We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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A few weeks ago, I pointed out that if the allocation of scarce resources that have competing uses is no longer the province of voluntary market exchange, but state control, it gives all manner of power, sometimes life and death power, to state functionaries. I wrote about the issue of healthcare, but we have had another example here in socialist Britain, in the form of our state education system.
At present, parents who send their children to state schools must send them to a school that operates in a “catchment area”. Parents who want to send their children to a school in a different catchment area cannot do so, except in exceptional circumstances. And much to the comical horror of our educational establishment, some parents have told lies about where they life so they can send their children to the highest-performing schools. The performance figures of school pupils are now published and, while a crude measure of performance in some ways, give parents at least some idea of where the best schools are. And so naturally, parents like to choose the best schools.
Of course, if we scrapped the state schooling system, and gave generous tax breaks or vouchers worth several thousand pounds to any parent with children, they could directly shop around for the best schools, and the whole nonsense of catchment area allocation would disappear. New education entrepreneurs would spring up. The catchment area mentality is partly drawn from a classic piece of egalitarian zero-sum thinking, which goes a bit like this: there are only so many good teachers to go around, and it is wrong that some children should be better schooled than others because of some unjust inequality in the spending power of their parents. But leaving aside the fact that I deny it is unjust for parents to spend as much as they want on their children’s schooling, the fact is that if you give far more choice to parents, competition will drive up the overall standard of schooling, and this, in my view, will disproportionately benefit youngsters from the poorest backgrounds. It is poor children who most need the kind of competition and drive of a school that has to worry about keeping its “customers”. Let’s face it, children from middle class schools will always be able to have some of the benefits of private tuition, etc.
I know that one objection to vouchers is that the state could, presumably, dictate certain standards for any school receiving voucher cash, and might use that power as a way of interfering with education another way. Fair point. To reduce the dangers of that happening, any voucher scheme or tax break system for schools should be accompanied by the obliteration of the current education bureaucracy. This is desirable on a number of grounds, not least for the cuts to state spending. It is, however, folly to imagine that a perfect free market system would be on the table any time soon, but as an intermediary step, greater parental choice, which would be of particularly great value to parents on low or moderate incomes, would be an enormous benefit to society, not just in educational terms, but also as a way of reinforcing the power of parents and of families generally. As some readers might remember me saying before, any such reform should also be accompanied by a reduction in the school leaving age.
But the present system of allocating school places by a rigid geographical formula, and policing it in the current way, is simply unendurable. It is also worth considering something else: in UK society, many of the big spending decisions that people make, either as individuals or as parents, are not mediated through the voluntary exchange of a market, but via the “tax-now and we might give you something in return” route of the state. On education and health – two of the most important issues for us – the role of the private sector is squeezed to the margins. One would have thought that the great growth in the prosperity of the West would have made the involvement of the state in such large areas less necessary than it might have appeared to someone in say, the late 1940s, but judging by this story about schools and catchment areas, the statist mindset is as strong as it was in the era of Clement Attlee.
We are used to all manner of choices in our lives in the West, whether it be our choice of holiday, spouse or computer system. Is it really such a massive leap to hope that parental choice of school will soon be as unremarkable as any other choice we make in our lives?
The predicted insanity of “quantitative easing” (i.e. re-inflating the bubble) is laid bare:
Sharp increases in share prices have improved the outlook for pension funds in every major developed nation apart from the UK, according to research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The news coincides with figures which reveal that the deficits in Britain’s largest privately-sponsored defined benefit schemes have soared by £15bn to £77bn, wiping out almost all the gains achieved by market increases the previous month. […] The deterioration is largely an unhappy consequence of quantitative easing (QE). Pension funds’ deficits depend on two factors: the value of their assets, much of which are equities, but also the potential amounts they will have to pay out when people retire in the future. These future liabilities have been pushed higher as QE has depressed yields on gilts and other bonds
I would quite like to see the people responsible for one of the greatest rolling acts of theft in recent history hanging from lampposts. Bernie Madoff was a minor league player by comparison.
Wise words have been heard coming from the lips of someone in the acting profession, to wit multi-talented MILF action babe Milla Jovovich.
“I think parents need to take a lot more responsibility than they do about whether it’s OK for their children to go to Resident Evil or any other movie with violence or sex or whatever. It’s really easy to blame Hollywood for violence having an effect on kids, but movies would have no power if parents would just set their own standards. And it’s the same with video games.”
Common sense of course and that she had to even say this is an indication of the extent to which civil society has decayed. Violent art forms are as old as art itself.
The trouble is rules based safety nets often end up subsidising what they are supposed to be alleviating.
The big advantage a charity has is that they do not have to give you anything if they do not think you actually deserve it… the state on the other hand operates (quite rightly) not by using discretion but by following politically derived formulae. To get things from the state all you have to do is understand the system. This has all manner of unintended consequences when you (in effect) nationalise charity and replace private institutions with public ones… in short, when you replace charity with an entitlement, you completely change the rules of the game.
– Perry de Havilland
Much is being made in some circles about this “9 Principles, 12 Values” thingie being bandied around by Glenn Beck. So as I am in the grip of insomnia yet again, I though I would run my sleep deprived eyes down that list and see how I would stack up were I an American politico, presumably running not under the Republican Elephant Banner but some sort of vaguely libertarianish ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ Rattlesnake Flag or maybe a Star-Spangled Hippopotamus Vexillum (I did warn you I was sleep deprived)…
The 9 Principles
1. America Is Good.
– America is a nation-state and even the least bad nation-state can never be more than a necessary evil. It is the nature of the beast.
2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.
– Nope and she ain’t … but “Hail Eris” just in case.
3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.
– Um, Glenn ol’ buddy… this 9/12 shtick is addressed to politicians, no? And anyway, I think I strike the right balance between honesty and tactical duplicity.
4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.
– The family is a pretty good idea, so yeah, but in truth I am pretty much owned by my other half as she can be pretty scary when she wants to be.
5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.
– Justice is blind and achieving it is a vital life objective … the law on the other hand is not just blind but rather prone to be deaf, dumb, stupid and as often as not utterly malevolent. So yes, it needs to be applied to politicians good and hard.
6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.
– Hell yeah.
7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.
– Amen to that.
8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.
– Indeed.
9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.
– Quite so. In theory. Sort of.
The 12 Values
* Honesty
– Great idea, at least with people likely to reciprocate.
* Reverence
– Very overrated… to me ‘reverence’ is something that I only feel when confronted by a juicy medium rare Argentine steak or a 10mm that never jams.
* Hope
– Essential.
* Thrift
– As politics is about Other People’s Money and Liberty… utterly essential.
* Humility
– Nice but hardly essential.
* Charity
– Also nice but how does this fit into politics? You cannot be charitable with other people’s money.
* Sincerity
– Indeed and anyone who can fake that has chosen wisely in their decision to pursue a career in politics.
* Moderation
– To quote Barry Goldwater… “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
* Hard Work
– Essential and I intend to hire people capable of doing exactly that.
* Courage
– Essential in all things.
* Personal Responsibility
– The cornerstone of all moral calculus.
* Gratitude
– I would be grateful to get a few hours sleep at some point tonight.
Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive to the Royal Society of Arts and a former adviser to Tony Blair, recently wrote an article in the magazine, Prospect, on the political potential of new developments in behaviourial economics, neuroscience and related disciplines. Such an enterprise is always difficult, in so far as new research is often part of an expanding research programme and questions are not fully answered. Therefore, one should be careful in the enthusiastic application of such results to the political arena.
Taylor’s article marries the politics and selected research results, with section headings such as the Social Democratic brain and the Conservative brain. Without citing too much detail, the aim of the article is to describe and promote this research as a source of justification for policy and power:
Much of this research makes good reading for social democrats. By highlighting our psychological frailties and the way these contribute to market epidemics, behavioural economics makes a powerful case for regulation, paternalism and measures to promote feelings of security. Nor is this the only encouragement for the traditional left.
Homo oeconomicus is circumscribed by the explorations of rationality undertaken by neuroscience and social Darwinism, but the disciplinary failure of the social sciences, the tabula rasa, is erased from the historical backdrop, as this draws attention to their total failure. A neoliberal dominance in our understanding of the human is conjured up to allow the entry of this new legitimation. The vision that Taylor pictures is of mankind as a social being, who requires constraints and direction through social institutions and norms. Such a general vision that marries up with your philosophy is the danger that the contemporary amateur interpretation of scientific results will conclude.
Given that there is no consensus on human nature, merely a greater understanding of our predispositions and controversy over how they relate to the social sphere, is it not arrogant to presume that existing political ideas have the key to unlock the controversial interplay of the social and the inherited. Such interventions in the past have proved disastrous, as the race science of the twentieth century demonstrates. Caution is a watchword here.
The byproduct of this article is the realisation that neither the Tories or Labour can articulate moral arguments and are reduced to tagging their miserable ideas on to the emergent exploration of human nature for the sheen of scientific authority. Economists and intellectuals working in these disciplines are seduced by the consultation of those in power and turn towards the exercise of application in a political sphere.
This article is a useful reminder of what both parties share. Supping from the same well via ‘libertarian paternalism’ or behaviourial economics, we begin to see the outlines of a commonality in approach, though there are differences in institutional and political implementation. Neither approach from Labour or the Tories is a friend to freedom.
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
– Lord Acton, from The History of Freedom in Antiquity
…with extra added bonus quote from the same:
Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime…
Sometimes a ‘leader’ is the person at the rear directing others to do things… but sometimes the ‘leader’ is the one out in front, well, leading, and the people who follow that person’s lead only after they see the way things are developing are mere ‘followers’… the bandwagon jumpers and weathervane watchers.
And that makes Sarah Palin a leader… quite possibly the de facto leader if she really wants. Certainly people who bet their party machine politics against her will think long and hard before crossing her after what happened to Dede Scozzafava, who the left wing statist press hilariously describe as a ‘moderate’ Republican. That the likes of Palin, Armey et al. can come in and kick the snot out of the established local party, even when it has the backing of people like Gingrich, will gave many pause for thought.
Of course some Democrats will rub their hands with glee and see this as the ‘Republicans tearing themselves apart’… and they are right, but wrong to be happy about it, because in truth the party that Obama beat needs to ‘tear itself apart’ and the fact it is starting to do so means the party opposing Obama could be a very different party in a few years… a party that rejects the catastrophic Bush years that hugely expanded the scope of the state and which made everything that Obama is trying to do now possible.
I suspect the reason so much effort was put into rubbishing and ridiculing Palin was an early indication that many of the ultra-statist in both parties saw what Palin represents as deeply unsettling, and not for any of the reasons usually given. Certainly I started to take Palin far more seriously the more she was lampooned by the usual coterie of dismal entertainment biz apparatchiks.
She ain’t no libertarian but she certainly ain’t no John McCain/George Bush either. I suspect her principle-over-party endorsement of an obscure New York conservative over an obscure New York Republican on the far-left of the party, may represent one of those seemingly minor events that turn out to be the precursor to something quite interesting and far reaching. Only time will tell but I think the winds of change are blowing and quite a lot of people are going to be genuinely surprised when their political careers get dumped in Boston Harbor.
Update: And to the commenter who called himself ‘Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle’ on my previous post about this issue… you said:
You know what is really funny? The Republican party candidate is not a lefty at all. She’s made nice to unions a time or two. That’s about it. She isn’t a RINO by any stretch of the imagination
Oh really? Well guess what… Republican Dede Scozzafava, who suspended her campaign yesterday in the New York 23rd Congressional District, has endorsed Democrat Bill Owens.
Yeah, not a RINO at all. This actually makes the “Palin called it right” contention incontrovertible. By doing this Scozzafava has just made Palin even stronger.
Via those observant followers of tech weirdness, Boing Boing, here is an electronic map that identifies where US bailout money gets spent. I am not quite sure of the accuracy of the plots, but cynics will have their views confirmed that a lot of bailout money seems to be clustered in politically sensitive places.
Whatever the flaws, I am all in favour of such “gimmicks” if they help people to visualise the scale of the state, taxes, and so on. For example, I support the way the UK’s Adam Smith Institute and others make a point about “tax freedom day”, the day in the year when you cease to work for the state and your earnings go to you. Such things can ram home just what government costs in way that no amount of elegantly written treatises can do.
“What I’m saying is that this does set me apart. One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he’s socially inept – because everybody’s been there – but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.”
“Which is still kind of pathetic.”
“It was pathetic when they were in high school,” Randy says. “Now it’s something else. Something very different from pathetic.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know. There is no word for it. You’ll see.”
– Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
So asks John McWhorter:
The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. The click sounds in certain African languages are magnificent to hear. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information. The Ket language of Siberia is so awesomely irregular as to seem a work of art.
But let’s remember that this aesthetic delight is mainly savored by the outside observer, often a professional savorer like myself. Professional linguists or anthropologists are part of a distinct human minority. Most people, in the West or anywhere else, find the fact that there are so many languages in the world no more interesting than I would find a list of all the makes of Toyota. So our case for preserving the world’s languages cannot be based on how fascinating their variegation appears to a few people in the world. The question is whether there is some urgent benefit to humanity from the fact that some people speak click languages, while others speak Ket or thousands of others, instead of everyone speaking in a universal tongue.
See also this article about Indians who write their novels in English rather than in one of the local Indian languages, partly because they just do, and partly in order to increase their potential readership around the world. The piece is by Chandrahas Choudhury, himself the author of a novel in English. He also blogs.
Both pieces were recently linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, to whom thanks.
I suppose a danger of everyone on earth speaking the same language, as was explained in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is that we would all of us then understand each other’s insults.
… the … Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
But this is to assume that hostility causes wars. I think it is at least as true to say that wars cause hostility.
Quite aside from the rights and wrongs of English conquering everyone and everything, there is the intriguing question of whether it in fact will so triumph, or whether any other potential universal language, like Spanish or Chinese, will triumph, in the nearish future. Perhaps English will triumph, but in the process it may itself fragment. If one language does triumph, it may well be English, but not necessarily English as I know it.
“The Japanese government did absolutely everything the Austrian theory suggests it should not do in order to fight recession. It engaged in every single activity that Keynesians like Paul Krugman recommended. As a result, its slump went on for a decade and a half. Keynesians continue to recommend these very policies for the United States, as if the debacle in Japan never occurred. In late 2008 financial newspapers in the US actually began to speak of a revival of Keynesian thinking (claiming, absurdly enough, that the present crisis gave the ideas of Keynes, one of the twentieth century’s collection of inexplicably respected crackpots, a new lease of life) again with no mention of Japan.”
Thomas Woods, Meltdown, A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Page 84.
This book is full of great passages like this. I have already quoted a nice line from Mr Woods mocking the contention that the enormous expansion of government spending in WW2 helped “solve” the Great Depression. Incredibly, there were people who actually defended this absurd idea on our comment boards. It never fails to amaze me that people overlook a basic fact of economic life: we work to produce stuff that people want to consume. The kind of state domination of a country during war, with its rationing, government direction of labour, and of course, mass conscription, hardly sounds like the sort of policy that anyone interested in increased prosperity should favour.
There is one point where I disagree with Mr Woods. He says the veneration of Keynes is inexplicable. It is in fact pretty easy to understand: he had a sort of superficial plausibility, and of course his ideas were meat and drink to politicians looking for intellectual cover to expand their powers. Even so, I do kind of wonder if Keynes would be embarrassed by some of the people who claim his name as justification for their views.
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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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