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The Libertarian Alliance made a bit of a splash during the week, after a Daily Mail journalist conflated the LA’s regular blogger, David Davis, with a man of the same name who happens to be a senior Tory MP. Sean Gabb, one of the head honchos of the LA, has had a bit of fun with this, and very enjoyable it is to watch the discomfiture of a journalist who, plainly, did not do the necessary checks.
But during my reading of this silly saga, I came across Sean Gabb’s thoughts about the start of the Second World War – 70 years ago – which the Daily Mail journalist came across, and which no doubt prompted some sharp intakes of breath. Here is his opening paragraph:
“Today is the 70th anniversary of our declaration of war on Germany. My own view is that this was the greatest single disaster in British and perhaps world history. It beats the decision to go to war with Germany in 1914. That was a disaster in its own right, but did not necessarily mean the destruction of western civilisation. By 1945, around fifty million Europeans had been killed in battle or murdered or starved or bombed, and Bolshevik Russia was supreme across half the continent. British liberalism and world power had collapsed. Their best replacement was American corporatism with its increasingly ludicrous fig leaf of “human rights” and “democracy”. None of this would have happened had we stayed out of another European war.”
Repeat that final sentence: “None of this would have happened had we stayed out of another European war”.
It seems to me that Sean Gabb is seriously overplaying the argument and as a result, has rendered it seriously defective, in my opinion. For a start, it is far from clear to what extent Britain, and its then-empire, could have “stayed out” of a conflict involving various European nations only a few hundred miles away. For instance, one question I would put to Sean and others is this: how neutral could Britain have been, and to what extent would it have been endurable, either morally or practically, for Britain to stand aside while millions of refugees, such as Jews, sought a place of escape? For example, suppose that Hitler had demanded, as a condition of UK neutrality, that the UK ban any of its citizens from joining anti-Nazi resistance movements, or even promoting causes designed to weaken Hitler’s regime?
It is also, in my view, verging on outright nuttiness to suggest that had Britain stood aside, that Western civilisation would have been saved in some way. Western civilisation necessarily includes the West, ie, Western Europe – you know, places such as France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Scandanvian nations, and so forth. It is not just about the UK, North America and the Anglosphere diaspora. And consider this point: had Hitler defeated Soviet Russia, and the whole Eurasian continent, from Bordeaux to Vladivostok, fallen under his iron hand, it is naive to suppose that this would be a great result for “Western civilisation”. At best, the remnants of that civilisation would have lived under the shadow of a huge and menacing empire, based on racial and socialist dogmas that are too obviously horrifying to need spelling out.
So while I can heartily endorse Mr Gabb’s disgust at some of the outcomes of the war and its cost, his argument does not convince me. That is not to say that there are not revisionist interpretations of WW2 that do not deserve taking seriously, nor do we have to denigrate those men, such as former UK prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who worked so hard to avert a conflict. But unlike Sean Gabb, I am glad that the young Winston Churchill escaped a violent death during his soldiering days, and ignored the advice of those who imagined that Britain could cut some sort of deal with a revolutionary racialist-socialist with a proven record of deceit.
Victor Davis Hanson has a good take on WW2 revisionists like Pat Buchanan. I also recommend this post by Patrick Crozier, taking on, and taking apart, the arguments of Ralph Raico, another revisionist, but unlike Buchanan, is a libertarian.
Rod Liddle, in his role as knuckle-dragger-in-chief at the Spectator, has an article bearing a most arresting headline. Now the writers of such articles often don’t get to choose the headlines, so this might even have taken Mr Liddle aback somewhat:
“We should seize whatever opportunity we are given to be racist”.
The Spectator now has a new editor in the form of Fraser Nelson, one of journalism’s good guys. Well, I know it is good to start one’s term in the editor’s chair with a bang, but er, isn’t this a bit off? Actually, if you read the article, it is quite clear that Rod Liddle, despite his salty turn of phrase and spirit of cheerful nastiness, is not saying that being a racist is a good thing.
The US Securities & Exchange Commission, which regulates US-based financial institutions, has been blasted by a report for failing to act to stop the massive Ponzi scheme fraud of Bernard Madoff, who has been jailed after admitting his crimes. The SEC, like Britain’s own Financial Services Authority, has not exactly covered itself with glory during the financial crisis.
A point worth making – since I doubt it will occur to much of the MSM to make it – is that this episode will hardly deflect policymakers from the idea of loading even heavier regulations on financial services. Our own Financial Services Authority, in the form of its chairman, Lord Adair Turner, recently reminded people of how bureacratic mindsets work by calling for a tax on financial services which he says have become “too big”. Politicians and commentators routinely describe the crisis as somehow proving that “unregulated capitalism” has failed. And yet the SEC failure over Madoff proves a very different point: you can have all the regulations in the world, but if you don’t enforce them, and financial watchdogs are run by people lacking a bit of common sense, then the regulations will be useless.
As I keep reminding people, the credit crisis and the subsequent fallout occured, primarily, right under the noses of the world’s most powerful regulators and central banks, and not some obscure Caribbean tax haven or Alpine principality. And yet the impression given is that we have lived through a sort of re-run of a Wild West movie. The truth is very different.
“I think we should not have put off shrinking our financial sector. The result of the bailouts is that we are maintaining credit markets based on false information and artificial prices. You may have pulled the airplane out of the dive, but you are flying with faulty instruments, and I don’t think you are going to be happy about where you wind up.”
Arnold Kling, reflecting on the financial turmoil and the missteps of policymakers. It is quite a shock to realise that the demise of Lehman etc happened almost a year ago. The ensuing 12 months have gone past very quickly.
There have been a flurry of articles in the press in recent days about the significant risk that in a decade’s time, possibly sooner, the UK will suffer from power blackouts as electricity generating stations fall out of use and as there is nothing – apart from some renewable energy sources such as windmills – to pick up the slack. The trouble for the Tories, of course, is that assuming they are in power by then, the blame for the disaster will fall on their shoulders, rather than on those of politicians who have chosen to play to the Green gallery by not giving the go-ahead to new power supplies, such as from nuclear energy. Of course, Mr Cameron’s own flirtation with the Green movement may come back to haunt him.
The problem, as I see it, as that not only do we not have a genuine market for energy in this country as the current setup is heavily regulated. Even if the industry were freed from worrying about complying with Green restrictions on CO2 production, there is still not enough of a genuine market to ensure that supplies keep up with demand. To say this is an urgent issue for any incoming administration next year is an understatement.
A question that I have is there anything that can be done to generate electricity on a smaller scale. rather than on the model that has operated for decades? I mean, could a group of firms join up to pay for a small nuke station, for example? (I am assuming that the security issues to that will not be a barrier).
Here is a new blog on the issue by the politician, Greg Clark. Meanwhile, Christopher Booker is in fine form on the same topic here.
“Mock the Week tells me something about the British I would rather not know. It commands an audience of about three million. As I watched, it occurred to me that Britain may well have three million people who would happily go along with the mob if we ever had a government that incited violence against the vulnerable.”
Nick Cohen, who loathes the alleged “comedy” programme Mock The Week as much as I do. An interesting theme, that Cohen does not explore much after raising it, is how entertainment thugs such as Frank Boyle consider it now acceptable to be extremely unpleasant about the elderly, and why this might be. Now that so many groups of humans are considered politically off-limits for jokes, only the old are left, provided they are middle class and white. Cohen muses that this trend of being vile about the old might be a sort of pent-up frustration about the rising costs of paying for an elderly population. He may have a point. But Boyle should remember that he is going to be old one day. And by the time he is in his dotage, who will remember him?
Cohen evidently loathes Mr Boyle. I rather enjoyed this piece of invective:
“Boyle is the show’s strutting cock. A gaunt, aggressive, slit-eyed Scotsman with a neurotic determination to be heard first and always, he seems to have grasped that the critics will hail him as “edgy” if he courts the porn market.”
Dearie me. Oh for the days of Dave Allen, a real comedian who understood that making people laugh is not the same as drawing blood. Well, at least I now have Family Guy to look forward to later on. Right now, Britain does not produce many funny people, in my view, with the possible exception of the cast of The Fast Show. There is a seething sort of anger and thuggery too much in evidence. I struggle sometimes to wonder where it has all come from. Explanations?
There have been so many incidents that some have described as being the death blow to the current UK government that one wonders whether any single news event will finish this lot of creeps off. But for a glimpse at the sheer, wanton corruption and venality of this administration, the story of the various relationships between those involved in handing over a convicted mass murderer to Libya gives you some idea of the morality of this government. It is appropriate that the article was written by Andrew Neil, a proud Scot and Anglospherist who is justly appalled at the behaviour of both the UK and Scottish administrations.
And yet the capacity of such stories to shock, while it should not be underestimated, needs to be put into some sort of perspective. Let’s face it, governments of Left and Right, be they French, American or British, have sold weapons and munitions to often odious regimes in the past, or done commercial deals that don’t bear too much scrutiny. Remember the UK Matrix-Churchill “supergun” affair of the 1990s? Remember the 1986 Iran/Contra kerfuffle that marred the second Reagan term, or the recent issue of British defence firm BAE Systems and sales to the Saudi government? There has been a history of Western governments willing to set aside certain scruples in the name of exports.
The Libyan affair is a grubby business, to be sure. But there is, alas, nothing remotely surprising about how the various parties have behaved.
The world of genetically modified plants took an interesting commercial turn, according to this story by Bloomberg that caught my eye.
“An old guy’s wife tells him to go to the butcher shop and get some meat. He goes to the butcher shop and stands in line for hours. Finally the butcher says, “We’re out of meat.” The old guy blows his top. He yells, “I am a worker! I am a proletarian! I am a veteran of the Great Patriotic War! I have fought for socialism all my life, and now you tell me you’re out of meat! What kind of a system is this?! You are fools! You are thieves! . . . ” A big man in a trench coat comes up to the old guy and says, “Comrade, Comrade, not so loud. In the old days you know what they would do if you said such things.” The big man in the trench coat makes a pistol motion with his hand. He says to the old guy, “Calm down and go home.” The old guy shrugs and leaves. He comes back empty-handed, and his wife says, “What’s the matter, are they out of meat?” “Worse than that,” says the old guy, “they’re out of bullets.”
An old Russian joke, as told by the one and only PJ O’Rourke.
The idea of the Enemy Class, to coin Sean Gabb’s term, gains credibility by the hour. A distinguished member of this class is Lord (but of course!) Adair Turner, now chairman of the Financial Services Authority, the regulator of UK financial affairs. The FSA was set up by the current Labour administration in 1997, and among its many achievements is to have largely failed to warn of the catastrophic expansion of credit – driven by central banks – which created an asset bubble in the UK. It failed to warn sufficiently about the high-risk lending policies of mortgage lender Northern Rock. Undaunted, the FSA churns out reams of consultations and reviews on how to make financial services more efficient and professional. It would require the patience of a saint to point out that the best way to promote competitive, high-quality financial services is for regulators and other agents of the State to get out of the bloody way and ensure that firms have to build a solid reputation and for consumers to exercise the virtue of caveat emptor.
But the latest foray of the FSA into the issues surrounding the credit crunch may be its lowest point yet. Lord Turner argues that the UK banking sector is too large, so large in fact, that it is harmful to society. He does not, in the widely cited Prospect magazine interview, elucidate what he means by “too large”, or whether it is possible for a civil servant, economist or other such person to figure out the optimum size of a specific sector. When Hayek talked of the “fatal conceit” of socialists imagining they can micro-manage the balance of human activities, this is the sort of hubristic thinking the great man was talking about.
I fear Lord Turner is also missing a crucial point, or just ignoring it. The point is that in a globalized economy such as we now have, financial centres such as London, Singapore, Zurich and New York are almost akin to nations in their own right; they dwarf the economies of their host nations because specialisation in finance has moved to a global arena. They rather resemble the old north European Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages. Take a different sector, such as telecoms. Finnish mobile phone firm Nokia is so large, as a percentage of Finnish GDP that a Finnish equivalent of Lord Turner would no doubt argue that the company should be punitively taxed, so that it shrinks and gives the reindeer industry in Lapland a greater share of GDP, or help those vodka retailers do so, or whatever. It is easy to laugh at such bizarre logic, but remember this: these guys have got where they are not by baldly stating their views in quite such terms, but by insinuating them through such question-begging terms as “excessively large”, or by referring to a sector of an economy as “swollen”.
Now it is true that as long as big banks can exert a sort of moral blackmail over taxpayers by stating that they are “too big to fail”, and as long as we benighted taxpayers are told we have to bail these guys out, then Lord Turner’s odd logic will gain a kind of ready audience. But he is looking at the problem the wrong way round: instead of making banking smaller and less profitable and simply driving it abroad, the better approach is to remove state-mandated deposit protection; to remove arbitrary and often counter-productive capital requirements and above all, to focus on the prime culprit in this business: the central bank as printer of funny money. But to do that will require the sort of analysis that does not give the FSA, or other bodies, the powers to tax and regulate. The FSA, like all regulators, is forever looking to increase its powers; it is hardly likely to consider the problem in such a way as to make itself redundant.
Perhaps we’ll soon be hearing that the casino sector is “excessive” in Las Vegas, gold mining is a “swollen” part of the South African economy, and there is too much reliance on fishing in Norway. And as for those Arabs, they spend far too much of their time drilling for oil. Cannot those chappies do something less fwightfully vulgar?
Lord Turner, by the way, is a former director general of the Confederation of British Industry, a lobby group for big business; he has had a consultancy role for Merrill Lynch and has wiritten a long and quasi-statist paper on UK pensions reform. He’s Enemy Class to the core. That he is, as I can attest, a thoroughly likeable guy does not alter that fact. It makes him actually quite dangerous.
Update: Tim Worstall points out how opposed to the notion of economic liberty this man actually is. When someone says that “an activity is socially useless”, what he or she really means is that “I don’t understand the use for it so it should be banned”.
The journalists who produce the UK’s Channel 4 news programme produced a rather sly piece of leftist propoganda last night (Quelle surprise? Ed). Faisal Islam – whom I have met – had a brief slot on last night’s daily broadcast suggesting that the Chicago school of economics, most famously associated with the likes of Milton Friedman, is somehow partly to blame for the credit crunch. Yes, you read that right.
Mr Islam went on about the “complex models” that were used by these economists and somehow sought to draw a link between the Chicago School, and the decisions taken by banks, both central and private. That seems a bit rum. I don’t recall Dr Friedman or his associates granting a sort of blanket blessing to financial engineering techniques of the kind associated with recent turmoil, suchas using derivatives to put bank liabilities off the balance sheet. That school has also hardly been in favour of encouraging sub-prime lending by legislation. After all, quite a lot of economists with conventional “soft Keyensian” views pretty much signed up to how banking has operated in the last few decades, and of course signed up to the idea that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, and his successor, Ben Bernanke, did a spiffing job.
There was no apparent attempt – admittedly quite difficult in a short TV spot – to explain what the key arguments of the Chicago school of economics actually are. Nor was there any attempt to point out that this “school” is only one of the centres of free market economics. The Austrian viewpoint, which tends to eschew statistical formulae completely, went unmentioned. And yet it is the latter approach, as exemplified by the likes of Thomas Woods, that has been most active in pointing out the sheer folly of central bank activity in the past decade or so. And this central bank activity is what has been the prime culprit, a fact that Mr Islam’s documentary left unmentioned.
The programme also failed to ask any questions of the Keynesian tradition, with its love of big, artificial aggregates such as “consumer demand” etc. If one is going to point to the hubris of statistical models of economic behaviour, then the Keynesian macroeconomic tradition is surely as much in the firing line as the Chicago one.
As propoganda, it was very effective on anyone who might not understand the issues. It might have been put together by that performance artist, Naomi Klein.
Maybe the problem is that these issues are often highly complex and difficult to portray intelligently in a 5-minute news slot. Well indeed.
David Gordon, a US writer, has a good review of a book called, unambiguously, The Case for Big Government by Jeff Madrick.
I liked Gordon’s final paragraph, which is worth waiting for. Assuming his review is fairly based, it is amazing how lame, or downright thin, are the arguments for big government. It is a sort of backhanded compliment to the efforts of free marketeers that collectivists should still feel the need to write such works defending their views at all. Whenever we get grumpy and depressed about the way the world is going, it is good to remember that the other side cares enough about our views to want to try and deal with them, however shabbily.
Update: thanks to a reader for spotting my error in the name of the reviewer. My bad. Now fixed.
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