Louise Mensch

I maintain that day-to-day party politics is completely unimportant. Because of that, when the name “Louise Mensch” kept cropping up on twitter I didn’t know anything about her: I gathered that she was an MP, and more or less got it straight in my head that she was a Tory, and that was about it until she hit the headlines this week for resigning to spend more time with her family.

It was only at that point that I discovered she was a successful novelist, writing books under the name “Louise Bagshawe” which I have seen people reading on the train.

Having missed the fuss when she ran for and won the seat of Corby, I was not in a position to make the link to Esther Rantzen, who ran as an independent in my own constituency (and therefore had come to my attention).

In the context of Rantzen, I wrote:

I have suspected for a while that media figures are capable of moving into politics very successfully, through the more normal mechanism of joining major parties rather than running as independents. In the long run, the question is not so much whether celebrities will be able to win seats in parliament, as why they would want to.

Had I known what was going on in Corby, I might have said something prophetic…

Lobotomised

The most significant effect of the coalition has been to bring into the highest level of government people who have little investment in maintaining the pretences about the way the system works.

This is because, as with the Liberals 35 years ago, the merest contact with the reality of government has made the Liberal Democrats unelectable for a generation. Nick Clegg’s importance will hit zero on the day that the date of the next election is announced.

I’ve commented about this before, when Clegg forgot to pretend that as “Deputy Prime Minister” he was supposed to be “running the country” when Cameron was away.

His comments on being “lobotomised” by the demands of his position are familiar to anyone who reads politicians’ memoirs, but the impact has always been lessened by the passage of time between the experience and its publication. “Things are different now”, “he’s just bitter, every political career ends in failure” etc.

Here is a man still not only at the peak of his achievement, but at the peak of what he could ever reasonably imagined he would achieve, all but saying that it is worthless, that responding to events so dominates activity that whatever he actually believes, whatever he was elected to do, is irrelevant.

This is no accident. One of the most overlooked facts in modern life is the time that it takes for a person in authority to understand a question and decide on an answer. (This is as true of business as it is of politics). The only way for a leader to function is by delegation, and it only works if he can delegate to people he trusts. There are two ways to do it. Either you choose someone to deal with an issue who you believe is the best person to understand and decide on that issue, in which case your power is fully exercised in making that appointment, or you choose someone who you believe will honestly and accurately inform you of the most salient elements of the situation so that you can make the decision that you would have made had you time to do it all yourself.

The first of these paths is never possible for a democratic politician. The appointment of subordinates cannot be made on the basis of their effectiveness in their position, because keeping power requires trading favours, and positions of subordinate power are the most important favours that the politician has to offer. Positions must be awarded primarily on the basis of who is to be favoured, not on who is best for the job.

The second path is rarely achievable either, for the same reason. Occupiers of subordinate offices are potential rivals, and can be expected to act in their own interests, not in yours. The normal expectation is that they will use their greater knowledge of the issue in question to manipulate you to the decision they want, rather than help you to the decision you would want.

This is the SNAFU principle. It says that hierarchy doesn’t work, because “Communication is only possible between equals”.

I do not say that the second path is impossible, though, because I do not believe the SNAFU principle is completely true. There is a phenomenon so unfamiliar to the 1970s Discordians who formulated the SNAFU principle that, radically open-minded as they were, they failed to take it into account. That is personal loyalty.

If a leader has followers who are personally loyal to him, and do not have independent ambitions for themselves, they can be trusted to assist his decision-making. Such loyalty is scarce, but the most effective political leaders have managed one or two loyal followers among their tail. Blair had Alistair Campbell. Thatcher had, I think, Keith Joseph, Willie Whitelaw, possibly Norman Tebbit. They both were able to have substantially more effect on government as a result.

Clegg, of course, has no such effect. There is nobody in the entire world who is personally loyal to Nick Clegg, with the possible exception of his wife – and he would not be allowed to make her a minister. For that matter, I rather doubt that Cameron has anyone either.

I don’t want to overstate or oversimplify: such personal loyalty is never total or unconditional, and cannot be perfectly verified. It is not a magic formula that will result in effective organisation. But it is real, and it helps, and it is reasonable to conclude that we could have a lot more of it if we were to respect it as something useful and admirable. Instead, there is a tendency to see it as questionable or even corrupt. We hear that executives (in the public or private sector) should be selected for intrinsic personal qualities, rather than for their external relationship with their superiors.

The end result is that Nick Clegg is made helpless by being surrounded by rivals and enemies, and doesn’t even see that as the root of his problem, because that is how politics is supposed to be.

This is the flip side of this post from February, where I looked at the relationship of personal loyalty from the follower side. There, I argued that having a personal tie to a superior had a beneficial effect on the long-term, moral behaviour of a subordinate. Here I claim that having a loyal subordinate increases the effectiveness of a leader.

Anomaly UK Realtime

An experiment:  Because I don’t get the time to write half the articles I’d like to on this blog, I’m shoving the half-finished, the TODO pile, and some rough notes onto a separate blog Anomaly UK Realtime.  Some of the scribbles there might yet make it to here as proper articles, but most probably won’t.  Currently I have brief pieces up on Tanistry, the abolition of a parish council in Lincolnshire, and whether everyone should learn to program.

The unthinkable

I wrote in the last post that the unthinkable can become thinkable shockingly fast.

We can see an example of that on any day’s news at the moment. As the current Private Eye reports, in 2002 the Mirror Group Chairman held a lunch, at which the then Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan made a speech featuring jokes about various celebrities, based on the voicemails he had heard. These included even references to messages between then England manager Sven Goran Eriksson and former TV weathergirl Ulkrika Jonsson, who was present at the event.

Private Eye is bringing it all up to prove the dishonesty of all those who are now denying that they knew or suspected anything at all of such outrageous activity as phone-hacking going on. But to me the fact that they’re now hiding it is much less significant than the fact that only ten years ago they didn’t feel any need at all to hide it. Almost overnight (and I particularly noticed how sudden it was because I left the country for three weeks in 2011 and it happened while I was away), what had previously been taken for granted became a huge scandal.

Another example was raised recently — that within living memory, leading US evangelical Christians were in favour of legalising abortion. I read an article a month or two back which explained how, like the 2002 Mirror Group lunch, writings of prominent protestants have been dropped from the narrative, not because they’re embarrasing to the people involved, but because they simply does not make sense in the context of the narrative as it is presented today by everyone.

The conventional wisdom, as modulated by the popular media (but I’m not  sure their role is all that vital) is governed by the following constraints.

  • Everyone wants to say something interesting
  • Nobody wants to be seen to be wrong
  • People have very short memories

The result is that there are remarkably few public arguments about substance. It is much more effective, whether you are a media pundit or a political practitioner, to show that you are the most in tune with the conventional wisdom than to claim that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Since everyone important agreed with the conventional wisdom of five years ago, it is in nobody important’s interest to remind people that it’s the opposite of what everyone agrees with today.

Where there are disagreements, the number of things that have to be assumed on all sides — because they are part of the current conventional wisdom — but which are blatantly untrue make realistic argument about the facts impossible. So instead, we have emotional arguments about meaningless abstractions — things like “Austerity” or “Europe”, that are safely divorced from the things that are actually going on, and can be consistently supported or opposed while one fictional narrative after another sweeps through the newspapers.

(It is also safe to argue about weak foreign countries. It doesn’t matter what’s really going on in Bosnia or Egypt or Syria: we can have an argument about who to kill, based on our fantasy conventional wisdom, and nobody who matters will ever know or care what was actually happening.)

There is, at the same time, a kind of debate among the elite that deals with facts rather than imaginary narratives, but it is not independent of the fantasy. It would be nice to think that the people who really run things could get together at a Bildeberg meeting or something and actually try to work out what real solutions exist for real problems, but if that was ever the case, it probably isn’t now. I rather suspect that that was always an aspiration for those meetings rather than a reliable achievement.

As I said in a comment recently, P.R. is fundamental to government. Most of the hard problems in government are about how you get group X to accept A or group Y to support B. Many of the people who rise high in the elite are those who are able to solve those hard problems, and in many cases I suspect they are good at that because they honestly believe the fantasy narratives. If the media and the mob were really having their strings pulled by a secretive cabal of cynical technocrats, things would probably work a lot better than they do. It’s much more likely that the tail is wagging the dog.

But the upshot of all this is that democracy can be thrown under the bus just as quickly and as decisively as The News of the World and Yugoslavia were. It doesn’t even have to be for a good reason. By 2017, saying we should still have elections for government would be as odd as saying that journalists guessing celebrities’ voicemail passwords isn’t a big deal or that Yugoslavia was a sovereign country and forcibly breaking it up from outside was illegal.

Unfortunately, while I can see that it could happen, that’s not the same as knowing how to make it happen. Predicting herd behaviour, contra Isaac Asimov, is probably the hardest thing there is.

 It might be worth collecting a list of huge non-partisan shifts in belief.

  • I’ve mentioned previously the idea that humanitarian political action can only be taken with UN approval. That went from not being suggested at the time of the bombing of Belgrade, to being generally accepted by the buildup to the 2003 Iraq invasion.
  • The notion that children up into their young teens can never be left unsupervised (as opposed by Lenore Skenazy) has arrived somewhere in the last 20 years, not sure exactly where.

neutrino-cannon contributes:

Thoughts on the Diamond Jubilee

I saw a post recently attacking constitutional monarchies (can’t find it now, I think it was one of the Ortho types). There is also an article by Sean Gabb, specifically criticising HM Queen Elizabeth

Both articles are correct on the facts. A constitutional monarchy is, for practical purposes, a republic, with all the faults of a republic

Further, the Queen’s practical influence over the last sixty years has been, as far as we are able to tell, smaller than it could have been and harmful in its direction.

 Does that mean that neoreactionaries should stand against the celebrations of the second Diamond Jubilee in British history?  Of course not.

 The value of our monarchy is not in the effect the monarch has either on public opinion or on the government —- both are negligible. The value is as a reminder and as an alternative. Some day this war’s gonna end. One day, maybe one day soon, though I don’t hope for it, democracy will fall apart: due to lack of electricity or money, unresolvable election disputes, exposure of criminal entaglement of all of them, civil war among the progressivists, or some other Black Swan I haven’t even thought of. When it does, we will need a ruler with some other basis of legitimacy. And we have one, ready to hand.

If it does happen soon, the new ruling monarch will, like Juan Carlos in 1975, not doubt see himself as a caretaker, overseeing the handover to a reconstituted democratic regime. But it doesn’t have to be that way. That is where we come in, between now and then: our role is to  make the concept of restored monarchichal rule an alternative.

That’s not so very far-fetched. Democracy could go out of fashion. Try just dropping into conversation the suggestion that Her Majesty (or the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Cambridge) could not actually be worse as a ruler than Gordon Brown or David Cameron, and quite a few will accept the point. That doesn’t make them Royalists —- they still see the idea as unthinkable, but not as actually bad. The unthinkable can become thinkable very quickly if the right noises are made publicly (I have another article planned about that).

I wrote much the same thing on the occasion of the Duke of Cambridge’s wedding. My argument is that the actual merits of members of a constitutional monarchy are not relevant. They, like the rest of us, are products of a liberal democracy. The choice of both the Queen and the Prince of Wales to concentrate their public attention on matters of great unimportance (the Commonwealth and the environment, respectively) is one forced on them by their situation. Could they have done better?  Undoubtedly. But you restore monarchy with the Royal Family you have, not the one you might wish to have.

I suppose there is another path, the only one open to republics, to start from scratch: let somebody rule absolutely, and start a dynasty. It could work. It’s not at all preferable, though: the first King must actually be a politician, and the politics is likely to stick: the North Korea precedent again. It would be easier for a republic to adopt monarchy if a constitutional monarchy could make a success of it first.

Failing that, probably the best bet for a republic is total collapse, and a recapitulation of the phylogeny of monarchy via anarchy, warlordism and feudalism. Possibly this is what John Robb has in mind when he talks about neofeudalism —- I’ve not quite been able to understand him. The whole process needn’t take longer than a couple of generations, provided technology doesn’t regress too far on the way.

Restoration of a constitutional monarchy to an absolute one seems a much smoother process.

Organisational Dynamics II

Bloody Shovel writes some complementary things about my Employment Policy post.

The comments run off into the direction of the pathologies of organisations, Nydwracu citing Robert Anton Wilson.

The SNAFU principle is real enough, but the central issue Shovel is emphasizing is not that; organisations like the education system fail at their nominal purpose not primarily because they are uninformed or incompetent (though they generally are), but because their real purpose is not their nominal purpose. Their real purpose is to survive and grow. C. Northcote Parkinson is more to the point than RAW.

(That’s not a complete opposition; the reason that RAW says that communication is only possible between equals is because otherwise the interests of the subordinate are not the interests of the superior. Whichever way you put it, the root problem is the agency problem.)

In the modern world, we have two treatments for Parkinson’s Law: one which sometimes works and one which never does.

The one that sometimes works is market competition. An organisation which has to fund itself in the market must succeed in satisfying its market or go out of business and be replaced. Big, powerful organisations have crumbled in the face of competition, and many others have reformed themselves effectively to avoid that fate.

But not every organisation has to compete. Government power exists and will always exist, and is a far more reliable nourishment. Not only do the inevitable organisations of power —- the parties, the security forces, the tax-collectors —- feed on it, but organisations which would otherwise have to compete in a market seek to secure government lifelines. Bankruptcy, Carlyle wrote, will bring down all falsehoods, but in the case of governments, rather too late for most of us.

To restrict government-fed organisations to their proper purpose, therefore, another treatment must be used. The one we rely on is to create a second organisation to regulate the first. This never works, for reasons too obvious to labour. First you create (or take over) a school. Then you create a board to control the school. Then an education authority to control the board. Then an inspectorate to control the education authority. The end result is you have four organisations pursuing their own agendas instead of one.

I can suggest possible better solutions to the problem, but not without a context. The normal context of any policy suggestion is the framework of organisations that make up modern government. The policy suggestion is then aimed at some organisation in that framework to carry out. In this case, that is obviously nonsensical. Appointing a single absolute ruler is not in itself a solution to the problem of organisations, but it is at least a context in which solutions can be meaningfully suggested. That, then, is the context I assume in making suggestions. As far as what “we” do now, in the current context, my answer is passivism: we merely remark that the problems are not treatable in this context.

The alternative I suggest, in the context of absolute rule, is to do, as far as possible, without organisations.

Tim Worstall made a revealing little post about the GSM cellular communications standard. An Observer article remarked that the group of European telecommunication companies which established the standard was “the kind of intergovernmental initiative that drives Ukip nuts”. Worstall, a (former, I think) UKIP press officer, is baffled by the suggestion that opponents of the EU, a permanent transnational government, would be opposed to an ad-hoc agreement (including non-EU members such as Norway and 1993 Finland) to carry out a single task. It should not be baffling; the institution-centric worldview of the political mainstream simply does not allow it to see the vital difference. That is a sufficient explanation for the state we are now in.

A wise ruler would not delegate permanent power or independence to any organisation. The principle should be that any organisation can be abolished by one person, and most should have a defined life. Obviously, an organisation can be abolished in theory and in reality just reconstituted under another name: the important principle is not to be dependent on an organisation so that it is able to do that. It is not likely that a ruler can avoid depending on anything, but it is better to depend on a person than on an organisation. Let the depended-on person build and destroy ad-hoc organisations the way the ruler does; the responsibility stays with him. It is better to depend on a lieutenant you know (and ideally have chosen) rather than on bureaucrats you cannot even name.

That sounds almost impossible, but we are conditioned by a world of large organisations dedicated to surviving and growing. It obviously entails a sacrifice to not have large permanent organisations, but the benefits could be still larger. After all, in commerce, there is an enormous sacrifice of efficiency involved in the duplication of functions by competing firms, and more sacrifice of efficiency in the destruction caused by bankruptcy of failed competitors. But in commercial fields the benefits of limiting the growth of cancerous dysfunctional organisations seem to consistently outweigh the very significant costs. The same may be true of government by temporary ad-hoc organisation.

The Breivik Trial

Have I written about Breivik at all? I don’t think so. Whenever I try I end up with something so wide-ranging and rambling that I can’t finish or satisfactorily edit it. His story touches on my themes in so many different ways.

He’s also something of an embarrassment. In claiming the “neoreactionary” label, I am in a sense grouping myself with whoever else puts a return to traditional forms of government on a modern theoretical basis. I would argue that fascism doesn’t count as a neoreactionary theory, but it’s not easy to exclude Breivik.

I’ve read his “compendium”; well, read quite a lot of it and skimmed all the rest. There’s some sense there, along with the major error I originally started this blog to oppose: a huge overestimate of the actual and potential power of Islam in the West. (And along with an inordinate fascination with medals.) I answered the question  Is Europe Becoming Islamicised with a “no” in 2004 and I stand by that.

The reason I haven’t posted before to make this point is that, after all, I know very little about Norway. Maybe it really is as bad there as Breivik claims: what standing do I have to claim otherwise?

However, my self-restraint from describing conditions in Oslo has not been reciprocated by Breivik, who in his defence speech described my home town of Luton as a “war zone” containing “no go areas”.

Now I am not here to sing the praises of Luton in all its glorious multicultural harmony. It’s a rough old place, not without conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims. I have reported on the Begum case, the violent demonstrations, the odd leaflets, and the (thin) connections with islamist terrorism. But there are not no-go areas. I walk through the back streets of Bury Park after dark with less trepidation than past the nightclubs of the town centre. It was a rough town long before the Muslims got here, and the police constable who was murdered a few years ago was knifed by a schizophrenic Nigerian, not by some jihadist.

As I said all those years ago, Islam is used as a proxy by the universalist ruling elite with which to attack those aspects of traditional culture which native Europeans cannot be simply persuaded to abandon. Breivik obviously understands this to some extent: it is the reason he directed his attacks at white politicians rather than Muslims.

(Incidentally, the same immigration strategy can, and on occasion has, been used by conservatives to manipulate the culture: immigrants could be used to encourage patriarchy and disciplined child-rearing. But we are ordered to accommodate some aspects of immigrant culture, while others are hidden or treated as a problem, and it is clear who is giving the orders).

Indeed, Brevik’s own operational competence is an indication of where the balance of power between Westerners and Islam lies: by himself, with no funding, he did more damage than the eight Al-Quaeda trained and funded operatives who attacked London in July 2005. If we ever really have to fight Islam on our own ground, it will be easy. But I don’t think we will.

Rather, I suspect that at some point when the elite have no more use for the Muslims they will turn on them as they habitually do to their allies. At that point the immigrants will be driven out or forced to conform to the new culture, their free pass to to retain outmoded privileges like freedom of religion and independent exclusive institutions withdrawn.

So while Breivik is right about the existence of a universalist attack on European culture, he is mistaken in making Islam such a central aspect of it.

Since I am in part defending Breivik’s position, I must address the violence question —- could action such as his ever be justifiable?

All serious politicans are willing to kill people in a good cause: that is why all governments have armies and armed police. Most are willing to kill innocent people in a good cause: that is how we get policies like the bombing of Libya.

Of course, Breivik was not acting on behalf of a state —- does that make his violence automatically wrong?  The mainstream of thought idolises the armed rebels whose causes it agrees with. So it can’t oppose Breivik on that basis. Rather, it probably relies on the fact that the state Breivik opposes is democratic as a reason why his violence cannot be acceptable.

However, as he himself pointed out during his trial testimony, the democratic states will always take steps to ensure that views like his will not be able to advance through democracy.

So, working on widely-accepted principles, it all comes down to his views — violence against the innocent in order to overcome a state which does not allow a legitimate method to remedy its failings is, apparently, justifiable, but is Breivik actually on the path to remedy the Norwegian state’s failings?

Er, no. I don’t think he has any realistic idea of what would be a better state, and I’m sure his one-man war is not going to help create it even if he has.

But that is my judgement of his political position — one based, unlike those of most journalists who have written on the matter, on actually reading what he wrote. And, for that matter, since this shit is difficult™, a judgement that might still be wrong.

In any case, while fighting an unjust state is right according to modern mainstream principles, it is not right according to reactionary principles. Reactionaries do not believe in a right to choose one’s government, by vote or by terrorism.

As to Breivik’s vision, while he said that he “gave up on democracy”, he has not given up on democracy in the way I have given up on democracy. He meant that he had given up on being able to solve what he sees as the immediate problems through Norway’s existing democratic processes. He doesn’t, as I do, see democracy as the problem in itself, the thing that must be got rid of. Like so many others, he has fallen into the trap of believing that democracy can be “fixed”.

But my real problem with him goes further than that. He wants to build an organisation —- the PCCTS —- to fight for power on behalf of European culture. I think that cannot work. It is the fight for power itself that is the root of the problem, and by joining it you are chasing the enemy into the abyss. That is as true of fighting with carbombs and shooting sprees as it is of fighting with demonstrations and election campaigns. By being an organisation that fights for power, you become a certain kind of organisation —- you succumb to the vicious logic of propaganda and coalition-building. You also, if you succeed, come to compromise with the system and in return become implicated in its inevitable failure. No good can come of it.

What on earth can we do, if we cannot fight for power? I do like to be original, but all of this is pure Moldbug. It is the Steel Rule. We become worthy of power, and wait for it to be given to us. Or we raise children and grandchildren who will be worthy of power, and wait for it to be given to them. This is not a short-term project, but neither is Anders “2083” Breivik’s. It’s a long shot, but so is his and as Moldbug wrote, if we fail, we have done no harm, which cannot be said of a terrorist campaign.

When a system collapses, power is given away. Everyone who is fighting for power with any success is already part of the current system. When the system fails, power will be given to someone else.

Looking at it another way, there are two narratives describing what has happened to European civilisation. One is that there is a somewhat conscious movement, which Moldbug first dubbed “Crypto-Calvinism”, then “Ultra-Calvinism”, and finally “Universalism”, which has continuously dominated English-speaking society for centuries, and utterly conquered Europe in 1945, and which has some ideological principles that have been consistent throughout (such as that humans are all fundamentally the same), and others that have become ever more extreme (such as Limited Monarchy to Constitutional Monarchy to Republic to Democracy to Universal Suffrage). The elite holding these beliefs have steadily pulled the resisting masses behind them.

The other narrative, also due to Moldbug, is the cold mechanical one. Since the end of divine-right Monarchy, the logic of the struggle for power pushes an ever-wider splintering of power, as people and groups seize what fragments of influence they can, and hold on to them. Responsible decision-makers are replaced by committees, working groups become institutions and own little bits of power, and all this fragmented power is directed by factions in the unending struggle, not for any external public or even private benefit.

Breivik describes the first narrative, though he doesn’t recognise how far back the universalists go. And the narrative is real: the infamous former Labour speechwriter who said that the British government of which he was a part deliberately and surreptitiously multiplied immigration “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity” was making as blatant a declaration of culture war as it is possible to imagine.

But the second narrative is real too, and that is what Breivik does not understand. That is why he thinks that universalism can be defeated by shooting a sufficient number of universalists in the head. But universalism hasn’t won for all these years because of divine providence, or by Dawkins’ “mysterious movement of the zeitgeist”, but because the logic of competing for power favours it over reactionaries.

Breivik is obviously sane*, and obviously right that a Norwegian state that was sane and honest would execute him without blinking. The Norwegian state is not sane or honest. It is incapable of sustaining or defending itself in the very long term. That is a fact to be deplored, not, as Breivik sees it, one to be taken advantage of. When the collapse comes, the duty of replacing the old order will fall not to those who accelerated its demise, but to those who expected and explained it without accepting any responsibility for it.

* What about the probably-fictional organisation of which he claims to be a member?  I am not sure whether it exists, but I am sure Breivik knows. If it doesn’t, then it is not a delusion, rather it is a deliberate lie for the sake of propaganda: it is easier to recruit followers to an already-established organisation than to one which is yet to practically exist.

Employment Policy

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the question of employment.
It’s an unfamiliar line of thought for me — I’ve always held to the libertarian line on unemployment: it’s a result of an obstructed market, let the market clear and unemployment will not exist by definition. Subsidise unemployment through the welfare system and you’ll get more of it.
That isn’t wrong — within the libertarian framework it’s completely true. But I’ve left the framework behind. Political power will be gained and held by people who believe that gaining and holding power are always a first-order consideration. I hope for a government whose hold on power is so solid that it does not depend on interfering in the market for labour, but that is not relevant to any present government or any feasible near-future one. Welfare is here to stay (even if based on private charity rather than the state, it would still have market-distorting effects), and unemployment will therefore always need to be addressed.
In the meantime, we’re faced with questions like the one a commenter asked back when I was kicking around AI possibilities:

Don’t you think we’re already way past the point where diminishing   returns of replacing human activity with automated activity kicked   in? Most people are just not that smart, they can’t all be designers   and scientists (or can’t be made smart quickly, it is not important   which is true as practical results are similar in both cases), and   it appears to me that we, the societies of the developed countries,   don’t know how to employ these people.

Yes, in a free market these people would have jobs, even if at a wage below what is generally seen as the poverty line. But, if I’m going to be more serious than simply advocating that, I need to face the question: is the combination of politically necessary price control in the labour market with technological advance making high unemployment unavoidable?
I don’t think it has to. There are other causes to high unemployment, some of which can be treated rapidly, and some which are more long-term projects.
High taxation is one of the biggest. Doing work yourself instead of employing someone is by far the greatest area of tax avoidance. I’ve spelled out the arithmetic before: I can do an hour’s work for myself, or I can do more of my normal job and use the income to pay someone to do it. The former is tax free, the latter, at minimum, involves 40% tax on my extra income, then 20% tax on what I pay out. I have to earn £1.68 to put a pound in someone else’s pocket, without taking into account NI or VAT, which may or may not come into it as well, pushing the effective tax on the extra activity up towards 100% of the real cost. That applies to jobs around the house (leading to the dreaded DIY); it also applies, less obviously but probably more significantly, to any good or service I buy where the supplier could, by employing extra labour, provide a better or more complete service. It applies to having the supermarket deliver my goods rather than make me carry them, or even to them having someone work on a checkout rather than wave me to a self-service.
Lower taxes would directly lead to lower unemployment. Also, lower taxes on economic activity would directly lead to lower unemployment — I’ve never written about the question, but I’m pretty sure the Land Value Tax crowd are basically right. Land Value Tax is still a tax, and is still bad, but it’s less economically destructive than the taxes we currently have.
That’s one area then for attacking unemployment: reduce tax, and shift what’s left from income, sales & profit taxes to land.
Next?  Well, the education system. It’s not that it’s failing to teach people “what they need to get jobs”. Rather, the purposeless and ineffective attempts to control unacademic children are actively teaching them not to work. Being forced to do schoolwork is a fairly crappy training for doing real work, but today the bottom stratum aren’t even getting that training. The result is they’re unemployable, not for lack of skill so much as lack of socialisation. It may be only a few percent, but the risk to the employer of getting one of them, and the costs if you do, push a large swathe of the lower classes out of employability.
A demonstration of what I mean came to my mind a couple of weeks ago: a hundred years ago, some huge proportion of the population worked in domestic service. I’ve been meaning to look it up: Tim said yesterday it was 25%.
That dropped sharply from the First World War to about zero by the 1960s, in large part due to the high demand for unskilled labour from mass manufacturing industry. Now that demand has subsided (for good, and inevitably — as also pointed out yesterday by Tim, busy chap). What is the reason why we can’t have domestic service back?  We’re always hearing about how ridiculously stinking rich the the rich are getting, so it can’t possibly be that they can’t afford what the moderately rich of a century ago were happy to pay for. The answer is all too obvious — the equivalent today of the people who were domestic servants a hundred years ago are people that no sane rich person would allow into his house under any circumstance. The late twentieth-century education system prepares normal people for the easily-supervised assembly line jobs that no longer exist, but not for any role requiring any degree of trust or self-discipline. (Having said that, the mass of civilised but somewhat dim people doing largely pointless make-work in the bureaucracy would possibly be capable of roles as butlers or housekeepers supervising the helots… worth thinking about).
The education system doesn’t need to be improved, it just needs to be in large part abolished. Actually doing useful work, for the family or for someone else, is not only a better preparation for being a useful adult than our schools are, it’s probably a good deal more personally satisfying and rewarding as well. The norm should be for people to be in full-time employment by the age of 16, and 13 or 14 is probably a good idea in a lot of cases. The wealthy can do what the hell they want as long as they pay for it themselves, and a sane education system not lumbered with uneducable teenagers should be able to grab anyone from any background with the right talent into a more academic channel, as was routine in this country up until the introduction of comprehensive education in the 60s-70s.
This is a tricky change to introduce, not least because if you already have high unemployment, throwing the bulk of the 16-21 age group into the job market is going to make things worse in the short term. But in the longer term, I think it would improve the situation. Unemployment is not simply the result of lack of work available, but due to the unfitness of a chunk of the population for what work could be available, due to artificially created and prolonged adolescence. The problems raised by Robert Epstein and Lenore Skenazy are relevant here.
Other options?  Well, there’s the immigration question. Again, the libertarian reasoning is entirely correct: if an immigrant is making a living, that means he is producing more value than he is consuming; in aggregate he is making all of us better off. But if immigrants are overwhelmingly competing with poor people in providing services to rich people, on top of that aggregate benefit there is a transfer effect from poor to rich. If it is politically necessary to compensate the poor for this transfer, and if the mechanisms for doing so are unavoidably clumsy and inefficient, then the aggregate benefit can be entirely eaten up. I’m not convinced that that is practically the case, but all the steps in the argument are plausible, and so I am not convinced that it isn’t.
The same form of argument could be made for other forms of protectionism: after all, foreigners compete with natives whether they actually come here or not. But I draw the line at that with moderate confidence. There are so many different ways in which overseas trade affects the domestic economy, all of them beneficial in the aggregate, and while some of them may harm some particular interest or other, the wide distribution of harms means that for almost everyone, the net effect of free trade is positive, and for the aggregate, the effect is so enormously positive that it should not be rejected.
And the same even more strongly for technological development — it is so hugely beneficial that restraining it in order to protect a politically influential constituency from competition is always a bad policy. The reason for paying attention to unemployment and being realistic about the necessity of reducing it is to make it politically easier to hold onto the huge benefits of technology and trade, which it is disastrous to give up.
(The effect of current tax and industrial policies is mainly to encourage more investment in capital goods rather than employing low-skill labour. There is no need for that. But neither is there a need for opposite policies). 

How to Kill Democracy

Tweetable link: https://t.co/aArQQv8QQj?amp=1

I’ve heard quite a few times that we can’t get rid of democracy, because we can’t get the votes.

Now, I’m not in any great hurry to get rid of democracy. It’s not ideal, but it sort of works, and when it goes things could get messy.

However, if you wanted to do away with democracy, it wouldn’t be all that difficult. I identified the method back before it was my aim.

The introduction of postal and electronic voting makes elections enormously easy to sabotage. I ranted about the danger, back in 2005, and then gradually lost interest in the subject once I ceased to care who actually won any given election. And the main safety margin is that nobody really cares who wins enough to cheat.

But cheating and getting away with it is hard — messing things up enough that nobody knows for sure who ought to have won is much easier, just as it is easier to take down a website than to take control of it.

And what would happen, if you did successfully DOS an election?  It would be pretty spectacular. The nearest we’ve seen was the 2000 US presidential election. That stirred up a lot of trouble, but it eventually more or less settled down. That was not what I have in mind though — there was no obvious large-scale fraud then, rather the problem was that the election was so close that the ordinary minor deceptions and inaccuracies made the difference.

In a near dead-heat like that, it will be accepted that you just can’t be sure. But experts have identified a number of local elections in various counties in the US where it can’t be determined who should have won, because of problems with the voting machines. Still, those involve cases where there is no evidence of determined large-scale deliberate fraud.

If we had a general election in Britain, and it emerged that, because of fraud, it wasn’t clear who won, or that it was very close, I don’t know what would happen. We don’t have the same extreme respect for the judiciary, or even the clear formal rules, that allowed the US Supreme Court to settle Florida 2000.

I suspect that in the event, the parties and the civil service would sew it up as best they could, and the business of government would go on. But in the process it would have lost the legitimacy of democracy.

That is why it was a mistake for me to stop paying attention to voting when I stopped caring who won. Because, the way I look at democracy now, it is the impression that the government represents a popular choice that is important: the actual influence of popular will on government is both minor and mostly harmful. But it is the impression that is endangered by unreliable voting systems, so they constitute a bigger risk to the system as I see it than as a democrat would look at it.

Britain is still on paper votes, so it is only through postal votes that the system is vulnerable at the moment, and that only to a quite large-scale attack. But if the system is changed in the direction of networked or electronic voting, then we know what we have to do if we decide to get rid of democracy.

Putin

I’ve been meaning to write about Putin. A newspaper turned up at the weekend: Saturday’s Telegraph, with two multi-page features attacking him, built on a new book by a lesbian journalist with strong links to America. I also owe commenter candide3 a reply on the question of just how secure Putin’s power base is.

So, I need to write something.  This isn’t it though – for now I’m going to hide behind Peter Hitchens.

I like Vladimir Putin. I wish I did not. But I cannot help it… Mr Putin is without doubt a sinister tyrant at the head of a corrupt government. His private life and wealth are a mystery. His personality cult – bare-chested tough-guy, horseman, diver, jet pilot – is creepy and would be laughable if it were not a serious method of keeping power… Vladimir Putin, alone of all the major national leaders of our times, refuses to be pushed around by supranational bodies.

What he said.