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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.

The Lords

I suggested in a comment at Tim’s that unicameralism would be OK, so long as it means getting rid of the House of Commons.

I was mostly joking. But maybe it’s worth thinking about.

On the anti side, there’s this amendment by the Lords to the Criminal Justice bill creating penalties for “Recklessly disclosing” personal data.

In order to rule that something is reckless, you need to have some idea of what normal practice is, to contrast against recklessness.

But in handling of data, there practically is no normal practice, and what there is is mostly terrible. We in the IT industry just make it all up as we go along. That’s what being such a young, fast-moving profession is all about. The high-profile failures that we’ve seen have been notable more for bad luck than for being worse than the rest of the industry.

I’m not saying that the current situation is satisfactory. But slinging around vague terms like ‘reckless’, outside of the context of the Data Protection Act which, for all its faults, at least tries to define the concepts it deals with, will not improve anything.

Business IT does not work to a level of reliability adequate for protecting confidential data, or for other critical functions. If we were to operate on a similar basis to the people who write software for planes or power stations, costs and delays would increase to the point where 90% of what we now do would simply not be worth doing.

And that has to be the answer for confidential personal information. If it really needs to be secret, it shouldn’t be on commercial-grade IT systems in the first place. If the state or a private business collects it, don’t be surprised when it leaks. Most of the time, the recklessness is in collecting it in the first place.

Back on unicameralism, I think the reason for this mistake by the Lords is a desire to defeat the government, to make them look weak, to get more votes. So if we didn’t have a Commons, we wouldn’t have had this bad amendment.

Perhaps.

Quote of the Day

“Hitchhiking is choosing to have faith in other human beings, and man, like a small god, rewards those who have faith in him.”

— Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro, two performance artists who demonstrated their faith in humanity by hitch-hiking across the Balkans wearing wedding dresses.

I’m so used to reading (and writing) unproved statements that just hang there. Not only is their truth debatable, but so is the sincerity with which they are presented. Making an outrageous statement for shock value is so easy.

Pippa Bacca proved beyond all doubt that she really believed what she said. She also proved that she was wrong.

When you read my little pearls of arrogance here, please remember that I’m not prepared to stake my life on anything I write.

I’m sorry.

Sovereignty and Human Rights

Britain has a very secure government. We are blessed with a government that doesn’t have to worry much about being invaded or overthrown, and can devote its attention to vital issues such as whether people are lying on school application forms.

The people of Somalia are not so blessed. Their government does not have the resources to give its citizens ASBOs or check that only genuine garden waste is placed in the brown bins. Nonetheless, it does the best it can to provide a semblance of order and peace. Unlicensed interior design work may go unchecked, but piracy on the high seas is likely to be punished with beheading.

In one way this is a good thing, because it’s actually quite important that cargo travels unimpeded up and down the coast of Africa without being snaffled by Captain Blood and his chums. But, on the other hand, our government officially believes that for a pirate to have his head detached, anywhere in the world, is an infringement of his human rights.

Therefore, the Royal Naval captain that encounters these miscreants is in a bit of a bind. If he lets them go, trade will continue to be impeded. If he takes them home to Britain, they will get the ASBO they so richly deserve, and can then claim Asylum as potential victims of the Somalians’ inhumanity. This is likely to be frowned on by the man in the street. Dropping them off back in Somalia to have their blocks knocked off is right out.

If the Somalis had caught them themselves, there would not have been an issue. Heads would be removed, trade would flow, Amnesty International would increment a box in a spreadsheet, and we would not take our eyes off The Apprentice. But because we want, for our own good reason, to assist the Somalian government in its basic duty to order its territory and territorial waters, the otherwise harmless hypocrisy gets in the way.

The hypocrisy should go. We have our standards, and other people have theirs. If we disagree sufficiently with a foreign government, we might attempt to overthrow and replace it, but that’s a big undertaking not to be treated lightly. If we are going to cooperate with foreigners to the extent of subsidizing their infrastructure or sending our leading exponents of the hop-skip-and-jump to compete there, we need to respect their sovereignty.

How bad is Mugabe?

The history of Zimbabwe, as seen from here via the media, is slightly strange. Mugabe and ZANU took over in 1980 and ruled, if not well, then at least averagely by African standards for twenty years. Then in 2000, came the land seizures, leading to the steady disintegration of agriculture, and eventually to the utter economic failure of today.

The assumption in these parts seems to be that Mugabe went bonkers in 2000. That is possible. But it seems at least as likely, based on the scant facts presented, that he held out against the destruction of white-owned agriculture for twenty years, and in 2000 could do so no longer. As I explained in the British context, it would be out of the question for him to defend his policy change in that way.

If my guess is correct, then the most important fact about Zimbabwe politics is that there is a powerful group of armed “war veterans” who will take what they want (land) and the most powerful individual in the country (Mugabe) is unable to stop them. If that is true, then the outlook, whoever is finally declared to have won the election, is not good.

It may be that the MDC, with western support, would be able to protect private property sufficiently for the economy to start to recover. If that is so, then the basic difference between ZANU and the MDC is that the MDC would have western support and ZANU doesn’t. By a startling coincidence, that is exactly what Mugabe claims.

Aside from the destruction of the economy, the alleged evils of Mugabe are not so obvious. The level of political oppression that has been reported is what I would term mild to moderate: no worse than Russia and considerably better than China.

I suppose there’s no direction to go but forwards, and forwards means getting rid of Mugabe and starting again with a new set of rulers who can accept outside help in restraining the “war veterans”. But I expect civil war. My bet would be that Iraq will be peaceful and prosperous before Zimbabwe is.

Invention of Tradition

Tweetable link: https://t.co/giqwREGElC?amp=1

Liberty and Power links to this Grauniad piece on how Highland Scottish culture – in this case specifically bagpipes – is all a 200-year-old fake.

The trouble is, yet again, that the headline doesn’t agree with the story. The familiar narrative is that the formal “Highland Culture” that assails the tourist and the expatriate today was collected and defined by the likes of the “Highland Society of London” after the real highland culture had been dead just long enough to be safe. It was now opportune for the British establishment to promote and co-opt the history.

That’s not the same as saying they made it all up from scratch. The highlanders wore heavy woolen woven cloths, often with various tartan patterns, so the revivers defined tartans and garment types. They played some kind of pipe, so they made bagpipes. The old highlanders didn’t themselves publish reference books of clan tartans and kilts and bagpipe designs, because that’s not the sort of thing a living culture does (particularly a backward peasant culture).

So what the Guardian’s big revelation of the “fake” bagpipes amounts to is that the pipes made by businesses in Edinburgh according to fixed designs for the last 200 years are not quite the same as the ones actually carried by illiterate cattle-herders and peasants two hundred miles north and a hundred years previously. Also particular specimens in various museums are not actually as old as they claim to be. The first point is obvious, the second is important for the museums but not actually of much interest to the rest of us.

Why am I sticking up for the rent-a-Jocks? Do I have romantic dreams about my Grampian ancestors sticking it to the Sassenachs? Hardly. But the arguments that annoy me most are the ones I’ve previously fallen for. I have gleefully debunked the tartans and the like in the past, and I’m embarrassed to have been had. There’s some relevance to the other issue, because, like the WMDs and the last decade’s temperatures, this is a case where the details say one thing and the headline has been spun to say something else.

Unlike the other cases, I don’t think there’s any particular agenda at work here. The base of it was explained best by G. K. Chesterton:

You’ve got to understand one of the tricks of the modern mind, a tendency that most people obey without noticing it. In the village or suburb outside there’s an inn with the sign of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose I went about telling everybody that this was only a corruption of King George and the Dragoon. Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry, from a vague feeling that it’s probable because it’s prosaic. It turns something romantic and legendary into something recent and ordinary. And that somehow makes it sound rational, though it is unsupported by reason. Of course some people would have the sense to remember having seen St. George in old Italian pictures and French romances, but a good many wouldn’t think about it at all. They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern intelligence won’t accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.

Debunking feels good. Knowing that what the what the other fellow believes is wrong feels really good. I have a particular weakness for it, which is why I’ve been a perpetrator of this one example before.

Good reason to buy fakes

Luxury watchmakers are apparently starting to add anti-forgery features to make it easier to identify counterfeits (via Division of Labour).

How embarrassing for them to have to admit that the cheap knock-offs are otherwise indistinguishable from the real thing.

As I’ve said before, the legitimate purpose of trademark law is to protect the consumer from inferior goods. A technical or artistic innovation is a positive externality, which copyright and patent law is designed to internalize. A brand established by costly marketing is of no general benefit, and cannot be deserving of state protection except inasmuch as it is a guarantee to the consumer of superior quality.

In defence of lying scumbags

Apparently (via Mr Eugenides) The EU’s new Unfair Commercial Practices directive will mean that psychics will have to prove they do not mislead their customers.

Now I’m more sure that psychics do mislead their customers than I am of almost anything, and we would all be better off if they stopped. They might not all be lying scumbags: possibly some of them are just nuts.

But I’m not sure that making every failed prophecy into a legal action will be an improvement. The problem in dealing with psychics, as with homeopaths, Christians, dowsers, mediums and the rest, is not that they are not obviously wrong (they are), but that many of the “legitimate” alternatives aren’t provably better. If we start demanding proofs, we’ll take out the pychics alright, but what about the equity research analysts? Homeopathy is crap, but how much respectable medicine has not been proved to be better? You can argue that we would be better without all these questionable experts and advisers, but I’d rather make up my own mind than have the choices regulated by the law.

Actually, the two examples I chose: equity research and medicine, are very regulated. Perhaps there are better examples. But even these aren’t actually required to be accurate. Equity researchers have to show they’re not being bribed to make particular recommendations, and doctors have to show that they’re consistent with other doctors, but neither actually have to show that their predictions come true. The required standard for astrologers might turn out to be similar, but if the result of all this legislation is that they just have to put a line of small print at the bottom saying the mystical power of the stars can go down as well as up, I don’t think it’s really worth while.