Legal downloading begins

The BBC is reporting that Microsoft’s WMA copy-protection has been cracked, and that a program for removing the protection has been published.

I haven’t seen any details from authoritative technically literate sources yet, but assuming it’s true…

“An analyst” (Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research) said Microsoft was probably working to “close the hole” – but I suspect that might not be possible without breaking many or all WMA players out there – including portable music players that play Microsoft’s files.

If so, then from now on, people who buy WMA-protected music from online stores will be able to actually play it on any music-playing equipment they own. Paid-for downloads will be almost as high quality as illegal downloads.

What I would therefore expect would be an enormous spike in the volume of legal paid-for downloads. I would certainly start buying them myself.

This could be the best thing to happen to the music studios since the invention of the CD.

Immigration and Liberty

Chris Dillow complains that the debate over East European immigration is carried on entirely in terms of the harm or benefit to Britain, and not of the freedom of the immigrants.

I don’t think this criticism is justified. I accept the idea that British government policy should be directed at the welfare of Britons, not of all humanity. This is a basic assumption of the system – it’s why the government is elected specifically by British voters. Benefiting foreigners is, all things being equal, desirable, but it’s a low priority, as indicated by such things as foreign aid.

Further, anything else would be unstable. Imagine for the sake of argument that allowing large numbers of Poles (or Chinese, or whoever) in is extremely detrimental to Britain. If we allow it anyway on the grounds of liberty, Britain would become weaker, poorer, and so on as a result. The benefit to the immigrants themselves would be limited. Therefore I think it is right that we assume that Poles, whyever they are put on Earth, should only be put in Luton that they might enrich the Brits.

To me, though not to most people, these aren’t entirely separate questions. To me, things like liberty and privacy are good because they are generally beneficial, so I am not surprised when principled and pragmatic arguments agree.

Also, the anti-immigrant arguments in this debate are weak enough that I am happy to take them on on their own terms. Half a million Poles sounds like a lot, but I read recently there are almost as many French in Britain. There are better places to be on the dole than Britain – people come to Britain to work. The last round of panic was over the load on local authority services, which doesn’t worry me in the slightest, firstly because they are so close to useless anyway that completely destroying them would constitute trivial harm, and secondly that, since the immigrants are working and paying taxes, there should be no problem once the bureaucracy has got its head round how many people there actually are in each area.

Finally, there is the track record of history. The claim that this wave of immigration is going to destroy society might seem plausible, but they always say that, and they always turn out to be wrong. They made as much fuss about the “Boat People”, and you can hardly say now with a straight face that we couldn’t have taken 10 times as many of them. Ditto Ugandan Asians.

I have the same attitude to Global Warming. People have been saying since the beginning of recorded history that our wealth and greed would cause us to be punished with natural disasters, and they’ve always been wrong so far. Climate simulation might have a bit more going for it than the “Angry God” model but one can say with one’s eyes closed that, as with immigration, whatever rational basis there is for concern is going to get massively exaggerated, because it always does.

Political Survival

By coincidence, just after posting my prevous piece on the importance of considering political survival as a constraint on any government, the EconTalk podcast on The Logic of Political Survival came out. Like others, I found this fascinating, and not satisfied with the 88 minutes of interview with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, I bought the book, which arrived on Friday.

The book in many ways lives up to its promise, but there are a few annoyances with it. The errors in the English are quite distracting: the first chapter is titled “Reigning in the Prince”. It’s just conceivable that this is some kind of clever pun, but if so it doesn’t quite work – it looks much more like ignorance of what reining in is. The title is taken from the sentence on page 4, “On the basis of our analysis, we propose ways of reigning in not ony Hobbes’s Leviathan, but Machiavelli’s well-advised Prince as well”. That makes perfect sense if it means “reining”, but has a quite different meaning if “reigning” were really intended, as well as sloppy grammar. (That is, it could refer to ways of reigning in the context of Leviathan or The Prince. I think it doesn’t).

The other problem is more general, not specific to this book. As you can see, the book compares the authors’ theories with those of other political scientists, from Hobbes and Machiavelli to the present day. There is a glaring ommission, though: an influential political thinker who produced a large body of work looking at the same questions. I shudder to think of the sarcasm that will come my way when I tell a Marxist about a new theory that governments are necessarily constrained for their survival to act in the interests of a definable powerful subset of the population.

This is not a problem with the theory – while the “Selectorate” is in many instances identical to what some call “The Ruling Class”, in other cases it isn’t, and the reasons for both the similarities and the differences between the two concepts are illuminating. But because of that, I think the comparison would have been worth making by the authors. If the Selectorate is identifiable as a class in the Marxist sense of sharing the same relationship to the means of production, that makes it easy for the leader to produce semi-public goods that benefit the Selectorate at the expense of the rest of the population, and harder to produce goods that benefit the “Winning Coalition” at the expense of the rest of the Selectorate. Conversely, if the Selectorate cuts across classes, then many policy choices would be available to favour one class within the Selectorate at the expense of others. This will have interesting implications on the behaviour of the government within the context of the theory, which in the part I’ve so far read and in the parts I’ve skimmed, don’t seem to be studied.

Of course, there are many avenues for further development opened by the theory, and that is just one, but it is an obvious one that occurs to anyone who has, like me, a passing even if hostile aquaintance with Marxism.

I have a bit of an interest in Catholic theology, on the basis that since this is what the brightest minds half the world could produce spent about a thousand years on, it is likely to have some value, even if it is fundamentally flawed. In the same way, a large proportion of political science in the twentieth century was carried out in a Marxist framework, and while it is no doubt the worse for it, it is a stretch to dismiss it as worthless, less worthy as a point of comparison than Hobbes or Machiavelli, or to examine Lenin and Mao as political practitioners without giving any attention to the theories they expounded before coming to power.

Even if I am wrong about there being useful insights in Marxist theory that are worth looking for, it is also the case that the world today contains a large number of ex-Marxists, ex-Marxist political parties, and even ex-Marxist countries. Is it really the case that they need to forget everything they ever learned about politics? So long as the dogmatic approach is rejected, it would seem more productive to show that modern free political scientists are looking at the same questions as the Marxists in much the same way, and drawing conclusions that in some cases agree and in others disagree with aspects of Marxist political theory.

First Principles

The biggest cost (in the widest sense) of any political system is that which it expends in preventing its overthrow.

Attempting to “design” a political system without paying attention to how it will protect itself is like designing a building without paying attention to how it will stay up – architecture without gravity, castles in the air.

To our current system – the family of political structures labelled “Western Democracy”, the cost is high. It saves costs, compared to traditional autocracy, on direct counter-subversion, but spends instead on bribery and waste to pacify potential opponents. The total cost of government is comparable to, but probably lower than, that of an outright dictatorship.

This is why I am not a revolutionary. I can draw up a political system enormously superior to any currently existing – minimising waste and maximising progress and prosperity for all – but my plans do not include mechanisms for maintaining the system itself. Such mechanisms would have to be improvised – and would in all probability be improvised much as Lenin’s were.

My ideal government being smaller and lighter than Lenin’s, the ad-hoc instruments of “state security” would have an even easier job of coming to dominate the whole.

So here I sit, in the midst of waste and ignorance, attempting to chip away here and there at the very worst of what Western Democracy is producing. It is a depressing vision, as the more succesful our society is, the more waste it can afford, so the cost of politics trends ever upwards. But our lives are improving, and will continue to do so. The brakes on progress are enormously frustrating, but the best we can do is spread the ideas – the key idea that goverment is mainly waste and the less of it the better – to reduce the cost of maintaining the political system.

Another suggestion for building

My last post suggested opening up areas for New Towns in order to provide more housing.

We are in the realm of political compromise here – the ideal would be to deregulate land use more or less entirely.

In the same spirit of compromise, Mischa Balen of the Adam Smith Institute has put forward another possibility – large scale low-density housing, combined with woodland and animal habitat, across the “green belt”. The value in this is that much of the undesirable effect of more housing is specifically an effect of very high-density development, which itself is the result of releasing very small amounts of land for building.

A good idea to throw into the mix (I haven’t read the actual pamphlet yet).

The housing puzzle

chris dillow is worried about high house prices.

In my day job, I point out that a single person must be in the top 3% of earners if s/he is to afford the average house. My gut instinct is that this is not a desirable state of affairs.

I certainly would go along with chris’s instincts. In general it is good if stuff is cheaper and we can have more of it, and housing is not any different. Better housing improves quality of life, and improves efficiency as people are able to store stuff, stay with friends, and so on. Not least, it is good for future generations – an apartment is OK for a single or a childless couple, but if you want to reproduce you need more space.

chris says “A few months ago, I’d have said: ‘nothing, prices will fall and the market will solve the problem.'” – a rare misjudgement. The market may be able to supply, for instance, heroin, at a reasonable price to all who want it, but as I observed previously, the government’s war on housing is vastly more effective than its war on drugs.

chris asks, “what should be done?” – well, what should be done is to end the war on housing. The war on housing is driven, as I see it, by two factors:

The first is the political influence of house-owners. Allowing house prices to fall to a reasonable level would hit very badly those who currently own houses. (It might also hurt those who lent them the money – although a large number of new cheap houses coming on the market and being bought by first-time buyers would compensate the lenders somewhat for the bad debt on the currently high-priced houses.) As I observed previously, that is only part of the impact; increasing the supply of houses will reduce the price of houses in the normal way, but it will also redistribute value away from houses that are ideally situated given the current setup:

The best places to live are on the edge between the city, with its civilised amenities, and the countryside, with its space and pretty landscapes and fresh air. It is expensive to live in such places, so the people living there are the rich and the powerful. If you build on the countryside next to them, you’re having negligible effect on the balance of the country as a whole, but you have a severe effect on those rich and powerful people who no longer have the best of both worlds, but are now part of the urban sprawl.

The second factor is the illusion that Britain is overcrowded. I have heard it suggested that this is only ever a smokescreen covering the sectional interest of property-owners, but I am sure many intelligent people believe it, even when it would be in their interest to increase the housing supply.

Again, what should be done? In theory, the interests in continuing artificial scarcity of housing should be at least balanced by the interests of those who would benefit by ending it. If the property-owners are able to maintain their advantage, it might be because, unsurprisingly, they are group – one could perhaps even say a class – with disproportionate political influence.

But to a large extent I think the scales are being tipped by the ignorant – those who would dearly love an affordable house, but not at the price of Britain being “tarmaced over”. We need to scream from the rooftops the vast amount of land in this country being used for nothing more useful than unnecessary subsidised industrial farming. The media always measure drugs seizures in terms of the retail “street price” – we should always refer to farmland in terms of the value it would have if built on – say 500 million pounds per square mile.

The other avenue to ending the war is to avoid the secondary effect on existing property-owners by building “new towns”. This could be done either privately or by the government (obviously, I would prefer to see it done privately), by allowing building over large areas which are currently undeveloped. The current owners of the land would obviously benefit, but even rural dwellers outside the designated area would be winners rather than losers, as their property would be in key high-end commuter territory for the new town.

I emphasise this is inferior to permitting building generally – I put it forward as potentially more acceptable politically.

The problem with the plan is transport – the lavish provision of the London and “Network South-East” rail and road networks is sufficient to strongly discourage anyone from going elsewhere. It might be possible to have the developer of the new town responsible for providing transport links, but that has a danger of turning into a vast “public-private partnership” corruption-fest. In any case, public projects such as the 2012 Olympics development (spit) will be tying up resources to the extent that it will be difficult to provide effective transport at any price.

I just want to finish by saying that I consider this issue the single biggest problem facing Britain, ahead of war, terrorism, global warming, crime, obesity, measles and Gordon Brown.

Gaps in defences

This is getting silly – most of my posts these days start out “A year ago, I said…”

Anyway, getting on for a year ago, I said:

The police have moved quite quickly – it emerged in September 2001 that some of the US hijackers were already under investigation, but nothing concrete had come up, so they were being left alone. As soon as they struck, the authorities were able to quickly track down their backgrounds. The same may well be the true here, and no blame would neccessarily attach to the police or security services – it could be very difficult to make the jump from vague suspicion to grounds for arrest.

On one hand, it seems that rather more information was available to the FBI in 2001 than we knew of.

On the other, my speculations about the July bombers have turned out to be accurate.

I find the news encouraging; it is somewhat reassuring to think that successful attackers slipped through our defenses rather than that we are wide open.

How do we prevent others slipping through? That’s not obvious, but one thing we can say with confidence is that wider information-gathering is not what we need. Terrorist plots are not being carried out without the security services getting any sniff of them. What they need might be better management, it might be more resources, or it might be easier access to specific kinds of information on suspected individuals – what might be termed “deeper” intelligence-gathering. (Or, of course, some combination).

Even illiberal measures such as ID cards have to be considered in this context. If it were easier or cheaper to “drill down” from having suspicions of one individual to getting enough information to act, then that might have happened in July 2005.

However, it’s hard to see what could have triggered action. What arouses suspicion seems to be contacts with known terrorist sympathisers. What would trigger action? Probably only getting hold of actual plans or materials for an attack – and those are hard to get. You can’t follow every suspect around with armed police, (which is a good thing) – if the amount of preparation for the attack is kept to the minimum, it’s very difficult to prevent it.

That’s not a reason for despair. The sort of attacks that can be carried out with little preparation of the sort that risks exposure are the ones we’ve already seen – kitchen-made explosives or poisons, small arms, sabotage. These are not a threat to our society, and not a significant threat to us as individuals when compared to the non-terrorist risks we run every day.

The IRA was able to to mount much more serious operations – mortar attacks on Downing Street, truck-size bombs, sustained campaigns. I feel in less danger from terrorism now than at any time since I moved to London in 1989.

If counterterrorism is basically working well, what are the lessons? More of the same, I think. Gradual increases in resources for intelligence and policing, and for analysis of intelligence – nothing that will disrupt an organisational structure that is functioning adequately; nothing that will carry too much cost or cause too much disturbance. No overreaction to the fact that small-scale attacks will continue to slip through the net.

On Badges

Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek asks:

I don’t understand this at all. Why would anyone care who has [Bjorn Borg’s] trophies? Its not like anyone is going to think that the highest bidder actually won them rather than bought them.

Isn’t it? Perhaps not in this specific case, but people in resenting the idea that the trophies might come to be owned by a private buyer are applying a general wish that badges of achievement be held by those that have earned them.

I think that’s a reasonable preference. There are lots of ways of displaying wealth, but fewer ways of displaying past exellence at tennis. Turning badges of achievement into symbols of wealth destroys information.

A better example of the same phenomenon is here. I might already know who won the Wimbeldon Mens’ Singles in 1980, but anyone on seeing a Blue Peter Badge on someone’s lapel might easily assume they’d earned it. If they can be had for a fiver on eBay, that information is lost to us.

There is a complicating factor when such badges become historical artifacts – at that point it is useful for them to end up in the hands of a collector or a museum, where they are linked to their historical context, rather than a descendant of the original winner of the honour. But while the winner is alive, people prefer that the badges stay in their possesion.

To summarise, there is money, and there is honour of achievement. Money can be, to some extent, a sign of honour of achievement, but in general they are different things. People like to be able to honour achievers, and so prefer that those symbols of achievement be usable to determine who is to be honoured.

(Of course, one can still ask why it is that people want to honour achievers, but that’s a much wider question).

What to do about this? We can attempt to restrict – by law or contract – the resale of badges of honour by those that earn them, but the enforcement costs are large, as the BBC is no doubt finding.

What does work is to keep the enforcement within the “system of honour” itself, which indeed is what people do. To buy a badge of honour is itself seen as shameful and dishonourable, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, to sell one likewise.

(The same principles underlie in part the loans-for-peerages controversy, but that sort of thing is historically so common that it’s difficult to be sincerely upset).

Lord Bingham's Judgement

A year ago I wrote:

I’m less interested in whether religious traditions should override school uniform policies, than in the bizarreness of the legal argument that the Appeal Court used.

Their finding seems to be that the School erred by not considering whether their uniform policy breached the pupils’ human rights. If they had considered it, they could have decided, as the lower court did, that the uniform policy was fine, and they would have been OK. They lost because they didn’t have a piece of paper on file saying that they had taken human rights into account.

[…] This trend of legal and regulatory requirement is intensely stupid and irritating. It replaces restrictions on actions and policies with thought crimes. I mean that precisely; the fault of Denbigh School was not in its actions but in the way it decided its actions.

Yesterday Lord Bingham of Cornill ruled:

31. Thirdly, and as argued by Poole in his article cited above, pages 691-695, I consider that the Court of Appeal’s approach would introduce “a new formalism” and be “a recipe for judicialisation on an unprecedented scale”. The Court of Appeal’s decision-making prescription would be admirable guidance to a lower court or legal tribunal, but cannot be required of a head teacher and governors, even with a solicitor to help them. If, in such a case, it appears that such a body has conscientiously paid attention to all human rights considerations, no doubt a challenger’s task will be the harder. But what matters in any case is the practical outcome, not the quality of the decision-making process that led to it.

Lord Hoffman concurred:

68. […] In domestic judicial review, the court is usually concerned with whether the decision-maker reached his decision in the right way rather than whether he got what the court might think to be the right answer. But article 9 is concerned with substance, not procedure. It confers no right to have a decision made in any particular way. What matters is the result: was the right to manifest a religious belief restricted in a way which is not justified under article 9.2? The fact that the decision-maker is allowed an area of judgment in imposing requirements which may have the effect of restricting the right does not entitle a court to say that a justifiable and proportionate restriction should be struck down because the decision-maker did not approach the question in the structured way in which a judge might have done. Head teachers and governors cannot be expected to make such decisions with textbooks on human rights law at their elbows. The most that can be said is that the way in which the school approached the problem may help to persuade a judge that its answer fell within the area of judgment accorded to it by the law.

What more need I say?

Links:

High Court case
Court of Appeal case
Law Lords case
2005 statement by Luton council
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