“Indeed, it would be helpful if the climate scientists would tell us what weather pattern would not be consistent with the current climate orthodoxy. If they cannot do so, then we would do well to recall the important insight of Karl Popper — that any theory that is incapable of falsification cannot be considered scientific.”
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For years, those of us who have supported mass migration, and believed in the social and economic benefits its brings, deluded ourselves. We conned ourselves into thinking we represented the majority viewpoint, and reacted with visceral anger towards anyone who dared challenge our cosy world view. And it was a disaster. We did shut down debate, which in turn created a political vacuum. One that was filled initially by the BNP, and is currently being filled by Ukip. But now the pendulum has swung back. With a vengeance. Where once everything was decried as racist, suddenly nothing is racist. Where every legitimate question about immigration was ritualistically dismissed as base prejudice, now every overt and coded racial, homophobic or misogynistic slur is deconstructed, and rationalised and legitimised. He deserves credit for recognising that at one stage, a lot of supposedly right-thinking people wanted to regard anyone who challenged unfettered immigration as bigots, when they emphatically weren’t. And he’s also right that when genuinely vile sentiments are expressed, there is a sort of knee-jerk reaction from those who think of themselves as anti-Politically Correct to make excuses for such remarks. (We forget that there is a sort of right-wing version of PC group-think). As a libertarian, I think it is always good to point out the following: Bigotry that is not backed up by state coercion (as in the apartheid regime in South Africa, Jim Crow in the US etc) is a cost to the bigot; the racist employer who refuses to hire those from certain groups imposes a cost on that business, and in a vigorous free market economy, bigotry gets weeded out over time as a result. Capitalism, and a widely dispersed system of private property, is arguably the greatest force against such attitudes that has ever existed. But I also don’t – unlike some libertarians perhaps – think it is enough to just follow the non-initiation of force principle and leave it at that. I do think that a healthy society, of the sort I want to be a part of, needs to have a critical mass of its population to be rational, tolerant and civilised. If, on the other hand, you have a society in which, say, the majority are none of those things, then even if such a society observes some of the forms of a liberal order, in practice it will be a pretty shitty place in which to live. In other words, culture, or call it what you will, does matter. A lot. (Health warning: my quoting Hodges, who is a man of the Left, does not imply I agree with all of his views in the article I linked to.)
May 2nd, 2014 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “A candidate in the European elections was arrested on suspicion of racial harrassment after quoting a passage about Islam, written by Winston Churchill, during a campaign speech,” reports the Daily Mail. “Paul Weston, chairman of the party Liberty GB, made the address on the steps of Winchester Guildhall, in Hampshire on Saturday. A member of the public took offence at the quote, taken from Churchill’s The River War and called police.” Here is a link to the Mail‘s story: Arrested for quoting Winston Churchill: European election candidate accused of religious and racial harassment after he repeats wartime prime minister’s words on Islam during campaign speech. I note that the Daily Mail had the guts to quote the Churchill passage in full but not to enable comments, whereas (opposing candidate) Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph has the guts to enable comments but not to quote the passage. Comments to my post are enabled and the passage is below:
I wish I could claim that by both quoting the passage and enabling comments I have demonstrated political courage. I haven’t. Might I too not be arrested? I won’t be. At the moment that is not the way the process works. Mr Weston has been arrested but I doubt very much that he will ever brought to trial. Trials can so easily go wrong. In fact I suspect that he will – eventually – be in receipt of an apology and compensation for wrongful imprisonment, as was the Christian street preacher John Craven after his arrest under the Public Order Act 1986. Mr Craven got £13,000 compensation. According to the Huffington Post article about him linked to above, “The total cost for Greater Manchester Police, including both parties’ legal bills, will be over £50,000.”. It is not clear to me whether the latter sum includes the former, but we can safely say that the total cost of arresting a man in violation of his right to free speech seems to be around £50k – £65k. That’s peanuts for a government – and yet, the whip broke skin. The point was made. All saw, this is what happens. Cheap at the price. May 1st, 2014 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is the First of May, a date traditionally associated with Marxism. Let us therefore pause today to remember that at least 100 million people were killed by Marxist governments in the 20th century, a number that dwarfs the predations of every other organized movement in human history. May 1st, 2014 | 146 comments - (Comments are closed)
Richard Carey is a devoted student of the English Seventeenth Century and of its ideological struggles in and around the time of the Civil War. Tonight, he will be giving a talk about all this at the Rose and Crown in Southwark, and I will definitely be there. There could hardly be a more important subject for an English libertarian. Libertarianism now has a rather American flavour. The biggest libertarian books, especially those of more recent vintage, tend to be written by Americans or at least in America. So, if it is the case (and it is) that libertarianism of the modern and self-consciously ideological sort actually has its origins in the English Seventeenth Century, then that is a fact that we English libertarians should regularly be celebrating and reflecting upon. My own off-the-top-of-my-head take on this is that libertarianism of the sort I espouse most definitely did make its first big appearance in Seventeenth Century England, in the form of the Levellers. But the impeccably libertarian nature of this first great libertarian ideological eruption has been masked by the kinds of questions that most exercised those first English libertarians. Libertarianism now tends to be about what governments ought to do, and most especially about the many things that governments now do, but ought not to do, or at the very least to do much less. In the seventeenth century, libertarians with unswervingly libertarian views on, e.g., property rights as the correct institutional foundation of liberty, were not quite so exercised about how the government should behave, although they did have plenty to say about this. Their central concern was: Who has the right to be the government in the first place? If you do have to have some kind of government, who should choose it? The central preoccupation of those Levellers was: Where does political authority come from? If there must be government, who decides about who shall be that government? Charles I – famously or infamously according to taste – claimed that God had chosen the government of England, in the form of … Charles I. This the Levellers, of course, challenged. But having challenged it, and the king having been executed, the question remained: If Charles I is not the legitimate ruler of England, then who is? The Levellers were “egalitarian” in the sense that they were indeed far more egalitarian about who should be allowed to participate in that political debate, about who should govern. Political authority sprang from … everyone! When it came to deciding who the government was, everyone’s voice counted. This was the sense in which the Levellers really were, sort of, “levellers”. But this political egalitarianism was seized upon by Seventeenth Century Royalists as evidence that the Levellers were also egalitarians in the modern sense, who believed that economic outcomes should be equalised by the government. They were accused of being socialists. There were indeed real socialists around at that time. These were the Diggers. But the Levellers had very different views to the Diggers. Later, the Levellers were proclaimed to be socialists by another ideological tendency, namely … socialists. The irony being that these later socialists mostly had ideas about how government should conduct itself were pretty much identical to those of Charles I. Charles I believed that the state (i.e. Charles I) had relentlessly to intervene in the market and in the workings of the wider society, in order to correct freedom’s economic and other injustices, and never mind any harmful consequences that flowed from such intervention, or “tyranny” as the Levellers called such activities. Modern socialists believe exactly the same, about themselves. So, the Levellers, historically, have been caught in a pincer movement of lies, proclaimed by two different brands of statists. Royalist statists accused the Levellers of being socialists. Subsequent socialists claimed the Levellers as socialists. Both were wrong. But if we libertarians do not now correct these errors, nobody will. I still recall with great pleasure the talk that Richard gave at my home last year about the ideological context within which the Levellers first arose, and the questions that they were most keen to answer. Tonight, I am hoping to learn more about the answers they gave to these questions, and, in general, about the nature of their libertarianism. Because libertarianism is most definitely what it was. I wrote this posting in some haste, to be sure that what I wrote got posted in time to encourage at least some who otherwise might not have done to attend Richard Carey’s talk this evening. I am fully aware that the above is a highly schematic and simplified version of a very complicated story. I have, in particular, supplied no linkage to pertinent historical writings. Comments and corrections, especially with links to pertinent material, will be very welcome to me, and I’m sure to others also. LATER: I see that in his piece about Richard (linked to above), Simon Gibbs includes yet again an earlier picture taken by me, of Richard sporting lots of hair like a down market Cavalier. Now he looks more like this:
Technically, that is not a good photo, but it’s the best I can do right now. Hair matters a lot, when it comes to Seventeenth Century English ideological disputes. May 1st, 2014 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I learned about white male Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang and the unearned privilege that got him where he is via Instapundit.
Read the whole thing. The fact that those telling him to “check his privilege” were wrong in their assumptions is only the beginning of his argument. April 30th, 2014 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some of these claims are false. Some reveal more truth than the writers intended:
April 30th, 2014 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Garrett Jones, who has written a gently devastating review of a much-heralded book, Capital in the 21st Century, by someone called Thomas Piketty. The reason it is worth drawing attention to it is that this is the sort of book that you just know is going to get bandied about in the usual quarters as a source of supposed wisdom, when in fact its central contention is based on sand. In some ways, the claim that the rich get so proportionately rich that they gobble up the rest of us, so to speak, is hardly a new assertion. Piketty has repackaged it and added in new supposed facts to make the case. Over to Jones:
And then there is this paragraph, containing a nice little nugget:
The author is fair in pointing out that there are useful insights in the book, although given that its central contention appears to be a crock, that is not a lot of praise. April 29th, 2014 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
The way to see if UKIP is actually winning is to see how wound up people in the Guardian are becoming, now that just ignoring them has not worked. So… lets see, I know… lets play the racist card! Again! Well that message got out loud and clear last time too. And it will not make the slightest difference, because what the folks doing this think is their trump card really isn’t. Some UKIP supporters are racists, for sure. So are a great many Labour supporters (they just don’t tend to be white racists). But lots of people who are not racists will still vote UKIP for all sorts of other reasons that most of the commenters and writers at the Guardian can not even fathom, because in a very real sense they are the people UKIP supporters are going to vote against. A lot more people read the Mail than read the Guardian, and the bourgeois lefties are really no smarter than them, they just have a better wine list (or may be whine list?). And by that measure, I have got to say I am starting to think Farage might be unstoppable. I have mixed feeling about that when I read some of the idiotic economic notions being bandied around by Farage… I can only hope it is just pandering without intent, as it may well be… but I will indeed enjoy the horrified squeals of incomprehension that are going to appear in the Guardian 😉 April 29th, 2014 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men April 28th, 2014 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
A few days ago I had a bit of a rant about a UK-based academic, Danny Dorling, who among other things seems to be scathing about those academics who have the effrontery to challenge egalitarianism, at least of the sort enforced by the coercive power of the state. Dorling is that rather perplexing example of a certain intellectual: penetratingly sharp and illuminating on some issues (he is marvellous about population control characters and some of his statistics are very interesting) but flat-out bloody awful in his political economy. (He describes David Ricardo’s crucial Law of Comparative Advantage insight as “infamous”.) As example of the latter, he writes about the implications of a decelerating population growth rate for retirement systems, such as tax-funded pensions and retirement ages:
When someone works to obtain something of value by providing something/service to another, it is called trade. Both sides are better off than they would otherwise be from doing this – they profit – since otherwise there would be no point in doing so. So, Professor Dorling writes a paragraph about “useful work” as if it is opposition to the notion of profit, not perhaps stopping to wonder whether the word “useful” is question-begging. Useful to whom? If I can write a news article, mend a fence, take packages to firms as a courier or work in a metal-bashing factory, all of these things might be useful to someone so much that they are willing to pay me enough to be worth my time and trouble, and profit me to that extent, and so on. It might be more useful for me, perhaps, to spend my time writing books about population, about how we should “share better”, and so on, but since these things might be thought of as totally bloody useless to others, I might have an issue in being able to make a living out of this unless I am lucky enough to not to have to earn a living with the free consent of my fellows. Luckily for Professor Dorling, who is paid a salary as an academic by the taxpayer, and who might also make a few quid selling his books and doing lecture circuits and so on, he can make a living, although we taxpayers might suggest that some of that money spent on supporting the lifestyles of this man might be more “usefully” employed on something else. And that is the craziness of it. When a significant portion of the UK electorate is supported by the coercively funded payments of others who toil in the evil capitalist system, the former will contain people who, even if they happen to look and sound clever with their academic honorifics, be utterly ignorant of the most basic facts of economic life. Discussion point: one of the Professor’s contentions is that highly unequal societies are far more environmentally destructive than egalitarian ones, although I find his reasoning a bit odd. (Correlation is also not causation). Surely, if you have a society where wealth is relatively evenly spread, but where people consume lots of stuff, that could be more destructive than a less equal one where people nevertheless had to be careful about the environmental costs of their actions. What Prof Dorling seems to be saying is that it is high levels of consumption that is the issue; some of his attacks on the mega-rich seem to be as much aesthetic as driven by environmental concerns. He also claims that unequal societies have higher birth rates than egalitarian ones – he may be right about that – but again, his contention begs the question as to why this is a bad thing so long as production is able to keep pace and if the standard of living of even the poorest person improves at a healthy clip. I cannot help but wonder whether Prof. Dorling is an egalitarian first and who wants to use the Green argument to bolster it. In other words, he is very much the face of the modern Left and different in many respects from old-style Marxists. What he has in common with such people is the unspoken – or even spoken – belief in the need for the supposed chaos and venality of the market to be replaced by the rule of people such as themselves. April 28th, 2014 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Incoming from the IEA, alerting me to a short IEATV performance by Matt Ridley, in favour of fracking. In Britain fracking will be easy, cheap, safe, and it will mostly to be done in the North. It will create just the sort of wealth we now most want, in just the sort of places we now most want it. Not even our current crop of environmentally deluded politicians will be able to resist this entirely benign process for very long. I am anything but an uncritical admirer of Ayn Rand, but one of many things that she got very right was her characterisation of the opponents of liberty as being anti-industrial. These people just do not like ingenious and complicated and clever and ever-improving technology, however much humans might benefit from its implementation, in fact the more it helps humans the more the anti-industrialists hate it. They prefer economic primitivism and damn the body count. Rand first started saying this at a time when many collectivists were still claiming, in all sincerity, to know, even better than free marketeers, how to get the world’s economy motoring along. But as that latter claim has faded, the anti-industrialism that Rand already saw has become more and more obvious and obstructive to human progress. Remember that Rand had emerged from the USSR, which once upon a time worshipped technology, until the kopek began to drop that it knew frack all about how to do it and to how make it better. Remember all those posters with belching factory chimneys. Remember all the lies about steel and tractor production. Time was when collectivists claimed to be able to make all this stuff happen even better. Not any more, as listening to Matt Ridley talk about fracking, and the myths and falsehoods upon which opposition to it is now based, reminds us. April 27th, 2014 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
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