Main – Page 22 – Anomaly UK

Actually Existing Monarchy

Aretae is the latest, though by no means the first, to observe that the ideal I have described, of the Monarch whose Unchallenged Authority removes all internal conflict and politics, does not closely resemble European history as we are familiar with it.

My response — inevitably — is that those monarchies that were forever engaged in political struggles against internal power centres and rivals were not Proper Absolute Monarchies — they were transitional stages on the way to creating proper monarchy.

Stop sniggering at the back!

But that is indeed how they saw things. Early monarchs were not able to raise armies and levy taxes effectively, as they did not control an apparatus adequate to do so. They relied on an aristocracy to provide those — and the Barons were not under the King’s personal authority, but tied to him by a net of property rights.

By the 16th Century (in England, I think France and Spain were more or less in step, or slightly ahead), the Lords’ importance for raising armies was reduced, and the apparatus of war was more under the control of the Monarch and his chosen subordinates. However, substantial tax-raising was still beyond the capabilities of the Royal administration. As the importance of the Lords declined due to their military irrelevance, their taxing duties were spread across a wider group of landowners and leading urbanites. The Lords together with representatives of the other tax-raising groups give us the Parliaments of the 16th-17th centuries.

As communications, literacy and the other technology of government advanced, the Royal administration became capable of levying taxes without assistance of pre-existing, independent, local power structures. However, the fact that tax collection had traditionally been done through and with the approval of those structures meant they saw their role in the process as a right, and resisted being taken out of the loop.

Unfortunately, as Charles I tried to complete the process of discarding the last piece of obsolete feudal detritus — parliament — he ran into trouble. He was stymied by a combination of his own incompetence and the after-effects of the reformation. However hard the King and his supporters argued that the path their opponents were on could lead to only to democracy, they were not believed.

In France and Spain, the Catholic monarchies succeeded where the Stuarts failed. Meanwhile in England, as had been forseen by the Cavaliers, the power of Parliament decayed into party politics and a ruling class devoted to the creation of propaganda. (I recommend Ophelia Field’s book which describes the process vividly.)

English politics produced more and more effective propaganda (that being, then as now, its main output), and the poison of Locke and the like spread Whiggism to France, and despite the tragedy it produced there, continued to gain ground until the twentieth century, when outright war against all monarchy became practical and in the end successful.

So, on Aretae’s point, I do not have a royalist utopia to point to — no English king, even in theory, could do whatever he wanted. The 80 years of Louis XIV and XV does hint at what is possible.

This is the conversation I want to have: let us accept that politics is the problem, and discuss whether absolute monarchy is a solution. I am far from certain, and am open to consider alternative solutions, whether they be rigged elections, institutionalised criminal gangs, seasteads, or whatever. Monarchy still seems the most promising line to me, particularly in Britain where we have a mythology and an extant Royal Family to return to.

The Swiss Canton/Medieval City-State deserves a separate post.

75 dead in power station disaster

18 months ago. You do remember the weeks of non-stop media coverage, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano%E2%80%93Shushenskaya_Dam

Not a major disaster, of course. Nothing can compare with the Banqiao Dam failure in China, which killed 26,000 people in 1975.

Of course, communist countries were notoriously careless about safety and the environment. In Western countries, Hydro power is perfectly safe…

39 Dead in Georgia USA, 1977 from a decommissioned hydro plant. Just because it’s not in use any more, doesn’t mean it’s not still dangerous.

And, of course, the only one of these I actually heard of without looking for it, the 2000 killed in Italy in 1963. Hydro plants are particularly vulnerable to earthquakes.

This isn’t meant to be an anti-hydro rant. Hydroelectric power is the only proved form of renewable energy. But all power stations of any kind, by their essential nature, concentrate large quantities of energy into a small volume. That is intrinsically dangerous, whether its lakes of dammed water, radioisotopes, oil or natural gas… The concentration of energy almost always has environmental impact, and always has risk.

No conceivable nuclear accident matches Banqiao dam. No nuclear accident in the first world has matched Kelly Barnes Dam (unless something new goes seriously and unexpectedly wrong at Fukushima). Arguably, no nuclear accident in history has matched Sushenskaya — and that wasn’t even kept secret, it just wasn’t newsworthy.

Repost

Briefly reposting a piece of mine from 2005, which was itself a repost from 2003.

At the end of the 1991 Gulf war there was an argument. Some people wanted to remove Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. Others opposed this either because they felt it would have bad effects on the region as a whole, or more simply because it would cause unnecessary bloodshed. It was decided, in my view rightly, to end the war with the restoration of Kuwait.

Many who opposed an invasion of Iraq nevertheless hoped that Saddam Hussein would be overthrown. Part of the Iraqi population was already in revolt, and it seemed an easy and harmless thing to help things along a bit. The Iraqi security forces could be prevented from wiping out the rebellion by establishing safe areas and “No-fly zones”, which could be justified on humanitarian grounds in any event.

Unfortunately the idea, approved by the UN Security Council, was not thought through. Carried away by the prospect of getting Saddam Hussein overthrown “for free”, the long-term situation in the case that the rebellion was unsuccessful was ignored. The United Nations, a body whose purpose is peace, and empowered to sanction war only to prevent wider war, was in fact ordering a perpetual war. It is an act of war to send armed forces into another country to protect a rebel army. The U.S.A. and U.K. have, with U.N. backing, been waging war against Iraq every day for over a decade. This situation should never have been created. Once it was decided in 1991 to allow the Iraqi regime to stay in power, then for consistency’s sake Iraq should have been accorded the full sovereign rights of any other country, including the right to use force against “traitors” in its territory.

If I had made this argument at the time (which I didn’t), I am sure I would have found little agreement. I would have been told that I was putting inappropriate and outdated principles ahead of the lives of innocent people. It is only with hindsight that we can see what has come of the denial of the basic principle of Iraq’s sovereignty. The twelve year war against Iraq, with its blockades (“sanctions”), its bombings and its imminent bitter end has claimed more innocent lives than either of the two logical alternatives in 1991 would have done, even without taking into account that it was the immediate provocation for the worst terrorist massacre in history.

At its root is arrogance. GWB has been widely accused of arrogance in recent weeks, but nothing has matched the arrogance of his father and his UN supporters in believing that they could expect peace and cooperation from a foreign government while openly attempting to overthrow it in defiance of its traditional sovereign rights. GWB has the humility to recognise that to interfere in Iraq to the extent of inspecting its chemical factories and limiting the actions its security forces, he must fight a war, take the responsibility and take the consequences. The UN Security Council still has the arrogance to believe it can achieve the same ends without bloodshed.

Anomaly UK

I’ve been doing this for over six years now, 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.

Democracy

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 who need to use patronage to defeat their rivals, and therefore is not achievable under democracy or under any other political system.

Politics is not inevitable, however. If rule is in the hands of one unchallenged individual, he would be in the position of owner of the realm, and would act to maximise the long-term value of his asset. In the process, he would provide better government than any modern state. It is politics itself that is the problem.

Back in Democracy, 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.

My views on this have been dramatically affected by Mencius Moldbug, of the blog Unqualified Reservations.

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 political significance of climate science means that scientists on both sides feel justified in employing levels of dishonesty that they would never contemplate in ordinary scientific disputes. While this dishonesty is very minor in the context of politics, it is destructive of the scientific process, which requires exceptional levels of honesty to function properly.

My impression is that the so-called consensus towards Global Warming is a house of cards built on flimsy speculations, and sustained by special-interest funding and by political animosity towards critics. That conclusion is suspiciously convenient for the political views I held at the time I first reached it, but has in fact outlived the political convictions that one might have suspected of motivating it.

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.

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 update it if my positions change. For comparison, an older version is here

Why you should be a reactionary

Why I am not has disclaimed the label of “reactionary” I put on him when I linked to him. Fair enough, it is a clumsy label (perhaps “Sith” as used by MM is better), and the title of his blog suggests a certain wariness of labels in any case.

Concretely he goes on to paint a more optimistic view of conservatism than you will get from us reactionaries.

Frankly, my lifetime (I was born in 1981) has seen progressivism dragged behind conservatism, as the right has progressively neutered the left and so the progressive need to stand on some of the middle ground has forced them ever rightwards. The current Labour Party is far to the right of where the SDP stood at its formation.

I think that is his mistake. It is true that since the 1970s we have seen privatisation, liberalisation of international trade, and reduction in top tax rates.

But those were just a blip in the tide of advancing progressivism. Even leaving out the nationalisations resulting from the financial crisis, the regulatory state, backed by employment, equality, competition and environmental laws, exerts as much control over a lot of “private” business as the 70s state did over nationalised industries.

Top marginal tax rates are pushing back towards 1970s levels, and for most people the tax burden is much heavier than then.

Voluntary co-operation has been all but wiped out by crowding out from government services and from state-sponsored fakecharities, and also by regulation, most egregiously the protection of children laws, but with health & safety, occupational licensing and so on doing their bit. The coalition has rolled back a tiny fraction of the last decade’s impositions, but the expectation is that, like other governments, that is the lot and it will then turn round and start adding on further restrictions. (Remember that Labour on coming to power started by liberalising pub licensing hours — a typical “opposition” policy that looks totally out of place against their subsequent approach).

Voluntary association is also hamstrung by the nationalisation of virtue — the idea that only the state is entitled to distinguish moral and immoral behaviour.

As for “ending the progressive war on the family” — that is long ended; the war on the family was won decades ago. With illegitimacy rates near 50% and most marriages ending in divorce, family life is now a faintly eccentric choice, rather than an expected norm.

In all these areas, everything except international trade, that is, the current Conservative party is far to the left of the 1970s Labour party. And I can say with confidence that the Conservative party in 20 years will be further left still.

So what of the trade question — why is that an exception to the general leftward drift of the Zeitgeist: a mysterious consensus, which changes over the decades? The only answer is that occasionally reality made itself felt. In the post-war period, protectionism was believed to be generally a good thing across left and right. Reality occurred in the 70s, free trade got a good jump in the 80s, and has been fading ever since. We get as much state as we can afford, but just occasionally the left gets ahead of itself and we get a level of state destructiveness that physically cannot be sustained. In that circumstance, and only that circumstance, are rightists allowed some small victories. To claim those as victories for conservatives is to underestimate reality. (In fact, I seem to recall that in its last days even the Callaghan government was moving towards some Thatcherite policies, as the situation so urgently demanded them).

The best understanding of the place of conservatism in Britain today comes from Peter Hitchens (e.g. The Cameron Delusion, as well as his blog. I have not come round to his views on drugs, but otherwise I consider his analysis sound. (Remedies are another matter, but there we are all floundering to some degree.)

Only reactionaries realistically oppose progressivism.

Two points from Ezra Klein

Common Mistakes Made By Economists

1. Political power matters. There are many outcomes that are economically efficient in the short term but lead to a dangerous imbalance of political power in the long term

I wouldn’t use the word “imbalance” – balances can be dangerous too, but otherwise the most overwhelmingly important point in politics.

8. Policy arguments are often conscripted for political purposes…

This is a great sighting near the surface of something so deeply assumed that the assumption is normally invisible: policy is the opposite of politics.

Klein’s strapline is “Economic and Domestic Policy, and Lots of it”. But politics is only allowed in when it forces itself, by point 1.

I have only seen the view of politics being opposite to policy stated so clearly by critics, such as in Mencius Moldbug’s Explanation of democratic centrism

99% chances

Another sensible article by John Kay, this time about financial models. He mentions the Allais Paradox, which relates to what I called folk probability.

I have a quibble though: Kay says “There are no 99 per cent probabilities in the real world”. Clearly, there are. That doesn’t mean, though, that you or I know what they are.

The real point is that at very low probabilities, the chances of your model being wrong dwarf the chances you’re predicting. If you model a probability as 20%, but there’s a 2% chance that your model’s significantly wrong, the true probability is somewhere in 20±2%. That’s useful to know. But if you model a probability as 0.2%, that doesn’t magically make your chance of having got the model wrong a hundred times smaller. What you really have is a probability of 0.2±2 %. It might as well be 1±2% or 0.000001±2% — the question of how sure you are about your model is far more important than whether the model says 1% or 0.1%

More comments on John Kay pieces: ICI rents climate, copyright

Whatever2AV

I don’t have a strong opinion toward what voting system future General Elections will use. I don’t think that who gets elected is very important: voters don’t have any control over immediate policy; they only have influence over the long-term direction of policy, and that doesn’t depend on who wins any given election.

However, I used to be very interested in voting systems, and I have an intense dislike of bad arguments. The bad arguments in the AV debate come mainly from the No side.

The silliest is the cost argument. They claim that a switch to AV would cost 250 million pounds. That is highly improbable, and includes the cost of the referendum itself, which is a sunk cost in any case since the referendum is now going to happen. But just take it at face value for a moment.

Assume AV is an improvement — if it is not then the cost argument is irrelevant. 250 million is about five pounds per voter. The average voter will probably have the opportunity to vote in another six or seven elections. If a significant improvement in the value of a vote is not worth a quid, then what is a vote worth? The only people who should be influenced by the cost argument are those of us who believe that voting is worthless anyway.

There is also talk of voting or counting machines; that is a much bigger and easier argument than AV itself. Introducing machines is a huge mistake. FPTP hand-counted is far superior to AV with machines, since there is no reason for anyone ever to trust the machines.

A bizarre gem came from John Redwood, who wrote on his blog, “we think it undesirable that elections are settled by the second preference votes of those who vote for minor or unpopular parties”. He doesn’t say why. If you like your local independent, or Green, then the fact that you also prefer Conservative to Labour should therefore be of no interest?

A more cogent objection is that AV would produce Labour/Lib Dem coalitions into the indefinite future. I do not dismiss that, but I think it is mistaken. For one thing, the current situation shows that the support for the Lib Dems, being as it is a historically-produced random collection of highly disparate groups, with no policy positions in common at all, cannot survive the Lib Dems actually holding any power. But more to the point, the biggest effect of AV is within the parties themselves.

In 1981, a handful of senior Labour figures broke away from the party to form the SDP. That was only possible because of the utter failure of the previous Labour government, and the sheer disarray that the party was in. The SDP held a handful of seats for a few years, then merged with the Liberal party.

But imagine how much easier the job of splitting a party would be under AV. The problem the SDP faced was that for most Labour supporters, voting for the SDP instead of Foot was more likely to produce a Conservative MP than an SDP MP. AV greatly lessens that effect: if 50% of voters prefer Labour to Conservative, it is almost impossible for the Conservative to be elected because of the Labour vote splitting between two rival factions.

In fact, other factors might turn out more important than the voting system itself: in the face of the threat of splitting, I would not be at all surprised to see steps taken to defend the leadership of parties from internal dissenters. Pay particular attention to rules on party funding or ballot entry.

I think AV would give voters slightly more influence than they have now. I am quite unsure as to whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing: the Establishment in this country does damage in internal competition and through its religious attachment to Universalism, but on the other hand it is generally less stupid than the voters. So at the end of the day I am in the Whatever2AV camp.

Car Insurance

The EU car insurance ruling is a thing of beauty because it rules out most of the theories of why the EU does the things it does.

There is no possible ideology behind requiring insurers to ignore risk factors. There is no favoured class which will benefit — even the benefit to young male drivers will be very minor*, and there is certainly no general EU intention to benefit that class. There is no practical benefit. The only reason for the EU to decide to interfere in this particular question is because it can.

And there is nothing irrational in that. The EU wants to interfere in as much as possible, regardless of the lack of any justification, because everything it can touch increases its relevance — its power. This creates jobs for people to check that car insurance rates are in compliance. It creates opportunities for deals, exceptions, opt-outs, and straight out bribes. That is a sound, logical course action for a self-styled government with no country.

*since if the insurers adjust rates to bring in the same revenue as before, the effect will be to discourage low-risk female drivers and encourage high-risk male drivers, which will cost the insurers a lot more in claims — therefore the insurers will have to set the rate much higher than the weighted average of what it charges now, and accept a corresponding fall in business.

Category: Main