Category: Main

Anomaly UK blog posts

Expanded blog reading

I’ve added one or two new feeds to my regular reading, as a result of the meet at the ASI on Wednesday.

There were talks from Tim Worstall, “Guido Fawkes” and Perry de Havilland, which served mostly to underscore how good blogging is as a medium, compared with, er, sitting listening to people giving speeches.

Some people really have it, though, and a few minutes listening to Chris Mounsey holding forth in general conversation were enough to persuade me that I should (a) be reading everything he writes, which for some reason I haven’t been doing up until now, and (b) be in the Libertarian Party. Devil’s Kitchen needs no introduction from me, but Mounsey’s vision of a positive libertarian platform that can be put to the general public was an eye-opener.

I may doubt the general proposition that we need a Libertarian Party, but if it is the way to get Mr Mounsey’s energy and vision to a wider audience, then we need this Libertarian Party. Since I let my UKIP membership lapse (for the second time) a few years ago, there’s no reason for me not to be a member.

I also have added Question That, a newish blogger who was there on Wednesday (another Libertarian Party person), and, as a side effect of paying more attention to British political blogs, have added The Remittance Man, Mark Wadsworth, and Iain Murray’s new outing, though as far as I am aware they weren’t there.

Libertarianism and Welfare

Johnathan Pearce at Samizdata kicks off a discussion:

“A barrier to people accepting libertarianism is the notion that we’d let people starve in the streets.”

I think this is true. And while the notion is fundamentally unjustified, there is a grain of truth in it.

For one thing, to the extent that there are people who believe that the poor should be left to starve in the streets, they are likely to be found among our allies and supporters.

For another, while most libertarians would say, like Johnathan, that the unfortunate would be looked after by private charity, and might well end up better off than is the case today, most would also say that there should be some stigma to being a recipient of charity; that the deserving poor (as judged by donors) should be better off than the undeserving poor, in order to provide useful incentives.

Similarly, people should be encouraged to look after their families, meaning the poor with families to look after them will be better off than those without, and that misfortune falling on one person would also impact their families.

There is a separate problem which results in a bad impression of libertarianism: there are things (like redistribution) which we can see are wrong as a matter of principle. Pretty much by definition, we agree that the state should not redistribute income. There are other issues which do not so easily resolve to matters of principle – like whether the state should invade Iraq. We do not all agree about that, and therefore we do not take such a strong position. So while I, personally, might see the war as a vast waste of lives and resources, I would be cautious in arguing it, because people I respect disagree for reasons which eventually come down to matters of judgement. On the other hand — state funding for opera! That is just wrong, and anyone who disagrees cannot be “one of us”.

The result is that it looks as if I care passionately about withdrawing state funding of opera (or cutting benefit for the disabled, or whatever), but am indifferent to the bombing of civilians. That is not the case. Whatever the right answers, the Iraq war issue is much more important than the arts funding question. If we, as libertarians, give the opposite impression, it’s because we see arts funding as an easy question and the right response to terrorism as a difficult question. For the pedantic mind, which characterises many of us, it is tempting to dwell on the easy but minor point rather than on the difficult but major one.

To improve the image of libertarianism, we should perhaps express more of a sense of proportion regarding things that could be done better, but, on the overall scale of things, aren’t all that big a deal.

State Beneficiaries

Patrick Crozier asked (a week ago), who actually benefits from the state?

He works down the list, from Tony Blair to a welfare junkie, and observes that nobody is doing much better from the state than they would otherwise.

There is a good reason for this: rent-seeking. If any particular position as a tax-eater is excessively profitable, then people will fight over it until the cost of winning it approaches the value of the loot. Hence, becoming an MP, say, and grabbing that lovely 120K/yr, involves a whole lot of hard work and sacrifice, in the same way as getting the best bargains on the opening day of a sale requires camping outside overnight, elbowing and clawing your way to the front of the pack.

The winners of the tournament are making a marginal profit, or else they wouldn’t bother, but they’re not doing that much better than they would at something else.

The individuals who do actually profit significantly are those who do not have to compete for their position, either because the position is not open to competition (for instance because of nepotism), or because there is a lot of randomness in the selection process.

The waste of the public sector is not really to be seen in the rare government-produced fat cat or welfare cheat. They are unrepresentative. The waste is most visible in the vast hordes who have no plans in life beyond collecting handouts or doing worthless public sector jobs. Most of them could do something like as well in the private sector, but in sheer numbers they make up the most solid statist interest group.

Financial Regulation

I think its fair to say that the financial industry has not been admirable over the last few years. One of the best accounts of what went wrong is this:

Prince was saying he was constrained to follow the conventional wisdom, even when it was palpably insane.

It is therefore understandable that people are saying the manifest errors of the industry should have been restrained by regulators. Given that governments end up bailing out the casualties, it cannot be denied that government has the authority to attempt to prevent such bailouts becoming necessary.

The question is not whether the government is entitled to prevent excesses, it’s whether it would actually succeed in doing so. Is it really the case that politicians or civil servants will be less influenced by the crowd effect of conventional wisdom than are financial executives with, in some cases, millions of their own on their line?

One year ago, there was no motivation for regulators to get banks to cut down on lending, to stop buying mortgages, and so on, even if the powers existed for them to do that (which, to a degree, they do). If you are asking regulators to prevent bubbles, you are asking them to outguess the market, which, while not impossible, is not something I would generally expect them to achieve.

How to treat spin?

In March 2003, I wrote:

…much of the propoganda on WMD’s has been misleading or dishonest. Sure, Iraq is months away from making nuclear weapons (if someone else gives them fissionable material). The same goes for the Sons of Glendwyr — getting fissionable material is the only difficult bit.

The government had tried to make us think Iraq had a nuclear weapons programme by telling us, effectively, that it didn’t. That was much more revealing than an actual lie, even an obvious lie, because it proved that the government knew the facts and was spinning them in one direction.

Now some climate sceptics have been claiming that the world has not got any warmer for the last ten years. I actually didn’t think that was true: from what I saw there was a confusion between US and global temperatures. I have not repeated the claim here because I didn’t think it was true.

But the World Meteorological Organisation apparently published a statement that begins:

GENEVA, 4 April 2008 (WMO) – The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008 are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century.

According to the Deltoid blog I got this from, they put out the statement “to correct the erroneous claims in the media that global warming had stopped”

The thing about the statement is that every factual claim is entirely consistent with the claim that global temperatures have not risen for ten years.

Since they unquestionably rose before 1998, they obviously remain above the long-term average, and likewise the last decade is the warmest on record. Temperatures have obviously risen over the last century. The rest of the WMO statement, (at least, the rest of what was quoted by Deltoid) also fails to contradict the proposition that temperatures have not risen since 1998.

Now, as facts go, it’s a minor one. It’s perfectly true that ten years is not long enough to draw any firm conclusions from. But like the 2003 Iraq claims, the fact of the spin is much more significant to me than what I can actually know for sure. I didn’t know what WMDs Iraq might have, but I knew for certain that the government was trying to make it seem like they had more than was actually the case. I don’t know how strong the evidence for AGW is, but I now know as an absolute certainty that the WMO is trying to make the evidence appear stronger than it is, in both cases not because the authorities are lying, but because they are spinning.

Olympic Shame

I do not feel that the Olympics are tainted by being held in China. In fact, I think China is tainted by holding the Olympics. I would think much better of the country if it refused to hold them, and better still if it refused to participate. I would support any boycott of the Olympics, ever, wherever they are held. In fact, I think I will start a campaign to have the 2012 Olympics moved to Yangon.

To me, all the complaints about 2008 are summed up in this priceless photo (h/t Distributed Republic)

Protester with sign: Would we have allowed Nazi Germany to host the Olympics?

No better demonstration could exist of the reality distortion field that surrounds this most objectionable of institutions.

Religiosity

My initial theme here was the difference between Europe and America. One of the most obvious is the importance of religion in America. Various explanations have been put forward for this difference, but mostly they do not account for the discrepancy.

I used to claim that everyone in England who seriously believed in God ran away to America to get away from the Tudors, but that doesn’t explain the rest of Europe.

I have heard it suggested that the welfare state in Europe has displaced religion, but that is too recent to account for a difference in religiosity that is much more longstanding.

I am inclined to a much simpler explanation: religions in America are more successful because they are privatised by the constitution. While the history of religion in Europe is one of religions fighting for state power with which to eliminate the competition, American churches have concentrated their efforts on appealing to the population.

If the US Constitution included an amendment that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of education, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”, then I believe the US would have the most successful schools in the world to go with the most successful churches in the world.

A New Era in Politics

Amid all the noise of the last few weeks, one minor story marks, for me, the beginning of the end of the old politics and the start of a new era.

The old politics is marked by belief in democracy. Voters complain about politicians incessantly, and, from time to time, vote against them. Unfortunately this entails voting for other politicians, and so has minimal effect.

In the new era, people see through the machinery of democracy and the abstraction of party, and hold politicians as individuals personally responsible for their misdeeds.

The sign of this new era, is, of course, the campaign to “bar” Alistair Darling from every pub in the country. Forget all the grand theories about Government, Politics, Budget; what has concretely happened is that Alistair Darling has forced various retailers of alcoholic beverages to pay more for their stock. Certain of those retailers have announced that they will decline to do business voluntarily with the man who did this.

It is my belief, alluded to previously, that we have far more influence over government in the course of our ordinary activity than we do as explicit participants in the political process. This is hardly a new idea; leftist revolutionaries have always known it, hence their emphasis on the Trade Union movement, or the mob.

This is only the beginning, though. It challenges one part of the great fallacy of politics: the part that says that the way to influence government is by participating in the political system. Imitating the publicans and ignoring the system is an advance, but they are still caught in the other part of the fallacy: the part that says that what matters are the decisions of a few famous people at the top of the hierarchy. In fact, the system of government (as opposed to the political system) has a position and a momentum of its own (as I discussed last month) and putting even direct pressure on the system’s figureheads will have limited effects. The principle which is being applied to Alistair Darling needs to be applied to every functionary of the state who turns up with a badge or a uniform and makes our lives less pleasant.

Now, maybe some of these people are actually helping us. The refuse collector who leaves behind a second bin cannot be deterred without the end result being that the first bin is left behind also. That is one of the great benefits of this approach, that it distinguishes between the concrete complaints about what the state does and the endless whining about what the state doesn’t do.

At present, the state employees most at risk of being threatened by the public are those who actively support the most state-dependent: the benefit officers, the social workers, the nurses in A&E on a Saturday night. If it becomes the norm that state workers can be prevented from doing their jobs by direct public opposition, both sides will benefit. The underclass will become more supportive of their servants or else will suffer the consequences, while the victims of the state — the people with fixed addresses and jobs and bank accounts and something to lose — will have some measure of protection from the persecution they currently face at the hands of “the system”.

Kafeel Ahmed, Idiot

At the time of the ludicrously inept propane-bomb attacks in London and Glasgow last summer, my biggest worry was that apparently those involved in the attacks were practising medicine. I would always hope to be treated by doctors with better knowledge of basic science than was demonstrated by those terrorists.

It is now emerging that one of the doctors, at least, was just the brother of the Glasgow suicide arsonist, who may or may not have been aware of the direction of his brother’s activities, but who is not accused of being active in planning them. That’s good news; there’s every chance that the defendant, Sabeel Ahmed, may be a competent doctor.

The idiot arsonist himself was no doctor, but, apparently, a “climate change expert”.

I would love to claim that climate alarmists generally are ignorant of chemistry and physics, but that is clearly not the case. I might with slightly more justification claim that there is a common tendency involved, which is to jump to worst-case conclusions. It is actually possible for a propane/air mixture to explode very destructively, it’s just very very unlikely without a very sophisticated process of using the right proportions and mixing very well. It is possible that the feedback effect of the climate system to CO2 forcing could be positive rather than negative, but that likewise is very unlikely. The alarmist case is based on climate models that appear to show that the feedback is indeed positive.

As an argument, that’s still a bit of a stretch; it’s worth thinking about it but I wouldn’t expect it to change anyone’s mind. The actual irony of this case is that Ahmed S. was pursuing an activity — climate alarmism — which has a serious chance of weakening or destabilising western civilisation. Even competent terrorism is less of a threat than climate alarmism. To give up green activism in favour of incompetent terrorism is, for an opponent of Western domination an own goal of Gary Sprake proportions.