Blogoir

Should women be allowed to go topless?

That's the question posed by National Go Topless Day. Which maybe you missed last week. Too bad.

Yet it somehow seems to me to be the wrong question, or at least it is replete with all sorts of curious assumptions which may need challenging:

My dear fellow, who will let you?

That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

The grim profile of the US Federal Reserve's balance sheet.

Volcanic?

A thoughtful reader writes:

There is one issue that occasionally troubles me.  It is quite obvious in politics and senior positions elsewhere, that leaders cannot have a grasp of everything.  Thus they must trust to their judgement on whom to believe on particular issues. 

This is particularly important on issues where the informed consensus (or its self-professed members) have not got it right, either totally or in significant part.  I think here of issues such as Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW).  Eventually, any wrong consensus must break; how can that be made to happen sooner?

So, how is it best for leaders to decide whom to believe, on matters beyond their personal detailed competence (and also those where there is not time to learn up on the whole issue)?

Very good questions.

In the British system at least, our leaders rely upon a combination of formal and informal advice.

On the formal side there are the posts of Chief Scientific Adviser, Chief Medical Officer and so on -- senior experts tasked with making sure that top levels of government have the best possible scientific/technical advice available. As well as that, individual Departments also may have in-house experts in science, economics and other specialist fields.

Leaders also likely to have a range of senior outside experts upon whom they call now and again to get a feel of the ebb and flow of debate as seen by clever people not within the system.

Plus, of course, individual experts may well send in their suggestions and complaints about official policy; a well-written letter from a senior expert sent to the Prime Minister will require an answer served up by the Whitehall system as a whole, and the fact that the letter has been read so widely down the policy chain itself acts to keep people on their toes and not take conventional wisdom for granted.

Beyond all that lies the hullabaloo of democracy. Think-tanks, commercial research organisations, scientists working for large corporations, amateur enthusiasts and energetic bloggers: they are all whirring away to get their points across in one way or the other. Letters to government ministers and/or MPs make an impact in this sense. The official system has to keep alert to public thinking and concern, whether it wants to do so or not.

All that said, no leader can take into much of this stuff. At the high policy levels knowledge declines steeply and instinct kicks in. The more so since the issues leaders in fact focus on may not be the issues under discussion.

Take the Copenhagen Climate Summit. The assembled armies of climate NGOs and lobbyists seemed to think that the issue was all about "climate change". But as the conference end-game loomed quite different priorities emerged for the key leaders concerned, namely their own reputations and how their own countries might best jostle for position in the new global order. Hence the ensuing fiasco.

Climate Change is perhaps the classic example of policy area where it is impossible to pull together an expert consensus. Partly because the science itself is so complicated. But more importantly because expertise is required from so many different areas and such long timescales are involved. Not to forget the enormous financial and other costs needed to change course in any way which counts.

Sir David King previously was the British government's Chief Scientific Adviser, and a prominent voice calling for Action to deal with CAGW. I myself lost faith in his judgement over his emotional reaction to unwelcome facts in a completely unrelated area.

How does a consensus break down? Depends what you mean by consensus.

Even if a large bloc of scientific opinion takes one view, public opinion may not take the same view. This in fact is a genuinely difficult area for leaders. On the one hand, they are being given credible expert advice pointing clearly in one direction. On the other, they know that if they move in that direction they are likely to lose votes.

The Climategate episode exemplifies this dilemma, albeit in a not unhelpful way in that it points to the need for much greater transparency and integrity in scientific process -- in a world of highly networked collective intelligence, the days of a small elite telling us all what to do and think our numbered. I hope.

Conclusion?

Leaders are no different from the rest of us. They sit in an office having little idea of what is going on down the corridor, let alone further afield.

Perhaps the greatest challenge they face is not mastering scientific briefs, but rather avoiding the temptation constantly to be "doing something" when each and every problem appears.

Over at Business and Politics is my latest piece, on the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

It looks in a roundabout way at issues of information flow, risk management and 'corporate culture':

Perhaps our hard-pressed rig operator makes the mistake of fact, misinterpreting the information being pushed to him by all the safety systems. Maybe he makes a mistake of judgement: he reads and analyses all information intelligently, but decides to take a decision which makes everything far worse.

In either case it is possible that the decision taken would not lead to disaster, had it not been for an underground factor previously undiscovered or not identified as likely to cause extra risk. In other words, the operator was doing his best at the very frontier of scientific knowledge, but that frontier itself was just not good enough.

Of such tiny subtleties are vast calamities made. Lawyers can not wait to get their hands on these problems in any subsequent enquiry or lawsuit. Anyone facing extended cross-examination by a wily barrister over split-second judgement calls is likely to end up sounding, looking and feeling confused or foolish...

On this site I have warned readers about the pernicious impact of the EU's several attempts to limit working hours by law, especially in the UK National Health Service.

See eg here.

And here.

My best friend happens to be an NHS consultant. He has warned me for years about the way the Working Time Directive has scaled back training hours for doctors, which must lead to more blunders in treating patients when the doctors are finally working alone.

Plus he made a not so obvious point about 'information decay'. The more shifts you introduce into hospital work as caused by the WTD, the information about patients has to be passed from doctor to doctor more often and so tends to decline. Decisions become less smart. 

Not to forget the fact that a new trend must emerge, namely slowing down one's effort as a shift draws to an end and leaving any tricky issue to the next doctor.

All of which is duly happening:

Consultants who took part in the study were most damning about the impact of the changes on their trainees.

Among responses from more than 500 senior surgeons taking part were repeated warnings that the rules were creating a generation of "clock-watchers" with a "lazy work ethic" who no longer felt personal responsibility for their patients.

Trainees were now spending so little time in operating theatres that they would lack the "cutting skills" required to perform safely when they became consultants, many warned.

College president John Black urged the Government to take urgent action to address the concerns, having pledged in its Coalition agreement that it would work to limit the application of the EU rules in the UK.

He described the situation facing the NHS as "acutely urgent".

Mr Black said: "Without action we are going to see a generation of specialists with less experience than any that have gone before."

As previously noted, the vile Precautionary Principle is used to stop all sorts of actions by citizens on a 'just in case' basis. But when it comes to official policies which are obviously likely to lead to people dying at the hands of the state, it is nowhere to be seen.

Madness:

The heart surgeon, 48, said that by the time she became a consultant, nine years ago, she had undertaken 900 cardiac operations. The current generation were likely to become senior doctors after performing less than 300, she said.

Toy Story 3 is just superb. Go and see it.

One highlight is Barbie abruptly hollering out one of the greatest ideas of Thomas Jefferson:

Authority should derive from the consent of the governed; not from the threat of force

Hurrah!

Yet ... what if those governing start off that way, but then slowly but surely change the rules towards rewarding themselves first and looking after the governed second?

How are the governed to withdraw their consent from this situation, when the governors of all main political parties seem to have more in common with each other than with those who pay taxes and vote?

This problem featured in a very different context in the famous 1957 book by Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System.

Djilas had been one of the very top Titoist communists after WW2. Some older Serbian staff working in the Embassy in the early 1980s hated his memory, as (they said) he had dominated Belgrade after the war wearing jackboots and carrying a whip brutally to impose comunist rule.

With the publication of this book Djilas was sent to prison by the Yugo-communists and achieved international glory as the first senior communist leader to renounce communism in its Stalinist-bureaucratic form.

Djilas' core ideologically devastating argument was that far from replacing a class-free society, the new communist elite themselves had become an effective class, hoarding power and privileges for themselves at the expense of the masses.

Which leads us now, via Barbie, straight to this:

The current state of American politics can be summed up in this poll data, published today by Rasmussen Reports:

75% of Likely Voters prefer free markets over a government managed economy. Just 14% think a government managed economy is better while 11% are not sure.

Well, one would hope so. But here is the kicker:

America's Political Class is far less enamored with the virtues of a free market. In fact, Political Class voters narrowly prefer a government managed economy over free markets by a 44% to 37% margin.

... It strikes me that these data largely explain the political turmoil of the last year. The political class, now firmly in the saddle in Washington, wants to substitute government control for free choice wherever possible.

Since members of the political class communicate mostly with each other, they evidently underestimated the extent to which such policies would be unpopular with mainstream Americans.

A point also made eloquently by Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit).

All of which applies to the European Union too. Whatever its merits in allowing all sorts of processes to be 'harmonised' for general public benefit, the fact remains that the 'consent of the governed' is not exactly something which preys upon EU elite minds as they pile on new 'Directives'.

Where is all this heading?

Somewhere dangerous, I fear.

A curious article over at Foreign Affairs about the efficacy of democracies in doing better to protect citizens from earthquakes.

Is it because democracies are simply richer and so build better buildings? No:

In a democracy, leaders must maintain the confidence of large portions of the population in order to stay in power. To do so, they need to protect the people from natural disasters by enforcing building codes and ensuring that bureaucracies are run by competent administrators.

... Earthquakes in politically sensitive areas such as the capital may threaten autocrats, but high-casualty events elsewhere do not; politicians respond to the desires of their immediate constituents and regard the needs of others as far less salient.

It matters little that the means exist to mitigate the effects of disasters if politicians are not incentivized to implement them. Despite high casualties, autocrats can expect to keep their thrones.

On the other hand, democratic leaders who fail to prevent natural disasters from causing calamity are replaced. As such, democrats plan and react to natural disasters, while autocrats do not.

No doubt there is something or other in this argument. The hot breath of angry voters on a politicians plump neck no doubt catches said politician's attention.

That said, if the issue is incentives this article surely incentivises leaders to become autocrats - why put up with all this democratic hassle when you're likely to be thrown out of power for something which was not your fault?

My beef with the piece is that it somehow assumes in a mechanical way that 'democracy' is only about power being dispensed downwards in a notably more efficient way than happens in autocracies. The true virtue of democracy - toughly enforcing building codes!

It's far more interesting than that.

In a democracy people themselves have power.

The power to sue other people (and indeed the government) if they do not do their jobs properly. The power to work for private corporations or research labs and create better, stronger materials. The power of transparency so that people can see what designs are being used and how contracts are awarded. The power of using the Internet to find global best practice in earthquake prevention techniques. And so on.

Not that all of this works well 100% of the time. But these things are mutually reinforcing, and the overall impact is to empower and incentivise everyone in a better direction. The system as a whole is more responsible and responsive.

The article contradicts itself:

In China, the government only half-heartedly assisted the remote province of Qinghai after an earthquake in 2010 and suffered few political consequences for its inaction. But when an earthquake hit Sichuan in 2008, the Chinese government -- wary of protest in this politically and economically powerful center -- undertook relief operations that won the approval of much of the international community.

Ha! Having seen that disasters annoy the masses, the crafty Chinese autocrats lifted their game. And became more effective autocrats. Nay, they won the 'approval' of the 'international community'. Tra-la.

Here is an interesting account from Devil's Knife of his participation in a public discussion on Freedom and all that.

I can imagine that his account of the end of Friendly Societies had some people bemused, but it is an interesting story:

As in other things where the state starts to provide a service, they crowded out the Friendly Societies. After all, if you were a relatively poor manual worker, you could not spare your three shillings per annum to the Friendly Society and the three shillings that the government was taking directly from your pay.

And so the Friendly Societies all but vanished, along with the communities they nurtured. And with them went the libertarian model of welfare—of people getting together as a voluntary collective in order to look after themselves. And so the model of state as mater and pater—the state in loco parentis, with all the intrusive hideousness that concept has spawned—was started...

It's the actions of regular people that are the most significant, serious, and worthy of respect, and they don't deserve to be treated like dolls when, in reality, the only truly and moral libertarian proposition is that they should be masters of themselves.

They did so in the past, and their aspirations were crushed by corporate whores and political shills: and in removing the ability of people to organise themselves, these evil people also removed the desire for them to try.

It is this that has led to our "broken society"—the cynical ambitions of the vested interests, backed up by the monopoly of violence that a corrupt and venal state willingly brought to bear upon its people.

Hmm.

If I am forced to work for someone against my will, that form of oppression is called slavery.

Slavery is a priori Bad, for various reasons:

• it creates a relationship of arbitrary pseudo-superiority imposed by violencce
• it belittles the slave - what sort of life is worth living in enforced servitude to someone else?
• it degrades the moral sense of the slave-master - why take responsibility for anything when you can beat a slave into doing the work?

Hence the famous line (emphasis added) of Satre in the preface to Frantz Fanon's furious attack on the psychology of colonialism, Wretched of the Earth:

The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot...

Of course, it is one thing for the slave to use violence to free himself/herself. That requires strong nerves and, perhaps, a willingness to die in the attempt.

But maybe it is even harder for someone to resist the temptation to want to be a slave-owner - to free oneself from the very wish to live at the expense of others.

As described in this peerless line - the far other side of Sartre's insight:

Crawf Minor (Lower Sixth) is in hot pursuit of several Maths A-Levels here in the UK.

All of which reminds me that once upon a long lost time I could pick my way through the mysteries of cos and sin and even on a good day tan.

Not to forget my old enemy: d²y/dx²   This allowed one to calculate not the rate of change, but the rate at which the rate changed.

Or something like that. I think.

People who can fathom out this sort of thing are smart. In fact, some of them go on from tricky basic maths to acquire lively and unpredictable new pets:

Langton got involved with ants.       

Paterson with worms.

Others had to make do with turmites. Or even busy beavers.

The notable thing about this sort of thing from our point of view is the deep idea that order (and 'orders') can and do come forth naturally without clumsy central direction. A light framework plus a few very simple rules are enough to generate impressively large and robust new structures. 

Which is where we walk over to Cafe Hayek (where orders emerge) and read this excellent piece about why new developments are often disappointing, and why indeed a solution to a problem often isn't very widely applicable:

Development happens thanks to problem-solving systems ...any solution that is going to work is likely to come from the use of local knowledge, or at least dispersed knowledge rather than some expert who proposes some solution from the outside without local knowledge.

That's the core brilliant Hayekian idea, unanswered by collectivists and centralisers of all shapes and sizes - dispersed knowledge.

More:

You can’t just take some piece of a market-based solution and impose it from the top down. You want organically emergent solutions that bring all the pieces along at once. Competition encourages the other pieces to emerge. Top-down solutions usually constrain competition and miss out on the extra parts of the puzzle.

... How do you liberate people to allow them to help themselves? You look for the barriers that keep them from helping themselves. Ironically, sending large amounts of money to corrupt leaders probably creates the single largest barrier.

Of course.

Which is why the rise of the mobile telephone gives Africans new chances to help themselves without development experts and corrupt leaders pushing them around.

And, perhaps, why it is a good and profound move to move huge slabs of NHS money to general practitioners (ie non-hospital doctors) so as to try to capture  much more directly in public health spending the benefits of all that dispersed GP knowledge about the nation's aliments ?

A little-understood feature of modern conflict is the impact of the so-called 'rules of engagement'.

Basically, these rules lay down when it is and is not lawful to shoot at the enemy or otherwise act in self-defence. A version of them should be carried by each soldier on a handy card. This is important - how peacekeeping and other military missions work out often can depends on how a group of nervous young soldiers deal with an angry-looking crowd of locals. Even shooting in the air unless this is strictly necessary can prompt all sorts of escalations in tension very fast.

The only people who care about rules of engagement more than the Western forces abiding by them are the Enemy. The stricter the Western rules on engaging with enemy combatants (eg to reduce the risk of causing civilian casualties), the happier the enemy combatants will be.

Why? Simple.

If you think that Western forces will not shoot at you if you're near civilians, stick near civilians and use them as human shields.

Net result?

Civilian casualties go down - success!

But enemy/insurgent/terrorist casulaties also go down, and Allied casualties go up. Hence Western prospects of defeating the enemy goes down - not so good.

Here's a tricky one. What if local civilians ask you to take risks with civilian lives to help rid them of even more cruel local insurgents once and for all?

Then what? 

Excellent NYT piece by Errol Morris via Browser exploring the Dunning-Kruger Effect: the fact that our incompetence/ignorance masks our ability to recognize our incompetence/ignorance:

Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.”  It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism.  There are things we know we don’t know.  And there are things that are unknown unknowns.  We don’t know that we don’t know.” 

He got a lot of grief for that.  And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

Of course there are different sorts of 'unknowns'. 

Facts I know I don't know (eg the longest river in Uzbekistan).

Facts which may or may not be facts (are there any rivers in Uzbekistan).

And phenomena which I am unaware might even exist (by definition indescribable).

See this:

To me, unknown unknowns enter at two different levels. The first is at the level of risk and problem.  Many tasks in life contain uncertainties that are known — so-called “known unknowns.”  These are potential problems for any venture, but they at least are problems that people can be vigilant about, prepare for, take insurance on, and often head off at the pass. 

Unknown unknown risks, on the other hand, are problems that people do not know they are vulnerable to.

All of which goes to point up the stupidity of wasting too much time on 'risk management matrices', another New Labour blight on public life:

Embassies have to complete every few months a spreadsheet which lays out 'risks' to policy and the accomplishment of our Objectives.

The first demand for one of these arrived in Warsaw, attaching the Asia Directorate's model as a splendid example. I crossly sent back an email saying that maybe, after everything which had happened in the Asia region not that long ago, a risk assessment which omitted the word tsunami might be thought to be a little ... ridiculous? I predicted that in a few years' time these banal exercises like so many others would have collapsed under the weight of their manifold contradictions.

I was told off for being 'unhelpful'.

The real problem in foreign policy objective/target-setting is indeed the unknowable unknowns - the impact of a tsunami on Indonesia's fortunes, or indeed 9/11.

Which again is why it is so stupid to organise British/EU policy round the things the Treasury thinks it can measure.

But then precisely because we are stupid enough to do just that, we can't recognise that stupidity.

QED.

Slowly but surely the language of lumpen totalitarianism creeps into democratic political life.

Scarcely a day goes by with President Chavez of Venezuela 'seizing' some or other private company, usually with some banal bombastic menacing statements:

A few days ago, during one of the rambling television and radio monologues for which he is notorious, he announced he was “declaring war” on the private sector. The main battleground, it seems, will be the food industry and the principal target the Polar group, which is Venezuela’s biggest private conglomerate owned by the Mendoza family.

The group supplies Venezuelans with many of their basic foods, including margarine, cooking oil and maize flour. It claims to represent nearly 3 per cent of non-oil GDP.

“But you’re mistaken if you think I don’t dare expropriate Polar, Lorenzo Mendoza,” Mr Chavez said, addressing his broadcast remarks to the company chairman.

Then we have this headline in the Times in 2008 (which uses fascist language not reflected in the article itself):

Americans must give the Republicans a good kicking on November 4

What does that 'good kicking' conjure up? A group of cowardly, bullying Clockwork Orange-type thugs viciously piling in to someone on the ground - an image far from moderate, inclusive democratic process which assumes mutual respect and open-minded tolerance.

This violent expression seems to have inflitrated the Labour Party in particular, sneaking in with the influence of Trotskyist activists and their proclivity for street brawling during demonstrations.

Here's a typical example oozing post-modern irony, from a Labour blog written by one Chris Paul. The subject is the National Bullying Helpline - which itself is said to need the incentive structure offered by a bullying boot:

The National Bullying Helpline (NBH) deserve a good kicking, a good metaphorical kicking, for their truly horrendous fails in professional standards.

Most recently we have this appalling example from two senior members of the Obama administration:

Sunday talk show of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar describing their tough dealing with BP by saying, “Our job is basically to keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum...”

The “step-on-the-neck” image had the White House seal of approval that was made clear on Monday by Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs. “I think that kind of sums up in that Western Colorado way how – what we’re trying to convey,” Gibbs said.

Not so much Western Colorado as jackbooted Brownshirts in Weimar Germany?

Vile, and inexcusable. President Obama himself quickly but unconvincingly rowed back from that expression, but now has come up with another crude kicking metaphor.

Maybe as his ratings deservedly decline it will dawn on him that by kicking BP he is kicking millions of American shareholders, pension fund stakeholders and workers. But by then real damage to everyone will have been done.

All this sort of thing stems from a dumbed-down populist nervousness in our decaying political classes, manifesting itself in the idea held by many politicians that these days they are entitled to lash out at any opponents and even at their own voters to show how tough they are.

And for a stunning example of this, live on camera, enter US Congressman Bob Etheridge - angry Democrat bully and, we fervently hope, now Official Loser:

How to 'explain' the shootings in Cumbria?

Jeremy Seabrook in the Guardian helpfully shows why he is inexplicable:

The second thing is, in our desire to explain these events solely as examples of personal pathology, we concentrate on the individual, and do not interrogate the role of society and a socially produced ideology of individualism ...

The importance of self-expression, self-indulgence, self-realisation in our society is bound to have its less glamorous form; and for all the exaltations of success, the parade of showy individuals who, by virtue of their beauty or skill, or simply their assertiveness and celebrity, there is bound to be another, suppressed march of misery, frustration, despair and hatred.

The insistent singleminded worship of wealth and power is itself a powerful generator of a darker side of human experience; and all the pathologies of crime, disorder, emotional breakdown, psychiatric illness and depression, are simply the shadow of the excessive adulation offered up to fame, youth or talent...

This is junk journalism, discombobulated sentences filling the available space but based on nothing coherent at all. As far as he is making any claim which is capable of being understood, it appears to be that the horrible shootings committed by Derrick Bird were somehow caused by a socially produced ideology of individualism.

Jeremy. If you want to write for a supposedly serious newspaper by making outlandish claims, try looking at the other side of the argument as well.

Your claim might make some sense if it can be shown that societies which emphasise the Collective over the Individual consistently do better when it comes to mass murderers.

Yet what do we find when we look at the finest example of a society which has made strenuous efforts to suppress any ideology of individualism?

Take the case of hungry Nikolai Dzhumagaliev. And lots of other Soviet-era cannibals. Or even Andrei Chikatilo.

More importantly, those societies which play down the ideology of individualism tend to produce people in positions of authority who really enjoy murdering on a lavish scale for the sake of the ideologically proclaimed common good.

Such as our favourite NKVD killer Vasili Blokhin. Every night for some four weeks he executed Polish prisoners every three minutes, some 250 a night. Then he went home and slept and did whatever NKVD killers did in their free time in those days, before heading back to another busy night's work.

And Che Guevara himself:

"If in doubt, kill him" were Che's instructions. On the eve of victory, according to Costa, Che ordered the execution of a couple dozen people in Santa Clara, in central Cuba, where his column had gone as part of a final assault on the island.

Some of them were shot in a hotel, as Marcelo Fernándes-Zayas, another former revolutionary who later became a journalist, has written--adding that among those executed, known as casquitos, were peasants who had joined the army simply to escape unemployment...

No, Jeremy. You have it exactly the wrong way round.

It's because we live in a civilisation which values individual life that (a) the sort of horrible shootings seen in Cumbria are mercifully rare, and (b) the state does not execute people on a massive scale.

Here is a must-read piece at Samizdata, which looks at a seemingly novel phenomenon, namely huge boosts to the money supply in the USA but no signs of price inflation.

How can that be?

Because the state in effect is bribing banks not to lend:

So to put this thumbnail in a nutshell, the Fed has inflated the available money supply by 1 trillion dollars while simultaneously paying banks to not loan 1 trillion dollars. While there is no obvious connection between these two acts, the effect is a simple one. The FRB/Treasury is competing against the free market, effectively borrowing banks' consumer lending funds to keep the band playing while the lower decks of the nation slip beneath the waves.

Killing loans is how they are hiding the evidence and disguising the potential hyperinflationary effect of monetizing. The Fed/Treas has to smother the private loan market or all of that new money they are creating and giving to special interests would show up in the form of doubled consumer prices.

As appears to be illustrated by a terrifying graph, which shows that something dangerous and unprecedented has happened:

The problem is not and never was 'market failure'. It was and continues to be incorrigible government and inevitably corruptible politicians and regulators.

This economy could and would have recovered quickly from even the most recent policy created bubble, the real estate 'boom', had the advice and opinions of some of us (even here on Samizdata threads) been heeded.

The cause of this continually worsening crisis is the repairs the self-anointed experts are inflicting. Paralyzing the lending market, taking money out of the free economy and using it to fund government sector favorites, is like giving muscle relaxants and pain killers for an asthma attack.

Sure the stridor of economic desperation diminishes, but that momentary relief is called 'dying'.

The Final Irony.

Capitalism/Freedom trends towards Collectivism/Serfdom because the state destroys the core feature of freedom - honest money..?

Brain Barder responds to my posting about Being, Not Producing - and poses some Questions:

Don't you find something just a tiny bit disturbing about the prevailing ethos of all our main political parties according to which those who for whatever reason can't or won't hold down a job must be forced to work, employing the sanction of poverty-level social security 'benefits' for those who resist? Are we all no better than cattle to be milked for the enjoyment of mega-rich senior managers and other tycoons?

Can we really not tolerate the idea that some people are incapacitated for work by their psychological or physical defects, their low IQs and illiteracy, their inability to obey authority and convention, their poor health, their deep-seated aversion to compulsion, routine or subordination, indeed in some cases their sheer innate laziness?

Can't we in this wealthy society afford collectively to keep this small minority alive and even in a degree of comfort? Is there really much point in trying to drive people like this into jobs when there are two-and-a-half million unemployed, most of whom would give their right arms for jobs if only they could find them?

Doesn't the philosophy summed up as "Work makes us free" have a chilling connotation, even in English?

Questions, questions. I don't know the answers, but they all seem worth asking.

Hmm.

Let's answer them seriatim (a neat little word which I always like to use if I can).

Don't you find something just a tiny bit disturbing about the prevailing ethos of all our main political parties according to which those who for whatever reason can't or won't hold down a job must be forced to work, employing the sanction of poverty-level social security 'benefits' for those who resist?

As far as I know no-one in this country is 'forced to work'. But everyone's bodily functions require fuel (ie food). So either that fuel is earned or it is given, by friends/family or someone else.

People who choose to live off other people's generosity without contributing anything in return are, in effect, beggars. Societies of all shapes and sizes down the ages have taken a dim view of beggars and mendicants.

Most parents start to lean on their offspring to start to make a contribution of some material sort once they leave school - that's just the right and fair thing to do. So if we all tend to take an unsympathetic approach to idleness among people we know best, should we be more generous with people we do not know at all? On the face of it, not.

Are we all no better than cattle to be milked for the enjoyment of mega-rich senior managers and other tycoons?

I think that your characterisation here is fatuous. People who do work all make a contribution, and the market rewards that contribution.

You seem to espouse a lumpen Marxist 'surplus value' idea that all work = exploitation. To which I say, piffle - whatever problems the market throws up, it is better than all the alternatives - and it does make everyone better off, including beggars.

Can we really not tolerate the idea that some people are incapacitated for work by their psychological or physical defects, their low IQs and illiteracy, their inability to obey authority and convention, their poor health, their deep-seated aversion to compulsion, routine or subordination, indeed in some cases their sheer innate laziness?

Maybe we can 'tolerate' it. But we also need to keep a keen eye open for what causes these things, which you (like me) seem to regard as unattractive or regrettable qualities.

Once people get caught in a low-income plight, the state can make it very difficult to escape. This is what your beloved Labour Party left us:

Gordon Brown made life more bearable for many people on benefits, but he also made it harder to escape from them. Get a job tomorrow earning between £10,000 and £30,000 a year and you’ll take home only 30p out of every extra pound you earn after the first £10,000. Twenty pence will go in income tax, 11p in national insurance, and 39p in lost tax credits.

Add in the loss of other allowances (housing benefit, council tax benefit) and you may find it simply doesn’t pay to work harder.

Our poverty trap is deeper than that of most other European countries. That is a strange legacy for a government that wanted to make work pay...

And this:

... Almost a fifth of 16 to 24-year-olds were not in education, employment or training in 1997. The number was identical in 2006.

These people stayed put in the Welsh valleys, in Liverpool, in Glasgow, while Eastern Europeans travelled a thousand miles to pick up work on construction sites in London. Immigration reduced the opportunities available to white British men whose poor education made them less attractive candidates, while the benefits system undermined their motivation.

So whereas there may well be individuals who can not cope and need help, it is (I believe) undeniable that the fact that we have created a welfare monster on this scale (which in turn emerges from a frequently dysfunctional state-run education system) has to be down to the consequences of sustained bad policies.

Can't we in this wealthy society afford collectively to keep this small minority alive and even in a degree of comfort?

But it is not a small minority! All common sense suggests that if you give people something comfortable for nothing, the marginal impact will be that more people inch towards this easiest option, reducing the pool of 'givers' and piling on the burden for those Givers who remain.

Is there really much point in trying to drive people like this into jobs when there are two-and-a-half million unemployed, most of whom would give their right arms for jobs if only they could find them?

The problem as we have seen above is that millions of poor but highly motivated Poles travelled across Europe for these UK jobs, since poor but highly unmotivated Brits up the road did not take them. Therefore what?

Doesn't the philosophy summed up as "Work makes us free" have a chilling connotation, even in English?

No. Hell no.

How can you even begin to think this?

Contributing to society through one's energy and creativity is a core part of being human. Work need not be paid employment.

There is nothing stopping all those unemployed people getting some self-respect by organising themselves and picking up litter or helping out elderly people. You sound just like grim old Commie Govan Mbeki:

I later went to visit veteran communist leader Govan Mbeki (father of the now fallen Thabo, then recently released from Robben Island) at his little house. This recalls that memorable encounter.

I described to G Mbeki my visit to Red Location - surely the ANC as the local power should be doing more to motivate the people living there to clean things up a bit and try to improve their lot.

"It's not the job of the people to do the job of the government", retorted Mbeki, tetchily.

Which of course may be true. Yet what a bleak practical philosophy that attitude brings with it: a willingness to let people rot - if not to encourage them to rot to pep up their sporadic militancy - until the state fixes things.

Above all, the corollary of your position is that Being Compelled to Reward People Who Do Not Work means that Work Makes You Unfree - the worker is in fact the slave of the non-worker.

Not much freedom in that for the people toiling to keep the whole sorry show on the road?

It doesn't matter, anyway. The 'European Social Model' model of unlimited 'solidarity' paid for by borrowing far into the future is dying on its/our feet.

We'll get back, the hard way, to a better balanced way of doing things.

In some ways it may be less Fair. But it will be a lot more Honest.

What did David Laws do wrong?

As I understand it, he claimed back from the taxpayer (that's you and me) a load of money for renting a room from his 'partner' without disclosing that he had a close relationship with said partner.

The homosexual aspect has nothing to do with it.

Nor does the fact that he might have claimed back even more money from us had he rented a room somewhere else at an arm's-length (so to speak) commercial rent.

Iain Dale makes an eloquent case here but gets it wrong, I think:

If he had moved into a one bedroom flat the taxpayer would have been paying far more. If Laws was seeking to maximise his income he would have either designated his Somerset home as his second home and claimed for the mortgage on that, or he would have bought a property in London and claimed for that. He didn't, and yet he's being mercilessly slagged off.

What we have done here is create a system where MPs are now, on average, claiming far more than they used to before.

Yes! True. But that is irrelevant. What we are aiming at is to rule out - for any use of public money - financial hanky-panky between family members or people in some sort of close private bond. Even if it costs us something extra to uphold this level of honesty.

It is not enough that transactions involving public money must be honest. They must be seen to be honest.

In my Balkan postings I was now and again lobbied fervently by local Embassy staff members urging me to offer a vacant job to one of their relatives:

"We have served the Embassy honestly for years - you can rely on Sasha to do the same!"

I told them firmly that even if we ended up recruiting someone less able and less honest, there was a vital value for Brits in having an honest process. Which meant a process in which everything was above board and transparent. Sorry, but we were just funny that way.

I spent an hour today chatting to a senior Greek financial expert (based here) who told me in great detail how petty corruption had overwhelmed the Greece system at all levels. Much of the way things have been fixed in Greece goes directly through family members. And look where all that has got them.

It would have been wholly improper for me as Ambassador to allow the Embassy to rent for Embassy staff a flat I owned, unless the whole process had been done in a 200% transparent competititive way with no involvement from me.

It would have been wholly improper for me as Ambassador to instruct the Embassy to buy supplies from a firm owned by one of my relatives, even if the cost to the taxpayer was less than the market rate, unless the whole process had been done in a 200% normal transparent competitive way with no involvement from me.

It was wholly improper for David Laws to claim back all this money from renting a room from a close friend without declaring the close friendship.

If he were not ready to do that, he should have moved somewhere else. Or simply not claim any rent allowance.

He has done well to resign promptly and with dignity. Viva British democracy.

Simple, really?

Update: Matthew d'Ancona gets it spot on:

We did not take advantage of the financial support available to couples, such as travel to and from my constituency,” pleaded Mr Laws in mitigation. Again, however, that was his choice.

His wish was that the relationship between himself and Mr Lundie should remain private. As a consequence, the proper course of action was clearly for him not to make any claims at all related to Mr Lundie’s properties.

In spite of the impression one might have formed from the expenses scandal, MPs are under no obligation to make such claims. I doubt that many taxpayers, considering the prospective impact upon their lives of the painful public spending cuts ahead, will have felt much sympathy with Mr Laws’s argument that he needed £40,000 of their money to protect his sensibilities. Privacy, in this case, was available for free.

It had to happen sooner or later. Mark Steyn writes what may be his greatest column ever on (of course) the way Wealth has made us Stupid.

Of course the very idea of the greatest ever Steyn column needs some thought. The funniest? The most scathing? The most thought-provoking?

The one where Monica Lewinsky's dress is interviewed in 2018? Or this one from 2001 about the Eurozone which reads rather well:

There is no need for a single currency, and several compelling reasons why it's a crummy idea, not least the insufficient labour mobility in Europe and the way the budgetary limits will complicate the already looming crunch over demographically unsustainable social programmes. Set against those considerations, the case for the euro was laughable in its feebleness. You don't need to scrap a dozen currencies to eliminate "transaction costs". That's like curing a cold by amputating your nose...

Because Texans, Vermonters and Georgians all agree that they're Americans, they're happy to go their own way in matters of capital punishment, income tax, gay civil unions: that's a dynamic, creative federalism.

Because Greeks, Scots and Austrians still regard each other as foreign, a European identity has to be imposed from the top down, as if by harmonising tax codes and passport design you can harmonise a bunch of foreigners into one nationality, regulate a European consciousness into being: that's not federalism, but a fetid, stagnant over-centralisation.

Still, this latest effort is up there with the best. It looks at the central issue of our times - how wealth has made us more and more stupid:

In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents. What to do about such people? Ignore the problem? Attempt to fix it?

The former nags at the liberal guilt complex, while the latter is way too much like hard work: the modern progressive has no urge to emulate those Victorian social reformers who tramped the streets of English provincial cities looking for fallen women to rescue. All he wants to do is ensure that the fallen women don’t fall anywhere near him.

So the easiest “solution” to the problem is to throw public money at it. You know how it is when you’re at the mall and someone rattles a collection box under your nose and you’re not sure where it’s going but it’s probably for Darfur or Rwanda or Hoogivsastan. Whatever. You’re dropping a buck or two in the tin for the privilege of not having to think about it...

The modern welfare state operates on the same principle: since the Second World War, the hard-working middle classes have transferred historically unprecedented amounts of money to the unproductive sector in order not to have to think about it. But so what? We were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid.

That works for a while. In the economic expansion of the late 20th century, citizens of Western democracies paid more in taxes but lived better than their parents and grandparents. They weren’t exactly rich, but they got richer.

They also got more stupid. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want.” Sir William and his colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic succeeded beyond their wildest dreams: to be “poor” in the 21st-century West is not to be hungry and emaciated but to be obese, with your kids suffering from childhood diabetes.

... In one-sixth of British households, not a single family member works. They are not so much without employment as without need of it. At a certain level, your hard-working bourgeois understands that the bulk of his contribution to the treasury is entirely wasted.

It’s one of the basic rules of life: if you reward bad behaviour, you get more of it. But, in good and good-ish times, who cares?

Western Europe is in the unhappy position of a group of sullen teenagers who have wrecked the place after a massive drunken vainglorious binge.

They know that they have to spend a lot of the immediate future clearing up the mess, when they could have been off doing something interesting had they not been just so ... so stupid.

And as they listlessly wander through the wreckage nursing a splitting headache trying to summon the energy to start to tidy up, they look around to find someone to blame. Anyone but themselves.

And, to make things worse, there's no-one there.

Other than up the road where some tough-looking Asian businessmen are wondering about buying the trashed property, and putting its silly occupants on starvation rations for a few centuries - to teach them a lesson in self-discipline.

A neat little piece here, getting to the heart of Reality - and where Reality meets Politicians.

Not a place politicians much like, as it shows too much about them:

“Plug the damn hole,” Obama told them.

That’s the politician’s answer to every intractable problem: give orders, issue threats, and wait for obedience. But the creative human mind cannot take orders like that. Notice I didn’t say, “refuses to take orders.” I said, “cannot take orders.”

By that I mean, the task of plugging a leak 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico is an engineering feat. BP’s acknowledged role in causing the leak does not alter the fact that careful study, creative thought, and the exacting deployment of technical and mechanical skills over long distances are all necessary in order to fix the leak.

No amount of jaw clenching or bug-eyed threats from politicians can bring the solution one inch closer to reality.

The human mind does not operate by force from outside. If engineering achievements could be conjured up by barking orders, the Soviet Union would be a thriving nation overflowing with engineering marvels, instead of a dead husk...

Why does Latin America underperform so consistently?

Vast land mass, rich in resources, manageable populations and so on. Yet wracked with instability and fecklessness, which never seem to end.

One answer - the fact that the political rules keep changing, which means that in effect there are no rules and so no stability allowing sustained steady 'normal' development:

The evidence is staggering: The Dominican Republic has had 32 separate constitutions since its independence in 1821. Venezuela follows close behind with 26, Haiti has had 24, Ecuador 20, and Bolivia recently passed its seventeenth.

In fact, over half of the 21 Latin American nations have had at least ten constitutions while, in the rest of the world, only Thailand (17), France (16), Greece (13), and Poland (10) have reached double digits.

Not only that. These constitutions are getting more and more stupid:

... one effect of these campaigns has been the inflation of constitutional word counts. Latin American leaders have discovered that, by packaging ever-longer lists of promises and rights alongside greater executive functions, they can make a new constitution appealing enough to the masses that they will vote for it in a referendum.

The result is constitutions that are not only the shortest-lived, but also among the longest in the world. Bolivia's and Ecuador’s recently approved constitutions have 411 and 444 articles, respectively, and read like laundry lists of guaranteed rights, such as access to mail and telephones; guarantees for culture, identity, and dignity; and shorter work-weeks.

By contrast, the U.S. Constitution, the longest-serving in the world, has only seven articles and 27 amendments.

It all amounts to nothing more than an irrational preference for form over substance. But once that preference is internalised by elites and populations alike, how on earth to change it?

Someone has shared with me a vivid communication from the Driving Standards Agency (Safe Driving for Life).

It was sent by Rosemary Thew, Chief Executive. A person grammatically challenged as she attempts to give instructions on how to access a DSA driving theory test centre hosted by Pearson Professional Centres:

On the door entry system, you will need to buzz number 9 inorder for the test centre to give you access to the building, please DO NOT ring any other buzzers.

Now that we have a (mainly) Conservative Government, may I as a mere taxpayer ask that state-funded operatives smarten themselves up?