highlight – Page 4

Detaching from politics

I do not read a newspaper. The only television I watch is “Doctor Who”, “Strictly Come Dancing”, snooker, and occasionally “Mythbusters” if I’m around when the kids are watching it. I used to to watch “Have I Got News For You”, but now I find it too unpleasant to watch anything that takes politics as seriously as it does. I cannot remember ever being able to watch “Question Time” or any serious political reporting without descending into a screaming rage.

Should you be like me? Absolutely not. I am not nearly detached enough from politics. I look at Google News. I follow people on Twitter who talk about current affairs. I see the headlines on the newsstands. All these are things that should be avoided as if they were heroin or crystal meth. Maybe a better analogy would be that they are ritually unclean and one should be cleansed or purged after exposure to them.

An example of my contaminated, junkie state is that I became aware, somehow, that Jeremy Clarkson had said that striking public sector workers should be shot. O, for a mode of living by which I could have avoided knowing such a thing!

Now I find out, from Language Log, that when he made those remarks, not only was he joking, as everybody already knows, but he was explicitly, in so many words, parodying himself and his “BBC token right-wing nutjob” persona.

With the proper perspective, this makes no difference. Whether he was making a joke about the strikers, making a joke about his other jokes, or even if he was completely serious, it still wouldn’t be important enough for any intelligent person to give it a moment’s thought. But for those without the proper perspective; for those, like myself, who are far too wrapped up in the political process, in that we look at the headlines on Google News a couple of times a day and know who the Prime Minister is, it is a vital reminder. This thing, which was obviously a pointless fuss about something of absolutely no importance, was actually a pointless fuss about nothing at all.

And every other story is the same.”Nick Clegg has committed the government to a crackdown on excessive executive pay”. What does that mean? It means nothing. It means no more than that Jeremy Clarkson wants to shoot strikers. It means less than that Holly Valance’s paso doble was better than Chelsee Healey’s jive. Nick Clegg is a meaningless figurehead of a meaningless junior coalition partner involved in meaningless posturing, while the decisions actually being made, which have an effect somewhere between nothing and negligible, are being made elsewhere. That sounds like I am positing some hidden conspiracy—if only! The real decisions are being made essentially at random, swayed by forces that are as large and as ill-understood as the climate, and by whoever by accident happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, for reasons that are as remote from anything we might care about as a butterfly’s wings in Brazil.

Teach us to care and not to care.

Teach us to sit still.

Slavery

One issue that comes up when you declare that the last 400 years of political “progress” are a bad thing is slavery. Lobbyists, the International Olympic Committee, sustainability facilitators, interior design licensing, bank bailouts, the Milk Marketing Board, these are indeed changes for the worse, but are you saying you want to bring back slavery?

There are a couple of answers to that. One is to argue that the lot of many in the modern world is no better than slavery, so that, even if slavery is bad, it’s not necessarily worse than what we have now.

In “The Servile State”, Hiliaire Belloc predicted that capitalism would necessarily lead ultimately to nationalised slavery, as the state would be forced to take responsibility for the poor landless, and would still need them to work.

That things haven’t evolved quite as Belloc predicted is due only to the decline in the social usefulness of unskilled work. When, from time to time, the question comes up of forcing the unemployed to do some kind of government-organised work in exchange for their handouts, there is only a little opposition premised on the basis that it is unfair to inhumane to the slaves themselves. The idea fails on the grounds that it will cost more than paying them not to work, and that it will constitute cheap competition against those that are in jobs. The fact that the unemployable are in essence slaves of the state is not widely disputed.

(Of course, the distributivists did not themselves intend this argument as a defence of older forms of slavery; they sought a compromise between feudalism and capitalism)

The true argument for slavery is this: that those who are not able to support themselves are necessarily slaves, and abolition ultimately amounts to an exercise in creative linguistics.

A liberal will object, correctly, that ability to support oneself is a can of worms. The ‘inability’ of the propertyless is an artificial condition. None of us are able to support ourselves if every hand is against us, and very few would manage in the hypothetical, and impossible, state where neigbours neither helped nor hindered us. The ability of a particular person to support himself is a social fact as much as a physical one.

Even so, given any social arrangement, there are those who can, in and with that society, support themselves, and those who cannot. The distributivists aimed, admirably, for a society of smallholders in which all could live free, but even if their plans were implemented there would still be some failures.

The natural arrangement for such failures has been demonstrated for us by the Irish travellers of Leighton Buzzard. If a person cannot live independently, someone must take charge of him, and if they can profit by doing so, then a solution has been found.

It is alleged that the workers in the charge of the travellers were not looked after at all well. That may be so, though a significant proportion of those “rescued” appear willing to go back. But when this natural arrangement is illegal, and therefore carried out only among that section of the population which cannot be policed without the UN getting involved, it is not reasonable to expect it to be done very impressively.

The conditions of slavery are a matter of compromise: legitimately a matter of public policy. The bulk importation and inhumane handling of captured tribesmen from a remote continent quite understandably gave slavery a bad name. I am not here to argue for any and all forms of slavery. However, drawing the line of what is unacceptable to include all forms of coercion is clearly an error when so many cannot actually live adequately without being coerced somehow. There have been many varieties of slavery, and I will use the term serfdom to emphasise a distinction from the form of slavery most familiar to us from history and fiction, but not to pretend that I am not talking about a form of slavery.

Back to those conditions: ideally, all those capable of freedom would be free, and the incapable should be given the best chance of becoming both capable and free. But there needs to be some compromise here. The welfare state is geared to the capable but unfortunate, is grossly unsuitable for the most incapable, while at the same time dragging far too many of the marginally capable down into dependency. There seems ample room to improve on it with a system of humane serfdom under which a serf is subject to a lord who his responsible for his support and humane treatment. Such an arrangement would probably require a long-term commitment on both sides, in order to work adequately. The lord has insufficient motivation to improve the serf’s knowledge and behaviour if he can wander out onto the job market as soon as he has learned enough skill and discipline to do so. I think it is essential that such a step would require some compensation to the lord, or a minimum period, or both. At the same time, every capable person who is not free is a cost of the sytem, so there should be some calibration to minimise that cost. It is worth bearing in mind that assisting those who would most benefit from exiting serfdom – by raising the necessary compensation – would be an obvious and worthy aim of charity.

All this really only leaves one question to answer; one which has probably occured to the reader, which is, “are you actually serious you mad loony???!??”

My answer is, “kind of”. The argument above is not presented to convince: I am not convinced by it myself. Rather, as I intimated initially, I am exploring the limits of the reactionary position.

If slavery is unthinkably evil, then the political wisdom of most historical civilisations is basically disqualified by it. If it is defensible, even in some limited way, then that wisdom becomes relevant again, not as infallible authority, but as something to be taken into account. Do I want to reintroduce medieval serfdom? It’s not high on my to-do list. But I refuse to accept that political thought begins in the 1780s.

Behind the Phone Hacking story

The story about the News of the World illicitly obtaining mobile phone voicemail messages for use in their stories has been around for years, but in the last couple of weeks it has gone stratospheric.

The sudden jump in perceived importance has looked suspicious to some — I was out of the country at the time, but it seems to have started up around the 4th of July, and none of the allegations involved were actually new, though possibly they were better substantiated than previously. (It is a hazard that faces every Private Eye subscriber that stories get mainstream attention only after one is bored of reading about them for years).

On the other hand the timing may be in significant part due to long delays in the criminal investigation; delays that are plausibly suspected to be due to the offenders’ close links to senior politicians in all parties and to the police.

There is a air of fake outrage about the whole thing. The facts of the case are reasonably clear, but the attitudes struck don’t quite ring true.

Every fictional investigative journalist has his contacts in the police to supply information, often in exchange for gifts. Telephone company contacts are a staple also. Further, the duo of the reporter and the private investigator/hacker describes the protagonists of the epochal Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

That probably isn’t the point though. Journalists get a lot of leeway when researching stories about the powerful that is denied them when dredging up sex scandals about celebrities and sob stories from crime victims — the sort of muck-raking that has been the News of the World’s core business for a century. The fictional journalists generally resort to the illegal acquisition of information at the dramatic stage in the story where they know roughly what they are going to print but just need a little more, which they can’t get any other way. They don’t usually just fish for dirt in celebrities’ voicemails because it’s less work than going outside, as their real-life counterparts seem to have been doing.

All the same, I am far from convinced that what has been going on was restricted to the News International stable, or that it is substantially different from what has happened for decades. Someone else must remember “Benji the Binman”, even if bribing servants for gossip is not as widespread an activity today as it was in the 1920s.

Obviously the most important questions are about the political power of the press — the power to topple governments, thwart investigations, shape the public perception of events. And I think that is source of the fakeness, because that is a subject which it is impossible to address rationally in public.

The reason is that even asking the question undermines the assumptions on which the rationale for democracy rests. Citizens have votes because they are autonomous. If voters can be swayed in large numbers by newspapers (as everyone knows is the case), then they are not autonomous at all. To ask who should be able to decide how other people vote, and under what conditions and restrictions, is to produce cognitive dissonance in any democrat.

The trick is to get outraged by the political power the press has, without admitting where that power actually comes from — the malleability of the irresponsible voter. Only when actual malpractice by the press is found can the suppressed outrage be expressed, and then it is multiplied, since at other times the evil of the press is just as real, but cannot be articulated without admitting the basic flaw in democracy. Vince Cable’s demise exemplified the previous situation: he could “declare war” on Rupert Murdoch, but he could not satisfactorily explain why. Everyone knew why, but it could not be put into words, and so he was sacked.

Hence the situation today. The malpractice was real, and deplorable, but the outrage is out of proportion, because the true crimes of the press are entirely respectable, and nobody can imagine a way to put a stop to them.

Authority and Anarchy

Aretae has a problem with authority.

I’ve never been able to understand authority as anything other than thugs with bigger sticks

Well, sure. That goes without saying. But thugs with bigger sticks are a fact of life, unless you set out yourself to be the biggest thug of all. Which, despite his having “chosen reason over authority”, does not seem to have been Aretae’s plan (I’m not sure exactly how to go about it, but I doubt it would leave much time for cookery).

This is a step back from our previous discussion, because it’s not about formalism versus democracy, or monarchy versus neocameralism, it’s about law versus anarchy.

The metaphor I would prefer, though, is not a “step back”, but a step down. Morality, or “Right Conduct”, like system architectures, has layers*.

The base layer is absolute imperatives. These pretty much have to be supernatural, or else non-existent. Aretae believes that nobody can give him an order that he absolutely must obey. I agree. At that layer, I am an anarchist:

There is no God but Man
Man has the right to live by his own law
blah blah blah…
Man has the right to kill those who would thwart those rights.

Having deified my own reason and my own appetites above all alleged authority, I can now follow them to get what I want.

The technology risk/governance types in a large organisation come up with rules about what a programmer on the coalface is allowed to do to the company’s precious systems. They frequently come up with rules for application code, and rules for configuration. If they’re not careful, or not expert, they end up with definitions that either classify java bytecode as configuration for the jvm, or else classify users’ spreadsheets as application code. Code and configuration really aren’t different things, they’re just different layers. They smell the same.

If Aretae starts to construct rules of thumb for how to act by his own reason for his own appetites, those rules will smell a lot like morality. They may not actually be ultimate imperatives that he has to obey, but then java bytecode isn’t actually machine instructions that are executed by a CPU.

So when I argue for authority, I do so not on the basis of ultimate morality, but on the basis of what works better for me. I don’t shy away from the words, however, because of the remarkable resemblance between what I reason to be the most utilitarian form of government, and what was once believed to have been imposed by supernatural forces. It is too close to be coincidental — I think for most people, they would be better off accepting the old morality and getting on with their cooking.

Further, the “no authority” attitude is not antithetical to formalism. The real opponents of formalism are those who do believe that some forms of government have an ultimate moral legitimacy that others lack. Aretae and I believe that all governments are ultimately “thugs with bigger sticks”, and the argument is not about which has more moral authority, but about which works better for us. That argument of course remains unresolved, but that’s because TSID, not because of different fundamental assumptions.

* Also like onions. And ogres. Both of which smell.

Political Formula

I wrote the other day that you cannot just create a state of any particular design. Why even discuss designs of states, then?

What I am hoping to take part in is the building of a political formula that will eventually produce a better form of government. To borrow the metaphor used by biologists to explain the role of genes in development, it’s not a blueprint, it’s a recipe.

Political formulae were brought up by Mencius Moldbug in his post Democracy as an Adaptive Fiction. “A political formula is a belief that makes the ruled accept their rulers”. But Moldbug understates just how adaptive the fiction is. He says, “An adaptive fiction is a misperception of reality that, unlike most such misperceptions, manages to outcompete the truth”. But it is more than that. A democratic state survives because of the adaptive fiction that democracy is a desirable form of government. But if that fiction were to collapse, so would the state — and it would be messy. In the short run, the false belief that democracy is the best form of government is adaptive not just for the government, but for the believers themselves.

And vice versa. While the political formula of democracy lasts, no undemocratic form of government will work very well. One might be imposed by force, but the force will cause at least as much damage as our democracy does today.

Therefore what I am pushing is not a program of monarchism or any other formalism, but rather the political formula that will support it and make it work well. The formula comes first, and the government later.

The key element of the political formula is that governing is a task, and, other things being equal, those doing that task will do it better if they are not interfered with. I then go further and claim that this is a vital principle that it is worth making sacrifices to maintain — that even if the current ruler is blatantly making a mess of things, in all but the most extreme circumstances it is better in the long run to let it happen and hope for better weather than to act to sort things out and set a precedent that in the long run will lead all the way back to democracy.

There are a handful of minor ideas that go with it, like belief in the value of the virtues of personal loyalty, family loyalty and patriotism. They are not essential, but they help.

We could throw in the divine right of kings, but I’d rather not. I don’t actually believe it’s true, and the problem with a false premiss of that sort is that, even if its first order effects are beneficial, the most able reasoners will reason from it to ever more lunatic conclusions. While our democracy actually works moderately well, many of its worst effects are due to the absurd theorems derived correctly from its political formula.

It is argued by some — Bruce Charlton, for instance — that it is not possible to create respect for authority in a culture which is secular and largely atheist. They could be right. Atheism and Democracy came in as partners and reinforced each other, and now I am trying to keep the atheism and lose the democracy.

I have reasons for thinking it possible. As the old order died, there were those who tried to retain it who had a very cynical view of the religious angle. I found a lovely quote recently:

he allowed, indeed, of the necessity and legality of Resistance in some extraordinary cases … [he] was of opinion that this ought to be kept from the knowledge of the people, who are naturally too apt to resist. That the Revolution was not to be boasted of and made a precedent, but we ought to throw a mantle over it, and rather call it Vacancy or Abdication.

That is Bishop Hooper (I think this one), described in “Tudor England” by Barry Coward. “Resistance” here means opposing the rightful ruler, and “the Revolution” is the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. Consistent with my formula, Hooper believed the revolution was a good move but a bad precedent. Note that, though a bishop, he is reasoning on entirely secular grounds.

He and the other Tories of the time hoped to restore the form of monarchic government with new personnel. They lost, but I don’t believe their loss was inevitable. They had majority support in the country, but lacked the intellectual elite (again, I recommend The Kit-Cat Club by Ophelia Field). However, as usual, Left and Right in this debate had differing visions of what the results of “progress” would be, and those on the Right were proved much more correct by history. That is why I do not believe I am attempting to reassemble an exploded bomb back to the moment before explosion. If the Whigs had known then what we know now, most of them would not have been Whigs.

On Over-Mighty Subjects

Even a king has to negotiate, Aretae says. Doesn’t that mean that every government is a coalition, with all the nasty effects that entails?

Certainly a monarch will make deals — with customers and suppliers. Nike threatens to move its factory unless it gets a better tax rate? That sounds like it might be a good deal. Reducing tax is, for the monarch, giving away cash out of his own pocket, but if he’s getting value for money, why not? That doesn’t mean that Nike are suddenly insiders in the coalition, or threats to royal power.

Ah, but now the CEO of Pineapple Computer Co is on the phone. He has a bit of a problem with a foreign journalist who has been investigating worker suicides in the Pineapple factory. Has Your Majesty heard that Queen Tamsin of Lower Congo has just created a duty-free enterprise zone for technology industries? Of course, that’s of no real interest to him, given Pineapple’s close relationship with Your Majesty. It’s not as if he could trust Queen Tamsin to make an awkward media problem just go away…

Yes indeed, it’s only natural that Your Majesty wouldn’t want to interfere in details like that. It’s a matter for the provincial judge, after all. Although, he is getting a bit old… these personnel matters are such a drag. For instance, Pineapple’s local legal affairs director is looking for a career change, says he wants to do “public service” of some kind. I bet he’d love to become a judge here. He would handle investigations of industrial accidents, to either workers or visiting journalists, with all the appropriate diligence.

Now is there a coalition?

It looks like the king is starting to give away power, rather than just discounts. In principle, he could dismiss the company’s chosen judge at any time, but he’d be starting a fight that he started out trying to avoid. And the longer the company’s foothold in power lasts, the more it will come to seem like an established right.

On top of that, he’s opening himself to blackmail; he may not have voters to pander to, but there’s a level of bad publicity that can be seriously damaging to his interests.

It is conceivable that such compromises could accumulate to the point where the king is just one player among several jostling for control. Such things have happened historically, though usually from a point where the monarch is much less than absolute to begin with (as most historical monarchs were).

It’s also obviously the case that a state needs some minimum level of power to be able to resist outside influences. A backward, penniless third world country simply cannot be independent, under a monarchy or under any other structure of government.

I think it’s the case, though, that a very large concentration of power is much more stable than a more even division. It is when your power is weak that you find you need to give away more of it, and outside influences can play one element of the coalition against another; on the other hand, for a strong ruler, small delegations of authority really can be taken back if the delegate shows signs of having ideas beyond his station*. Historical monarchs, though mainly less powerful than I am hoping future monarchs will be, were jealous of their power as a matter of principle, and reluctant to tolerate extensions of rivals’ scope.

That retention of power does not come for free, of course. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, rapid economic and technological change is disruptive to any political order. Any political system is likely to try to restrain change that is threatening to those currently in power. Otherwise, it will swing power in a somewhat random direction.

I would prefer to have unrestrained technological change, but I don’t think it’s on offer. Where it has been allowed in the past, I think that has been where an interest group has come to power on the back of a technological change, and has had to support the principle at least temporarily to justify their own position, or where the group in power has simply not recognised the threat that technology holds to them.

In this as in other matters, the more secure the regime, the more confident it will be of being able to benefit from technology while riding the shocks.

And once again, note that the chief value of our current arrangements come, not directly from the division of powers, or from the accountability of elections, but from the security that the regime as a whole has, due to its universally respected right to be in charge. The ruling establishment, large and diffuse as it is, has nevertheless imposed gradually a whole lot of changes that would have been unthinkable when my parents were the age I am now. If they are restrained at all, it is only in the pace of what they can do, not in its limits.

Aretae could argue that the very size of the establishment means that more lunatic ideas are ruled out by a process of averaging. On the other hand, that is counteracted by the effect of groupthink, and the sincere belief among members of the establishment that they really are the only people who matter. Megalomania is an occupational hazard of rulers, but a lone king is likely to notice when he is in a small minority — our rulers seem genuinely oblivious.

* It’s not relevant to the question, but I’m actually curious about ideas like that “beyond his station”; in Britain, at least, the moral principles that go with aristocracy are old-fashioned, slightly comical to most, and violently detested by some, but they are still very familiar. It was essential to the old system that only the right sort of people could hold influential positions. It was never a closed caste, but you had to at least show that you respected the hierarchy and were committed to it before you could be allowed into it. It is very important to the stability of the system that actual power stays where it belongs; outsiders can live and prosper, but they must stay outsiders. The worst case is when the proper authorities are secretly under the control of outsiders, as in G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much”.

Edmund Burke on the Libya situation

Highly topical: Burke talking about the attitude of the Revolutionary French government to peace negotiations in 1796, from the first “Letter on a Regicide Peace“

The first paper I have seen (the publication at Hamburgh) making a shew of that pacific disposition, discovered a rooted animosity against this nation, and an incurable rancour, even more than any one of their hostile acts. In this Hamburgh declaration, they choose to suppose, that the war, on the part of England, is a war of Government, begun and carried on against the sense and interests of the people; thus sowing in there very overtures towards peace the seeds of tumult and sedition: for they never have abandoned, and never will they abandon, in peace, in war, in treaty, in any situation, or for one instant, their old steady maxim of separating the people from their government.

It is impossible for a democracy to make peace with a non-democracy. Overthrowing non-democracies is a permanent foreign policy aim of any democracy.

Compare with John Redwood, taking a moderate position, this Wednesday:
“We would all like the Libyan government to behave better, and would like democratic forces to be allowed to protest and to seek peaceful change” (my emphasis).

Obviously I’m not specifically having a go at Redwood, his blog happened to be the next one I read. Almost nobody would disagree.

If our governments make peace, or even alliance, with a non-democratic regime, it goes without saying that they will still wish to overthrow it given an opportunity.

Gadaffi thought he had a deal in 2003: he made a whole lot of concessions to the “international community”, and the US would stop trying to overthrow him. And it did, really. Until the moment when he appeared to look weak, and the entire democratic world went in for the kill.

Sandeep Baliga points out the obvious lesson of these events for the likes of North Korea. It is a simple fact, so obvious to us that we don’t ever see it spilled out, that the democratic world will never cease to wish to remove the NK regime, whatever if offers, whatever it does, short of calling elections to abolish itself.

No peace is possible; only a ceasefire that will vanish the moment that the regime’s grip on power is weakened. Not even allies like Egypt or Pakistan are safe.

Actually Existing Monarchy

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

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

Stop sniggering at the back!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anomaly UK

I’ve been doing this for over six years now, and some of the first things I posted I’d written up to a year previously. I want to recap over the major propositions that define what a newcomer would find.

Democracy

Most people would be better off in a society with minimal government as advocated by the libertarian movement. However, this is against the interests of politicians who need to use patronage to defeat their rivals, and therefore is not achievable under democracy or under any other political system.

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

Back in Democracy, for those not being directly promised bribes by one candidate or another, the amount of predictable improvement in policy by electing one candidate rather than another is often outweighed by the difference in entertainment value between the candidates, as estimated using the market prices of entertainment. Democratic politics can therefore be seen as a small section of the (huge) entertainment industry. That is not to say that government is insignificant, just that the changes that can be made to government by democratic politics are.

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

Climate

The Climate Change debate is about politics, not science. The question is whether the small chance that disastrous change will happen but can be averted by a concerted global programme of austerity justifies the costs of such a programme. The dangers are exaggerated by those who support austerity or transnational government or both. The dangers are minimised by those who support prosperity or small-scale government or both.

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

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

Global Politics

I think the arguments used to advocate the Iraq War were legitimate, but that the costs of the war, both to the OIF alliance and to everybody else, outweighed the benefits and it was therefore a mistake. There were people who correctly anticipated this, but I wasn’t one of them; I was a “don’t know”.

The major competing political forces in the world are the EU’s corporatist totalitarianism and the USA’s residual individualism. No other world power or ideology – including Russia, China and radical Islamism – comes close to challenging either of them.

Many foreign countries are crap places to live, but I don’t think there is any strategy for improving them by military action that will have overall beneficial results, although it might get lucky now and again. I think it is more beneficial to respect the sovereignty of other countries’ governments, even where they are very nasty.

Copyright exists to correct a market failure: that the creation of new valuable information benefits anyone who obtains a copy, but the costs are concentrated on the creator. Like all interventions to correct market failures, there are dangers, including capture of the regulatory structure by concentrated producer interests, which has clearly been demonstrated by retroactive extension of copyright terms. Also, as with other such interventions, it is not obvious that the market cannot find its own solutions to internalise the externality, nor is it obvious that the costs of regulation and the deadweight losses do not outweigh the benefits of the correction. Getting rid of copyright might be an overall benefit, although it would be dangerous. The evidence is overwhelming that reducing the scope of copyright would be beneficial, and that regulation aimed at suppressing technologies that are used to evade copyright enforcement is very harmful.

Free Software is cool. The overhead of protecting copyright in software is very damaging to the efficiency of the software production process and to the quality of the product.

his post will remain as a kind of “index” to the blog, and I update it if my positions change. For comparison, an older version is here

Degenerate Formalism

Aretae has responded to my defence of formalism:

My major objection is not North Korea, but china from 1000BC to 1900AD or Japan ~1500-1850. Stable society with stable-ish rulers stagnate hard. In neither case was maintaining rule a big deal…but in both cases, you had enormous periods of malthusian stagnation. That’s what scares the shit out of me about the formalist prescription is that the Game theory seems to guarantee that path.

This time the criticism is not that the leader untrammeled by democracy will be too rapacious, but instead too unambitious — happily sitting at the top of a stable but stagnating civilisation.

Once again, true formalism has an easy answer: as in any underperforming enterprise, the CEO of a stagnating sovcorp will draw the attention of investors who believe that by changing management they can get an improved return. They will buy the shares, call an emergency general meeting, and have the management replaced. Their fully-legal hostile takeover will be bloodless, as the share-purchasing crypto protocols ultimately give them control over the keys that activate the guns.

And again, I don’t buy all that. Mencius described the joint-stock sovcorp as an advance on the “family business” sovcorp, or hereditary absolute monarchy. Formalism without magic guns is just royalism — perhaps we could call it “degenerate Formalism”, as there is just one share of voting stock and it is indivisible.

So, is Formalism in its degenerate form susceptible to this kind of stagnation? I do not feel able to discourse adequately on three millenia of Chinese history. My impression of the last thousand is not of permanent stagnation, but of a complacency that set in after some centuries of being more technically and economically advanced than any neighbour. Success always carries a danger of such complacency, but success is nevertheless worth aiming for.

Japan, similarly, being sufficiently strong and advanced to be quite safe from its only neighbours, made a conscious decision to rest on its laurels, which only ceased to work when the world shrank around it.

No European country made any such abdication of striving for greater wealth and power, not because of different political arrangements, but because the competition between powers never waned.

Malthusian, is, I think, a red herring. Malthus was right about a world where agriculture was the main activity. Adding more people to the same agricultural land produced diminishing returns. It is conceivable that similar contstraints could return, but it does not seem imminent. Again, forms of government are not the determining factor.

On the other hand, it must be recognised that for any government, rapid growth, and particularly growth driven by technological change, is potentially destabilising. The key is that it unpredictably makes different groups in society more and less powerful, so that any coalition is in danger of rival groups rapidly gaining enough power to overwhelm it. Back with Malthus, if one group of families owns land, you can predict that they will continue to own land for many generations. But if another group is powerful because of trade, or manufacturing, or entertainment, they might be bust in ten years’ time. That is why the stability of feudalism is unlikely to return.

There are two circumstances in which the natural tendency of government to restrain technological advance is avoided. One is if it is as easy as possible for the newly rich to take power. That way, whatever the new technology is, those who benefit from it are in charge, and they will drive it on. The other is to totally detach power from wealth creation. Then the ruler will not care who is doing well, provided the country is wealthy enough for him to take a generous cut. The aim of formalism is to achieve the second situation. The ruler should be secure enough that he does not fear growing wealth of any interest group. The question is whether such security is possible.

The best government is one that nobody is trying to overthrow. Western democracy works as well as it does not because of any virtue it has, but because of the virtue people imagine it has, which false belief induces them to leave the government unmolested. If people were to understand that government is better when it is unchallenged, they would largely cease to challenge it.

I believe this was generally the case in late-medieval Europe. People did respect the anointed King, not primarily out of superstition, but because they understood that politics would only make things worse, as they were worse in the days of feudalism. This happy state of affairs was undone by the Stuarts’ idiotic fumbling of the religion question in England, and the return of politics in England triggered copycats around the world, in just the same way as Tunisia has triggered waves of politics across the Middle East. The world has yet to recover from the English Civil War.