anomalyuk – Page 44

On Rights

In the past, I’ve argued against the concept of “rights” as basis for reasoning about policy.

I’m about to do a 180° on this. I think I’ve finally understood what rights are.

The currently popular idea is that rights are automatically attached to every human. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, I suppose, the most relevant statement of this idea, though the US Declaration of Independence makes the same fundamental claim.

The obvious – and fatal – problem with this theory is that it is useless. What does it mean to say that somebody has the right to life, if they have a terminal disease? What does it mean to say someone has a right to protection against unemployment (article 23) if nobody can afford to employ him?

One can attempt to avoid this problem by restricting rights to “Negative rights”. On this system, one cannot have, as a right, anything that requires another person to actively provide anything; one can only have the right not to be prevented from some given course of action. This is less obviously silly, but not, I think, really different. Two people cannot usefully have the right to eat the same apple.

It can go as far as defining rights simply as restrictions on government, but that is not useful, for what is government but a bunch of men with guns? Restricting the government does no good if some other bunch of thugs commit the same crimes.

So much for inherent rights. There is another view, which is that rights are not inherent, but are given by government. There is no problem with rights which are awarded by government, it is just one way of expressing the government’s law. On the other hand, since the essence of government is that the strong enslave the weak, there is no particular significance to the laws insofar as they restrict government, they are just the way a government chooses to behave until it chooses differently.

Rejecting both inherent and government-awarded rights as useful concepts, then, I have rejected rights. I now see that there is a third category of rights, which is a useful basis for thinking about law and about government.

Rights are neither inherent, nor given. Rights are taken.

The early arguments based on rights appealed neither to God nor to charter as the basis of the rights. If anything, they appealed to tradition. How does tradition justify their claims, if it only pushes into the past whatever is supposed to be the origin of the rights. The answer is that the argument is saying, that for some long period of time, when the alleged rights have been infringed, the people have acted to regain them. A right is not something you are born with, or something you are given. It is something you are prepared to fight for. More pertinently, it is something a group of people are prepared to fight for. If you establish a track record of consistently fighting for some right, then the most absolute of governments will nonetheless find it advisable to make a point of respecting it.

I worked this out once before, in the case of the right to freedom of religion, but I saw that at the time as a special case, whereas I now claim that is an instance of the general principle of what rights are.

Anomaly UK

I’ve been doing this for three and a half years, and some of the first things I posted I’d written up to a year previously. I want to recap over the major propositions that define what a newcomer would find.

Global Politics

I think the arguments used to advocate the Iraq War were legitimate, but that the costs of the war, both to the OIF alliance and to everybody else, outweighed the benefits and it was therefore a mistake. There were people who correctly anticipated this, but I wasn’t one of them; I was a “don’t know”.

The major competing political forces in the world are the EU’s corporatist totalitarianism and the USA’s residual individualism. No other world power or ideology – including Russia, China and radical Islamism – comes close to challenging either of them.

Many foreign countries are crap places to live, but I don’t think there is any strategy for improving them by military action that will have overall beneficial results, although it might get lucky now and again. I think it is more beneficial to respect the sovereignty of other countries’ governments, even where they are very nasty.

Democracy

Democracy necessarily entails class divisions. Either democracy is working within a ruling class and is kept “straight” by the need to efficiently resist revolt by the disenfranchised class, or else the important division is between politicians and non-politicians.

Most people would be better off in a society with minimal government as advocated by the libertarian movement. However, this is against the interests of politicians, and therefore is not achievable, under democracy or under any other political system. A wider understanding of the situation would result in marginal improvement, however.

For those not being directly promised bribes by one candidate or another, the amount of predictable improvement in policy by electing one candidate rather than another is often outweighed by the difference in entertainment value between the candidates, as estimated using the market prices of entertainment. Democratic politics can therefore be seen as a small section of the (huge) entertainment industry. That is not to say that government is insignificant, just that the changes that can be made to government by democratic politics are.

Climate

The Climate Change debate is about politics, not science. The question is whether the small chance that disastrous change will happen but can be averted by a concerted global programme of austerity justifies the costs of such a programme. The dangers are exaggerated by those who support austerity or transnational government or both. The dangers are minimised by those who support prosperity or small-scale government or both. The latter group includes me, but I try to avoid dishonesty.

Copyright exists to correct a market failure: that the creation of new valuable information benefits anyone who obtains a copy, but the costs are concentrated on the creator. Like all interventions to correct market failures, there are dangers, including capture of the regulatory structure by concentrated producer interests, which has clearly been demonstrated by retroactive extension of copyright terms. Also, as with other such interventions, it is not obvious that the market cannot find its own solutions to internalise the externality, nor is it obvious that the costs of regulation and the deadweight losses do not outweigh the benefits of the correction. Getting rid of copyright might be an overall benefit, although it would be dangerous. The evidence is overwhelming that reducing the scope of copyright would be beneficial, and that regulation aimed at suppressing technologies that are used to evade copyright enforcement is very harmful.

Free Software is cool. The overhead of protecting copyright in software is very damaging to the efficiency of the software production process and to the quality of the product.

his post will remain as a kind of “index” to the blog, and I’ll update it if my positions change.

Entertainment and Policy

Boris Johnson’s win is consistent with my theory that politics is a branch of the entertainment industry. Boris won because people liked him on TV, not because they had any confidence he’d do a good job. In fact, it simply doesn’t matter whether he does a good job or not.

Whatever the budget of the GLA, the actual amount of cash he can shift from one activity to another over the next four years is probably on the order of only a few millions. He can change a few buses, approve a few “don’t knife each other, there’s good chaps” posters, approve or deny one or two large buildings.

On the other hand, he will be on television a lot, and get a lot more attention, because now he’s (drum roll) In Government. And if you treat each of his appearances as a light entertainment programme, value it as equivalent to an equally entertaining non-political celebrity appearance, and multiply up the number of such appearances over the four years, his entertainment value to the voters easily outweighs whatever costs might be imposed on the voters if he is a Bad Mayor in a policy sense.

And in fact the predictable cost of Boris vs Ken is near enough zero. Who knows, Boris might even be better. While the predictable difference in entertainment value is huge – not only is Boris more entertaining than Ken on a level playing field, but more importantly the Ken show has run for eight years and we’ve seen all the best bits.

My point is that (a) Boris has been elected because he’s funny and people are bored of Ken, and (b) This is, with apologies to Bryan Caplan, rational voting.

And of course, it is nothing new: Ken was elected in 2000 for just the same good reason.

BBC drops UKIP from election results

Update – they’ve corrected the omission now. I did notify them of the error directly as well as ranting here.

The London Elects website shows results by first preference votes for 10 candidates. The BBC website shows 9 candidates: Gerald Batten, who came 7th for UKIP with 22,422 votes is missing. The Left List, English Democrat and Independent that polled fewer votes are shown in 7th, 8th and 9th.

It’s rather reminiscent of the US Republican primaries, where Ron Paul was routinely omitted from media publications of results, even while lower-polling rivals like Giuliani were included.

The BNP had to be covered, because they were discussed before the election and people would be looking to see what they got, but the fact that UKIP on zero publicity had outpolled the hard left was a fact that could be safely kept from public view.

London mayor election results (BBC)

Boris Johnson (Tory): 1,043,761

Ken Livingstone (Lab): 893,877

Brian Paddick (Lib Dem): 236,685

Sian Berry, (Green): 77,374

Richard Barnbrook (BNP): 69,710

Alan Craig, (Christian Choice): 39,249

Lindsey German (Left List): 16,796

Matt O’Connor, (Eng Democrats): 10,695

Winston McKenzie (Ind): 5,389

London mayor election results (London Elects)

Results by candidate for 2008

Candidate name	Party	1st choice votes	1st choice %	2nd choice %
Boris Johnson	Conservative Party	1,043,761	42.48%	0.00%
Ken Livingstone	The Labour Party	893,877	36.38%	0.00%
Brian Paddick	Liberal Democrats	236,685	9.63%	0.00%
Siân Berry	Green Party	77,374	3.15%	0.00%
Richard Barnbrook	British National Party	69,710	2.84%	0.00%
Alan Craig	Christian Peoples Alliance and Christian Party	39,249	1.60%	0.00%
Gerard Batten	UK Independence Party	22,422	0.91%	0.00%
Lindsey German	Left List	16,796	0.68%	0.00%
Matt O’Connor	English Democrats	10,695	0.44%	0.00%
Winston McKenzie	Independent	5,389	0.22%	0.00%

Cognitive Surplus

Hugely important point from Clay Shirky (via boingboing)

Doing the numbers below, the entire volunteer effort that’s gone into producing Wikipedia, in man-hours, is about one fifth of the time Americans spend watching television on an average day.

That kind of puts Seth Finklestein’s “digital sharecropping” into perspective.

Here’s the key section:

if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

I’ve tended to be towards the sceptical end of the new-media hype, but this way of looking at things really gives a glimpse of the possibilities.

Black Mass

As I mentioned some time ago, I planned to buy John Gray’s Black Mass when it came out in paperback. I came away from the book very disappointed.

I would guess the core of the book is the second half, which is a criticism of the Iraq war. This is a very strong attack on the overconfidence of the idea that a western democracy could be set up in Iraq, and on both the deception and self-delusion of the leading advocates of war.

That much is fine, but criticisms of the Iraq war are ten a penny. The book as a whole is an attempt to generalise from that to put neoconservatism in a tradition of rational utopianism starting with the enlightenment. Jacobinism, Marxism, Nazism, neo-liberalism and even Al-Quaeda itself are all described as incarnations of a single myth of an end time of perfect rule spread across the whole world by human rationality.

The problem with the thesis is that it proves too much. By the standards he sets, there’s hardly a movement imaginable that would not be able to qualify as utopian. If you imagine a better future than the present, you’re a utopian. If you rhetorically appeal to any religious or mythical glory, you’re a utopian (even if the rhetoric is obvious hyperbole). If you claim that something that worked in one country could work in another, you’re a utopian. If you exhibit undue confidence in the success of your current policy (such a rarity among politicians), you’re a utopian. I felt that the only movements that avoided being labelled as a utopian were those which, with hindsight, actually achieved durable success. Therefore Reagan, despite all his rhetoric, was no utopian, because communism was really defeated.

The book also suffers by the association of the Bush regime with actual evangelical Christianity. While this might casually appear to be consistent with the argument, every earlier version of the utopia myth Gray describes relies on actual human achievement without divine assistance. The accidental coalition between secular ex-Trotskyite empire-builders and devout backwoods millenarialists plays no part in his wider thesis.

Fundamentally, I think Gray is misunderstanding the importance of myth in politics. The point is not that people believe the utopian myth to be true, it’s that a narrative, whether an explanation of the past or a forecast for the future, feels subjectively more convincing if it accords with some myth than if it doesn’t. The follower of Marxism or neoconservatism or whatever would not say that the final victory was inevitable, but the theories of the leaders would feel more persuasive because they carried in them the essence of the myth. Some ideas are easier to get carried away by than others.

And then there’s the final chapter. Oh dear. I really don’t want Anomaly to become simply a climate denial blog, but there’s something overwhelmingly ridiculous about spending a whole book attacking political movements which you claim are apocalyptic religion in disguise, and then casually, in passing, signing up to the most alarmist of all climate change predictions in their entirety, and citing as scientific authority a book entitled “The Revenge of Gaia“. If someone could explain that level of blindness in otherwise highly intelligent commentators, and I certainly can’t, they would be making a real contribution to the understanding of political history.

The only slight indication of awareness of the contradiction in his position is the following feeble half-justification:

… In another sense the prospect is not apocalyptic at all. In wrecking the planetary environment humans are only doing what they have done innumerable times before on a local level …

In the end the point is that Gray is not against mythology, only against one particular myth:

Happily, humanity has other myths, which can help it see more clearly. In the Genesis story humans were banished from paradise after eating from the Tree of Knowledge and had to survive by their labours ever after. There is no promise here of any return to a state of primordial innocence. Once the fruit has been eaten there is no going back. The same truth is preserved in the Greek story of Prometheus, and in many other traditions. These ancient legends are better guides to the present than modern myths of progress and utopia.

NO! STOP! The problem is with mythology as a guide to policy, not with just one myth. Myths are bugs in the mind, nothing more. The answer to bad policy based on myths is not other myths, it’s accuracy and humility.

Of course, his own continuing preference for myth might explain the vehemence of the book. His claim that neo-liberals believed in their inevitable global dominance struck me as very strange: if neo-liberal means people like me, and I normally interpret it that way, we have always inclined more to pessimism and defeatism than triumphalism, even at the end of the eighties when a few of our ideas like privatisation were spreading across the world. But of course Gray himself was one of us at one time, and if he took a millenarian view of things at the time, then, like me sticking up for the Men in Skirts, he could be expected to turn against his old ideas violently. But his error was not his liberalism, it was his mythologising, and he has changed the myth instead of keeping the politics and rejecting myth.

Gray needs to put down Leo Strauss and the Bible, and read some Pratchett.

Fascism: right or left?

In the last few days I have seen, from several directions, the old question raised as to whether fascism should be considered right-wing or left-wing.

The argument familiar to libertarians is that, because fascism is collectivist, it should be considered left-wing. This is often traced back to Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and has been brought up recently by Jonah Goldberg in his book. There is also the fact that the originators of fascism were on the left first.

There is a summary of some recent discussion among British libertarian bloggers at the curiously-named don’t set fire to your jacket .

John Gray argues in his book Black Mass, which, as promised, I will review here shortly, that fascism, if not actually of the left, is at least a product the same enlightenment mythology, as he sees it. In this he is closely following Kuehnelt-Leddihn.

Mencius at UR has argued the contrary.

In the 1930s, there was no confusion at all as to whether the fascist movements were parties of the extreme Right or of the extreme Left. Everyone agreed. They were parties of the Right. Populist right-wingers to be sure, but right-wingers nonetheless. For once, the conventional wisdom is perfectly accurate.

In this case I would go along with him. This is not really a question which has a right or wrong answer, but I think its more useful to classify fascism as right-wing than left-wing. The reason is in what I consider the essence of government, as I wrote yesterday. Politics is not primarily about how society should be governed. It is primarily about who does the governing. So the similarity in policy between far-left and far-right is interesting and noteworthy, but it does not mean they are the same. Politics is primarily about what group should rule, and fascism and communism represent different groups. The left seeks to dispossess the rich; the right seeks to control them. The fact that, after gaining control of the economy, they would each do much the same thing with it, is not enough to make them allies. Since they will always oppose each other, it is not useful to classify them as on the same side.

One reason some libertarians dislike describing fascists as right-wing is that they consider themselves of the right. I think that is a mistake, caused by the history of the cold war, where they sided with the true right against communism. That is all over now, but the personal and organisational ties survive to an extent. Let the fascists have the “right-wing” label; our position is not left or right, but fundamentally “anti-politics”. That should have public appeal currently, although it is an admission that we cannot really win the game, because we are not really playing.

Update: I’ve written a lot more on fascism recently; see here and here.

The Essence of Government

Further to my previous post, I have come across this piece from last week by Jim Henley, also dealing with the problem of how libertarianism can make a practical difference.

I think libertarians are, rather, the court jesters of politics. I mean that in a good way. We whisper to Caesar that that he is mortal. We caper about, turning ourselves blue if necessary, reminding everyone that government power is inescapably violent and inescapably self-interested. You’re probably not going to care, but we’re going to make you actively decide not to care. And sometimes, maybe you’ll care after all. As a class, we can be stupendously silly people, believing and saying the most absurd things. But our rulers are silly people too, in different and more malignant ways. And as fools, we have the freedom to say so.

I think he’s right, and if he’s right about America, the same is even more true of Britain, where libertarian ideas are that much further from the mainstream.

The problem is that all politics is based on a lie: that the essence of government in a democracy is to serve the people, and that political questions are about how best to serve the people.

In fact the essence of government, in a democracy or elsewhere, is that the strong enslave the weak. What democracy provides is not a different essence, but, by the mechanism of dividing the strong against each other, a situation where the strong enslave the weak much less effectively. The point of democracy is to provide ineffective government, which is a good thing.

So if the debate is about what the government should do to better serve the people, then I am a libertarian (indeed now a Libertarian), and will bore my victims to death talking about lower taxes and more flexible markets and civil liberties and the rest of it. But the policies I complain about are usually not imperfections in our servant, the government. They are the reality of our master, the government, sticking out through the bars of the cage in which it is restrained.

How to get better?

At Samizdata, Johnathan Pearce has asked another of the fundamental questions. By what route do we get from where we are to a better situation for the country?

The problem is that even attempting to carry out such a programme entails playing the political game. And a key part of the political game is feeding the movement by handing out patronage. If you’re not doing that, you’re not really playing the game, you’re just posturing.

How did Thatcher manage to fight the overgrown state for three terms, with two landslide majorities, and yet leave it as large as she found it? Because every victory had to be paid for by buying support somewhere else.

So slimming the state through the system is out of the question. Fighting the system would not leave enough afterwards to help, even assuming (delusionally) that we had anything like the support to make it possible. There is the ASI approach of working through those in power, attempting to change their minds directly. The gains are marginal, but real. The necessity to a politician of defending statism so as to be able to reward supporters leads to a situation where the powerful believe their own propaganda beyond what is actually useful to them; that is why good argument can have some effect but never achieve real change.

Another opportunity for marginal change is direct action. The point of this is not to overthrow the system, but to change the incentives of those in power. Therefore aim not at the top, but at lower levels where the real damage is done by those making unseen decisions week by week and year by year.

20th Century Wars

Via L&P, a good piece in the Grauniad about the actual motivations behind the second world war. Right or wrong, WWII was a practical war against a geopolitical rival, not a crusade for justice or human rights.

Combining it with the latest excellent essays from Mencius (1, 2, more still to come), it would seem that the conventional wisdom is reversed: the first world war was an ideological war, fought in the name of democracy, while the second was a pragmatic struggle for power and influence.

It would be consistent with my theory of Humanitarian Intervention (and why not to do it), that the war fought for realpolitik has proved easier to justify in hindsight than the war fought for democratic ideology.