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Yesterday, I took myself along to a rather dreary and sullen conference hall in Central London to attend the Liberty Conference previously flagged up by Brian.
I admit that I was unsure about whether or not to bother going but it was curiosity more than anything else which tipped me in the direction of attendance. An event which was touted as a meeting of minds between socialist ‘rights’ campaigners and capitalist ‘liberty’ campaigners was, I thought, bound to set a few sparks flying and that would be a worthwhile way to spend an otherwise idle Saturday afternoon. Fellow libertarians like Tom Burroughes, Chris Tame and Marc Glendenning clearly felt the same.
Sadly, it was a sparkless day. Brian pointed out that Liberty is the re-branded National Council of Civil Liberties which was set up as a Bolshevik front and, I regret to have to say, that the Bolsheviks have left their imprimatur. There was no meeting of minds, no agreements, no breakthroughs, no ideas, no progress and no real debate to speak of. The atmosphere was stultified by stubborn unwillingness to address any issue other than the race and immigration in any depth whatsoever. Mostly though there was an abundance of waffle; waffle, waffle and then some more waffle. Valiant efforts on the part of Tom, Chris and I to raise other issues or inject other memes or even start a meaningful debate fell on stoney ground. We were strangers in a strange land, spectres at the feast and we all felt it.
There was, however, some cursory discussion about the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ and even some agreement that such terms were no longer adequate or even redundant. But ditching outmoded terminology does nothing whatsoever to bridge the yawning gap between those people who think that the world will become a freer, better place with more laissez-faire and those who think that freedom cannot be achieved without state enforced equality and state distributed entitlements. It was the difference between ‘free to’ and ‘free from’ but between those two little words lies a vast ocean. It wasn’t just a difference in approach. We were two sets of people who simply saw the world through a whole different set of lenses.
I came away with the feeling that the whole day was not so much an attempt to reach out to libertarians for new ideas but more an attempt to gather us into the big tent and thereby neutralise us. In a way this is actually quite good news. It means that they not only are aware of us but are frightened of us. Good. If we can’t join ’em, beat ’em, that’s what I say.
And it is in that spirit that I actually decided that it would be a good idea to join them nonethless. It means I can go along to future meetings and make a thorough nuisance of myself by asking lots of discomforting questions. I shall try to plant the seeds from whence some different memes can germinate and whilst I doubt very much that I shall succeed I shall have enough fun in the process to make the relatively modest (and tax deductible) subscription fee worthwhile.
I must remember to arm myself with some cream, strawberries and maple syrup though.
I’m thinking of starting a specialist blog of my own, dedicated to educational issues (“Brian’s Education Blog”?), and the following is the kind of story I have in mind to be featuring, along with things about government education reports and such like. In this case, however, The Times (paper version, yesterday, June 8, news section, page 12) got there ahead of me:
Lorraine Crusham decided to go private after her daughter was assaulted by 20 pupils at the local state school (Glen Own writes).
Nicole, 15, was a few weeks into her first term at Bridgemary Community School, in Gosport, Hampshire, last year when the attack occurred.
“I’d only just dropped her off at school when I received a call saying she had been hurt by a group of boys and girls,” Mrs Crusham said. “She had a massive bruise on her faced and had been kicked up and down her body. Two teachers were also assaulted.
“The school swept it under the carpet, claiming that she had instigated it by insulting someone the day before. But she had been off the previous day. I immediately took her and my 13-year-old son James out of the school.
“James was bullied for having red hair and being Scottish. One teacher suggested he could avoid it by dyeing his hair a different colour. I asked what else they thought I should change – his accent?”
Both children are now boarding at Shebbear College, Devon, where fees cost more than 12,000 GBP a year.
This story illustrates a more general report next to it, headlined “Parents go private as order collapses in state schools.”
On the subject of things Scottish, Freedom and Whisky linked recently to another story about school unpleasantness, and tentatively suggested that it might be something to do with compulsory school attendance laws. I agree, although the young people mentioned in this story were older than the current school leaving age of 16. I believe that almost all seriously nasty and bullying behaviour perpetrated by people who are not career criminals is the result of circumstances that both the perpetrators and their victims can’t (or feel that they can’t) escape from. Nicole Crusham was lucky. She could escape. Millions of others aren’t so lucky.
The Moving Finger blogs; and, having blogged,
Moves on: fortunately my Piety and Wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a Line,
and all my Tears wash out a Word of it
Thank goodness for delete functions
-The Rubaiyat of Samizdata Illuminatus
I would like to apologise to any visiting Argentinians or Argentophiles for yesterday’s rather visceral outburst.
My temporary use of such inflammatory and pugnacious language, whilst regrettable, was purely the product of a temporary bout of fog-inducing euphoria following Englands Word Cup win. Let me assure you that I bear no ill-will towards the Argentinian people. Indeed, they have my every sympathy given the chaos into which their venal and corrupt political class has plunged them. I hope, pray, nay expect them to rise like a phoenix from the flames.
Contrast, however, the mode of celebrations in Croatia from whence Natalija reports on the sounds of gunfire filling the air following the unexpected victory over Italy today. How spontaneously joyous.
I long for the day that I, too, can rejoice in Englands victories by firing my carbine into the air. But, due to the UK’s ridiculous prohibition on the private ownership of firearms, such healthy and safe expressions of national enthusiasm are forbidden to me and I am forced to resort, instead, to malevolent jingoistic slurs.
I apologise for any offence caused but I must lay the ultimate blame squarely at the feet of HM Government. Thank you for your kind attention.
In the 1990s, Paul Krugman was one of the most respected economists in America. He wrote for a popular audience as well as for the scholarly community, and although I didn’t always agree with the contents of his books, he at least pursued his subjects with rigor, and occasionally turned out a real gem (1995’s Pop Internationalism is a great book). He was seen by many on the left as their Great White Hope, the one cutting-edge liberal economist who was raising objections to the more conservative University of Chicago crowd that was dominating the debate (and the Nobel Prizes) at the time.
Like those before him, though (Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky) Krugman has done irreparable damage to his academic credibility by choosing to become a political hack — that’s what I mean by the title. Krugman’s latest NY Times op-ed (link requires registration) serves up one howler after another. He offers precious little support for his thesis — that the Bush administration has given “energy companies” carte blanche to dictate environmental policy because the energy companies bankrolled the Bush campaign — because, well, that claim just won’t stand up to scrutiny, no matter how good a sound bite it makes. So in that great Blogosphere tradition, let us now fact-check Krugman’s ass and see where he comes up short.
Whopper #1: In the case of energy policy, the administration still won’t release information about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. But it’s clear that energy companies, and only energy companies, had access to top officials. The result was that during the California power crisis — which, it is increasingly apparent, was largely engineered by Enron and other companies that had the administration’s ear — the administration did nothing.
Enron did some sinister things. They lied to the investment community, covered up their lies and committed securities fraud on a grand scale. This does not mean, however, that Enron is responsible for every crisis that comes down the pike. Enron engineered the California power crisis? This simply strains credulity. The electricity that Enron did sell to the California ISO (the power-sourcing agency for the state) came at a lower price than the market average in California, and at a lower price than the LA Dept. of Power and Water was charging the state for its electricity. Moreover, Enron accepted credit from electric power distributors and from the state of California during the worst part of the crisis, and the state of California ended up reneging on millions of dollars of obligations to Enron. If anything, Enron helped relieve the California electricity shortages of 2001.
Whopper #2: When scientists discovered that industrial chemicals were depleting the earth’s protective ozone layer, [Reagan-era Interior Secretary James] Watt suggested that people wear hats, sunscreen and dark glasses. Luckily for the planet, he was overruled; the United States joined other countries in curbing production of ozone-depleting chemicals. The ozone hole is still growing, but disaster has at least been postponed.
The US banned CFC’s (the principal group of industrial chemicals linked to ozone depletion) from use as an aerosol propellant in 1979. The treaty Krugman referred to, the Montreal Protocol, was signed by the US delegation in 1987, and was ratified in the spring of 1988. All of this was going on during the Reagan administration.
Krugman then resorts to damnation by faint praise, congratulating the Republicans for “at least postponing” ultraviolet disaster. According to the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) 1999 publication on the Montreal Protocol, global CFC production is presently lower than in 1960, and the bureaucracy predicts that the ozone layer will stage a recovery over the next 50 years, even if no further action is taken. As Bjørn Lomborg points out in The Skeptical Environmentalist, the additional exposure to ultraviolet light from the ozone depletion we have already experienced is roughly what would be experienced in moving 100 to 200 miles closer to the equator, say from Manchester to London.
Whopper #3: … the E.P.A.’s Christie Whitman assured the public that Mr. Bush would honor his pledge to control carbon dioxide emissions — only to be betrayed when the coal and oil industries weighed in on the subject. So the administration learned nothing from the California crisis; it still takes its advice from the energy companies that financed its campaign (and made many administration officials, including Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, rich).
Big corporations financed the Bush campaign! This assertion is totally preposterous on its face. The last US election in which corporations of any kind were permitted to make any contribution to a presidential candidate was the hotly contested Theodore Roosevelt vs. Alton Parker race of 1904. Direct corporate contributions have been illegal in federal elections for nearly 100 years. Of course, corporations can set up Political Action Committees and have the PAC make a donation to a candidate, but this is limited to $5,000 per PAC per candidate per election. GWB raised a total of $193.1 million for his 2000 presidential bid (including a federal subsidy of $67.6 million.) Just over $2 million, or 1.2% of Bush’s campaign funds, came from all PACs. Maybe that $2 million came from 400 energy company PACs that donated $5,000 each … or maybe not. (Rather than muddling through the FEC’s website for data, check out this handy thumbnail of the Bush Campaign’s sources and uses of funds at OpenSecrets.org).
Whopper #4: And it’s one thing to reward your friends with subsidies and lax regulation. It’s something quite different to let them dictate policy on climate change.
First, Krugman says that the administration is bound to energy companies such as Enron. Then he says that the energy companies are dictating policy on climate change. So it stands to reason that Enron opposed action on the climate change front, right? Wrong. Enron lobbied heavily for greenhouse emissions caps a la Kyoto, and also for subsidies for renewable electric energy, the exact opposite of what the administration wants.
All in all, this was a thoroughly disappointing effort by Krugman, a man whom I used to have a great deal of respect for. Paul Krugman is a brilliant man, and he is capable of much better work than this. Come on, Dr. Krugman, stick to economics, and leave this sort of political sloganeering to the Carvilles and the Begalas of the world.
One of the elements of Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” I enjoyed was the casual references to anarcho-capitalist mechanisms for dealing with services that are currently provided by the state. In answer to a question about social security, the narrator said that a bookmaker will agree odds and take a stake for any eventualities covered by insurance schemes.
Certainly the evolution of spread betting and online betting has brought such a vision closer to reality. What struck me about the recent soccer match involving two beef-eating nations was the speed with which the price mechanism adjusted: England went from a 16 to 1 chance to win the FIFA World Cup to 7 to 1 in the space of a couple of hours. Meanwhile, Argentina went from 3 to 1 favourites to 8 to 1. One could claim that this shift is merely a symptom of nationalist delusion by the English.
Planning freaks would say that if the government set the odds they wouldn’t shift, because they would be based on a rational assessment of the various teams merits. I beg to differ.
First, it’s a lot more fun for the outcomes to be unexpected. Visiting market-places is generally more entertaining than visiting a planning office.
Second, the planners can’t put every factor into their equations (as the state price fixers in Argentina have recently discovered, to the distress of millions).
Third, bookmakers aren’t sentimental or swayed by public opinion, only committed cash. If Her Majesty the Queen were to stake £10 million on a Commonwealth team to win the World Cup, it would shift the price the same as if one million punters did the same with £10 each. The same isn’t true of such political decisions as working if, when, and at what rate at which the pound should join the Euro. The planners will decide with other people’s money, trusting to public opinion (or lack of it), and hoping to freeze the price mechanism if not to ignore it altogether.
So here’s my tip. 1) Ignore the opinion polls, check the bookies for the results of the next elections, dates of Euro referendum, future market prices. 2) Don’t stake too much on a single event.
Antoine Clarke
Yes Brian, people in Croatia are very happy that our footballers have defeated Italy… the moment the match was over the streets were filled with people holding glasses of beer and bottles of loza, car horns were being blown and I could hear the crackle of guns being fired off into the air from all directions.
Like Perry said in his earlier article, modern societies do like to express their identities through sports… and of course the fact that historically Italy has a habit of invading us tends to make the significance of any ‘national’ clash on the football field take on a certain extra flavour just as the fact Britain and Argentina have fought a war against each other adds much the same spice. So just imagine how the English felt after defeating Argentina, then add the sound of rifles and pistols being fired off into the air and you should be able to picture the situation across Croatia!
… and of course guess who gets tricked into providing the logistics for the celebration party for my football mad friends this afternoon…
Josh Chafetz over on OxBlog has an interesting post about the nature of order, touching on Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith but mostly about Fred Hayek. He also brings up a useful point about a Pejman Pundit post ridiculing the idea of an anarchy club. In a later posting Pejman insists he does understand the definition of the word ‘anarchy’ and points out his first posting was mostly in jest.
There is indeed a useful point being made here and one I have made to several Libertarian Alliance members before: we understand what we mean when we say ‘anarchy’ but when the term is used in common parlance, it is generally a synonym for ‘nihilism’. For example when a bunch of scruffy self-described anti-globalisation protestors set fire to a MacDonalds in Paris and smash up a Mercedes parked near by, those so-called ‘anarchists’ are not doing those things because they want more kosmos (spontaneous or natural order) and less taxis (imposed order), leading to a morality based anarcho-capitalist golden age… no, they are mostly just nihilists whose vision of the future is little different from that of the bikers from hell in the movie ‘Mad Max’. The few of them who actually do have a semi-coherent idea of what the future should look like are Spanish style (circa 1938) ‘anarcho-syndicalists’… which is to say they are rather like meat eating vegetarians (see the ‘related article’ link below).
It is for this reason I usually urge libertarians to stay away from the ‘A’ word because it is so widely misused. Josh Chafetz also expresses his views about anarchy as an objective that shows he more or less does understand the true nature of what real anarchists are arguing for:
That is to say, there is nothing absurd about people organizing in favor of anarchy. What they are doing is stating a preference for absolute kosmos with no taxis. Again, I think this preference is folly. I think that it is neither possible nor desirable to do away with all taxis. I am not an anarchist.
I said more or less understand because taxis does not necessarily mean state imposed order: for example most of the rules within a stock exchange are ‘taxis’ rather than ‘kosmos’ and are analogous to the rules of a private club.. a few are imposed by the state but most are imposed by the exchange itself. No one is forced to trade in a stock exchange and thus in some hypothetical anarchist future, there may well still be ‘taxis’ intensive stock exchanges.
However like Josh, I too am not an anarchist. I am a minarchist but where I depart from Josh is that whilst I agree it is probably not possible to depart from a system in which there is a state, I do think it is desirable. In essence I believe in systems involving the one word conspicuous by its absence in this interesting but utilitarian discussion: morality. I believe in objective morality, albeit imperfectly understood and conjecturally proposed. That, rather than the force of state or vox pop, is the one and only source of legitimacy in any system.
 Probably not what you had in mind
I promised myself, no more soccer for a few days. Give it a rest, Brian. Let David do it. Don’t join him in the St George and Assorted Dragons Asylum for the Temporarily and Quite Possibly Permanently Deranged (any website you try for that will probably work). But do tell us Natalija, what are your fellow countrypersons making of today’s big World Cup news (and it couldn’t have been closer): Italy 1 CROATIA 2 ?!?!?!?
Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow…
– Ludwig von Mises
Last September two very big towers in New York were zapped by terrorists, and ever since then the argument has bubbled along about what ought to be done with the site once all the debris was cleared away, as it now has been. I’ve only just seen the piece in which, last Wednesday (which I’m learning is like a month ago in blog time), Anne Coulter says: rebuild and rebuild big! I agree, and I hope (and I learn that) New York does, and probably will.
Ask yourself this. What would Al Qaeda want? A park and some silly sculpture? They’d love that. That would be game set and match to them. Two huge concrete and metal fingers raised to the sky, or maybe one even bigger one, featured on every other photo of New York for the next five decades? They’d hate that. There you go.
Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon, George Bush, Pervez Musharraf, Osama Bin Laden, Jean Marie Le Pen, Vladimir Putin, Crown Prince Abdullah, Gerhard Schroeder, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Charles Krauthammer, Silvio Berlusconi, Colin Powell, Jacques Chirac, Romano Prodi, Javier Solana, Kofi Annan, Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro are you listening?
ENGLAND 1 BEEF-EATING SURRENDER MONKEYS 0
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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