The new Adam Smith Institute blog is launched today

This is going to be a long, long post. Where it says ‘MORE’ it ought perhaps to say ‘A LOT MORE’. But my basic message is very simple. Go and look at – and have a read of – this new blog.

Want to read the longer version? Very well, gather round. Once upon a time, long long ago, before many of you reading this were even born, in an unhappy land ruled by unhappy people some of whom were perhaps doing their best and others of whom were just plain bad, and none of whom seemed to be able to do anything right …

It’s hard now to remember the political atmosphere in Britain in the late nineteen seventies. Frankly, the place seemed headed for the Third World. The public sector was growing and growing, in every way except in the contribution its workers made to the lives of others, and the public sector trade unions seemed untouchable. But then the International Monetary Fund came calling, demanding economic rectitude and cuts, and the public sector had to be challenged, even though nobody knew how. It wasn’t pretty.

I remember this as the time when a cup of coffee in Covent Garden went from costing about 15p to costing about 30p in what seemed like the space of a few months. Inflation is a thinly disguised tax, and this tax was going up, fast. National ruin beckoned. When it came to the public sector, one of the words most commonly used in my part of the political landscape was ‘ratchet’, meaning that it got bigger, click by click, but couldn’t ever get smaller. This was a sort of domestic version in our midst of the Brezhnev Doctrine. What the public sector had the public sector held. Public spending could only increase. That was its nature. It couldn’t go down. That wasn’t possible.

The free market academics trying to make sense of these horrors even found themselves an economic theory to explain why public spending could only go up and never go down, which they called Public Choice Theory.

Public Choice Theory was perfect for all those free market economists who had been trying for several years to stop the public sector getting huger and huger, but failing. They had been campaigning for spending cuts for a decade and had hardly a single actual cut to show for it, merely a few slimmed down expansions. They favoured denationalisation, but nothing ever got denationalised.

Were these academics failing because they were stupid? Impossible. No, they were failing because the task was impossible. What Public Choice Theory told these academics was that the growth of the public sector was unstoppable, not because they, the free market academics, were too stupid to stop it growing but because it was, indeed, the nature of the public sector to grow and nothing and no-one could change that.

Public Choice Theory said that each item of public spending, each nationalisation, was extremely good news to the small group of beneficiaries who each benefited a lot from it. But, individually, taking each spending increase or nationalisation separately, no one spending increase or nationalisation was of any great consequence to the massed ranks of the taxpayers. Ergo, the small group of beneficiaries lobbied like mad vultures for the spending increases and the nationalisations, while no one else worried that their taxes (or their inflation) was clicking upwards in individually tiny clicks of that ratchet, up and up and up. Thus grew the public sector. Thus collapsed the rest of the economy. Thus Britain was becoming Argentina and thus we were all doomed.

I was hanging around the Alternative Bookshop at that time, around 1980, and we at the Alternative Bookshop prided ourselves on not being too bothered about what was practical or achievable. We concentrated on what was sayable, and we said what we damned well pleased. Slash public spending. Shut down the Welfare State. Taxation is theft. (And although this is something of a tangent here, we also said things like: legalise heroin. Because we wanted to shove economic freedom and ‘social’ freedom into the same freedom bag where we thought they belonged.)

But what if you wanted to be practical? What if you wanted actually to roll back that state, instead of merely talking about how nice that would be? Impossible, right?

At this point enter Madsen Pirie and Eamonn Butler, two rather confident people from something they referred to as the Adam Smith Institute, carrying gifts. Pro-free-market policy publications on every subject you can imagine. Housing, education, health, pensions, ‘privatisation’… we’re going to make a difference, they said. And they did.

No one wants to take the blame for failure, but success is something that lots of people want a slice of. Was it Thatcher herself? Her cabinet ministers? The Centre for Policy Studies? The various political and policy advisers buzzing around then, like Sir Alan Walters?

It’s hard to tell just how important was the contribution of the Adam Smith Institute, but I think they made a big difference. Others may have disposed, but they proposed. They didn’t bet on a tiny few policies, and raise them like mammals. They spawned a vast shoal of policy ideas, in the knowledge that only a tiny percentage of them had to reach maturity for the project as a whole to succeed massively.

Some of their ideas got huge amounts of press coverage, and provoked PhD theses all over the planet. Others were merely done. They went straight from boring old ‘reports’ to being boring old government policies, with the media hardly even noticing. For many, it was all just so ghastly that they preferred to pretend it wasn’t happening at all. At lot of ‘privatisation’ went on beneath the radar of public debate and media coverage, which suited the ASI fine. After all, it’s a lot harder to oppose a policy if you don’t know it’s happening.

It’s also hard to oppose a policy if it comes at you not in one huge lump, but in the form of a thousand little steps and from two dozen different directions. At what point do you draw the line, and who do you then get to stand at it and fight to the death?

How did the ASI do it? Their central insight was to see that Public Choice Theory, far from being a mere excuse for failure, was in fact a recipe for success. Did individual expansions of the state sector concentrate the benefits while dispersing the costs so widely that no one complained? Why then, individual contractions of the state must be like that too. ‘Cuts’ were no good. They united those cut, while enthusing no one else. But how about ‘privatisation’? What if … you sell some shares in a formerly state-owned enterprise, at a price that causes great happiness to the buyers but without upsetting anyone else involved nearly as much as the buyers like it? What if … you sell off state-owned houses for less than the going rate? Again, the buyers love it. Who objects? Well, ‘the public’ may be getting a raw deal from the deal, but that’s the point of Public Choice Theory. The public, spread around everywhere, count for far less than the special interests.

As the later history of privatisation in places like the ex-USSR illustrates, there are moral hazards associated with privatisation, just as there are with nationalisation, and for the exact same reasons. By the end of the Conservative era of the eighties and nineties, the word ‘sleaze’ came to mean everything that was wrong with the government, much as ‘spin’ does now. Nevertheless, ‘Thatcherism’ was a success, and the Adam Smith Institute with it. It turned Britain from a country that might or might not have been disappearing down the plug-hole into a country that might or might not have bounced back into making some serious progress in an upwards direction.

What I remember most about those ASI policies of the eighties and nineties was their sheer number. It was the flexibility and inventiveness of the place that was so striking, especially when you compared it with the leaden-footed fixation on single-issue lobbying that dominated the thinking of their ‘free market’ predecessors. While unwieldy delegations of old fogeys battered away for years with their ‘demands’ for things like education vouchers, cursing the politicians for being insufficiently ‘courageous’ (which means stupid), the ASI would spread out a continental breakfast of suggestions for the politicians and their advisers, and for all the other interested parties involved in the public policy debate, to choose from and to feast on. They never expected politicians to be courageous. Instead they treated them as decision-makers with interests, and ambitions, and pressures, much like anyone else, and crafted their policies accordingly.

At first, the ASI had high hopes of New Labour, who at first made a great show of continuing with their own version of Thatcherism – the sort that never spoke its name, the sort with a human face – even as they insisted that ‘sleaze’ was not for them. But slowly, inexorably, the clock has been turned back by this government and by its massed ranks of unreconstructedly socialistic backbenchers and interest groups. Too few of them really believe in decentralisation, in ‘private/public partnerships’, in ‘reform’, in ’empowering’ people, in involving ‘stakeholders’. (The words were different, but the policies were at first much the same.) But now New Labour is looking Older and Older Labour with each month that passes, and they are falling back more and more on their default position of mixing bribes with threats with an ocean of regulations. Britain is now entering (many would argue that it has been there fore some years already) a very nasty episode, more or less protracted, of seventies style misgovernment, which will probably end just when everyone is thinking: My God, is this never going to end? Can’t governments do anything right? Can’t public services ever be made to work? Can Britain ever truly recover from its post-imperial disappointments? The state, having blundered forwards and sideways and everywhere for a few more years yet, will then be ready to draw back, and then we may see a rerun of that attempt, first made twenty years ago, to roll back the state, to cut taxes, and to unleash a new generation of entrepreneurs.

If that happens, the Adam Smith Institute will still be there, ready to supply a new torrent of policy ideas, and, just as important, to spread the attitude that gave rise to them, to spread, as we might put it here, the Adam Smith Institute meta-context.

Can you see, once I myself got into blogging, why I wanted the Adam Smith Institute people to become bloggers too? Just as blogging contrasts with old-school political publishing in offering a lot of small posts, often, rather than a few big table-shakers every few months, so too does the ASI style likewise depend on saying a lot of different little things, in all directions, to the people who want to hear about them, with the ‘media’ (i.e. the other media) paying attention or not as they please, but not able to control the process. Blogging is not something I merely wanted these guys to bolt onto the side of what they do seriously; it could be central to their entire way of operating. Oh well, dream on Brian.

But now it has happened. Now there is an Adam Smith Institute blog, and, just as importantly, the writing of it is not being done by some invitation team of extras while the real honchos do the Stuff That Really Matters. It really looks as if the A-team are going to write for this one.

Their official launch is today, but for the last week or so they’ve been accumulating some postings, so that when we all go there, there’ll be a decent spread of things to look at. These postings are already good, and worth looking at. They’re going to get a lot better. Madsen, Eamonn and their collaborators are some of the smartest people I have ever been acquainted with, present company excepted, and once again they’re thinking a spread of things, not just banging away about only three or four excessively detailed and over-elaborated ‘campaigns’, with much forcing of the issue under the noses of the unwilling, of whom ‘courage’ is demanded. No, they’ll just launch a whole new dinghy fleet of little ideas, and see who else is interested. It is going to be a lot of fun to watch, and it’ll be all the more fun because although a lot of people are going to pay a lot of attention to all this, a lot of other people aren’t, who aren’t going to know what is hitting them when it hits them.

And just as I believe that blogging can do big things for the Adam Smith Institute, so too I believe that the Adam Smith Institute blog is a notable addition to the blogosphere. They will bring into the blogosphere a whole new network of thinkers and movers and shakers whom they’ve been cultivating over the last three decades. With their arrival in our midst, they make us all stronger.

And yes you’re right, I am starting to repeat myself. Stephen Pollard. Now the ASI. Could they and their blogs, I wonder, have anything in common? Nah, it’s just a coincidence.