Samizdata

I do have a life. I know because I was holding on to it at 7.30am last Thursday while sliding down the tarmac unseated from my Monster bike by an act of altruism.

Well, altruism mixed with incompetence but it’s the motivation that counts. I was hit by a scooter who rammed into the back of me. Those who have seen a picture of my Ducati Monster Dark may ask why would a 900cc bike be worried about a scooter?! Well, this baby was a 400cc Piaggo weighing about 200kg (400lb)!

The cause of the collision was a cyclist who just spilled herself and her bags to the left of me and I, moved by an altruistic impulse, decided to stop. I checked the road to my left, started braking and as I was about 10 yards from the hapless cyclist, the earth moved closer and then disappeared. When I came to, there were three men peering into my face asking me whether I am OK. After I replied “No I am bloody not!”, two of them disappeared, leaving a rather peevish looking scooter rider behind to face my wrath.

The whole incident boils down to the fact that both of us were looking to help the cyclist. My brakes being far superior (the same as Formula 1) to the scooter’s caused the rider to miscalculate the braking distance. If one or both of us simply decided to ride past nothing would have happened. As it is I damaged my bike, my helmet and more importantly my knee. I have been out of action for several days and have suffered pain for no other reason than trying to do the right thing.

So here we are altruism does not pay and if I were rational, I should not repeat the same ‘mistake’ next time. However, I know if I face the same situation, I couldn’t live with myself, if I didn’t stop for a person who just had an accident. So am I irrational and therefore immoral? Balls!

I am not really interested in arguments such as that stopping to help someone is not really an act of altruism because one can do this in hope that others will stop for you when in need and belief that this needs to be generally encouraged. Or the anti-altruist classic that such an act makes me feel good (or not stopping causes negative feelings), and so my action wasn’t without self-interest. Why don’t I buy those arguments? Because it is harder to prove that an altruistic action is motivated by self-interest somewhere along the motivation chain than it is to disprove that a self-less act is just that.

I believe altruism is connected to free will. To say that all our actions are motivated by self-interest at some level smacks of determinism to me. If we are free to act, we should be able to act without the constraints of self-interest and be able to chose an act that may not bring us any direct benefit.

As things stands I hope my bike will get repaired and my knee will heal soon, so I can continue to make the world a happier place.

I love the taste of tarmac in the morning
it smells of…victory

Paul Marks points out that truth is rarely allowed to get in the way of objectives.

Libertarians who study the history of thought are well aware of the power of lies.

To give one example: Generations of people accepted that the labour theory of value was universally accepted (at least in the English speaking world) because J.S. Mill, in his “Principles of Political Economy” (1848), stated that the theory of value was now settled and not disputed. Actually most economists in the Italian, French and German speaking worlds opposed the theory and two of the best known political economists in England also opposed it. These economists were Samuel Bailey and Richard Whately (the work of both men was known to J.S. Mill).

I wonder how many people in the last one and half centuries have been tricked by J.S. Mill’s ‘no one disputes’ tactic. This tactic is deployed whenever wants to pretend that no one opposes a piece of statism he happens to favour. In “Principles of Political Economy” we are told that no one disputes the need for police (in fact hotly disputed and not made compulsory for local communities till 1856), or the need for the government to be engaged in street building, water supply, drainage, rubbish collection etc (all hotly disputed at the time).

If one wishes to make something happen, pretending everyone agrees with it may be a good tactic. However, it does not work for free market reform – as it has always been too obvious that some people oppose liberty, so the lie that no one opposes it is too transparent. We have to be honest whether we like it or not – otherwise we look absurd.

How is this all relevant to the present day? → Continue reading: The Power of Lies

In Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph, Janet Daley wrote an article called The Tories have room for liberals of both persuasions.

Now I really have no quarrel with the thrust of her contention:

The cruellest and saddest irony of all is that the self-styled new model army, with its social liberalism ticket, need have no dispute with the old faith. Social liberalism and Thatcherite economic liberalism are consistent with one another.

Nothing is more likely to give people the confidence and the wherewithal to live their lives as they choose than personal prosperity and the freedom that it brings. Respect for personal liberty sits neatly alongside the promotion of economic self-determination. Together, they could make a coherent, radical and very modern party programme.

Well as our confreres in the United States so lyrically say: no shit, Sherlock.

What I find so saddening is that perhaps Daley has indeed set the level and tenor of this article to what is appropriate for the current state of sophistication and received wisdom of the typical Daily Telegraphy reader, i.e. acting as if ‘all the elements of truth and measure’ were to be found within the essentially bipolar world of parochial Westminster party politics. But frankly what Ms. Daley is saying is nothing more that what libertarians in Britain have been saying for a great many years. When she says:

Respect for personal liberty sits neatly alongside the promotion of economic self-determination.

This phrase practically defines the libertarian meme and yet you will search the article in vain for the word ‘libertarian’.

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.