indolence » bella gerens

Adventures in SCOTUS

Mar 272012

I’ve been reading the transcripts of and commentary about the US Supreme Court arguments taking place this week about the constitutionality of the “individual mandate” and associated penalty contained within the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010).

Before I get into any analysis, a seeming triviality: many of the news reports about this case are noting the fact that its opponents refer to the act as “Obamacare,” as if this were some kind of novel piece of slang. It’s not. What’s new is that, ahead of these oral arguments, the Act’s supporters have started embracing the term instead of discouraging its use, as if Barack Obama himself has delivered this manna to the unhealthy. Frankly, I don’t think Obama has even read the full text of this legislation, so I refuse to give him sole credit (or blame) for it, and will refer to it by its acronym PPACA, which is the norm when referring to legislation of the American Congress. (What, did you think PATRIOT Act was capitalised because it’s a big deal? No: it’s because it’s the Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. American politicians are nothing if not massively cheesy.)

Now let’s address why I’m writing this blog post. This case is an extraordinarily big deal, and you will have a hard time understanding why if all you read is the news media accounts of the arguments. The American media does not want to go into any great analysis of the issue, for fear that you might draw your own conclusions, and the British media does not understand the significance. In the British media in particular, you will find reporters utterly baffled by what appears, to them, to be a sneaky, underhand challenge of the president himself under the pretext of a legal technicality.

Whether or not a law, or a part of a law, is constitutional is simply not a legal technicality. The Constitution is the basis for all federal government in the United States. The federal government simply may not make laws that contravene, or surpass, what the Constitution allows it to do. The law, or the provision within the law, cannot be imposed upon the American people if it is not constitutional. And one of the basic rights Americans have is to challenge the federal government about the constitutionality of its laws. That British journalists don’t seem (or want) to grasp this, simply because they personally think the PPACA is a good thing, makes them shitty journalists.

So. What is the issue at stake?

The challenge to the PPACA is about the provisions in section 5000A, which require Americans to be covered by health insurance (whether purchased individually or through their employer) or incur a penalty. These parts of the law are collectively referred to as the “individual mandate” or the “minimum coverage provision.”

The challengers, in this case, are a number of American states and some associated individuals. Their basic contention is that the US Constitution does not permit the federal government to compel people to purchase health insurance when they are not purchasing health care services.

In this case, you have two participants: the challengers, and the US federal government (as represented by the Solicitor General). This case has gone through the federal courts already, and the Supreme Court agreed at the back end of 2011 to hear it. This is significant: the Supreme Court can choose not to hear cases, so the fact it has chosen to hear this one means the Court believes that there is enough doubt about the matter, or enough importance about the question at hand, to make it an issue worth settling. The Court’s decision is binding and, in this case, may also be precedent-setting. (This is kind of what puzzles me about the position of many British journalists; if the high court of the US thinks it’s important enough to discuss, who are you to call it a trivial technicality?)

But enough about British journalists. Part of the reason reportage about this case is so crappy is that there are lots of different strands of argument involved, not all of which make a lot of sense if you consider them in isolation.

For example, yesterday’s arguments centred around whether or not the Court could even hear the case. Here’s the background: as the case has made its way through the lower levels of courts, the government’s position has been that the penalty for not purchasing health insurance is, effectively, a tax, and taxes do not come under the jurisdiction of any court until the complainant has paid the tax, requested administrative redress, and been refused. Then, and only then, can the complainant bring suit. (Challenges to tax are covered under a law called the Anti-Injunction Act.) The government’s argument has been that, since the mandate and penalty/tax do not come into force until 2014, the law cannot be challenged on those grounds in 2012, because nobody has yet paid the tax and therefore nobody can at this point bring suit.

Interestingly, once the Court agreed to hear the case, the government switched positions, and yesterday argued before the justices that the penalty is not a tax subject to the Anti-Injunction Act. Because the challengers were making the same argument, the Court had to appoint independent counsel (the amicus curiae) to argue that the penalty is a tax. Ultimately, yesterday, the Court appeared to accept that the penalty is not a tax subject to the Anti-Injunction Act. Nobody was surprised by this; why would the Court schedule three days of argument about the matter if it envisioned recusing itself after the first day?

So. We proceed to today’s arguments, which were about the constitutionality of the mandate itself. I have read the transcript, but I am not a lawyer, so take what I am about to describe with the understanding that I am both ignorant and naive to a certain extent. However, you can read the stuff yourself on the SCOTUS website; the arguments were very accessible to the layman.

The government argued as follows. In the Constitution, the federal government is allowed the power to regulate commerce, and issues affecting commerce, between the states (the “Commerce Clause”). There are two commercial markets at issue: one is for health care services, and one is for health insurance. All people in the US are participants in the health care market, because all people in the US will require health care at some point. Health insurance is the method by which people finance their health care in the US, and therefore all people are technically participants in the health insurance market also. Ergo, Congress has the right to regulate both, as both constitute interstate commerce, even to the point of requiring people to purchase health insurance at a given point in time, because their failure to do so is an issue that affects commerce within that market.

(There is also a whole bunch of stuff about how the penalty for not buying is a tax, but I didn’t follow that part too well, and since the government argued yesterday that it is only kind of a tax, I’m not sure how germane the point is anyway.)

What it is important to understand about the government’s position is that, in the US, even if you do not have health insurance, you cannot be refused health care. So what happens is that people without the means to pay for their health care nevertheless receive it, which drives up the cost of care, which in turn drives up premiums for those people who are insured. So the government is arguing that because some people’s failure to insure themselves affects the price of everyone’s health care and insurance, Congress has the right to interfere in the purchasing (or not) of health insurance under the justification of the Commerce Clause.

By compelling people to purchase insurance (and penalising/taxing people if they don’t), the government’s aim is to reduce the free rider problem and thus lower the cost of care and insurance premiums.

If you read the transcript, Solicitor General Verrilli does a lot of waffling about the “40 million Americans who don’t have access to care,” but the upshot of what he’s saying is this: actually, these people can get care, they just don’t pay for it. So in order to cover the cost of people who can’t pay for the care they definitely do get, everyone has to be insured. That way, the insurance companies can use the premiums paid by the healthy to subsidise the cost of the care for unhealthy people who can’t pay for it themselves. Thus, because everybody is affected by this way of ensuring poor people can still get health care, Congress can do what it chooses, including compelling purchase, to deal with the problem.

So far, so clear. The system envisioned in the PPACA is one of the healthy subsidising the unhealthy.

The challengers argument was somewhat more complicated.

First, they disputed the “everybody is a participant” claim. Many of the Americans who do not have health insurance are young, healthy people who choose to spend their money on something else, believing themselves to be at low risk of requiring health care. Thus, these people are not, at a given point in time, participants in either the health care or health insurance market. The Commerce Clause, they say, does not give the government the right to compel people to participate in these markets when they otherwise would not choose to do so.

Second, they disputed that the health care and health insurance markets are so intertwined as make eventual participation in the one the justification for forced participation in the other. There are, they said, other means of subsidising the unhealthy who cannot pay for their care than compelling the purchase of health insurance. Social Security was brought up: a general tax, linked to income, levied on everyone, which the federal government then disburses to those requiring the payments, would be constitutional in a way the mandate is not, because the Constitution does give the federal government the right to levy taxes. (This is, in fact, how Medicare and Medicaid work at the moment.) The challengers also pointed out that the problem the provision is attempting to solve is one created by the government in the first place: namely, the government forces emergency rooms to treat those who cannot pay, and it forces insurance companies to insure high-risk individuals. If it did not do those things, there would not be a free rider problem, and so there are other solutions than the mandate imposed by the PPACA.

During the arguments, the justices focused particularly keenly on two problems with these issues: (1) are the health markets unique, and if so, what specifically is the limiting principle that will stop the federal government from engaging in compulsory purchase in other markets? and (2) if the challengers concede that the federal government can force people to purchase health insurance at the point of purchasing health care itself (which, apparently, they do concede), what is the problem, precisely, with moving that point of compulsion forward in time, when it will have the most beneficial effects?

A lot of today’s commentary was along the lines of “Obamacare in danger of being struck down,” because the justices seemed particularly pointed and hostile in their questioning, but I think this is premature. The mandate may be ideologically horrific to the average American mindset, but that does not mean it is unconstitutional. And the role of the justices is to pick holes in the arguments and expose the weaknesses; that doesn’t mean those weaknesses are fatal. The most aggressive questioning came from Justice Scalia, and I admit the Solicitor General didn’t seem particularly articulate in his answers—at one point, Justice Sotomayor summed up his argument for him much better than he had done, and he didn’t seem to notice—but that doesn’t mean his points are invalid.

There were a lot of other issues and sidelines in the arguments, but there was one point that came out pretty strongly to me, and it was made by Michael Carvin for the challengers. What he argued, in effect, was that the government’s own argument is self-contradicting. At the moment, people with insurance effectively subsidise those without. Under the PPACA, people with insurance will effectively subsidise those without. There is no difference in where the cost is borne; it is always borne by the people with insurance. What the PPACA proposes to do is to increase the pool of insured people to pay the subsidy, thereby spreading the cost over a larger base. The PPACA itself, and the government, admit this is the entire purpose of the mandate: to make healthy people who do not currently purchase health care purchase insurance in order to cover the cost of those people who cannot pay for the health care they purchase.

Therefore, the government is implicitly admitting that there are some people who are outside the market, who need to be drawn into the market in order to spread the cost of subsidy around—and since that is the whole purpose of the mandate, the existence of the mandate demonstrates that not everybody is a participant in these markets, and therefore are not engaging in commerce that can be regulated in this way by Congress.

It’s a neat little argument, and I wish he’d been more explicit about how circular it is. He does call it “bootstrapping,” though, and it’s true. If everyone was a participant in these markets, which is the government’s justification for this falling within the power of the Commerce Clause, there would be no need for the mandate; but because the point of the mandate is to make everyone participate, it is itself an admission that not everyone does, and therefore it can’t be justified by the claim that everyone is already a participant, because if they were, the government wouldn’t need to mandate that they participate.

The only other interesting thing to point out is that, although everyone involved seems keen not to get into the merits of the law as a whole, with the whole, y’know, making sure people don’t bankrupt themselves in order to stay healthy, the people who are most prone to talking about the merits of the law appear to be the justices themselves. This is why I think the commentators are premature: while it’s nice to think that Supreme Court judges are impartial, they’re not. They’re perfectly capable of allowing their approval of the aim of the PPACA to bias their views on its constitutionality—and by the same token, of allowing their repugnance at the methods of the PPACA to affect their judgment of its intention.

And that’s true of a lot of people right now, I think. Health care in the United States is totally fucked up, and I don’t think it’s really possible to dispute that. However, the PPACA is not the only possible solution to the problems, and my personal view is that it’s about the worst one, in fact. But people on the right are in danger of defending a really shitty situation when they attack this law, and people on the left are in danger of defending a really shitty law when they attack the current situation.

This is why, going back to the beginning, the label “Obamacare” is so pernicious. Would people really be as blindly and tribally partisan about this law if it didn’t involve a cult of personality and were, instead, the boring old PPACA?

Read the transcript for Monday’s arguments.

Read the transcript for Tuesday’s arguments.

Then they fight you

indolence 3 Responses »

Feb 042012

Other libertarian bloggers have written about this phenomenon already, that there have been a spate of attack pieces in the media about the follies of libertarianism, probably as a result of Ron Paul’s popularity, but not necessarily. We like to see this sort of stuff, because nobody bothers fighting against an unsuccessful opposing ideology. You don’t tend to see polemics against Nazis these days. If fatuous left-wing commentators are attacking libertarianism, it means we’re winning!

This is not to say there isn’t always anti-libertarian guff from the left wing, because that would be to deny the constant, low-level contempt thrown at us by Rousseauistes whose goal for humanity extends no further than meeting the animal instinct for a full belly. But I digress. To see high-level anti-libertarian guff is rarer, and therefore more meaningful when it shows up. It’s just a shame that our first instinct is to interpret this attention as victory.

***

Exhibit A: George Monbiot, that second-rate St Paul for the Guardian (motto: “Comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable”), took on libertarians twice in two weeks. His first piece, “How Freedom Became Tyranny,” might as well have been nicked wholesale from the Brer Fox playbook.

Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned “freedom” into an instrument of oppression.

Oh, no, Mr Monbiot, please don’t throw me in the briar patch!

Monbiot’s whole piece leads up to that conclusion with the standard dodgy rhetoric and facetious analogies that are no stranger to any libertarian. We’re argumentative creatures, so it’s tempting to fisk this pile of manure, but if I’ve done it once, I’ve done it a hundred times, and I credit Monbiot with enough sense to know he’s just putting libertarians into their comfort zone with this one. No, this article is merely the set-up. Draw libertarians into making their usual tasty rebuttals about negative freedom, property rights, and the non-aggression axiom, so that you can deliver the blow with this: “Why Libertarians Must Deny Climate Change.”

Look at the libertarian, trapped by his own arguments!

Let us accept the idea that damage to the value of property without the owner’s consent is an unwarranted intrusion upon the owner’s freedoms. What this means is that as soon as libertarians encounter environmental issues, they’re stuffed.

Climate change, industrial pollution, ozone depletion, damage to the physical beauty of the area surrounding people’s homes (and therefore their value), all these, if the libertarians did not possess a shocking set of double standards, would be denounced by them as infringements on other people’s property.

How neatly Monbiot skewers us. Either we care about property rights as a form of freedom, and we reveal ourselves as blinkered anti-science tribalists; or our denial of climate change exposes our devotion to property rights and freedom as a flimsy pretence for poor-hating selfishness. Either way, he’s happy, and we’re “stuffed.” You see, children? Don’t be seduced by the libertarian, after all. The puppet-master has just made him put a bullet through his own foot.

Or not. Good little libertarians have read their Rothbard, unlike Monbiot, so instead of shooting our own feet, we feel like we’ve patted our own backs. Well done to us, anticipating this trap by 30 years! Well done indeed. When the public at large gets round to reading Rothbard too—surely just around the corner, any day now—they’ll see we were right all along.

Exhibit B: Jeffrey Sachs, jumping on the bandwagon, holds forth in the Huffington Post with “Libertarian Illusions.” Unlike Monbiot, Sachs is writing to reinforce the average HuffPo reader’s herd instinct. (Take a look at the article’s tags, too: they’re hilarious.)

You see, children? Don’t be seduced by the libertarian—not because he is wrong, but because he is, like, unenlightened, man. His conscience is less exquisitely sensitive than yours, and in his quest for justice (a fine thing, to be sure), he overlooks the infinitely more spiritual delights of forgiveness.

It’s beguiling to focus one’s activist energies on something as unopposable as liberty (and it is a good thing, to be sure), but… what about all that other stuff, you know? Stuff like compassion, and help for the weak. Those are all good things too, as you already believe: don’t they deserve your energy too? Freedom isn’t the only unassailable good thing.

By taking an extreme view—that liberty alone is to be defended among all of society’s values—libertarians reach extreme conclusions. Suppose a rich man has a surfeit of food and a poor man living next door is starving to death. The libertarian says that the government has no moral right or political claim to tax the rich person in order to save the poor person. Perhaps the rich person should be generous and give charity to the neighbor, the libertarian might say (or might not), but there is nothing that the government should do. The moral value of saving the poor person’s life simply does not register when compared with the liberty of the rich person.

Most ethical and political systems find the libertarian position abhorrent, indeed preposterous. Most would hold that the government can, should, and indeed must, tax the rich person to save the poor person. That’s because most ethical and political systems hold that liberty is only one value among many important values, and that the value of the indigent’s life takes priority over the liberty of the rich individual.

For all of you philosophers out there (and there are many, you’re all such enlightened thinkers), libertarianism is unethical: it is a rejection of deep spiritualism!

This view is the opposite of Christian charity and Buddhist compassion, according to which moral worth is achieved by helping others.

For the economically-minded, remember that even the great free-market thinkers didn’t think liberty was the finest thing in life! You don’t have to be a Marxist to believe libertarianism is wrong.

The affirmative role of government includes public education, promotion of science and technology, environmental protection, and the provision of infrastructure. Friedman and Hayek both championed a state guarantee of basic needs for all citizens.

And for the political activists, well, you and I both know that government doesn’t have to be the enemy of liberty, any more than it is the enemy of compassion or helping the vulnerable.

Modern history has shown that activist democratic governments, ones that provide public goods and help for the poor, do not really threaten liberty. In Scandinavia, for example, where the governments are much more activist than in the United States, democracy is very vibrant and far less corrupt than in the U.S.

So while it’s tempting to be a libertarian and simplify everything to questions of freedom, the only people who really do this are vulgar materialists whose limited horizons prevent them from joining you in working toward a world of the impossible good. After all:

America has achieved it greatness not through a single-minded ideology but through pragmatism and the wisdom to embrace several important values. A vast majority of Americans today embrace liberty, civic responsibility, and compassion, and seek a government built upon all three. We are the better individuals and a much stronger society for it.

Good little leftists: the libertarian may have one or two ideas, but you were right all along!

***

Do these kind of attacks represent a victory for libertarians? I don’t know. It’s difficult to counter something like Monbiot when your vindicating text is fringe literature most people are never going to read, and with people like Sachs blowing smoke up the enemy’s backside, you need a much bigger prick than Ron Paul to pop that smug self-satisfaction.

This is what I always wonder about libertarianism: we have the tactics to advance, sure, but do we have the strategy to win? Somehow I doubt it. When, as a group, your dearest-held moral values are non-aggression and individual agency, you tend to eschew the Monbiot-Sachs Plan of ambushing your enemies and brainwashing your allies.

Why the NHS is not fit for purpose

indolence, stupid-heads 1 Response »

Feb 042012

In the NHS, there two main activities. One is helping sick people. The other is measuring, improving, correcting, extending, and promoting how well sick people are helped. Much energy is expended on the first activity: technical advances, new pharmaceuticals, further training for doctors and nurses in new ways to help sick people. But the more you read about the NHS, the more you get the feeling that a lot more energy is expended on the second activity.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with this; even in a business, delivering the product or service to customers is straightforward, if not always easy, and the bulk of business energy is expended on how to improve the product or service, how to measure whether or not it’s good, strategy for getting it in front of the market, selling it, and so forth. Large numbers of people are employed to do these things, and a lot of money is spent in doing them—money that is generated by the delivery side, both by delivering the goods and by finding new ways to reduce inputs and increase outputs. Greater productivity means greater profits, which can be taken home as pay or ploughed back into the rest of the business.

The difference between a business and the NHS, however, is that issue of money. Money is the simplest metric for business success: how much are we making? Allocating money in a business is also fairly simple: wages, tools, marketing, infrastructure, tax, in varying proportions, and what’s left over goes to the shareholders. And if the metric drops—we are making less money—the allocations drop too. Therefore business responds to money.

The NHS, on the other hand, doesn’t respond to money, because it doesn’t make any. You can argue whether this is an intrinsic function of what it does—healthcare—and you can even argue the ethical toss about measuring something as important as health by looking at money, but you can’t get away from the fact that the NHS has something to do with money, because helping sick people has a cost.

The NHS is sort of halfway in the market. It doesn’t directly charge its customers for its services, so it can’t respond to the “how much are we making?” money question. But it still has to answer “how do we allocate it?” and “what do we do if we have less to allocate?” Doctors and nurses don’t work for free, so it still has to think about wages. Medical supply manufacturers don’t manufacture for free—they are businesses, so they have to worry about how much money they’re making—and infrastructure has to be paid for as well. The NHS has all of the business problems of spending money, and none of the tidy business solution of earning it.

So when, in the NHS, the costs grow and/or the pool of money to spend shrinks, the sector has to find pseudo-business solutions to deal with this problem. “Pseudo” because what businesses do is frequently not an option for the NHS. For instance, a business could produce more goods or services. The NHS can’t do this, because it’s really unethical to go round trying to make people sick so that you can cure them more, but also because the NHS’s primary service—helping sick people—is actually a cost, and doesn’t make them any money. For the same reason, they can’t look for new markets like a business would, but also because the market for the NHS is already every person in Britain. Other solutions are simply odious. The NHS can borrow money, but their collateral isn’t private, so they end up mortgaging the public good. The NHS can ask patients to pay—private patients, or foreigners—but this invalidates the ideology that health shouldn’t depend on wealth. They can ask the government to raise taxes, but that’s a PR nightmare, and the existence of the NHS depends on people’s loyalty and goodwill.

So the NHS has only one option, and that is to reallocate its spending. Reduce the number of doctors and nurses treating the sick people, and thus lower the wage bill. Find cheaper suppliers, and thus lower the tools bill. Hire cheaper builders to patch up the estate, and thus lower the infrastructure bill. Use what you’ve saved to increase marketing healthy lifestyles, and hopefully the number of sick people will drop, and through all of these increases in productivity (in the NHS, it’s called “efficiency”), maybe you can break even, or even turn a profit (in the NHS, it’s called a “surplus”).

In the NHS, you can also do rain dances, make offerings, and perform collective prayer rituals that the UK economy flourishes enough for tax receipts to go up, giving the government the power to increase your budget again.

Unfortunately, all of these things make for a cumbersome and difficult-to-run healthcare system. Sacking nurses looks evil, and makes life harder for the other nurses. This, and using cheaper supplies, can literally endanger people’s lives. Infrastructure creaks as it gets older, and the population rapidly outgrows the limited space. Paying staff, suppliers, and contractors less reduces tax receipts. And public-health marketing is notoriously ineffective.

So what the hell do you do, if you’re the NHS? Do you say, “Fuck it, this half-business life is no life at all—let’s act like a real business and charge people money. Then if they pay us, we know we’re doing a decent job”? This doesn’t even have to mean that poor people die in the streets, because the government could just give them the money to buy their healthcare.

No. Instead, you bitch and moan and look for Rube-Goldberg-esque solutions to act as proxies for normal market behaviour. And then you can see why helping sick people is the least of what goes on in the NHS.

Let us consider, for example, the Health Service Journal, the premier trade journal for non-medical NHS staff. Does it have anything to do with awesome new and better ways of helping sick people? Does it fuck. It is Rube Goldberg literature for the Rube Goldberg system.

This week’s stories include:

(1) The way to improve the NHS’s effectiveness and efficiency is to set up an independent standing commission to look into the matter.

(2) Outsourcing middle management can, in ideal circumstances, reduce “overspend” (in the business world, “losses”).

(3) Medical unions are concerned that competition will lead to health “inequality.”

(4) A government quango will judge who is allowed to help sick people.

(5) The same quango prioritise patients over creditors when it puts private providers out of business by disallowing them from helping sick people.

(6) The same quango shouldn’t give NHS bodies credit ratings for borrowing purposes, because credit ratings are not an appropriate proxy for how well sick people are helped.

(7) Another government quango will measure how well sick people are helped by a series of inspections centred on 100 performance metrics.

(8) Another government quango will judge which GPs are allowed to buy healthcare from the NHS for sick people, but it will need management consultant help to do this.

(9) The GPs will also need to be helped to create a QIPP strategy. (QIPP stands for “quality, innovation, prevention, productivity.”)

(10) Publication of how well these 100 metrics are met may lead to health “inequality.”

(11) However, not publishing these data, because they are impossible to collect and monitor, is also unacceptable.

(12) PCTs can close down their competition but only if they don’t ask doctors whether or not they should do it.

(13) A commission will investigate whether imposing fines for making people sick with C. difficile will hurt hospitals.

(14) Some middle managers are unhappy about spending money, time, and energy on healthy lifestyle programmes for staff.

(15) Patients need a better way to complain about the quality of help they received when they were sick.

(16) In order to do all of this stuff, there needs to be a strategy for staff engagement.

(17) There also needs to be a strategy for adopting helpful technology.

And my personal favourite:

(18) “Salford Royal Foundation Trust’s clinical leaders development programme is part of an emerging organisational development strategy to engage senior medical staff in the business of clinical leadership and develop their talent.”

So there you have it. Because the NHS cannot measure how well it provides its service—helping sick people—by the money it makes from its customers, it has to invent Byzantine proxies, implemented and assessed with great energy and at enormous cost, none of which have anything to do with helping the sick people.

And why? Because this tremendous waste of time, money, talent, and human capital is preferred as a more humane outcome than letting sick people hand over money directly in order to get better.

American elections and a gift to one lucky foreigner

indolence, US-bashing 7 Responses »

Dec 282011

Somewhat strangely this year, I find myself in possession of a vote of higher value than normal. Allow me to elaborate:

In 2008, the presidential popular vote in North Carolina was extremely close. Obama won the state’s electoral college votes by a margin of 0.32%, the equivalent of about 19,000 votes.
The current US Senate has 51 Democrats and 47 Republicans. Of these, North Carolina supplies 1 Democrat and 1 Republican.
The current US House of Representatives has 193 Democrats and 242 Republicans. Of these, North Carolina supplies 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans.

All of which means that, for the first time I can ever actually remember, North Carolina is an important swing state, where candidates are suddenly bothering to campaign—the Democrats have even chosen North Carolina’s biggest city to host their national convention this year. North Carolina might therefore just become a deciding factor in this year’s federal elections, and my vote, historically puny and pointless, this year carries some weight.

(Although not in the primaries, thanks to the NC General Assembly’s long-standing and well-attested tradition of constant gerrymandering.)

I thought I might bring this up for the purpose of drawing attention to a basic and amusing irony: I, suddenly possessed of an important vote, nevertheless don’t care; while many foreigners, possessed of no votes in the American elections at all, would give their eye-teeth to have it. What the United States political class does, so the argument goes, affects the world, so the world should have a vote. And yet it doesn’t, but I do.

And this is likely to be a dirty-fought and close-won election, in both legislative and executive branches.

I have therefore decided to offer my federal vote to one non-American person who gives a shit that is statistically significant from zero. I will vote the way you want in the presidential and congressional elections, whether it be for specific candidates or a straight-ticket party or not at all, or even spoil my ballot with amusing sayings. I stress that this is a gift, not a trade; I am conversant with North Carolina general statute 163-275 making it a class I felony to accept any thing of value whatsoever in return for my vote.

Therefore, any person who would like to take up this offer of mine must be scrupulously conspicuous in offering me no value for it at all; in fact, it might even be better if such persons were to cause me a loss of value somehow, for example by kicking me in the shins or making me buy them pints.

Takers in the comments, please.

Social impact bondage

indolence 5 Responses »

Dec 122011

Seriously? No, seriously?

Just cut out the middleman and let rich people sponsor a poor person. There would be less waste in the long run, jobs for council workers (the OKCupids of wealth patronage!), and a powerful social impact.

After all, why give your money to charity when you can give it to your own impecunious client?

I mean, it worked for the Romans.

“Climate change”

indolence 3 Responses »

Dec 012011

So. This time last year, London was under a blanket of snow. That was weather, not climate change.

This time this year, London is positively balmy. I haven’t even busted out the winter coat. This is climate change, not weather.

What’s what, you climate change types?

I know that, y’know, climate change is all about melting ice caps and polar bears and stuff, not about what the temperature is in any given place in any given time.

But on the one hand, I’ve got this message that unseasonable cold is not indicative of global warming, because global “warming” can cause unseasonable cold due to cold meltwater effing up the Gulf Stream.

On the other hand, I’ve got this message that unseasonable warm is not indicative of climate change, because climate change doesn’t cause meltwater to eff up the Gulf Stream, due to some Pacific weather pattern…?

Look. Either global warming is effing the Gulf Stream and therefore causing massive freezes north of the Tropic of Cancer; or else global warming is heightening the Gulf Stream and causing crazy warm weather north of the Tropic of Cancer; I don’t care, just make up your minds for more than a year in advance.

And when you do, I’ll bust out the winter coat or else the flip-flops, and become a convert.

But until your weather/climate/Gulf Stream/meltwater/Pacific current makes consistent sense, I’ll continue to believe in “mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation.”

Mmkay?

History came to a .

indolence 3 Responses »

Nov 222011

From the Mail:

Some universities, such as London Metropolitan, have slashed more than 60 per cent of their courses, including philosophy, performing arts and history.

Much as I’m not in favour of direct state funding of university degrees, nor am I remotely in favour of the apparent belief, held by just about everyone in the western world, that the purpose of learning is to make one an economically viable unit.

‘Go to university so you can get a job and… pay taxes, god damn it!’

No, I’m sorry. That is not the purpose of knowledge, learning, or education, as far as I am concerned. It’s important to be ‘economically useful’ solely so that one can support oneself; whether this requires learning is a matter of circumstance.

It is particularly dreadful that the welfare state and the state funding of tertiary education, and the cost that involves to the taxpayer, has resulted in this pathetic narrative about education—learning how to think, process information, and make independent analyses—being reduced to the question of whether or not what you learn helps you get a job.

To the point where universities are axing degrees that accomplish precisely the goals a university degree should accomplish.

When the taxpayer doesn’t have to subsidise ‘economically non-viable units,’ one doesn’t have to be over-concerned with how people enlarge their brains and their understanding of humanity.

I would be interested to know what degree courses London Metropolitan University will be retaining. Presumably, given the jobs possessed by people I know, courses like ‘Working in the Public Sector’ and ‘How to Add No Value in Human Resources’?

But perhaps that’s uncharitable. I do know people doing productive work, who all seem to have degrees in, y’know, philosophy and history.

Or no degree at all—and have become complete humans all on their own, without the subsidy of the state, or the help of London Metropolitan ‘University.’

Jesus.

UPDATE: Okay, so I’m told that wasn’t the clearest post I’ve ever produced.

Here’s my deal.

Knowing various stuff and supporting oneself independently are separate things. State subsidy of knowing stuff, and state subsidy of those who can’t support themselves, have conflated these concepts.

You don’t always need to know some stuff in order to support yourself. Likewise, lots of people who do know some stuff can’t support themselves. (Cf. OccupyLSX.) The two do not need to be linked.

Axing history and philosophy degrees does not mean that university graduates will, therefore, be able to support themselves, even if they are paying £6k more for the privilege of studying. All it means is that a significant contingent of people will no longer know stuff to do with history or philosophy. Whether this assists in their economic viability is neither here nor there; what it does mean is that particular knowledge will be systematically lost.

Now, you can choose to assess the value of that knowledge economically, as everyone seems to be doing currently.

On the other hand, you can say, ‘Hey, people should be able to support themselves. Quite apart from that, at least some people should know some stuff about what it’s meant to be a human being up to this point. But being able to support oneself doesn’t mean one has to be completely focused on being able to support oneself.’

One of the greatest things about our society becoming ever wealthier is the growth of leisure (Cf. just about every blog post by Tim Worstall). Leisure is, essentially, the opportunity to think about what it means to be a human being. If we’ve reached the point where thinking about being a human is so devalued that we’re not even providing the opportunity to people willing to spend their money (i.e. leisure) on it, then we might as well all work ourselves into the grave right now.

Honestly, what good is having wealth and leisure time otherwise?

Disclaimer: I have two degrees in history. And yes, I work and pay taxes. The reason I got my job in the first place was, incidentally, due to blogging. Maybe universities should be offering that as a degree course.

Meet the new plan: same as the old plan

argh, indolence 14 Responses »

Nov 132011

I have Tim Worstall to thank for raising my blood pressure on this fine Sunday afternoon and distracting me from some work I’m supposed to be doing. His reaming of this article by Naomi Klein in The Nation is brief, but extensive enough to hint that she might be saying some stuff that I particularly hate.

There is a run-of-the-mill Left position, that revolves around general ideas of environment, equality, and government involvement that I can sort of tolerate, even if I don’t agree with it. And then there is the crap spouted by people like Naomi Klein, who seem to view themselves as the best thing since sliced Marx, and in that tradition of philosophising about a new world order. This group also includes Madeleine Bunting.

And if there’s one thing that really gets my goat, it’s assholes holding forth about overturning the current “narrative” and bringing about a completely new social and economic “paradigm.” Especially when it’s actually a really old one.

I’ll declare my interest and say this is partly because the current narrative isn’t so bad (for me), but there’s another facet, and that is the blind outrage I feel when someone talks about junking the collective effect of the individual, diffuse, organic behaviour of billions of people. You can’t get different results without changing the inputs, and the natural way to do this—making a case, hoping it’s reasonable, and watching it become a trend if it is—isn’t good enough for the Kleins and Buntings of this world. There will be no grass-roots, bottom-up behaviour change, even though this is how it has only and ever worked. No, instead we shall have planning. Lots and lots of planning.

And in the service of what, precisely? Why, a new paradigm that overturns capitalism and delivers an earthly paradise of low-carbon equality of wealth. The infuriating thing about this is reading how they propose to do it, and losing one’s temper about the fact that it makes no sense.

Let’s start with Klein’s thesis.

The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

That would not be a “new civilisational paradigm” but a very old one: the one humans lived in for many thousands of years, the rhythms of their lives attuned acutely to the natural cycles of growth, rains, harvest, dormancy—or else growth, drought, famine, and death. Many people in the world still actually live this way, and not only does it suck, we in the first world acknowledge that it sucks because we call these people “poor” and try to help them not have to live attuned to the cycles of nature.

This is mainly because, while human intelligence might have its limits, inability to overcome the cycles of nature isn’t one of them.

Not that any of this really matters, because Klein doesn’t want to do this really, and nothing in her “planning” would achieve it, or is even designed to achieve it. Her six-point plan bears no resemblance to anything remotely “natural.”

It’s not even as sensible as my colleague’s ten-point plan for when he becomes dictator of India. That one starts like this:

1. Remove all restrictions on trade.
2. Legalise prostitution.
3. End all licensing laws.
4. Introduce the death penalty.
5. Put all corrupt people to death.
6. etc.

So let’s look at Klein’s plan. With the rhetorical crap stripped out, it goes like this.

1. Create a huge government deficit by building massive green infrastructure.

Yeah, okay. That’s just run-of-the-mill leftism, but we’ll come back to it.

2. Every community in the world to plan how it will stop using fossil fuels.

My favourite part of this is how collective lifestyle imposition is described as “participatory democracy.” I guess it doesn’t occur to Klein that people don’t require participatory democracy when they are free to make their own individual decisions. It’s only when some group is trying to force its shit on everyone else that the twin charade of “engagement” and “consultation” is invoked. Seriously, whenever you hear that you’re about to be consulted or engaged with, abandon all hope, because it means some decision about you has been made without you and you’re now about to be told what it is.

2a. This planning should focus on “collective priorities rather than corporate profitability.”

Somehow this is something to do with making sure those people whose current jobs are entwined with fossil fuels don’t end up left without a job.

This makes no sense. For one thing, there is nothing more capitalist than a job. A job is what you do to earn money (sometimes also known as capital), with which you buy the stuff you need to live. You can’t sweep away capitalism and keep jobs. It just doesn’t work. A job is not some kind of intrinsically good way of keeping oneself from growing bored with leisure. A job is work someone pays you to do. And jobs are not the same thing as work; this is why we don’t call hoovering and dusting “housejobs.”

Let’s also address the problem of “profitability.” You know, the one where “profit” is the positive difference between outgoings and incomings. You know, the one where that difference—that profit—is what the government takes a slice of (“tax”) to get its money to build lots of lovely infrastructure?

2b. Re-introduce labour-intensive agriculture in order to create jobs.

Labour-intensive agriculture is otherwise known as peasant farming, and peasant farming is not a job. It’s work. It’s the work one does not to have money with which to buy food, but to have food to eat. It’s back-breaking work that is harder than a job, less fun than a job, and less rewarding than a job. It is another old paradigm that we’ve actually spent some centuries now trying to get away from. We’re still trying to help third-world subsistence farmers get away from it. Returning to it is a shitty idea, and a really stupid plan for achieving a really stupid thing.

3. Rein in corporations’ ability to supply and burn fossil fuels.

That’s all well and good, but there’s nothing here about what happens to all of the other corporations where there’s no fuel. I work in a web software company. The other day, some builders over the road accidentally cut the power cable, and for two hours, the entire neighbourhood went dark. Our whole company was paralysed—no routers so no internet, no phones. Within ten minutes, the place was like something out of Boccaccio, with employees sitting in dark rooms telling stories about other power cuts they’d endured. Imagine that all over the world, and it’s only a matter of time before hundreds of millions of people start contemplating peasant farming as the only alternative to eating each other.

4. End non-local trade.

Wow, again, we’re back to the fucking Middle Ages. Thank you very much for coming to dinner, Ms Klein. Have a turnip. No, really, that’s all we’ve got. A turnip. We have to source our food locally, you see. Perhaps you would like a bit of the salted rat I’ve been saving up for our meat during the winter? What do you mean, that’s a protected species?

5. End “growth” in the first world.

Hey! You there! Yes, you with a good idea for streamlining this process! Stop it right now.

Either these people do not understand what growth is, or they don’t understand what humans are. Humans are problem-solving creatures. “Growth” is not using more resources to make more profit. “Growth” is solving problems. Often, it is solving the problem of “how do we do this thing with fewer resources?”

Klein obviously doesn’t understand this. To her, use of resources is to be minimised, except when the resource is human labour—use of that is to be maximised.

I mean, am I going crazy in the rare sunshine, or does anyone else see that we’re going backward here? The whole reason we use “stuff” is so that we don’t have to use people, because back when we had no “stuff,” we had things like 30-year lifespans from toiling in the fields, and slaves.

It’s like she’s saying we should use less stuff so that we can use more people, because it’s good for people to be used, because it means that they have work, and it’s good for people to have work, because it means that they’re not being underused.

It’s so recursive that she’s in danger of suggesting that jobs need humans in order to live.

6. Tax people and corporations.

We’re back to the whole “profitability” thing again. Now that we’ve spent some time using participatory democracy to make sure nobody cares about profit, and some more time ensuring that we stop using resources to make things, and still more time ensuring that no one makes money from using or supplying fossil fuels—where is the money, precisely, that the government’s going to take in tax? When everywhere is a co-op or a peasant farm, producing only what people need locally, where is the excess capacity that the government can take in tax?

This is the whole problem with this stupid obsession with the evils of profit. Profit is what the government taxes. Therefore, no profit, no tax. No tax, no government infrastructure projects or green subsidies or anything else the government is supposed to pay for because the private sector won’t do it because there’s no profit in it.

Jesus.

Klein sums up:

There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our ideas—informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of industrial state socialism—are more important than ever. It means that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity’s best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises.

Yeah, okay. There’s nothing in your “plan” that didn’t come straight out of the playbook of 1381, only in 1381, the peasants were revolting because it was such a shitty fucking plan and they didn’t like living under it.

More to the point, it makes no sense. The whole point of this “new paradigm” is to stop climate change and, as an added bonus, improve equality and “participatory democracy.”

But go back to the first premise—climate change should be stopped—and take a moment to ask again why that is so. Climate change is bad because it will destroy our way of life. It will kill a bunch of people outright in floods and storms. It will reduce the land area we have to live on, and reduce how much food we can grow on it. It will make many of the natural resources we depend on unavailable. It will make miserable, cramped subsistence farmers of us all.

And the way we’re supposed to avert this disaster is… to do it to ourselves first? What a pile of complete nonsense.

As Klein herself admits, the dangers of climate change are being used as a pretext to re-order the entirety of human life according to the “progressive” plan of using up excess wealth in order to maximise human work.

That is the most backward, fucked-up, and human-hating plan ever dreamed up. Anyone who backs it has a perception of life on earth so diseased and warped that they’re barely recognisable as human beings themselves.

Obscenity

indolence, poignance, political blunders 9 Responses »

Sep 292011

Look at the way every person in this photograph is grinning, like film stars being mobbed by paparazzi on the red carpet, about subverting the will of the German people. If there is a hell, surely each of these belongs there.

BBC News: Germany approves EU bailout fund, all participants smile at subversion of democracy.

Total Politics 2011 Blog Awards

indolence 6 Responses »

Aug 182011

Hey everybody.

Even if you were inclined to vote for me, DON’T. For I see via Dick Puddlecote, this:

3. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents and based on UK politics are eligible. However, this does not mean blogs hosted outside the UK, or blogs with contributors who don’t live in the UK aren’t eligible.

I am not a UK resident. So don’t vote for me, or your ballot might be disqualified. Okay?

Fuck me, even fucking bullshit popularity polls appear to be run by the fascist anti-foreigner Home Office.

Music and politics

indolence 10 Responses »

Jul 292011

Even though I am, as this blog demonstrates, overtly political, one thing I have always tried to keep away from, as a general rule, is imputing political messages to music that isn’t overtly political. For one thing, it’s pretty difficult to know what was in the lyricist’s mind at the time of inspiration, and for another, openly attaching political significance to art can be extraordinarily divisive, whether it’s the audience or the artist doing it. (Let’s just say I lost some respect for J K Rowling when I discovered she’d given £1m to the Labour Party.) People are protective of their art as they are of their politics; to find that a revered artist has repellant views sometimes feels like betrayal.

One of our goals in creating Heaven Is Whenever (now, sadly, defunct) was to create a kind of haven for all of these political people we were connected to where they could engage with each other about something they could love together. Bringing politics into Heaven Is Whenever was verboten.

I was reminded of this today when I happened upon, through pathways measureless to man, this article at the National Review called, cringeingly, ‘Rockin’ the Right.’ What, the author asks, are the 50 best conservative rock songs? And then he proceeds to appropriate a bunch of songs for the American right wing, most of which are far from overtly political.

Now, if we’re talking about ‘Bloody Sunday’ or ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ as being political, that’s one thing.

But in this case, we’re talking about the following:

‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ by the Beach Boys—Pro-marriage, yay, conservative! This song is a conservative rock anthem? What?

‘Heroes’ by David Bowie—East Berlin is bad, yay, conservative! Yeah, okay, if you ignore the fact that Bowie was dressing up like a Nazi during this era and going on stage in the persona of a fascist. Oh, wait…

‘Brick’ by Ben Folds Five—Anti-abortion, yay, conservative! I don’t think this dude has listened to the rest of the words to this song. Incidentally, I ran into Ben Folds once or twice while I was at university. Given this place is often referred to as ‘the People’s Republic of Carrboro,’ I can’t say I feel his lyrics were all that conservative in their intent.

‘The Battle of Evermore’ by Led Zeppelin—What? The basis for this judgment appears to be, solely, the line ‘The tyrant’s face is red.’ Therefore Robert Plant was against communism. Or something. Incidentally, I have actually met Robert Plant, who in his own words ‘doesn’t do it for the money.’

‘Janie’s Got a Gun’ by Aerosmith—Pro-guns, yay, conservative! I may be wrong, but isn’t this song about a girl who shoots her abusive father? Possibly there is more critique here of traditional family values?

‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Iron Maiden—Old poets, yay, conservative! Seriously, Coleridge was an opium addict. I’m pretty sure that songs based on poems based on opium dreams don’t have a place in the conservative heuristic.

It’s a shame he’s picked these as some of the top 50 conservative rock songs, because they really detract from the first four or so in the list, which I would say probably have some vaguely conservative message.

Yes, even ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’ though certainly this does not begin to resemble what passes for conservatism in America. True story: I once had a student who wrote a phat term paper about this song. When I was teaching history in the US, I used to assign term papers on subjects of historical interest. Because I am not a fascist, I didn’t choose the topics for them.

(Why? Because I had a history teacher who did that to me when I was in school. He had these file cards with topics written on them, and he put them all face down on a table, swished them around, and made us pick one blind. Imagine my dismay when I turned over the card: ‘Pinochet? What the fuck is that?’ And this was in 1997 or so, when there was no internet to speak of and I couldn’t find a damn thing in the family set of World Book Encyclopedias from 1977. I had to trek all the way to the state fucking library and read newspapers on microfilm. Contrast this with my best friend, who picked ‘The Tudors.’ This deep injustice still haunts me.)

This one kid, he was not the brightest, but he loved music: proper music as well, not the Britney Spears and whatever that his classmates were listening to. He came to my office hours after I gave out the assignment, wanting to know what on earth he should do his paper on, because he didn’t really ‘get’ history. After some discussion, it came out that he was really into the Who, and into this one song.

‘Write about something to do with that,’ I suggested lamely.

Two months later, he handed in this masterpiece, all about the post-war consensus in Britain, the principle of democratic choice, and the long decline of Empire—as an exegesis of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’ To this day, it is one of the two best pieces of work I have ever seen from a student.

(The other was a short video about the career of Lucius Cornelius Sulla. There is an unsubstantiated theory that Sulla disguised himself as a German to spy on the invading tribes in 104-103 BC. To depict this, the student playing Sulla turned his back to the camera for a moment, and turned around again wearing a Hitler moustache. This was his interpretation of ‘disguising oneself as a German.’ Hilarious.)

So yeah, I can seem some politics in some of these songs, sometimes even conservative politics.

Ultimately, however, I deplore this article and this idea. Much of the reason music is evocative is because each of us, as individual listeners, can read into it that which is meaningful to us. Appropriating music for political purposes (see also: Labour Party Conference, ‘Sit Down’) robs us of that meaning. When I listen to ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’ I don’t want to think of the personal judgments of John J Miller at the National Review.

I want to think of that kid I taught who loved listening to the Who.

Rules of engagement

indolence 5 Responses »

Jun 192011

Guest post by Trixy

We’re still fighting in Libya, still racking up the costs, still insisting we’re doing it to protect civilians and not for regime change. No, definitely not regime change, because that’s what Tony Blair did, the war monger, and this coalition is nothing like him, right?

Well, one thing’s for sure, and that’s that neither of them have or had a legal mandate from the United Nations Security Council to invade another country. Blair and his team may insist that they did, but for those of us who can, and who chose to, read the documents from the Security Council at that time, we know he was pulling a fast one. The US Ambassador John Negroponte insisted that UNSCRs 687 and 1441 were sufficient for war, and yet the Council were told by others that the latter was ‘not a smoking gun,’ and another resolution would be required before military action could legally occur.

UNSCR 1973 was for the protection of civilians and to maintain peace and security in the region. The latter is the reason that force can be used, under Chapter VII articles in the UN Charter. So is the bombing and killing of Gaddafi necessary to achieve this, without capture and a trial? Airstrikes destroy in a way that a crack team of soldiers performing a raid don’t. Sophisticated missiles can target but not so well as an SA80 MkII or an M16. So will Gaddafi find himself the victim of yet another airstrike in the name of supporting a group of his opponents whom we know nothing about, with whom senior figures in the Ministry of Defence are nervous of being involved? Will Gaddafi’s final moments be as a non-speaking extra in Pirates of the Caribbean: ‘The Naughty Dictator’ as his body is dumped into Davy Jones’ locker?

The details of what is going on and what will happen are being discussed in COBRA and the bowels of the MoD.

And what we’re hearing about now is Syria.

Hague has ruled out military action, yet the UK and France last week presented a draft UN resolution condemning Syria’s suppression of protests. China and Russia fear, understandably given recent history, that this is the first step towards yet more international intervention by the men in Disruptive Pattern Material. And certainly the calls for the end to violence must ring hollow in the ears of not only the Syrians, who see another group of civilians appearing worthy of ‘protection,’ but also those relatives of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre who had heard such platitudes before.

For whilst Mladic faces trial for genocide, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity after 16 years of evading discovery, we are reminded of what peacekeeping forces not only allowed, but were forced to allow to happen. And we should remind ourselves of why the murder of 8000 Muslim men and boys occurred in this ‘safe area.’

The answer comes down to our rules of engagement, which did not permit the use of weapons to protect civilians. And Mladic and his men knew that, and thus made a mockery of any ‘peacekeeping’ which UN forces were supposed to be undertaking.

So what I am expecting from William Hague, if he does go back on his promise of no military intervention (something few would be surprised about if he did, I suspect), is fewer words and more action. It’s a tough call for the international community not to look like hypocrites, and if we know one thing about politicians, it’s that they value their reputations/egos very highly.

What we need, if we are going to shoulder the cost of more troop deployments and continue to view ourselves as being in the company of World Policemen, is more permissive rules of engagement. Otherwise Hague, Cameron and their successors are simply offering false hopes and empty posturing to a scared population. And we are wasting our money.

Of course, given MoD cuts, farcical procurement policy, and the ongoing war in Afghanistan, whether we should be getting involved in Syria is a question for another day. But another day soon.

Whatchoo talkin’ bout, Ann?

indolence 12 Responses »

Jun 152011

Ann Coulter is probably one of the most hated political figures in the United States, just behind George Bush and just ahead of Rush Limbaugh. In her ideology she exudes what the Republican Party probably ought to be if it ever wants to be credible again, and is a bone fide conservative, and in her contempt for left-wingers she is inflammatory and scathing. She is therefore loathed by left and right.

I love reading her stuff. So do some surprising other people—’the right-wing Judy Garland‘ is not an accidental handle.

I love her even though she sometimes takes a shot at libertarians, as in her most recent column. And even though I love her, I’ve gotta fisk her.

She takes issue with Ron Paul for advocating that the government ‘get out of’ marriage but carry on with providing health and social care benefits for ‘children and the elderly’ because so many of them are currently ‘dependent on the government.’

In one sense I agree with her; I think Ron Paul is being a bit weird here in the context she points out. Marriage, says Coulter, is a contract on which many, many legal attributes depend. Adoption, child custody, health insurance, inheritance, medical proxy, etc etc. Fair enough.

On the other hand, she’s missing the point and tilting at a massive straw man. I can’t speak for Ron Paul, but I do know a good bit about what libertarians think, and that tends to go something like this:

Contracts, and the ability to enforce them, are a basic pillar of civilised society. In the absence of Rothbardian private justice, one of the legitimate functions of government is to arbitrate and enforce contracts. Marriage, whilst for many people religious in nature, is just a particular type of contract in the eyes of the state. It carries implicit agreements about child custody, insurance, inheritance, and so forth. There is nothing special about marriage that should make it any different to any other type of contract—in the eyes of the state.

Except that in the US, for some reason, there is a strange moral attribute to the marriage contract. Homosexuals cannot enter into this contract with each other. They are specifically and specially debarred, in a way that is utterly exceptional in a country that usually only refuses to recognise your right to contract if you are (a) a child, or (b) non compos mentis. There is nothing, even, to stop a gay person from marrying someone of the opposite sex. It’s only each other they can’t contract with in this way.

The state is not there to enshrine the religious or moral connotations of marriage; in fact it doesn’t do so for straight people at all. Straight people can contract marriage in front of the state without ever getting close enough to sniff a priest or a rabbi or an imam.

So why should gay people be denied this same legal status? The US government isn’t trying to pretend that gay people are as incapable of consenting to agreements as children or the mad; it isn’t trying to pretend that straight marriages always and everywhere carry a moral or religious weight. It’s either (a) bowing stupidly to pressures from people who would use the government to impose a moral sanction, or more worryingly (b) sees nothing wrong with making arbitrary exceptions to normal jurisprudence when it suits.

The exceptional treatment homosexuals receive in the context of this one contract is not only hypocritical and wrong, it is dangerous to the body politic.

I would guess that this sort of thing is really what Ron Paul is getting at.

However, obviously in Coulter’s mind he is some kind of pansy jackass for saying, essentially, ‘It’s not the state’s place to disbar consenting mindful adults from entering voluntarily into contracts with one another, but I don’t think at this stage I would eliminate Medicare and Social Security at a stroke, because it’s some old folks’ only income and some children’s only health insurance. I’d sort of prefer a different approach.’

The idea that Ron Paul is ‘pretending to be [a] Randian purist, but [is] perfectly comfortable issuing politically expedient answers’ is ridiculous. So is that idea that all libertarians are like that. I know a lot of libertarians but not many who even pretend to be Randian purists.

Furthermore, this?

I make the case that liberals, and never conservatives, appeal to irrational mobs to attain power. There is, I now recall, one group of people who look like conservatives, but also appeal to the mob. They’re called “libertarians.”

Is hilarious. The mob? Please. There is no irrational mob in this universe that finds libertarians appealing. There isn’t even such a thing as a libertarian mob. When libertarians gather together, they don’t chant slogans together or march in unison. At the Rally Against Debt, as large a gathering of libertarians as I personally have witnessed, someone tried to start the slogan-chanting thing. About 3 people joined in for a round, then got bored. The speakers, far from being cheered like messiahs, received polite applause. The closest thing to a mob was the three ‘anarchists’ (left-wingers) chanting in the pen, where the police had put them in case a fight started. They needn’t have worried. Libertarians don’t fight with left-wingers, they fight with each other. It’s the only ‘mob’ you’ll ever see where the crowd hears a rousing speech and says to one another, ‘You know, I’m not sure I agree with him. He misses Friedman’s point about the fact that…’ and then argues all the way to the pub, where they’d all much rather be anyway.

As much as I like Ann Coulter, she doesn’t seem to understand the libertarian perspective at all. And it’s a shame, not because I think she should agree, but because I think if she could be as accurately nasty about us as she is about left-wingers, her occasional potshots would be a lot more entertaining.

On Laurie Penny and Wadham College

indolence 6 Responses »

Apr 122011

Let me be the first to admit that I don’t know Laurie Penny, nor have I ever met her.

I discovered tonight that she was an undergraduate at Wadham College, Oxford—at the same time that I was a student at Wadham.

I was not surprised to find this out, and I’ll tell you why.

Wadham is known for being the ‘left-wing’ college at Oxford. It famously hosts Queer Bop, originally a celebration of all types of sexuality, and the quad around the college bar is officially called Ho Chi Minh Quad. All Wadham bops, by college statute, conclude with the playing of ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ by the Specials. Whilst I was in attendance, the Wadham SU banned Coca-Cola products from the college on ethical grounds and forbade the serving of beverages in glass receptacles, preferring biodegradable plastic on the assumption that it was more environmentally friendly.

I have read many of Laurie Penny’s columns. They read the way many conversations at Wadham sound. People who deploy the same language, the same ideas, and the same arguments are a dime a dozen at Wadham. There is a miasma of youthful optimism about the place, somewhat at odds with its transmission of privilege and its well-preserved Jacobean splendour. Laurie Penny appears to have Wadham in her veins in the same way some Americans bleed red, white, and blue.

The funny thing is, Wadham is known for a lot of other things too. Its Canadian law students. Its South African MBAs. Its British science students. Many of these people are Rhodes Scholars, entrepreneurs, and humanitarians. They take what they learn at Wadham and use it to help victims of human rights violations, disease-stricken populations in the poorest parts of the world, and small businessmen in chaotic nations who want to improve the standard of living in their communities.

Wadham also has its complement of true socialists who, although they come from middle-class backgrounds, would never blog (‘bourgeois’), would never write for the New Statesman (‘selling out’), and would never go straight from protesting with the so-called working class to hobnobbing with media personalities at champagne receptions. Sure, they read the Guardian (for the crosswords, mostly) and fix bruschetta for starters with eggplant casserole for the main course (when they can afford it, otherwise they eat beans), but they don’t pretend to be one with the down-trodden or think there is anything glamourous about smoking roll-ups. When they can afford it, they would rather have Gauloises.

Most of these people, of whatever degree, profession, or political persuasion, go quietly off to satisfy the demands of conscience, duty, and pleasure.

Laurie Penny, whatever her conscience may demand of her, certainly represents what Wadham College is. I’m not so sure she represents what Wadham College becomes. She has certainly worked very hard to communicate a message, but I don’t know if it’s the message she intended. Like many people from Wadham, she seems to want to improve the world in a certain way. But what she seems to do is reinforce the belief that privileged people from privileged educational backgrounds can, as long as they say the right things, engender trust among the lower classes whilst taking their place among the elite.

Laurie Penny is maybe 25 years old. She is the author of widely-circulated newspaper columns, and she is the subject of them. She is a student, a protester, a squatter, and a voice for those without a voice. She is a well-known name and represents a well-known point of view amongst the nation’s intelligentsia. She is one of them, and she is one of us. But stacked against everything else that comes out of Wadham College, what is Laurie Penny really doing?

She is travelling an extremely well-trodden road bearing the placard of thoroughly-explored philosophies. And the destination, reached so many times before, has benefitted no one except the travellers themselves.

Those NHS reforms…

indolence 6 Responses »

Mar 132011

Because of what I do for a living, I have a pretty decent understanding not only of how the NHS has worked throughout the past couple of years, but also of how it is envisioned to work under the reforms now being discussed in the Commons.

And I do not see that these reforms amount to selling off the NHS piecemeal and having sick people dying in the streets.

What I see, primarily, is two things.

First, a step is being eliminated in the commissioning process with the abolition of the PCTs. This doesn’t mean that GPs themselves, with all of their other workload, will also be sending the commissioning paperwork to the secondary care providers; it means that the PCTs will be, in effect, split and absorbed into the newly-forming GP consortia. These consortia are groups of GPs who have voluntarily banded together because they share a geographical area or a particular patient demographic and thus have excellent collective knowledge of the populations whose health they deal with. These GP consortia are already consulting deeply with their PCTs and, from what I’ve heard, most plan to absorb not only the function but also many of the staff.

This restructuring, therefore, allows voluntary groups with similar knowledge to take responsibility for commissioning the healthcare appropriate to that knowledge and to those patients. This is a massive improvement on the PCTs, which are region-based and have no frontline exposure to the population and patient groups in their regions.

Second, all NHS trusts are being compelled to become, or join, foundation trusts. For those not familiar with foundation trusts, they are locally-established and locally-accountable, fiscally independent hospital or healthcare trusts. They are governed, ultimately, by a membership consisting of local people, and they are required to demonstrate the involvement of that membership in major decisions. This makes foundation trusts both more democratic and more responsive. Some of the best trusts in this country—such as Guy’s at St Thomas’s—are foundation trusts and have been since the Labour government brought in the concept.

Every other part of these reforms is incidental and, incidentally, is what seems to have the “Save the NHS” and “N4S” (Not 4 Sale) campaigners so worked up. OMG, there will no longer be a cap on private-patient income for foundation trusts! So what? FTs can’t make those kind of changes without the agreement of their membership. And if the membership wants the FT to take more private patients, who are you to stop them? OMG, care might be given by non-NHS providers! So what? GPs are not technically part of the NHS; neither are care homes, many mental health centres, many home carers, and so on. Provision doesn’t have to be done by NHS bodies, and there is no proof whatsoever that private providers will give a lower standard of care, or that NHS commissioners will choose the cheapest private providers at the expense of patient wellbeing.

In fact, lately there have been a lot of, erm, questions (let’s be nice about it) surrounding the quality of care the NHS itself provides, particularly when it comes to (a) old people and (b) hospital-acquired infections, and therefore I see no reason to cling so tightly to this idea that NHS provision is automatically a good, or better, circumstance for patients.

In the end, none of these reforms alter the vital fact that the NHS is still free at the point of use for everyone, which I believe was the object in the first place: that sick people would have access to care regardless of income. However the back-end management works, this salient fact will still be true, and there is good reason to believe that these reforms, particularly the commissioning reforms, will help to improve that care, as the people responsible for looking after these sick people will have a much better understanding of their patients’ needs, both individually and as part of a particular community, and thus be much able to direct both budget and resources where they are needed, instead of distributed evenly across the board without reference to patient and community health profiles.

Review: The Churchill Memorandum

indolence, lol wut 6 Responses »

Mar 032011

Sean Gabb, director of the Libertarian Alliance and prolific author and commentator on British politics and society, has written a novel of mayhem, adventure, and alternate history: The Churchill Memorandum.

I don’t know Sean Gabb personally, but I have read other works on his recommendation (notably those of Richard Blake), so when the review copy of his novel arrived, I dove into it with great anticipation and devoured it in one afternoon, taking assiduous notes between incredulous outbursts of ‘He just… did he really just do that? WTF?’ Anyone who has read the novel will probably recognise this frequent reaction.

Even though this was several weeks ago, I waited to publish this review because I had a feeling, which turned out to be correct, that the novel would be somewhat controversial. In that interval, Gabb has been accused of being, variously, anti-American and an English national socialist, all because in his novel the United States is a fascist horrorville and Hitler wasn’t a mass murderer. As an American myself, I’m rather more sensitive than others to whiffs of anti-Americanism, and I didn’t get any as I was reading. I certainly don’t think Gabb is an apologist for Hitler or the Nazis. And I suspect that to make these sort of assumptions about an author based on the characters or settings in his novels is to indulge in more than one cognitive bias.

Sometimes, a novel is just a novel.

Or, in this case, a crazy drug-trip into an alternate universe where Hitler dies in a car accident in 1939, the pound sterling is still sound money in 1959, and Winston Churchill ‘did nothing big after Gallipoli.’ Be thankful for this back-cover exposition, because you, the reader, are a genius. If you know nothing about Europe of the Second-World-War era, expect to spend half your reading time delving around the murkier recesses of La Wik.

Our hero is half-caste Anthony Markham, historian of the feeble sideshow that is Churchill in this universe and unwitting possessor of a document that numerous plotters, including Germans and Indians who smell persistently of curry, desperately want to get their hands on.

Why do I characterise the book as a crazy drug-trip when others have described it as ‘Hitchockian’ and ‘noirer than noir’ (which I’ll also buy)? It’s hard to say without giving too much away, but here are a few bullet points to whet the appetite, or bring smiles to the faces of those who have read it:

Chekhov’s Buttcheek.
Alan Greenspan is shot within hearing of a bunch of air commuters, and nobody bats an eye.
CS Lewis as archbishop of Canterbury.
Goering is giving nukes to the Jewish Free State.
Having been framed for murder, our main character goes on the run—and promptly murders someone. Not even an important someone, so this doesn’t count as a spoiler.
Who the hell is actually behind this convoluted plot, anyway?
Michael Foot’s acid baths.

The importance of the titular document is wholly drowned in the gunfights, the multi-transport chases and escapes, the sheer insanity of staid types you once knew and loved such as Harold Macmillan—who, incidentally, tries to corral the main character just as said hero has been mistaken for a Labour Party candidate in a town hall meeting and is delivering a triumphant speech:

‘Brothers, let it never be said that the Labour Party was at all exclusive in its welcome to speakers. You’ve heard me put the socialist case for our national future. If you want to hear the other side, be aware that our Foreign Secretary—Harold Macmillan himself—is standing just outside this room, and is waiting to answer all your questions in person.’

Cue the mob.

Markham’s publisher’s daughter and a mysterious Major who doesn’t officially exist are also part of the dastardly plot, and Enoch Powell turns out to be the shadowy badass whom all the plotters fear.

Y’all, this book is further down the rabbit-hole than Alice, and I dearly wish that instead of a review wherein I praise the author for his audacity and imagination, I was publishing verbatim the notes I took. You would not believe this book.

That said, there are some deep author-avatar moments, and without doubt Gabb can create characters who are horrifyingly realistic. Markham, protagonist and first-person narrator, is a remarkably unsympathetic character, callous and cowardly by turns and buffeted along by events entirely out of his control. His attempts to take refuge in a sense of loyalty or duty to his country are constantly shown up as stupidity by people who possess neither, and his actions neither drive the plot nor resolve it. Much like real people, in fact, warts and all. And the realism is necessary in light of the fact that most of the other players stepped straight out of a Bond film.

More importantly, the more you hear from Markham, the more you realise that despite having access to his internal monologue, you do not know this guy at all. There is no mention of friends, family, background, previous life, or romantic involvements (apart from whoever gave him Chekhov’s Buttcheek.) His thoughts revolve around two things: nebulous politics and immediate circumstances. He’s like a random guy in a pub telling you a random story, and when you stagger out you’re none the wiser.

To me, this makes him possibly the most unreliable narrator in fiction. This is what really makes the novel worth reading, though of course it is exciting and inventive as well. But I feel compelled to draw your attention to the fact that the insanity all starts in chapter six, and when you remember what Markham does at the end of chapter five, well…

…that’s my theory. And I’m sticking to it.

A positive approach

indolence 12 Responses »

Feb 202011

Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer today has written a fairly ridiculous article in which he complains that FPTP supporters spend too much of their time being negative about AV, and uses the second half of the article to be negative about supporters of FPTP.

But let’s pass over this lack of self-awareness and give him a bit of credit; he does lay out succinctly what are supposed to be the advantages of AV:

I do think it would be a fairer and more appropriate electoral system for contemporary Britain. It will be a worthwhile improvement if MPs have to gather some form of support from at least half of the voters. The parties will be impelled to engage with more parts of the country than just a minority of marginals and it will pay MPs to connect with more parts of their constituencies.

I’d like to address these points a bit more seriously than I did yesterday.

First: the claim that AV is more appropriate for contemporary Britain. By Rawnsley’s lights this may well be the case, but what is so different about contemporary Britain? If AV is appropriate now for the reasons he gives, it has always been appropriate, and FPTP is a bastard system that has always been unfair and unrepresentative. And if this is true of FPTP in Britain, it is true of FPTP everywhere and at all times. Rawnsley does not address why, then, most democratic countries use FPTP.

Second: that MPs will have to gather support from at least half the voters. This is probably right, for certain values of ‘support’ and ‘half.’ For one thing, nothing in AV necessitates that an MP will have the support of half the constituency electorate; only that s/he will have the support of half of those who actually voted. If we examine, for instance, the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election in January, we see that less than half of the electorate turned out. Already we are not going to have the majority of voters represented.

Furthermore, if we redistribute the votes from all but the top four parties (Lab, Lib, Con, UKIP) to Labour, for the sake of simplicity, their share of the votes cast goes from 42.1% to 49.3%—not enough to win under AV.

Now we have to play a little game. Which party would UKIP voters place as their second preference? Probably Conservative. If we distribute the UKIP votes to the Conservatives, our top three totals are as follows:

Labour: 49.3%
Lib Dem: 31.9%
Conservative: 18.6%

Still no majority. So we have to redistribute the Conservative votes to their second preferences, and the UKIP votes to their third preferences. I have a difficult time believing that either of these groups of voters would choose Labour as anything but their last wish, although some might have chosen parties already eliminated in earlier rounds. However, let us say that most of these votes would go to the Lib Dems next, so we’ll add another 15% to the Lib Dem share, giving us:

Labour: 49.3%
Lib Dem: 46.9%

Um, crap. We’re on our last two candidates. We’re certainly not going to start fiddling around with the second preferences of the Lib Dem voters, as that would be utterly absurd. But if we don’t, then we don’t have a candidate with at least 50.1% of the votes cast. So AV does not necessarily deliver MPs support from at least half the voters who voted.

Now obviously this is a rough and dirty calculation, that doesn’t take into account tactical voting. There may have been Conservatives who voted Lib Dem in the hope of keeping Labour out, as the Lib Dem candidate very nearly won in the general election. But that still doesn’t solve the problem that the Labour candidate, even if you very generously allow all of the smaller-party votes to them, would most likely not have achieved a 50.1% majority under AV. What happens in that case? A run-off, which would be less fair even than FPTP, since it would deny a good 50% of the voters to select a candidate they truly agreed with and thereby restrict voter choice even further? Who knows.

Third: the claim that AV would impel parties to engage with more of the country than just marginal constituencies. This, I fear, is a silly belief. Seats are ‘safe’ because a majority of the voters in those constituencies firmly and regularly support one party. Let us examine what is generally considered to be the safest seat in Britain: Bootle in Merseyside, which has been held by the Labour party since 1945. In that time, the Labour candidate has never won with less than 50% of the votes. The closest was in 1955, when the Labour candidate won with 52% of the vote. Since then, the Labour share has been well over 60%, once even as high as 83%. Other parties in Bootle simply do not have a chance, nor would they even under AV. This seat is not ‘safe’ because FPTP delivers a skewed result in which some people’s votes don’t count. This seat is ‘safe’ because the vast majority of voters there like Labour. And the fact that it’s ‘safe’ doesn’t appear to affect voter turnout; turnout in Bootle is no worse than anywhere else on average.

I’m not going to spend my whole afternoon trying to discover whether these facts are similar for all ‘safe’ seats, but I imagine they probably are. In which case, even under AV, I have a hard time believing Labour would bother directing its campaign effort at Bootle. Labour is in no danger whatsoever of being ousted from Bootle.

Parties will always campaign the hardest where they have to work the hardest to get elected, and I see no reason to think this would not also be the case under AV. It seems that the real complaint here is that parties don’t engage on a broad national level during election time, which is a pretty bizarre complaint if you ask me. A particular candidate need only bother engaging with the voters in his own constituency anyway; they’re the only ones who can vote for him. If his party as a whole focuses its campaign efforts elsewhere, that’s between him and his party, not between him and his voters. AV won’t solve this.

Fourth: AV will pay MPs to connect with more parts of their constituencies. If this is true, then MPs are damned stupid and there is simply no saving them. What candidate does not try to get the largest share of the vote possible? What candidate does not, already, try to increase his existing majority? In short, what candidate is not trying his damnedest to win? Show me this person. No, really: show me.

AV, therefore, is not a solution to minority majorities, safe seats, or MPs who don’t give a damn about the voters. It does not even make every vote ‘count,’ as there is still only one winner. At best, it is an opportunity for those who feel unrepresented by any major party to give their support to the candidate they dislike the least, and a chance to indicate that a vote for a party doesn’t necessarily equate with wholehearted support for that party.

But FPTP already permits people to send these signals. And send them the voters do. What, then, is the advantage of AV? That we would have a better way of quantifying these signals?

I mean, imagine how this would pan out. My MP is Chuka Umunna. Here is how he won:

Labour: 42.8%
Lib Dem: 35.8%
Conservative: 18.3%
All others: 3%

Let’s assume the Conservatives all give Lib Dem as their second preference (I have a hard time believing any real Conservative voter would choose Labour anything but last.) Under AV, it’s therefore possible that Chuka Umunna would have lost. But could anyone then claim that Chris Nicholson was supported by more than half the voters? No. A true statement would be that Umunna was supported by less than half the voters. Since the FPTP vote already delivers this message, there is no need for AV to send the signal. Another true statement would be that more than half the voters preferred someone other than Umunna. Again, we can see this from the FPTP vote. But why should this mean Nicholson deserves to win, when clearly more voters actively want Umunna than passively reject him? Those 42.8% of people who really want Labour are effectively disenfranchised by the fact that the Conservatives get to vote twice. How is this ‘fair’?

Or let’s examine it another way. Lots of people vote Lib Dem for tactical reasons—in the case of Streatham, probably as a vote against Labour. Under AV, the theory goes, people wouldn’t need to do this. Suppose a third of those Lib Dem votes were actually Conservatives in sheep’s clothing. Under AV, our first-preference result might look like this:

Labour: 42.8%
Conservatives: 30.1%
Lib Dem: 24%
All others: 3%

Let’s be generous and say that of those 24% of voters whose first preference is the Lib Dems, a third choose Labour second and two thirds choose the Conservatives. In which case Chuka Umunna wins, and AV delivers a result absolutely no different from FPTP: Chuka Umunna becomes MP for Streatham. Everything else an AV vote might tell us is academic.

If I studied the results from every constituency in the 2010 general election, I could probably show this again and again: AV would deliver an obviously unfair result, or one exactly the same as FPTP, or one where nobody manages to secure more than half of the votes. The more marginal the seat, the more likely an unfair or inconclusive result; the safer the seat, the less difference AV would make.

FPTP means that a candidate can win with less than half of the votes. Admittedly this is not great. But at least it means he was wanted by more voters than any other candidate was. At least it means every voter had exactly one vote of equal weight. Why should we reject this system for one in which some people’s half-hearted second preferences are held equal to others’ whole-hearted first, and may not even then deliver a conclusive result? That is not ‘fair’. That is the bastard system.

Yes2WhoCares

indolence 15 Responses »

Feb 192011

I’ve decided that ‘electoral reform’ is an issue so utterly pointless in the modern British polity that it deserves me taking the piss.

For your pleasure and mine, I’m going to provide alternative answers to Yes2AV’s FAQs.

Q: How does AV work?
A: It destroys even the fig leaf political parties have to wear of possessing a consistent, unified ideology about how governing should take place, and instead replaces it with a system in which contradictory, populist vote-chasing sets of laughable ‘policies’ are constitutionally enshrined and pursued by all political parties at one and the same time.

Q: So what’s the point?
A: There is no point. You’ll still only get to vote every four years, and the Government will still do whatever the fuck it wants, manifestoes be damned.

Q: Isn’t that too confusing?
A: Only if you possess insufficient intelligence to observe that even under AV, your ‘fairer’ vote won’t necessarily deliver a candidate or Government of your choice.

Q: Isn’t it fair that the candidate with the most votes wins?
A: Nothing is fair when ‘fair’ is defined as ‘not losing, ever.’

Q: Doesn’t that mean that some people get two votes?
A: Yes. In fact, more than two; some people might get as many votes as n-1, where n is the number of candidates on the ballot paper. And even then, the candidate in second place still loses.

Q: Don’t you end up with the Least-Worst candidate?
A: You end up with a Labour or Lib Dem candidate. Whether you consider that ‘Least-Worst’ is up to you.

Q: Do I have to give a 2nd preference if I don’t have one?
A: Not yet. But it’s only a matter of time before all of this shit becomes compulsory in the name of ‘fairness.’

Q: Will my ballot change?
A: Yes. Right now the ballot is designed so that even the illiterate and innumerate can vote. Do you really think that a voting system that requires people to be able to count and write in actual numbers won’t result in a total re-design of the ballot to make it more accessible? Get real.

Q: Who uses AV?
A: Almost no other democratic country in the bloody world. The one that does—Australia—has had a hung Senate for 25 years. In its House of Representatives, the same two factions exchange control every couple of elections. But I guess this regularly alternating result, identical to what happens in the UK, is okay with the voters, since at least their votes were ‘fair.’ (UPDATE: Their votes were also compulsory.)

Q: Who benefits?
A: Whichever two of three main political parties are the most similar to each other.

Q: Who loses out?
A: Everybody else.

Q: Wouldn’t AV mean more hung Parliaments?
A: Probably. But surely that’s the idea? No winners = no losers = ‘fair.’

Q: Wouldn’t AV mean more tactical voting?
A: All voting is tactical. Get over it.

Q: What about the constituency link?
A: MPs who actually care about their constituents will do so whatever the electoral process. MPs who don’t, won’t. This is true even in marginal seats.

Q: Wouldn’t reform help minority parties like the BNP?
A: Of course not. Extremists don’t deserve ‘fair’ votes.

Q: Doesn’t the current system let us ‘kick the rascals out’?
A: Not really. But then, if Australia is any indication, neither will AV.

Q: Won’t election night take longer?
A: Yes. It will also be more susceptible to unintentionally spoilt ballots (“Hey, this one has two 1s! DOES NOT COMPUTE.’), mistakes (‘Are we on second preferences now, or third? I’ve been counting for 15 hours straight and I’m bleeding to death from paper cuts.’), and fraud (‘That 2 totally looks like a 1. Yay, another vote for Labour!’).

Q: Will AV boost turnout?
A: No. AV won’t make busy people less busy, apathetic people less apathetic, or disenfranchised foreigners, prisoners, and homeless people less disenfranchised.

Q: Will AV change things on the campaign trail?
A: Yes. Candidates will promise even more of the bland sameness than they do now. Good luck with your Hobson’s Choice.

Q: Why a referendum?
A: Because even though we elect representatives to make every other decision about our lives, our country, and our money, and this is considered right and proper in the case of (for instance) letting the people determine Britain’s role in the United States of Eurasia, whether we put Xs or numbers on a ballot paper every four years is way too important to be left up to those jokers. After all, this is the one instance in which the public choice problem is admitted to exist.

Q: Isn’t First-Past-the-Post a British tradition?
A: Yes. Which is why it MUST GO. You fucking racist.

Q: Do the public even care about voting reform?
A: No, which is why this referendum doesn’t require over 50% of the electorate to vote in it for it to count, and why it’s being held at the same time as notoriously low-turnout local elections. If the public really cared, as represented by their representatives, we’d get a special Referendum Holiday with voting booths on every street corner.

Q: Isn’t electoral reform just for Lib Dems?
A: No. It’s for Labour too.

Today’s episode has been brought to you by the colour There’sStillOnlyOneWinner and the letter GTFOverIt.

Another Point of View

indolence 2 Responses »

Feb 062011

Unlike DK, who thinks it all boils down to pointless questions of semantics, I have a great respect for philosophy. Perhaps too great, in that I have always understood its purpose to be the examination of stuff, any stuff, with the goal of reaching enlightenment, or just understanding, or even just theoretical solutions to theoretical thought-problems.

In simplest terms, I think the purpose of philosophy is to examine with intent to reveal, rather than obscure. If that means delving into pointless semantics, so be it. Words, after all, have meanings. And if it means spending a lot of time examining something and ultimately getting no further toward a conclusion than, ‘Well, I guess it sort of depends,’ I’m cool with that. Stuff has many facets, and people have many perspectives. Sometimes agreement can be reached, and sometimes it can’t. And when it can’t, that’s often more interesting, because then you can examine why, which hopefully leads to more enlightenment, or just understanding, or whatever.

So it pains me to read stuff like this from supposed champions of philosophy.

According to La Wik, Alain de Botton has had an elite education which, presumably, trained his mind in the ways of examining stuff, including a master’s degree in philosophy and an unfinished PhD in same. He is credited with making philosophy accessible to a wider audience, though not without some accompanying criticism.

I recognise that a first-rate education and some degrees is no guarantor of quality of thought, but I would have liked to hope these can permit a man’s thought to rise at least fractionally above that of the common herd.

But there is no point of view or argument in this article that I have not seen a hundred times before from all types of people, even from the keyboards of that most reviled and aphilosophical species, the blogger.

There’s the underlying theme of ‘people are so selfish, they actually think they have nothing to learn from the government about how to live!’

There’s the crass comparison with religious rules and taboos, observers of which ‘libertarians’ are said to pity often—a necessarily unfounded statement, and one that entirely fails to examine the question of consent.

There’s the assertion that the existence of advertising makes us unfree and mass consumption has turned us away from morality.

And then finally, there’s the blanket belief that ‘we’ (speak for yourself, Alain) lack the strength to resist temptation and could all do with reminders to be nice and act like good grown-ups.

We may begin to wish that someone could come along and save us from ourselves… Complete freedom can be a prison all of its own… It is not much fun, nor ultimately even very freeing, to be left alone to do entirely as one pleases.

To paraphrase a rather greater thinker than I: is this language which philosophy may properly speak?

Is it part and parcel of making philosophy accessible to the masses to obscure meaning with meaningless contradictions? Freedom can be a prison, indeed.

Is it the task of philosophy to perpetuate misconceptions such as equating libertarianism with absence of moral judgment, when in fact libertarianism contains very robust concepts of what constitutes right and wrong?

Perhaps so; I, after all, am a product of state education and have no degree in philosophy. Who am I to judge?

But all the same, I feel desperately sorry for the real philosophers out there, when the man popularising their discipline to the proles is a real-life version of Dr Floyd Ferris.

Repeal thyself

indolence, US-bashing 2 Responses »

Jan 202011

It appears that the House of Representatives has voted to repeal last year’s bloated healthcare act and has put committees together to draft new legislation to replace it—without a timetable.

As you will know, the ‘without a timetable’ aspect is something I lean toward favouring, as I criticised the act heavily, in large part for this reason:

Obama and his Congress sure did fuck it up, didn’t they? Instead of doing thorough research, either before the election or after it, and determining the best possible way to ensure universal, affordable healthcare, they cobbled together a travesty of a bill, full of unrelated pork to get various hold-out politicians onside, that when all is said and done, could serve as an exemplar of what every rent-seeker (in this case, the insurance industry) hardly dares even to dream.

But this vote is not a repeal in itself, of course. That whole ‘checks and balances’ thing means that the repeal bill will have to go before the Senate and win passage there, and then go before… the president. And, typically:

Democratic leaders in the Senate have vowed to shelve the repeal bill, and President Obama has said he would veto repeal if it ever reached his desk.

‘Shelving’ essentially means that the Senate Majority Leader, one egregious Harry Reid, can simply refuse to put the House bill onto the Senate’s legislative timetable—more or less indefinitely, if he so chooses. And even if, by some miracle of organised crime, intimidation, and sweet sweet reason, Republicans get the bill put on the Senate timetable and manage to pass it there, Obama can employ a number of veto tactics depending on when over the course of the legislative session the bill is presented to him. (Although he is required to submit his reasons for vetoing in writing; I wonder what boilerplate he’d spew on that occasion?)

The Congress can override the veto, but only with a two-thirds majority vote in both houses. So that’s pretty unlikely unless the Tea Party start getting uppity again.

I’m pleased the Republicans in the House have taken this first step, and they have a backstop in the fact that the healthcare act is being challenged in a number of cases and has already been ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge. (That ruling is under appeal, naturally.)

But they won’t get anywhere in the absence of some serious pressure from the American people, and given how the sheeple are, and how blind the Democrats are to protest and demonstration when it’s against their policies, I think the actual repeal of this hideous act will not occur. It’s more likely to be struck down by the high court, and even that’s pretty pie-in-the-sky.

Still, I wonder if the Democrats will now begin to hyperaccuse themselves of being obstructive, partisan, and resistant to the expressed will of the demos. It’s hard to imagine anything that demonstrates those qualities more than:

Democratic leaders in the Senate have vowed to shelve the repeal bill, and President Obama has said he would veto repeal if it ever reached his desk.

UPDATE: Hmm, seems I forgot about those little things called states…

Succeeding without planning is ‘miraculous’

indolence 1 Response »

Jan 152011

A comment on Clay Shirky’s piece in the Guardian entitled ‘Wikipedia—an unplanned miracle’ hath pleased me:

by any traditional view about how the world works, Wikipedia shouldn’t even exist

I can understand what you mean, if we replace “traditional” with “orthodox”, and I remember that this is The Guardian.

Elsewhere, the idea of emergent order, and its superiority to centrally planned order, has been commonplace for centuries, described by Smith, Hume, Bastiat, Hayek, etc.

This is an unplanned miracle, like “the market” deciding how much bread goes in the store.

Suspicious quotes around “the market”! Perfect.

But you have a point… no need to tax anyone, no need to order anyone to do anything. Mystifying, to be sure. Maybe worth further investigation?

Wikipedia, though, is even odder than the market: not only is all that material contributed for free, not only is all that material contributed for free, it is available to you free; even the servers and system administrators are funded through donations.

Actually the greatest writers on emergent order often wrote about the emergence of the Law, which is also (hopefully) not driven by money changing hands. A more recent example, almost contemporary with Wikipedia, is open source software.

People don’t always value only money; most people want respect and admiration, an many get it from their visible contributions to things regarded as socially valuable.

When a minority were very rich, they would make extravagant gestures like building whole hospitals, orphanages, colleges, etc. (obviously with a nice statue of the generous founder). These days large swathes of the middle classes have enough spare time and income to be a little bit philanthropic, leave their mark and feel good about themselves (and how others see them).

As people get better off, there is less and less need to order them to take care of their society. And people are getting better off. So the real mystery is not that something like wikipedia works, but that we don’t let other things work the same way.

I wonder if Clay Shirky, author of a book subtitled ‘The power of organising without organisations’, is really so blind he thinks his insights only apply to the internet, or if the suggestion this might be the case is the fault of some overly-zealous Guardian editors.

If only Kassandra had been so lucky

indolence 9 Responses »

Nov 032010

I didn’t start blogging until well after the 2008 US presidential election, so I haven’t got the documentary evidence to prove this, but I was one of the many who said at the time:

‘Well, y’know, Obama… I wish him well, I really do. It would be great if he got the nation back on its feet. Hell, it would be great if he could really do even half the shit he says he’s gonna do. But I’m sorry, this is total fantasy. The president has nothing like that kind of power, and it’s just not going to work.’

The number of people who popped up, then and later, to tell me I misunderstood the structure of my native body politic was staggering.

In fairness, Gary Younge wasn’t one of those. But it seems that Apollo has been startlingly generous toward me and those who shared my views, because Gary Younge is now saying the exact same thing.

Their mistake was to believe that transformational change was something you could impart to a higher power – the president – and then witness on CNN. The problem was not that many set their hopes too high but that rather than claim those hopes as their own they invested them in a single person – Obama – and in an utterly corrupted political culture.

The difference, of course, is that Younge attributes this ‘corrupt political culture’ to something rather different than what I was thinking. His analysis isn’t wrong, by any means, but…

A winner-takes-all voting system where both main parties are sustained by corporate financing, the congressional districts are openly gerrymandered and 40% of the upper chamber can block anything, is never going to be a benign vehicle for radical reform. Virtually every enduring progressive development in US politics since the war has been sparked either by massive mobilisations outside of electoral politics that have forced politicians to respond, or through the courts.

…are all of those really such bad things? I mean, bribing candidates electoral financing is a criminal clusterfuck, and gerry-mandering is so endemic its practically become an American trope. No argument from me that those are serious problems—not because they hinder radical change, but because they systematically and deliberately seek to reduce the human right of individual self governance.

But the fact that 40% of the American Senate can filibuster* a bill? There’s kind of a reason for that. It’s so that radical reformers can’t trample over the rights of the minority. I’m not going to say something here along the lines of ‘Surely Younge can’t think that’s a bad thing?’ because that would be a cheap rhetorical device. Of course he thinks that’s a bad thing, provided that minority disagrees with him.

And so we arrive, inevitably, at the ‘oh, poor Obama’ bit. Yes, Younge says the whole sordid business is partly Obama’s fault. Yes, his criticisms of Obama are all actually veiled compliments. Because y’see, President Obama is embedded in a sclerotic system that refuses to let him shine his light.

Strangely, when I make that same argument to my boss, he’s not impressed.

Oh, and P.S. Younge doesn’t forget the obligatory dig at the Tea Party, who while Obama ‘imitated radicalism,’ have managed to snow the American public by ‘affect[ing] anti-corporate populism.’

Blah fucking blah.

Truly, y’all, while it is certainly true that the pressures of work leave little energy for blogging, there is another reason my posting has fallen off: I’m sick to death of this ridiculous charade we all perpetrate on ourselves, that government and politics matter.

My god, the significance and gravitas with which politicians and their apologists invest their every fart, their every random, ‘radical’ idea for making us all better people! And with what lame naivete people lap that shit up.

Recently I was engaged in a debate via email with a good friend of mine, a committed left-winger with a bizarre hard-on for Margaret Thatcher. It was the kind of debate you have over and over with friends of the opposite political persuasion: it’s all been said before, you know you don’t agree, but nevertheless one party or the other believes that somehow, this time, someone’s mind is going to change. Here is what he said (quoted entirely without permission and with punctuation and spelling corrected):

Any political, social or religious value system that doesn’t have at its heart a concept of what a “good person” is and how to help people achieve it is pointless. People can disagree about what being a good person is, or that it’s wrong to coerce people to follow a particular lifestyle, but not to engage in the debate, or to say that you are somehow morally neutral while supporting policies that would totally impoverish millions of people and deny them real freedom of choice in their lives (except to either follow the ethical codes set down for them by the rich or starve) is simply hypocrisy. Also, you are interested in being a “good person,” you just don’t agree with [Monbiot's] definition of what that is. Only sociopaths have no interest in being a “good person”.

Have you ever heard such tiresome bollocks? Notice, first of all, the conflation of political with religious value systems. From an avowed atheist, that’s an interesting tactic. Second, observe the clear admission that there is no universal concept of what a good person is. Finally, witness the neat tactic of suggesting that, since only sociopaths share my view, and I am clearly not a sociopath, I cannot possibly mean it when I say I have no interest in being a ‘good person.’ (I do wish people had less of a tendency to engage in armchair psychology.)

And finally, see how he assumes that the point of it all is to make people good! All politics, all governance, all ideology, should have this aim! And it is a weighty aim, so all enterprise engaged in pursuing this aim is weighty enterprise, and not the pathetic game-playing of a bunch of meddling control-freaks who honestly, genuinely believe there is a desperate need for the ‘service’ they provide.

Bitch, please.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a libertarian and a historian, because nothing I know of in human history suggests we will ever not have government. At first we lacked it, but then we built it, because there was always some overpowering reason why a couple of dudes had to be in charge of shit. Whether it was coordinating the defence of the village or making sure people didn’t go to hell, there was always some realm of human activity that simply couldn’t be looked after by the voluntary, individual acts of the people concerned.

At least back in the day, those couple of dudes were honest about it: ‘I’m the best fighter, peasant, and if you don’t do what I say, I’ll do you.’

Now, the justifications are a lot more spurious. On the one hand, you have the politician, who starts with ‘I’ve consulted and studied and learned and listened, so vote for me,’ then moves to ‘Lots of people voted for me, so STFU,’ and ends with ‘I’ve got the bombs, motherfucker.’ Are any of these legitimate?

On the other hand, you’ve got the Chris Dillows of the world, who know an awful lot of stuff about human behaviour and this bias and that bias and that other bias also, but whose basic argument seems to boil down to ‘Rational action is imperfect, so the role of government is to insulate people from their own and others’ crappy choices.’

Well, you know what? That sucks. If we’re all irrational actors, what hope is there, even if we were governed by philosopher-kings? What’s going to protect me from their irrational actions?

And so, I say to you, my predictions about Obama have come true. This fact brings me little pleasure. Instead it deepens my cynicism. I don’t claim expertise in everything—in almost nothing, truth be told—but at least against all fucking odds I’ve acquired enough wisdom to know the virtue of humility, especially when it comes to telling other people how to live their lives and feeling massively important in doing so.

To all people like Gary Younge, Obama, every politician on earth, and everyone who helps embiggen their heads, I say with Jacopo Belbo, ma gavte la nata. Pull out your corks, you buffoons.

*No, they do not actually have to filibuster. It’s more of a ‘let’s not and say we did’ tactical deployment. A degraded holdover from the Roman Senate, which recognised the right of a speaker to speak until he was finished, and could not sit later than sunset. Cue Cato Uticensis, famous for being able to harangue the house in filibuster from early afternoon until the Senate was obliged to dissolve for the day. If Senators actually still had to do this, I predict we’d see a lot fewer filibusters.

The curious rage against Barack Obama: another explanation

indolence, US-bashing 6 Responses »

Jul 242010

In all the la-de-da with John Demetriou about my previous post, I totally forgot that I’d read another piece about American rage etc. only recently, one which I found pretty compelling.

It is, of course, the work of the genius Mencius Moldbug, a superior man loftily unaware of the petty squabbles on these here blogs, and in fact he wrote his explanation before either JD or I donned the mantle of trying to address recent developments in the United States. An excerpt:

When gentlemen look at progressivism, they see a movement whose purpose is to help the underclass, those whose plight is no fault of their own. When peasants look at progressivism, they see a movement whose purpose is to employ gentlemen in the business of public policy, by using the peasants’ money to buy votes from varlets. Who, in the peasants’ perception, abuse the patience and generosity of both peasants and gentlemen in almost every imaginable way, and are constantly caressed by every imaginable authority for doing so.

Not only had I read this two weeks ago, I even remarked on it in a discussion with sconzey in the comments to this post. I do urge you to go an read the whole thing, and then read the whole of Moldbug’s blog. It will take a long time, but it’s worth it.

I can only blame this omission of mine on my recent birthday; truly, it seems forgetfulness does come with advancing age…

The curious rage against Barack Obama

indolence, US-bashing 28 Responses »

Jul 212010

[I wanted to leave this as a comment over at John Demetriou's original post, but his implementation of Blogger rejects comments of more than 4,096 characters.]

JD, unlike your usual rants, this post is dire. I don’t mean that to be harsh, but you’re coming at this from an angle of misunderstanding that makes your ‘I don’t understand’ claims all too believable.

For one thing, you refer to ‘Americans’ and ‘the American people’ as if there is one collective American mind, and you find its schizophrenia puzzling. Perhaps for the sake of simplicity, it might be better to think of Americans as two collective minds: those who voted for Obama, and those who didn’t. For all sorts of reasons, he is and has been a polarising figure. And so you have two poles, rather than the single mad hive-mind you say is so bizarre. It is one pole that exhibits ‘curious rage’ against Obama, not ‘the American people.’

For another thing, you massively overstate Obama’s popularity during the election and at the beginning of his term. You assert that he ‘won by a landslide’ and was the subject of ‘hero worship,’ ‘hagiography,’ and high approval ratings. In fact, he did not win by anything like a landslide. He won with 53% and 28 states.

By comparison, in 2004, George W Bush won with 51% and 31 states. In 1988, George H W Bush won with 53% and 40 states. And in 1984, Ronald Reagan won with 59% and 49 states. And that wasn’t even as impressive as the 1972 election, when Richard Nixon (Nixon, of all people!) won 49 states and 61% of the vote.

Obama has had nothing like the electoral success other presidents have managed. Your perception of hero-worship and hagiography, just like your perception of rage and hatred, comes from one pole of the American populace.

Furthermore, your understanding of the role of US president is woefully incomplete. You say that ‘Bush inherited an excellent, albeit imperfect, set of books from Clinton and very quickly wrecked it.’ As if either Clinton or Bush had anything whatsoever to do with the books or quality thereof. Congress controls the cash, and the Congress that delivered Clinton a budget surplus was, in composition, almost exactly the same Congress that fucked it all up for Bush. And the Congress Obama has been working with is, in composition, almost exactly the same Congress Bush was working with during his last two years in office. The state of the books in the US is entirely unrelated to the views and actual quality of the president.

You also say that Obama is hated ‘for having the temerity to actually carry out what he proposed to do.’ Again, the president does not ‘do’ things. He does not draft legislation, propose it, debate it, or vote on it. He merely signs it once it’s made its way through Congress. (Or not, as the case may be, but I don’t think Obama’s actually used his veto yet.)

So any carrying out during Obama’s term has been done by Congress. And what they have carried out bears little actual resemblance to the platform on which he campaigned. Sure, the health care bill, but what about everything else? What about the war, the ‘middle-class tax cuts,’ the great repeal of the Bush administration’s incursions on civil liberties? Neither he nor Congress have done any of those things, which were major selling points among Obama’s supportive node. Surely you don’t think the whole election revolved around the question of a healthcare bill?

A healthcare bill which you describe thus: ‘The timing…was perhaps ill-judged, even from a social democrat perspective, but this was one of those once-in-a-thousand-years opportunities, politically, to achieve this ambition.’ For a once-in-a-thousand-years opportunity, Obama and his Congress sure did fuck it up, didn’t they? Instead of doing thorough research, either before the election or after it, and determining the best possible way to ensure universal, affordable healthcare, they cobbled together a travesty of a bill, full of unrelated pork to get various hold-out politicians onside, that when all is said and done, could serve as an exemplar of what every rent-seeker (in this case, the insurance industry) hardly dares even to dream. That’s not even to mention the costs this bill imposes, both to individuals and to the body politic, which have been revised upward continually since the passage of the bill. And the bill fails to achieve even its basic objective, which is to ensure that the poor and low-paid have access to affordable, customised insurance and care.

Is it any wonder that a significant number of Americans are horrified and disgusted by it?

All of this is a far cry from, ‘Hey, you all voted for him, he did what he said he’d do, so what’s the big problem?’

Finally, you assert that les Americains sont fous because ‘their media and overall educational standards are so lacking in substance.’ This is, basically, not true. Unless by ‘their media’ you mean Fox News, and by ‘their overall educational standards’ you mean ‘those five schools in Kansas where they teach intelligent design.’

Or perhaps you just mean the rednecks, Tea Partiers, and Christians are poorly educated. Maybe you can confirm or deny.

What I don’t understand is why you are displaying so much contempt for a bunch of people who, for the most part, share your opinions. These are people who didn’t vote for Obama (as presumably you wouldn’t have, did you have the opportunity) and who loathe what he stands for and what he’s supported as president. Sure, some of them have authoritarian tendencies, but they’re with you on at least 50% of stuff. If you were in their position, wouldn’t you be angry? They didn’t want him, they didn’t vote for him, and his presidency is riding roughshod over their cherished conception of what the United States is.

I never expected you to take this position, I must say. That you would present Americans who disagree with their president and his Congress, and who display that disagreement with words, ideas, and peaceful legitimate protests, as ‘wild, irrational…mad and retarded’ comes as a great surprise to me.

And a serious disappointment.

UPDATE: JD rebuts here.

Whither the libertarian state?

indolence 21 Responses »

Jul 042010

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organising its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

John Demetriou suggested another blogging challenge the other night, the topic to be: whether it is best to create a libertarian state by means of democracy, or by means of revolution. It seems rather appropriate to address such a question on this particular day, the anniversary of the only occasion in which the creation of a liberal state was attempted by both means at one and the same time.

Two initial problems present themselves when I consider this question. The first is that revolution is historically successful at changing the form of a government, but is usually violent and therefore illegitimate, and rarely creates a more liberal government in place of the one overthrown. The second is that democracy is non-violent and therefore legitimate, but where it successfully changes the form of government, it rarely creates a more liberal government in place of the one overthrown.

What these problems suggest to me is that changes of government are rare, sometimes violent, and usually for the worse. This presents a great difficulty to your average liberal or libertarian, for even though we may believe we have the right, as above, to alter or abolish a form of government that is destructive of our liberty, we are terribly reluctant to exercise that right—and as a result, never actually remove the destructive government from power.

A third problem, of course, is that the form of government currently destructive to our liberty is a democracy itself. And the idea of democracy is today so untouchable, any suggestion that it might be the democratic system which is destructive of our liberty, rather than simply the people in charge of it at the moment, is met with a sort of outrage.

Or else it’s met with a patronising smile and a statement to the effect that if libertarian government was at all desirable, the demos would desire it and vote for it—and the fact that they haven’t isn’t a fault in democracy, but a fault in libertarianism.

As much as I loathe the patronising smile etc., I’m beginning to believe that point of view may, indeed, be the correct one. It’s certainly true that the demos are rarely presented with a libertarian party or candidate to vote for, but even when, on occasion, they have that alternative, the majority of them don’t choose it. Libertarians and liberals, I conclude, are therefore a minority in democratic nations, and don’t have the option of democratic overthrow of the government even if they wanted to attempt it. We could, as the patronising smilers are wont to say, try to convert others to our way of thinking and thus grow to become a majority, but that’s difficult as well.

Most people can agree, roughly, that governments must not infringe the life and liberty of their citizens. (The disagreement usually regards criminals.) Libertarians would have no problem generating a majority with that view, because here at least, that majority already exists, and is why the government is not judicially murdering its opponents or locking them up in gulags. The ‘unalienable right’ libertarians can’t get a majority agreement about is property (coyly omitted from the excerpt above).

Oh, the government cannot (does not) come and take your stuff willy-nilly, sending in soldiers or policemen to boot you out of your house or snatch your family silver or raid your stash of cash under the mattress. Your property is, for the most part, protected from such predation—because you possess it.

But the government does take a certain category of your property, which it conveniently defines as property you’ve never legally possessed and thus has never actually been ‘yours.’ This is what the government calls ‘taxes.’ And, in Britain at least, most people never actually possess most of the tax money the government collects. It flows straight from their employers into the government coffers without ever passing through the fingers of the taxpayer. There are other types of taxes which do pass through taxpayer hands first: road tax, car tax, VAT, council tax. But that money never actually belongs to the taxpayer either, as evinced by the fact that if the taxpayer tries to keep it in his possession, he is charged with criminal activity: to wit, theft.

So the government declares that a certain proportion of the property within its jurisdiction belongs to it, regardless of how that property is generated or allocated originally. In practice, anyone who is employed (i.e. engaged in the production of property) is also employed by the government, by definition. In return for generating property for our employer, we receive a cut; in return for generating property for the government, we receive services. Quite naturally, the cut we receive from our employer is smaller than the amount we produce for him, and so it is reasonable to assume that the services we receive from our government are worth less than the property we produce for it.

In our chosen employment, however, all of our colleagues are in the same boat. Their cut is also less than what they produce. In our government employment, though, it’s a different story. Some people receive much more in services than they provide in tax—and some people receive services for which they provide no tax at all! In fact, the more tax one provides, the fewer services one receives, and the less tax one provides, the more services one receives!

There, then, is the source of the disagreement, and of the libertarian minority: most people, under our current form of government, perceive that the value of the services they receive is greater than the value of the tax they pay. For some people, this is factually true, and for others, it’s nothing more than perception: but as long as the majority perceive that they are receiving more than what they pay for, the libertarians (who generally perceive the opposite) will remain a minority.

And as long as most people think they’re pulling the wool over the government’s eyes in this way, they will neither (a) consider their property rights infringed, nor (b) support any change in government that eliminates that state of affairs. I submit that this must be the case, simply because whenever the government has moved in a general libertarian direction, it’s been because people have perceived, for a time, that government services are no longer worth vastly more than the tax contributions that pay for them. That was the case in Britain in the eighties, and that’s the case in Britain now.

You see the difficulty, no? Joe Bloggs can go into the store and pay 50p for a plasma television. It’s not a great television, but it works most of the time, and hey, he’s not going to get better anywhere else for 50p. Now you try stopping him outside the store and saying, ‘Hey, man, doesn’t it bother you that you can’t choose not to buy the television? That you pay the store 50p whether you take home the television or not? That I pay the store £50 but I’m not even allowed inside?’

Joe isn’t going to say, ‘Hey, you’re right. Screw that television, and screw this store.’

He’s going to say, ‘Well, I paid my 50p, so I’m entitled to the television. And if it could get £50 off you, the store must think you can afford to buy your own television for full price somewhere else. And if this store didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be able to have a television at all, whereas you would—so this way is only fair. See ya!’

All of which leads this cynical libertarian to conclude, ultimately, that most people don’t want a libertarian state. They don’t think the current form of government is destructive to their rights, and they don’t think it’s destructive to libertarians’ rights either. After all, if we’d just shut up our bitching, we could be busily defrauding the government, too. Or at least believing that we are.

As long as these perceptions prevail, nothing short of violent revolution has a chance of producing a libertarian state. And libertarians, I like to think, don’t do violence.

So if democratic change isn’t possible, and revolution is abhorrent, how do we arrive at a libertarian state? The only method I can imagine is to become so prosperous, as a society, that people no longer need some of the services the government provides, and can purchase the others more cheaply elsewhere. [UPDATE: For what it's worth, I think the rise of the pernicious 'inequality' meme is proof that we're really close to achieving this level of prosperity.] The best way to become that prosperous would be, of course, to have a libertarian state; but I think it’s possible to get there without one. It’s just going to take a hell of a lot longer, longer than I or my children or my grandchildren will live. In the meantime, the best thing I can do to help bring about a libertarian state is never, ever to shut up my bitching.

Read Obnoxio the Clown’s answer here.

John Demetriou weighs in at last here.

Politics and ethics: incompatible

indolence 4 Responses »

Jun 122010

Great words from Mr Civil Libertarian:

Politics and ethics aren’t easy bedfellows. That’s because there’s nothing ethical about politics. Politics as we know it consists entirely of: Using the force of the state (which is unethical) to coerce (which is unethical) otherwise peaceful citizens into a) giving up their preferred way of life (unethical), b) giving up their justly acquired property (unethical), c) obeying the rules of a small section of society under threat of severe punishment (unethical), and also d) committing violent, coercive acts against citizens of other Nation States that they can claim no possible right over (VERY unethical).

There’s very little politics can do that is ethical, since ultimately, the power of politicians comes, not from namby-pamby “social contracts” (which you never knowingly signed, cannot rescind, and cannot see the terms of) or from any sort of “God given right”, but ultimately from the use of, or the threat of use of, violence against you. What Lucas, as a Member of Parliament, does, is work as yet another embodiment of this established violence. That’s her job. That’s her role. To claim she is “ethical” makes a mockery of ethics.

Tears…

hilarity, indolence 16 Responses »

Jun 062010

…of laughter.

Meanwhile, apologies to all for the recent falta of worthwhile posts. I might have written something yesterday, but I went to the Derby instead. Not what I might call a profitable day overall, but tremendous fun and those £2 I put each way on At First Sight at 80-1 really paid off when he came second.

In other Derby news, I hope nobody placed any bets based on the tote tips. Of seven races, they got one right.

Favourite horse name from yesterday: Seeking the Buck (B g Seeking the Gold – Cuanto Es). Clever.

Also, I am thinking that it’s time for karma or whatever to change. The past year has felt like one tremendous uphill struggle, so surely the world and I are due a little plateau of contentment. To that end, I am humbly asking everyone who reads this post to leave lulz in the comments. Failbooking, Lolcats good; hectoring bombast will result in personalised poison-pen character assassinations from yours truly. These days, the bitch-blade goes snicker-snack almost of its own accord, so don’t even think about whiffling and burbling through this tulgey wood…

The case of left-libertarianism

indolence 27 Responses »

May 192010

[NB: This post was inspired by a Twitter discussion with @obotheclown and @John_Demetriou. There was a time-limit involved, so please excuse any errors.]

There is a stream of thought out there in the political troposphere that goes by the name of left-libertarianism. This flavour is usually summarised as supporting civil liberties while advocating economic redistribution in some form or manner so as to even out the material unfairnesses in society.

For the time being, let us dispense with the nomenclature and consider first principles. (I’ve been reading Mencius Moldbug lately as you all know, so I’m very much in the mood for thought experiment and first principles.)

Political thought can be summed up as the set of philosophies, opinions, and practices devoted to the question of how people should be governed or should govern themselves. By discussing politics at all, we are addressing the needs and concerns of society or other large and similarly defined groups of humans. We are automatically moving outside of the realm of the individual, which is problematic for the libertarian, of course, but as the population of the earth is not one libertarian, this is simply a pragmatic attitude.

Also, generally speaking, political thought revolves around two central questions: (I) what is good for people both as individuals and as groups? and (II) once we’ve identified the good, what methods or mechanisms do we employ to achieve it?

Despite seeming insurmountable, answering question (I) is generally pretty easy. Almost all humans, when asked, will conclude: (a) I wish to go about my business in the absence of violence or coercion, and (b) I wish to fulfil my material needs in the absence of same, preferably without damaging myself, and preferably without sacrificing (a). Of course, you find that the extent at which people define ‘needs’ and ‘damaging’ and ‘business’ differs from person to person, but this is where the maligned inequality thesis comes in. As long as people feel their effort does not exceed their compensation, and that other people’s business does not impede their own, they tend to be satisfied.

Of course you will always find people who disagree with our answer to (I) for some spurious Calvinist reason, typically either that wanting to go about one’s business is selfish and therefore evidence of evil, or that privation is a moral virtue. I discard them, because they are clearly insane.

Now we are left with question (II), namely, how do we achieve personal freedom from coercion and violence, as well as personal freedom from making ourselves miserable in the pursuit of sustenance? (All the ‘civil’ freedom in the world does not compensate for the mental and physical drain struggling for sustenance, contrary to Patrick Henry etc., but in fact true civil freedom has never been achieved anywhere, so this is more or less a moot point.)

Pace Rothbard, but I think it would be very difficult to achieve either of these things without some kind of overarching authority. Thus I am a minarchist rather than an anarchist. However. As a right-libertarian, I suppose, I see the role of the authority as defending the territory from external aggressors, and enforcing a set of laws that prohibits internal aggression and contract-breaking. These roles, in my view, are sufficient to maintain my civil freedom. I doubt your average left-libertarian would disagree with me on this.

So in the left-right libertarian struggle, we can actually agree on what we might call (II).1.

But what about (II).2, i.e. material freedom?

Your reasonable left-libertarian (thought I don’t presume to speak for such people, obviously) takes the position that just as the authority must enforce the conditions that preserve civil freedom, it must enforce the conditions that preserve material freedom.

(Again, keep in mind that neither of these has ever actually been achieved.)

As it happens, I agree with him on (II).2 as well.

Here’s where it breaks down. In my political schematic, all parts of question (2) are achieved by the same measures: that is to say, defending the territory and enforcing laws and contracts. You will note that my view does not require any particular type of authority–simply some entity with the authority to defend and enforce. It could be a parliament. It could be a dictator. As long as defending and enforcing are what the authority does, it could be the Slime Beast of Vega for all I care. And while I would like for everyone to be materially free, I recognise that the great variety of skills, talents, and needs may preclude this. Thus, for me, it is sufficient that everyone has the opportunity to be materially free, and no one is prevented from seeking material freedom (except with regard to everyone’s civil freedoms), and no one is assisted by the authority in achieving material freedom. In this way, the pursuit of material freedom is at least fair, if not equal in result.

This attitude is not shared by left-libertarians. For them, the authority has a role in ensuring that people achieve and maintain material freedom. Those whose talents and skills are accorded value on the market insufficient to providing material freedom must receive some support from the more talented and more skilled. Some of this support will be voluntary, of course, as there are still people who retain a conscience about this sort of thing. But history and demographics have shown us that the number of skilled people who possess a conscience is always smaller than the number of unskilled and low-skilled people, so the left-libertarian will refuse to rely solely on the voluntary action of people with conscience. He will insist on endowing all of the skilled with a faux conscience, and deploy the authority’s monopoly on force to make sure enough people are endowed with faux conscience to provide for the full support of all of the unskilled and low-skilled.

The left-libertarian will see no conflict in this, as almost by definition he does not believe that property ownership beyond body and mind is an aspect of civil freedom.

And frankly, if material freedom operated on the same basis as civil freedom, this would be entirely sensible.

Unfortunately, although he is consistent in his aims, this is where the left-libertarian becomes inconsistent in his methods: for while civil freedom consists of individuals refraining, a left-libertarian’s material freedom consists of individuals acting. Refraining requires only personal self-discipline and sensibility; acting requires deliberate intention if it is voluntary and deliberate force if it is involuntary. Moreover, civil freedom consists of everyone refraining from aggression, while the left-libertarian’s material freedom consists of some people acting or being forced to act, and is thus inherently unfair and unequal. To achieve civil freedom, everyone has the same personal responsibility; but to achieve the left-libertarian’s material freedom, only a certain portion of the population has a personal responsibility.

And in fact the left-libertarian position imposes a double responsibility, for not only must those with skills provide for others’ material needs, they must provide for their own as well. To the left-libertarian, this is only just, for anything else would condemn the unskilled to starve in the streets and the low-skilled to suffer a life of toil that greatly exceeds its rewards–damaging both body and mind.

The left-libertarian position, just like mine, demands no particular type of authority, nor is it inherently redistributive.

But in practice, his method of pursuing economic freedom requires redistribution. For unlike civil freedom, which depends upon individual acts of reason and will, material freedom is contingent upon the supply of goods and services, the demand for goods and services, the supply of labour, the demand for labour, and people’s willingness to enter into mutually voluntary transactions. It is also contingent upon the identification of some minimum level of material comfort below which is unfreedom and above which is freedom. And as material comfort is relative to both immediate neighbours and prevailing conditions, this is not an absolute and can only be determined by the subjective judgment of those with the power to enforce it.

Because of this, the left-libertarian position also requires an authority that is prepared to wield force against its own citizens or subjects, and there is a name for authorities like that.

So while I might find left-libertarian goals both humane and righteous, and in agreement with my own, I find left-libertarian methods to be internally inconsistent with regard to freedom as a concept and incompatible with reality.

But then, non-libertarians say that about all libertarian philosophy, left or right. And given that neither left-libertarianism nor right-libertarianism has ever been implemented, let alone successfully implemented, they may have a point.

Obnoxio the Clown’s case of left-libertarianism can be found here.

Jock Coats, a self-labelled left-libertarian, weighs in here.

And you can find John Demetriou’s assessment here.

Sage Moldbuggery

indolence 1 Response »

May 162010

In light of various discussions taking place around the series of tubes regarding what parties did, or did not, get 150 votes and what their leaders should, or should not, go round saying and doing, this snippet bears the appearance of both wisdom and relevance:

For any kind of collective political action, whether capturing a state or creating a new one, a smaller, more cohesive, tightly disciplined and indoctrinated movement is much more powerful and effective than a larger, more amorphous, loosely organized and weakly indoctrinated one. Especially if the latter is heavily contaminated with actual opponents of your actual ideology – you know, the one you actually believe.

Anyone who does not read Mencius Moldbug is seriously missing out. He is bleach for the acidic brain, and a good dose will help neutralise any growing (and understandable, given the difficulty of eternal vigilance) instincts toward collaboration. This does not mean that I, too, have become an Orange reactionary; although he makes a good case, I’m not sure his remedy is the best of all possible remedies. His diagnosis, on the other hand, is pure veritas in veritate.

A thought re: British democracy

indolence 4 Responses »

May 162010

For some reason I have this corny idea that for a political party in Britain to stand a parliamentary candidate in a parliamentary constituency, that party has to pay £500 to… somebody. And he must win 5% of the vote if he wants that money back.

Therefore to have even the hope of securing a parliamentary majority, a political party has to stump up a minimum of £163,000. And until recently there has been very little point in aiming for less than a majority. (Pace the Lib Dems, the true winners of the recent election despite coming, er, third.)

Assuming this corny idea is at all accurate (and trust me, I hope to be corrected on this point of fact), the only possible justification for it is that somebody, somewhere wishes to discourage what we might call ‘frivolous’ candidacies. That is to say, nobody shall stand for parliament for giggles, else he or his party shall lose £500.

The average size of a parliamentary constituency in the UK is 70,000 voters, at least according to Wikipedia, of which 5% is 3,500.

If we apply average voter turnout for the nation to the constituencies themselves (a rough and dirty approximation to be sure), then of the potential 70,000 voters in each, only 45,500 of them actually voted in this most recent election – meaning that to secure his £500 deposit, a candidate actually need only about 2,275 votes.

It is very difficult to know ahead of time whether acquiring this number of votes is possible for a small-party candidates, and indeed many majorities (Ed Balls’s, for instance) are smaller than this amount.

But what I’m getting at vis a vis my corny idea is that somebody, somewhere in the British government has decreed that if you can’t get 2,275 people to vote for your ass, you must pay up, sucka.

And if we carry the arithmetic just a little bit further, we see that the British government has essentially assigned a monetary value to every vote, and that value for the recent election was approximately £0.22.*

I’d say that’s about right, wouldn’t you?

P.S. Does anybody know what party expenditure was during this past campaign? I’m interested to know because, at that value per vote, one would expect a Tory party spend of some £2.3m, a Labour party spend of about £2m, and a Lib Dem spend of about £1.5m. Does those numbers sound close to reality?

*Merci, Dan.

Two degrees of Ptolemy

indolence 8 Responses »

May 152010

One of the most complex pieces of information I have ever tried to grasp is that of ancient cosmology, by which I mean that which prevailed as accepted knowledge before Kepler. Ancient cosmology has almost exactly the opposite ratio of complexity to modern cosmology: these days, the concepts are simple but the math is mind-bending; those days, the math was easy but the concepts were labyrinthine.

Imagine, if you will, what Ptolemy [the 2nd-century AD Greco-Roman whose works formed the basis of most medieval astronomy] and his Arabic successors were dealing with. Geometry, trigonometry, algebra (for the Arabs): we learn these as teenagers. But they were using these tools to explain and predict the actions of a cosmos they viewed as a vast and interlocking array of perfect circles which is nearly impossible for the casual investigator to envision, let alone comprehend its relationships. If you’ve ever seen an astrolabe, you will have a pretty good idea of what I mean, and an astrolabe is only a small and simplified model of the relationships obtaining between celestial bodies as the ancients understood them. (If you haven’t seen an astrolabe, may I recommend you visit the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford? It has as fine a collection of them as I’ve encountered.)

Ancient cosmology, like Aristotelian physics, has become a modern archetype for ‘wrong’ science, primarily because in our present-day arrogance we have applied Occam’s razor retrospectively and concluded that those old astronomers were idiots. (Funnily, Occam himself never applied his razor to astronomy, so there we are: we’re better at being Occam than Occam was.) But this is tremendously unfair, because actually the ancients weren’t wrong, at least not in the sense we usually mean.

Civilisations had been observing the skies for millennia and noticed certain patterns about the movements of heavenly bodies in the sky, none of which were wrong. The heavenly bodies really do move as observed thousands of years ago. Where they erred was not in the what, but in the how and why. Scientists then as now were keen to explain the mechanisms behind what they observed, and then as now they used as their test of correctness whether the mechanisms they hypothesised accurately predicted future behaviour.

And contrary to what you may have read or heard or taken on board in snooty science class where even Newton is ridiculed for being wrong, Ptolemy et al. came really close to accurate predictions in spite of their giant wrongness. Copernicus himself noted that Ptolemy’s mathematical tables resulted in predictions that were rarely more than 2 [geometrical] degrees off from observed measurements. Given that nobody at the time was relying on this information for anything really important – such as organising trips to the moon – this was an acceptable margin of error, and in the circumstances would not have mattered much but for the fact that (a) it was sloppy, and even pre-modern scientists found sloppiness annoying, and (b) more sophisticated tools for observing the heavens began to show us that ancient knowledge of the skies was, in fact, incomplete. Galileo saw things through his telescopes that the Egyptians never knew existed, because they didn’t have telescopes and couldn’t see them. The human eye is good, but not that good.

In the end, it was perfectionism and superior datasets that brought down the ancient cosmology, rather than its inherent ‘wrongness.’

And in fact the ancient cosmology was only wrong on one particular point: but it was a big, important point because it was the fundamental assumption on which everything else was based – and as we say today, garbage in, garbage out. You can have, as Ptolemy did, the most incredible and precise system for analysing data in the world, but if your inputs are crap, your outputs will be too. What’s astonishing and really worthy of admiration, in my view, is that Ptolemy’s outputs weren’t more crap than they were, considering how hilariously incorrect his starting point was. As noted before, he was always within 2 degrees of being accurate.

The reason Ptolemy’s system is the byword for bad science is actually the very thing that tells us what an incredible genius he must have been: the tortuous complexity of his data analysis system.

His point A, that incorrect starting point, was stationary geocentrism. His point B, those predictions, were mostly right. But the path from A to B is what gave us deferents, epicycles, equants, prograde and retrograde motions – terms which you only see used today, really, in astrology (which is one of the reasons why astrology is bunk).

You can’t exactly blame him, can you? To the naked-eye observer, it really does look as if the Earth stands still and everything else circles around it. We, who are so big on Occam’s razor, can hardly criticise the ancients for assuming this simplest of theories was the correct one. They saw what appeared to be the skies circling round the Earth. There was no good reason, at the time, to question this simple and elegant explanation of observed conditions.

Unfortunately, that simple starting point made it exponentially difficult to explain the mechanisms empirically or prove them mathematically. Every time someone thought they’d figured out the process, their predictions would turn out to be wrong – even if just a little – and then it was back to the drawing board to add on new layers of theories to account for those errors. Nobody thought to go back and examine point A, because why would they? Like good little scientists, they assumed the data were correct and the mistakes were theirs. They didn’t consider that stationary geocentrism was not a datum at all.

So the tiny fixes for the tiny errors built over time into a giant, interdependent, Escher-like edifice that was always just not quite right, a kaleidoscope picture just out of true no matter how one fiddled with it. Cosmology was a grand project, generation after generation always fixing, fixing, working away, convinced that just a tweak here, a jimmy there, and those minuscule errors would resolve into glorious perfection. After all, their margin of error was so tiny that their mistaken assumption must be tiny too. But in the process of fixing their tiny errors one by one, they hypothesised a cosmos that was no longer simple, no longer elegant, no longer perfect – instead it was complex, and virtually impenetrable, and exhausting: every scientist’s nightmare.

And that giant, unwieldy, hideous nightmare that was always not quite right turned out to be based on a fundamental assumption that was so mistaken it now occasions ridicule – and the vast unwieldy system is so archetypal that today we pretty much assume that the more complex your theory is, and the more tiny fixes it requires all over the place, the more likely it is you’ve made a mistake in your fundamental assumptions. You can alter this over here, and fiddle with that over there, and that will make everything more complicated, but nevertheless things will be better as a result, won’t they, and bring us closer to perfection, because we’re nearly there anyway, so surely that last step must be a small one.

Now, what does that remind you of?

Incidentally, I wasn’t re-reading my master’s dissertation before writing this post. I was reading Federalist No. 10.

From the mouths of babes

indolence 17 Responses »

May 082010

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the only way this brat could have received a polling card is if he deliberately falsified the electoral registration form that came to his parents’ house.

Whatever, his commentary is chilling:

Alfie went to his local polling station before school on Thursday, wearing a trench coat, glasses, jeans and smart shoes so officials would “think I was a Tory”.

“I knew they wouldn’t suspect an under-18 for voting Tory,” he said.

Alfie said he was “very serious” about politics and socialism, but decided to vote Liberal Democrat as a tactical option.

He said: “There’s not a socialist candidate in our area and unfortunately even if there was it would be a wasted vote. I’ve looked into it and the best option for a socialist is the Liberal Democrats.

“I did want to make a difference – unfortunately I didn’t.”

Police are investigating. Can we do 14-year-olds for electoral fraud? I do hope so. And for God’s sake, somebody give the kid’s mother a backbone:

Alfie’s mum, Nadine Wiseman, said she had asked him not to vote, after he received the polling card, but she “wasn’t surprised” when he did.

The captions below this little bastard’s photo says that Alfie is ‘very serious’ about politics. Too bad he’s not too fussed about, y’know, the law.

How to solve the problem of a hung parliament

indolence 10 Responses »

May 082010

Whenever constitutional reform is mooted here in the UK, the drive seems to be something along the lines of: the executive has too much power, MPs have too little, and oh yeah, unelected Lords have no place in a democratic nation. (Let’s pretend in this discussion, for the sake of simplicity, that the Lisbon Treaty hasn’t made Parliament redundant.)

What kind of reforms would be required, then, to address these perceived problems?

The House of Lords is easy: sweep out all of the old peers and bishops and allow people to stand for election. Presumably the old peers and bishops would be permitted to stand if they wanted to; certainly they would have to have the franchise returned to them.

It’s not as easy as that, though, is it? First of all, how many members of an elected Lords should there be? Will it be fixed, or determined by population the way Commons constituencies are? Should it even be called the ‘Lords’ any more? What will be the length of term – same as the Commons, or staggered, or fixed terms? What will its constitutional functions be?

At the moment, its high-court responsibilities having been snaffled away, the Lords exists primarily to scrutinise Commons legislation. Because the lords themselves are supposed to be non-partisan, they are meant to be able to judge legislation on its merits, rather than according to who drafted it and who’s whipping them into place. In reality, however, the Lords rarely scuppers Commons legislation. A part of the reason for this is probably because they are unelected, and Commons legislation is supposed to represent the will of the people. Another part is probably because, though supposedly non-partisan, a great many of the lords themselves are ex-party higher-ups. Does anyone really think Kinnock, Mandelson, and Martin, for example, have been busily scrutinising Commons legislation on its merits?

So we end up with a conundrum. The lords are granted the power to scrutinise legislation, but only because they are meant to be non-partisan. But non-partisan also means unelected, so they can’t scrutinise too closely or they’ll be usurping the power of the people as represented by the Commons. But if we start electing them, they’ll no longer be non-partisan, and there will no longer by any point in their scrutiny because it won’t even have the current veneer of disinterest.

Okay, that’s a little too tough for a Saturday afternoon. Let’s look at MPs and the executive, because they go hand in hand. Absent the European aspect, the reason MPs have so little power is because the executive has so much. The executive controls the parliamentary calendar of bills, it introduces bills, it whips its party’s MPs to vote on those bills. Ministers have extraordinary powers in their departments to introduce measures that don’t have to go before the Commons at all. This is why the executive is called the Government, and the Commons is just a bunch of fat-chewers.

The current hung parliament really throws this into stark relief. Why is there such consternation? Because Britain, at this precise moment, has no government. Or rather, no Government. The people have had their say, and there is certainly a legislature. But the legislature can’t act, because no executive exists to, well, execute any action. The executive is, by constitutional tradition, the leaders of whichever party holds a majority of the seats in the Commons. No majority means no executive means no Government means that, even though MPs have been duly elected all over the country, they are sat on their asses with nothing to do at the moment. They are, in a word, powerless.

Now, that’s weird, isn’t it? Normally MPs have no power because the executive is over-bearing. But then we discover that they also have no power when there is no executive at all. So what is the point of MPs, exactly?

Quite clearly, then, we see that the only purpose of MPs is to provide a count by which it is determined which party’s leaders will rule the country. The electorate are not choosing a person to represent their interests in the legislature; they are choosing a counter for the party’s leaders to whom they wish to give power. After an election, the party leaders tally up their counters, and whoever has more than half gets to be dictator for 4-5 years, as long as he maintains his number of counters. He gets to choose the rest of the executive, and the executive rules the nation.

We can see now how pathetically laughable are all of the ‘reforms’ that have been mooted to give some of the executive’s power back to the Commons. Committees? HA. Relaxing the whips? Slightly more muted, but still ha.

The only thing that will transfer power from the executive to MPs is to change the way the executive is chosen. And the obvious solution is for the people to elect the executive separately. We can even be generous and just elect the Prime Minister separately. Then parliament can approve, by vote, his or her Cabinet choices.

Except – wait! Remember that newly-elected House of Lords with little to do because their partisanship has destroyed their previous role? Hey, why don’t we let them ratify the Cabinet? Let’s let them ratify the executive’s choices of important judges, too, just for funsies. Keep them busy with something, since we’ll be paying them to sit there. And maybe they can still have their scrutiny of legislation, because the balance of parties in the Lords may be quite different from that in the Commons.

We can also open up the Commons a little bit too, now. The parties can still have their whips, of course – otherwise what’s the point of parties? And the executive can even decide the calendar. But instead of introducing legislation, the executive will have to get its MPs to do that – because of course the Prime Minister et all won’t be members of the legislature any more. So now the legislature will actually be able to control legislation. As it should be.

And so at the end of all of this, we get a less dictatorial executive, a legislature that is actually in charge of legislation, and a democratically elected House of Lords (or House of Whatever) that can act as a legitimate check on the power of the Commons. We’ve spread all of the power around, you see, and because every elected representative will have a greater say in what the government does, so will the people who elected him (or her). The democratic deficit is reduced, the parties become less tyrannical –

– and there are no more hung parliaments.

What’s not to like? Come on, you constitutional reformers out there: propose something like this, and maybe we can stop nominating you for Biggest Bullshitters of the Millenium award.

American views of the UK election

indolence, US-bashing 14 Responses »

May 072010

American commentary on the UK elections has me practically in stitches from laughter. This might have to become a series.

Take this, for instance, in Slate magazine (emphasis mine):

Our American campaigns have become decadent spectacles of horrifying length and expense characterized by 30-second attack ads, a class of parasitic professionals, and a running media freak show.

By contrast, Britain’s feel pure. They are swift (four weeks!), substantive, and not entirely driven by fundraising. Spouses are treated as human beings and allowed their own lives. The electorate is informed and engaged. The candidates are more spontaneous and accessible.

If there is one thing I’ve noticed about the ‘candidates’ in this election, it’s been their spontaneity and accessibility. Brown, for example, was so spontaneous that he called a little old Labour lady a bigot live on air. My local Labour and Conservative candidates were so ‘accessible’ that, in what was really four months of campaigning, not four weeks as Jacob Weisberg seems to think, I received one leaflet apiece from them. Not a single candidate’s supporters here actually doorstepped us; I only managed to talk to the one Lib Dem guy because I opened the door while he was… delivering a leaflet through the letterbox.

Substance, too, has been a running theme of this election: Brown has it, or so Mandelson would have us believe. But the ‘substance’ has been, more or less: Vote for me, I’m not as bad as the others! Yeah, that’s real substantive.

I don’t know what evidence Weisberg has for thinking that the British electorate is more ‘informed and engaged’ than the American one, especially since he wrote the article before the election and thus before voter turnout was known. American voter turnout in 2008 was about 61%; UK voter turnout this time round was 65%. That’s not a gigantic difference.

Later in the same article, Weisberg admires the intellectualism (he read Waiting for Godot!), atheism (his wife is a man of faith!), and multiculturalism (Dutch father! Spanish wife! Bruges and Brussels!) of Nick Clegg, whom he ‘laid eyes on’ once in Birmingham. On that occasion, Weisberg reports, Clegg failed to answer a direct question from a voter (‘Clegg replies, before going on to rephrase what he’s already said’) because evidently she wasn’t listening hard enough the first time, then ‘patiently tries to bring her around’ when, having been asked what she thinks, she tells him it’s his job to answer the questions, not hers. But that’s all right, because Clegg ‘handled a tough customer well.’ Um, what? Clegg treated her like she was an idiot. No wonder the Lib Dems lost seats.

Weisberg’s attitude toward Cameron, however, is nothing like so enthusiastic:

I’d seen Conservative Party leader David Cameron twice before, both times in off-the-record press conversations, and both times I came away with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I found his case for modernizing the Conservatives well put. In the United States, the Republicans have gone in just the opposite direction, moving closer to the most extreme positions of their base and purging themselves of any sort of moderation. Under Cameron, the Tories acknowledge the value of government and the necessity of taxes, not to mention the threat of climate change and the equality of gay people.

One has to wonder, now the count is in, whether ‘modernizing’ the Conservatives to be left-wing has helped them as much as remaining actual Conservatives might have done. And once again, an American reveals an implicit belief that somehow Conservatives equate to Republicans and Labour equate to Democrats. An American conservative, knowing the legends of Margaret Thatcher, would gasp in outraged horror at Cameron’s free bus pass and eye test guarantee. Weisberg might twig Blue Labour, but he clearly doesn’t understand American conservatives at all – not least because he seems to think that American conservatives are the same thing as Republicans.

On the other hand, I was put off by Cameron’s focus on what historian Daniel Boorstin once described in a visionary book of the 1960s as “The Image.” He seemed more focused on the rebranding of the Conservatives than on the contents of the package.

Weisberg cannot make up his mind: he likes the Tory rebranding (yay, modernizing!), and yet he doesn’t like Cameron’s focus on the Tory rebranding. What, does he think that should have been understated? Does he really believe that a party that wants to get elected should understate the very aspect they reckon is likely to get them elected?

Oh, and also, unlike Nick Clegg whom Weisberg ‘laid eyes on’ once, during his several meetings with Cameron, he felt Cameron was inaccessible. Press access was, apparently, limited – limited to three meetings per random foreign journalist, I suppose. And even though Cameron ‘takes… questions seriously’ and is ‘relaxed, fluent and cogent’ when he speaks to voters, he is somehow less engaging than Nick ‘I Said That Already’ Clegg.

Oh, and also-also, Weisberg gets in a dig about the Contract With On America. Because obviously that worked out so poorly, what with six years of record prosperity following its implementation.

Finally, Weisberg moves on to Brown. Brown reminds Weisberg of a character in a novel who is half blind, angry, and unable to deal with other people. The character turns out to have Asperger’s Syndrome.

At a vast, Andreas Gursky-like Tesco supermarket in Newcastle, I watch [Brown] move briskly down an aisle, bumbling through encounters with people to whom he has nothing to say. Upstairs, in the employees’ lounge, he mistakes me for a Tesco worker and reaches out to shake my hand—even though I’m standing behind a barrier in the press section and had been chatting with him just a few minutes before in the second-class compartment of the train from London.

A second-class carriage? My God, how did they stand it? Folks who ride in standard class are a totally different type of person from them!

But wait, a heckler is yelling something about Gillian Duffy. Amazingly, the Special Branch officers are doing nothing about a possibly unhinged man menacing the prime minister—the luxury of politics in an unarmed country. A woman not more than 5 feet tall tugs at the protester’s sleeve. Eventually, he is dragged out, trailed by the press, as Brown continues his speech as if nothing has happened.

Ah yes – for all his admiration of the British way of doing things, Weisberg still seems to believe that armed bodyguards should be ‘doing something’ about a perfectly legitimate heckler. My God, drag him out of there! Apparently Weisberg remains blissfully ignorant of how that sort of thing went down last time Labour did it. ‘It’s a shouty old man! Quick, beat him up!’ Contrast Weisberg’s attitude toward this random heckler with his description of, quite obviously, another heckler (emphasis mine):

Julian Borthwick, who has blemished yet another day on the campaign trail for Gordon Brown, is an unexpected character. Nicely dressed in a hounds tooth tweed jacket, the 38-year-old academic says he is not a Conservative, not highly political, and not ordinarily given to interrupting politicians. He was having lunch at the museum with his parents when the prime minister interrupted them by arriving with his entourage. After listening to Brown’s speech for a few minutes, he became furious enough to begin shouting. In particular, he was appalled by his promise of subsidized broadband Internet access for the North, which, he says, already has excellent connections. Despite his poor manners, Borthwick has a point: Why is Labor promising new benefits of marginal value when austerity should be the order of the day?

I guess hecklers become a lot less menacing when you know they’re tweedy academic types ‘not ordinarily given’ to heckling. Julian Borthwick has a mild case of the bad manners, rather than being a ‘possibly unhinged’ and working-class trade unionist as mentioned earlier. Weisberg, you snob.

Not to mention the fact that Weisberg’s section on Labour revolves almost entirely around Gordon Brown’s inability to act like a human, mixed with anecdotes about members of his audience and people who chastised Weisberg for getting his press pass from the Grauniad. Julian Borthwick gets more of a hearing than any criticism Weisberg might have of Labour’s policies. Presumably this is because he has no criticisms to offer. After all, Labour are practically the same thing as Democrats, and look how awesome they are!

If this brief, intense visit showed me the pleasures of British politics, it has also underscored the miserable job that the next British prime minister faces. Simply put, he will inherit a government that is much too large in relation to the country’s post-crisis economy. He will have to cut services, reform pensions, and scale back commitments, ultimately reducing spending from current levels by about 12 percent, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He will literally decimate the government, reducing it by a tenth. America faces a dire fiscal prospect as well, but we have a better chance of solving part of the problem through stronger growth and have more ability to raise taxes.

Ahahahahahaha… oh, sorry. America has a better chance to recover because it has more ability to raise taxes? I beg to differ. Not because Congress couldn’t jack up taxes – they could, obviously – but because America will recover better, not through taxes, but through the fact that its private sector, unlike Britain’s, thriveth mightily.

That’s Weisberg, then: huge admiration for British politics despite its useless and insulting party leaders, its voters who heckle and refuse to listen, and its dire prospects for the future. Yup, there’s loads of stuff there to admire.

And now, of course, I shall make the obligatory defence that, no, I don’t hate Britain and I’m not a racist against the British. There are things I really admire about Britain – why the hell else would I be here? – but its political system is not one of them, except insofar as it provides me with copious entertainment. Oddly, what I like best about Britain is what Weisberg seems to like least: its individuals. Most of the British I know are among the most interesting I have ever encountered. Weisberg’s respect is reserved only for the idea of Britain which exists inside his head. Individuals, where he mentions them at all, Weisberg mocks and derides.

Apart from Julian Borthwick, who presumably is spared this treatment because, at the museum, he had a copy of Waiting for Godot bulging from the pocket of his tweedy jacket.

Dear Election Fairy

indolence 13 Responses »

May 062010

Dear Election Fairy,

I have been a very good girl this year. If you could see your way clear to rewarding this, I would be most grateful. I have only three election wishes.

1. That Ed Balls should lose his seat.

2. That Nigel Farage should defeat John Bercow.

3. That Old Holborn should win in Cambridge.

And, Election Fairy, if you are feeling particularly generous and it’s not too much trouble, one further thing: Phil Woolas should suffer.

With many thanks,
Bella.

Rosebud

indolence 1 Response »

May 012010

Iowahawk. Go. Read.

Libertarians: mostly all right, Jack

indolence 28 Responses »

Apr 252010

The results of my straw poll are in. Obviously they are not representative, but by and large they are the answers of some of the self-described libertarians who read this blog, and a few cheaters (here’s looking at you, Mr Rob). Approximately 105 people contributed, though a few of those answered some questions and not others. So – what did they say?

Are we rich bastards?

Mostly, no. 59% of respondents have never earned more than £38,000 in a single year, therefore putting them outside of the ‘rich people’ tax bands.

Of those, 29% report that they have never earned more than £13,000 in a single year, although this is probably due to age – these will likely be younger libertarians who are still in education of some sort and have not yet worked in a full-time position. And 23% say their maximum per-annum earnings fall somewhere between £13,000 and £23,000.

So libertarians as surveyed here are mostly not rich. However. £23,000 is roughly the median annual income in Britain – and 70% of us have indeed earned more than that amount in a year.

The actual breakdown is as follows (gross income):

more than £38,000 in a year – 43 (41%)
between £23,000 – £38,000 in a year – 30 (29%)
less than £13,000 in a year – 18 (17%)
between £13,000 – £23,000 – 14 (13%)

Do we live off the sweat of others?

Not really. 56% of libertarian respondents work in full-time jobs (35 hours per week or more). A further 10% support themselves with part-time jobs.

Full-time students who don’t work are well-represented – 12% – as are a surprising number of people who are unemployed or between jobs (11%).

Only 3 respondents live from accumulated wealth.

The actual breakdown is as follows (working for a living):

more than 35 hours per week – 46 (44%)
about 35 hours per week – 12 (12%)
not at all, full-time student – 12 (12%)
not at all, unemployed/between jobs – 11 (11%)
less than 35 hours per week – 10 (10%)
not at all, retired – 6 (6%)
not at all, accumulated wealth – 3 (3%)
part-time with other support – 3 (3%)
not at all, maternity – 1 (1%)

Are we drooling rubes?

Definitely not. Despite frequent claims that educated people are left-wing (and that left-wing people are educated), 70% of libertarians surveyed have a university-level education, almost half of whom have some kind of post-graduate degree or qualification.

The actual breakdown is as follows (education level reached):

bachelor’s degree or equivalent – 41 (39%)
post-graduate degree or qualification – 33 (31%)
A-level – 22 (21%)
GCSE – 5 (5%)
still in school – 4 (4%)
no formal education – 1 (1%)

And so?

What this presents to me is a general picture of libertarians as hard-working, middle-class types. No surprise there, at least to me, as that basically replicates what I know of libertarians I’ve met in person.

But ‘all right, Jack’? Well, yes. We tend to be all right. But we work for it. And although I can’t speak for everyone, my own feeling is that this is the way it should be. Being all right should require hard work, and hard work should make you all right. So fair dues to us.

Anybody want to draw other conclusions?

It’s not just me and DK

indolence No Responses »

Apr 252010

Other people are frustrated with British immigration policy.

See Andrew Hickey here.

And he’s right. There are too many outright misrepresentations floating about. Britain does not have as restrictive border controls as some countries, but neither does it have ‘open borders.’

In fact, a large part of the problem is that those of us wishing to stay here legally and gainfully are obstructed, while very little is done to discourage those who come here either through legal channels or because they are entitled to benefits.

Of course I must add that even those coming here illegally, or without jobs, are not sub-human and don’t deserve to be spoken of in the way some (though not a ‘vast majority,’ Dave Semple, thank you for getting on your high horse about that) Britons do – but I don’t really think I need go into that at 2 am. I doubt very many immigrants come here for the benefits, frankly, but even if they do, so what? Apparently benefits are a human right now. And immigrants are humans too.

Second leaders’ debate

indolence 30 Responses »

Apr 222010

Just some brief remarks, because I expended most of my rage by silently live-tweeting.

There were two main things that struck me about what the party leaders had to say.

The first was something Brown said about an hour into the debate: that if the voters realised how much of their daily lives was affected by government policy, they would be a lot more politically engaged. Someone had asked about coalition governments, hung parliaments, and voter turnout, and his response was to point out that income, benefits, housing, the environment, business, crime, social cohesion, etc. etc. etc. were all inextricably linked to government policy and action.

Frankly, I was horrified. If your argument that people should exercise their vote is that government affects everything in their lives, you’re not exactly pointing out a positive there. Unfortunately, I think he’s right. I don’t like it, mind, but he wasn’t misrepresenting the truth (or whatever is the parliamentary language for lying). The fact of the matter is that he is right. Government in this country does have an impact on almost every aspect of people’s lives. And that is profoundly depressing.

Oddly enough, the other thing that really gripped my wick was also a Brownism. I expected not to have any reaction to Brown – I thought I was completely insensitised – but actually I found what he had to say more interesting (if also more objectionable) than the other two know-nothings on stage with him.

During the question on immigration, roughly 20 minutes before the end of the debate, Brown was defending Labour’s points system (introduced less than two years ago, by the way) by claiming that it made sure that the only non-EU immigrants who came here (legally) were ones with necessary skills.

I beg to differ, my friends. Having gone through the torturous process of the new points system, I can say with absolute certainty that it has nothing to do with skills and everything to do with wealth.

Now, some of you may argue that wealth is a good indicator of skills, and that showing a high previous income roughly correlates with having useful skills. Perhaps so.

But not if your job is highly skilled (in the general, wishy-washy sense) but low-paid. I was a teacher. Britain had a teacher shortage. Before the introduction of the points system, teachers could immigrate here quite easily. After it, only teachers of maths and sciences can do so easily, even though the shortage of teachers has not diminished, regardless of the subject being taught. The ‘skills-based’ points system application never enquired as to my profession or the skills necessary to work in it. It wanted to know how many degrees I had, and how much money I had earned in the previous twelvemonth.

I was fortunate in that I had been earning in sterling during that time. But an American, or Canadian, or Australian teacher wanting to come here would have been in a pickle (and I’m sure many were) because of the exchange rates. Teachers in those countries are paid roughly the same number amount as teachers in the UK. So, for example, a teacher in the UK might earn £25,000 p.a., while a teacher in the US, Canada, or Australia might earn $25,000 p.a.

But the ‘skills-based’ points system only considers your earnings in pounds sterling. So a quite respectable wage in the other Anglosphere countries becomes miniscule under this system, because it has to be converted into pounds sterling. When I first applied for my ‘skills-based’ points system work permit, the exchange rate was roughly £1.90 = £1.00. That $25,000 an American teacher might have been earning would only count, under the points system, as £13,000 – not enough to earn even a single point in the ‘previous earnings’ section of the application.

The honest-to-God truth is that Labour’s points system gives the highest rewards to those who have earned the most money, not those who have the most necessary skills. Third-world kleptocrats would have no problem immigrating to the UK, whereas skilled professionals earning what would be considered huge amounts in their native countries would be turned away because the points system measures earnings in pounds sterling, not the average wage in the country of origin.

The other thing I’d like to point out regarding Labour’s points system is that it gives huge advantage to those who have an MBA. Many, many people on the left wing are big fans of Labour because they have the impression that Labour will stick it to the evil capitalists. They do not realise that Labour’s immigration system is now designed specifically to favour those evil capitalists: an MBA will automatically grant a person 80% of the points they need to immigrate here. Add into that the points you gain for knowing English, and someone with an MBA will waltz into the UK, way ahead of doctors, nurses, teachers, blue-collar workers, etc – the very people the left wing are supposed to be supporting.

Now, obviously I don’t care much about the massive advantage MBAs have in the British immigration system. Businesspeople are all well and good. But I found that, in the reality of Labour’s ‘skills-based’ points system, it no longer profited me to be a teacher. Instead, I have gone into evil capitalism. This country, with its dire shortage of teachers, has lost a skilled and experienced teacher because it treated me like a piece of foreign shit: not as worthy as a businessperson, and not nearly as worthy as a native Briton, despite the kind of bottom-feeding scum who are native to this country and contribute nothing to it in the way of hard work, taxes, or civil behaviour. This government (and all prospective governments) has done everything it can in the past two years to reinforce their view that compared to even the shittiest British wastrel imaginable, I am inferior. There are Britons who have never worked or paid taxes – I do. There are Britons who are criminals – I’m not. There are Britons who hate me, as part of a general ‘inferior’ class, because I was not born on this soil and because they think I’m stealing something from them, either a job or resources, or because I’m diluting their pristine and delightful culture that… treats immigrants like shit.

I did not choose to come to this country out of romantic Anglophilia or anything like that. I came here because, in order to do my post-graduate degree, I needed documents archived in British libraries and it made more sense to get the degree here than to do inordinate amounts of travelling from the US. I stayed because, for the most part, I like the British people and I like British culture. I would certainly never do anything to harm either.

But I get more and more demoralised by the fact that a lot of British people, most of whom are perfectly happy to have me in their country, nevertheless go on about how ‘something must be done’ about all of these fucking immigrants. And they say it without realising just how hard it is, in reality, to be a legal immigrant in this country. They seem to have this idea that immigrants are just strolling over the border and doing whatever they please – and I can state without reservation that for 99% of immigrants, that is just not the case. It’s hard to immigrate here. And I’m not saying that’s wrong.

What I am saying is that none of the parties – none – are going to fix it in any reasonable, humane way. Cameron and the Tories want an arbitrary quota. Clegg and the Lib Dems want to intern migrants in particular regions. And the Labour party has already shown its fascist colours in making their points system overtly partial to wealthy businesspeople rather than, as Brown disingenuously avers, the highly skilled.

So let’s cease the lies, shall we? Forget complaining about racism towards immigrants. Let’s all just admit that the vast majority of British people are xenophobic hypocrites who preach endlessly about social justice but then vote to prop up an immigration system that is manifestly socially unjust. Oh yes, everyone has a right to education, healthcare, a living, blah blah, except immigrants. They can get to fuck. They’re stealing benefits that should be reserved for native Britons. And if they come here and work and pay taxes, then they’re stealing jobs. And if they come here as independently wealthy taxpayers, they’re diluting the culture.

Immigrants can’t win. And the three fuckers leaders have made that abundantly clear.

If I had the vote, I’d vote for whoever acknowledged that the vast majority of non-European immigrants subsidise your fucking state and come here because they want to be part of British culture.

But since I can’t vote, I simply have to ask the rest of you British people, with all sincerity and no small amount of self-interest: consider what the immigration system here is really like. Take a look at the UKBA website and see if you, as I did, could sort yourself out without a solicitor or immigration advisor. Ask yourself if you would be willing to do what I did to get a visa. Ask yourself if your boyfriend, girlfriend, or whatever would be willing to do what DK did for me. Consider whether you earn the minimum of roughly £22,000 p.a. that a foreigner needs to earn to get a work permit here, or whether you have have the master’s degree you would need. Really put yourself in an immigrant’s shoes. And then, when inevitably some of you discover that if you were an immigrant you would be turned away with a contemptuous laugh, give a thought to how you vote.

There are more people in Britain than simply Britons. Most of us have no say in this election. We are entirely at the mercy of whatever government is in power. If you have no preference yourself, consider what our preference might be. One of the primary precepts of libertarianism is that all people are human and equal, regardless of race, creed, gender, or nationality. Yes, we came to Britain knowing we wouldn’t have the vote. But I think most of us would like to think that the British are humane enough to consider us when making their decision at the polling station. We, the foreign minority, rely on you to protect us. Please don’t let us down.

In which I begin to consider liberty

indolence 12 Responses »

Apr 192010

Libertarians, by their nature, are wont to bang on about liberty, and that it is desirable, and that it is the mother of Order. In the mind of a libertarian, this is all correct and proper, for liberty is the blank slate of the individual; only when he exists in a state of freedom may he pursue those ends which he deems appropriate and suitable for himself.

Thus libertarians take a critical view of those who claim that liberty is an end state, rather than a means – a philosophical ideal to be reserved for a time when material needs have been fulfilled. A person is not free, say these terminal types, until he no longer need struggle for food, clothing, a roof over his head, healthcare, education, employment, transportation – in short, until his physical integrity and livelihood are assured by minimal effort on his part. Western society has, in fact, become so progressive that ‘liberty’ is sometimes defined as ‘possessing sufficient time, money, and energy to expend on leisure rather than sustenance.’

This is, to be sure, a wonderful development in one sense. Rarely in human history has daily toil been considered an irritation to be minimised in favour of pleasure, rather than an essential and all-consuming necessity for survival. Peasant farmers in early medieval Europe had, on the whole, much more liberty than we do today: being unimportant, they suffered little interference from the state, especially those who only farmed enough to feed themselves; being poor, they suffered little interference from others, as they were both inoffensive and had nothing worth stealing. But on the other hand, they had to struggle for food, clothing, a roof over their heads, and had no healthcare at all, or education, or employment, or transportation – therefore they were not free, in the sense that they spent all of their time ensuring their survival and virtually none of their time or effort on leisure.

In essence, then, we have two conflicting modern interpretations of ‘liberty.’ Let’s call them liberty-as-means and liberty-as-ends. Liberty-as-means is a basic state of being in which coercion and unwanted interference by others or the state are absent. This will unfortunately mean that an individual may have to struggle for physical integrity and livelihood. Liberty-as-ends is an advanced state of being in which the struggle for physical integrity and livelihood is absent. This will ideally mean that an individual may therefore focus primarily on the pursuit of that which gives him pleasure.

Enders take a critical view of meansers (libertarians), claiming that those advocating liberty-as-means are able to do so because they are not on the margin of struggling for physical integrity and livelihood. I cannot say with any certainty whether this criticism is valid for all meansers; it may indeed be the case that material comfort breeds libertarianism. On the other hand, it may be that people with a libertarian mindset drive themselves to achieve material comfort. We may never know the answer – counterfactuals can’t be proved – but it might be interesting one day to survey the backgrounds and material circumstances of libertarians.

In any case, we have this situation of liberty in opposition to itself. Meansers cannot have their basic state of liberty because it nearly always has to be infringed in order for the enders to achieve their advanced state of liberty. Enders cannot achieve their advanced state of liberty because meansers are always resisting their methods.

This raises some understandable questions.

First, can liberty-as-means result in liberty-as-ends, and if so, over what sort of timescale?

Second, if not, can liberty-as-ends result in liberty-as-means – and if so, over what sort of timescale?

Finally, if our two conflicting interpretations of liberty are mutually exclusive, which is objectively better and thus more worthy of pursuit?

Stay tuned.

Older Entries

The Progressive Dictionary

Bella on Twitter

Recently On

Popular Posts

Literature

Top Topics

I Have Awards!