Tories”.
Their fundamental belief is that providing people consent, they should be allowed to do what they like without state interference – a sentiment Rand would heartily approve of.
That last extremely dubious qualification was also added. Accept through gritted teeth more like. For as I was allowed to go on to say:
… she never called herself a libertarian.
Nevertheless,
… libertarians, and in general any political activists looking for arguments in favour of capitalism, tend to have heard of her and are anything from impressed at arm’s length to wildly enthusiastic.
Why? Because she offers a fiercely intellectual defence of economic freedom, free markets and of the institutions that result.
… Above all, she was right about the need for the “intellectual struggle”. She may not have got all the details right but she completely understood that an intellectual counter-offensive against the forces of anti-capitalist collectivism was necessary.
That simple idea may be her most enduring legacy. The enemies of capitalism are now more cunning, more inclined towards debilitation by regulation than straightforward murder by outright politicised theft -at any rate here in Britain, for the time being.
All the more reason, then, for pro-capitalists such as the Tories to think, and to read, not just books by Rand but also books generally. Ideas matter. There is more to politics than just getting and holding office.
And so on. Not too ghastly. And particularly good was that they tailed it with me being the editorial director of the Libertarian Alliance and then printed the address of the LA website. This has caused what by LA website standards has been a definite hit-surge.
In general, I don’t know whether to be pathetically grateful that my opinions were aired – with almost complete accuracy – in one of our great national organs, or irritated that they took it upon themselves to make tiny but annoying alterations. I don’t query their right to edit their own newspaper, and I realise I didn’t make it easy for them. I just wish they’d done it a bit better.
These slight alterations are not completely insignificant. They turn me, from someone who is accurately describing his own opinions, into someone who is trying to stir up trouble in the Conservative Party by attributing opinions to members of it that they almost certainly don’t hold.
What kind of world is it when, in sheer self-defence, you have to Fisk your own newspaper articles?
I prefer Samizdata. My stuff here may sometimes be rubbish, but at least it’s all my own rubbish.
It’s good to be back.
For the last decade my Conservative acquaintances have been waiting for the Blair government to reintroduce socialist economics, confident that any month now they would. And for that same decade, I and friends of mine like Tim Evans have been saying: You don’t get it, do you? They aren’t going to do that. For as long as you fight these people on this terrain, you’re doomed, doomed. Start dealing with the fact that mothers on TV comedy shows don’t want their daughters going out with Conservatives, because Conservatives are too peculiar and too nasty. That’s your problem.
The Conservatives are still as peculiar and nasty as ever, but now, suddenly, the “Blair government” is the Blair government no longer. We now we have a Brown government. New Labour is back to being Labour. And now that public spending really is about to do a huge leap into the wild red yonder, all that the Conservatives can find to say is that they will do public sector extravagance better. Patrick Crozier‘s other blog linked, earlier this week, to an article by Matthew Parris in the Times of London(*) which spells all this out.
But give the Conservatives a few months. They’ll eventually get what’s happening. After all, they’ve been waiting for this for a decade.
Why has Tony Blair let this happen? He has built his whole position in British politics on not allowing Labour to ruin the British economy, and thereby making it unnecessary for Britain to vote for those peculiar and nasty Conservatives.
Could it be that he blames the recent relative success of the British economy for the fact that younger British people don’t seem to believe with anything like sufficient fervour in Britain getting itself stitched into the European Union? Could it be that he wants to wreck the British economy, again, so that we will then be willing to run to Europe for cover, again?
I don’t think it’s anything so cunning. After all, we had an economic semi-miracle by voting economically-conservative six times in a row, four times for the Conservatives and twice for Blair. So if we carry on voting economically-conservative, i.e. voting for the Conservatives again (as peculiar and nasty as ever, but now necessary again), we could semi-rescue the British economy, again.
No. I just I think that Blair has become bored with being the Prime Minister of, as a Bond villain once put it, these “pitiful little islands”. He wants to be the King of the World.
(*)=we have a Samizdata.net policy against linking to The Times of London as they charge for access to their archives and restrict access by people not in the UK.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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