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There have been some interesting discussions across the blogosphere about the role of arms in resisting tyranny, many sparked off by what is going on in Zimbabwe. But whilst I am very much in favour of civilian ownership of firearms that are suitable for all manner of uses, I think many ‘on my side of the aisle’ overstate the direct benefits of not allowing the state to have a monopoly on the means of violence. Certainly I do not buy the argument that arming the Tiananmen Square protesters would have prevented the massacre that occurred.
However what arming the population does is not prevent tyranny (at least not on its own), but rather it raises the marginal cost of tyranny. The in your face reality of most tyrannies around the world is that it is not enforced on a daily basis by armies with tanks and helicopters (against which a few AK-47’s will do little) but rather by a couple swaggering officious policemen with little handguns pushing their way into people’s houses. Now those folks are the ones a few privately held weapons can truly work wonders with when it comes to the bottom line reality of force, not because privately held weapons will actually be used to kill or intimidate directly but simply because those policemen know that whilst they have the authority of the state behind them, right there and then in that house, there are very real limits to just how far they can push things, which is exactly how it should be.
Sure, they can come back with 50 soldiers in armoured personnel carriers if needed, but if that is what they have to do every time they want to intimidate someone, well, that is a much bigger investment of time and effort. Do not underestimate the value of increasing the marginal cost of tyranny. For example widespread gun ownership in Zimbabwe probably would have a major impact at mitigating the shambolic Zimbabwean governments ability to carry out much of what it does even if it does not directly lead the Mugabe’s well deserved downfall.
Guns in private hands work, but it is just one piece of a much larger question and I suspect claiming they are a panacea for the ills of bad governance is not doing the pro-liberty side any service at all.
Sir Bob “Make Poverty History” Geldof is getting the vapours over the fact that tickets for his various supposed poverty-relief events have been put up for sale on that symbol of dark, rampant capitalism, eBay. In particular, he seems all upset that a big corporation like eBay should make any money from such a highminded event.
Horsefeathers, is all I can say. eBay, in my view, contributes vastly more to the sum total of human happiness and welfare than that preening stage army of hasbeens, wannabees and well-intentioned nitwits that have clustered around Sir Bob. As has already been recounted in detail here, Sir Bob Geldof is a man of infuriating contradictions, able to talk with piercing clarity and lack of cant about the corruption of African governments and yet also willing and able to spout the cheap pieties that seem to accompany many a post-colonial guiltfest such as Live8.
If Africa’s economy were run with the same brio, dash and entrepreneurial brilliance of eBay, Sir Bob and his ilk would have to spend a little more time on what they supposedly do best.
UPDATE: thinking this through in the light of watching Geldof on the television, I can certainly applaud his desire to steer as much revenue to the poor of the world as possible but there seems no awareness on the part of the Live 8 crowd that what Africa needs is precisely the sort of business acumen of which eBay is a modern example.
UPDATE 1: eBay has blocked sales of such tickets on its pages, according to the BBC.
Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of South Africa’s President, says that the private sector is key to modern economic development in Africa. But, he says, African leaders and Western donors are holding it back. On the website of his organization, the South African Institute of International Affairs, he argues that:
foreign donors could play a more constructive role than they are doing at present through their current efforts to sustain the political elites and African states with budgetary support and the like.
Instead of giving more money to African governments, Mbeki says donors should providing the expertise to help establish independent financial institutions like credit unions and savings banks and help shield them from political elites.
Moreover, African governments need less power and the private sector more:
Africa’s private sector is predominantly made up of peasants and secondly, of subsidiaries of foreign-owned multinational corporations. Neither of these two groups have the complete freedom to operate in the market place because they are both politically dominated by others – non-producers who control the state. Herein lay the weakness of the private sector in Africa that explains its inability to become the engine of economic development. Africa’s private sector lacks political power and is therefore not free to operate to maximize its objectives. Above all, it is not free to decide what happens to its savings.
→ Continue reading: President Mbeki’s brother: only the private sector will make Africa rich
As several people have predicted would be the case, many of the EU’s ‘great and good’ are just continuing with the Great European Integration project as if the French and Dutch NO votes never happened. But it does seem that the shock to the system those votes administered to the torpid media has indeed woken up a few people. It seems that the insects have not noticed that someone has picked up the rock they were under.
With almost Marxist historiography, Eurocrats dismiss the French and Dutch results as the product of “false consciousness”. The peoples of those two countries plainly misunderstood the issue. They were really voting against Turkey, or against Raffarin, or against Anglo-Saxon liberalism – against anything, in short, except the proposition actually on the ballot paper.
[…]
During the recent referendums Yes campaigners argued that a No vote would be a rejection, not simply of the constitution, but of the entire European project. Let them now stand by their own logic.
With luck the Euroclass will continue to seriously underestimate the problem and thereby create enough real hostility that the whole European edifice will just start lurching from one political crisis to another until various bits start falling off… preferably UK shaped bits.
The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language
Melvyn Bragg
Sceptre 2004
A History of the English Language
Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable
Routledge & Kegan Paul 1951, revised 1978.
It is probable that those who have watched Melvyn Bragg on television and have heard him on radio on the subject reviewed here, will find the printed word, in short, his book, by far the superior medium to communicate it. It would be tedious to enumerate the advantages of the printed word, but the lack of sound is its great drawback, for of course language is oral, not visual – yet the only evidence of its past and development is visual, not oral. In his fluent, informative and thoughtful account of our language, Bragg tends get excitable: English faces “challenges” and, at a critical stage even “kept its nerve”, though whether its speakers were aware of these anthropomorphic postures is doubtful. Readers might do well to keep by them the more sober narrative of Baugh and Cable.
Although he gives a mention to the Indo-European stock from which almost all European languages differentiated, Bragg very sensibly begins in the fifth century when a variety of invaders from the mainland of Europe started to land in what is now England, speaking a distinctly different language from those who were already there. This language was a Germanic one, existing in a number of dialects. Some dialects were brought across, others left behind. The resulting mixture evolved into Anglo-Saxon, though it seems its closest living relative is present-day precarious Frisian.
The Anglo-Saxon speakers moved west, gradually conquering the resistance of the Celtic-speaking inhabitants and replacing their language with their own. One must be careful to distinguish this process from one of replacement of the inhabitants themselves, for studies of the DNA of today’s population indicate that this was far from being the case. However, the Celtic language itself survived only in Wales and Cornwall, though refugees transferred it to Brittany in France, while a related Celtic language continued unaffected in Ireland, and what was probably another one, spoken by the Picts in Scotland. → Continue reading: Bragging about English
There is nothing certain but taxes.
– Marvin Minsky
Adriana is doing some rather reluctant Saturday night meta-blogging…
The decision to write off billions of dollars in debt for various Third World nations is in effect a subsidy for bad governance. Oh sure, the debt relief is tied to various conditions aimed at improving the kleptocratic ways that are the norm in the world’s various hellholes, but it is still just a way of saying that in the final analysis it is western taxpayers yet again who will be the ones picking up bill for the actions of various corrupt WaBenz bureaucrats.
And what of those poor nations who actually do repay their loans? What of those who keep corruption under control and who have a ruling class that does not see private businesses as a personal piggy bank to be raided as needed? What message is sent to them when they see the incompetent and corrupt rewarded with free money so that some celebrity activists can make economic illiterates feel good about themselves?
Which brings me to Geldof. I just cannot figure out this guy; on one hand he says self-evident sensible things like (emphasis added):
Bob Geldof admitted today no amount of aid to Africa could eradicate poverty on the continent while its Governments remain corrupt. The former singer was launching a 170-page compact summary of the Africa Commission’s report which will be presented to the G8 summit this July.
And the maverick Irishman repeated his call for ‘hundreds of thousands’ to converge on Edinburgh to coincide with the summit at Gleneagles. He said: “The issue governance is at the forefront of this compact. You can’t give aid to countries when they return it to us in debt payment, especially if you don’t allow them to trade with us. None of that will function unless there is a decent Government.”
But then says something as preposterous as:
Fears over corrupt African regimes should not be used to delay aid to the poverty-stricken continent, Bob Geldof said yesterday. Less than 48 hours after both Tony Blair and George W Bush insisted that corrupt regimes had to be tackled to ensure that aid was not wasted, the Live 8 organiser told them to “get off the corruption thing” and deliver the promised help.
So what is one to make of that? By his own admission, Africa’s appalling governance is a huge contributing factor to poverty and woe (not to mention the continent’s horrific record regarding civil liberties) yet we are urged to “get off the corruption thing”. So to use Geldof’s sort of language… what the fuck?
If governance is perhaps the single biggest factor (amongst several) that makes the Third World so damn poor, surely the Western taxpayers whose money Geldof is to keen to give away should indeed be asking if they really want their money to end up in someone else’s Swiss bank accounts via Kinshasa or Freetown.
Sadly for Africa, most of the things written about the causes and solutions of poverty in the Third World, or at least the articles that get serious column inches, are drivel by ‘celebrity activists’ who are ill-informed and arrogant in equal measure. A prime example being the mind numbingly ignorant Chris Martin for example, who thinks ‘shareholders’, the people who provide the capital to wealth creating businesses, which are the “great evil of this modern world” rather than, say, the governments of North Korea, Cuba and Burma. But then such folks do not concern themselves with actual benefits to poor people in various far off places but rather with pithy soundbites and causing emotional surges brought on by ‘doing something’, regardless of whether or not it actually improves anything for anyone other that a few Mercedes Benz dealers in sub-Saharan Africa and some portfolio managers in Zürich.
No, none of this really has anything to do with helping common people in the Third World.
The Right to Bear Arms. It’s not just for Americans any more.
– Joe Katzman
Yup, they have jilted Motorola…just as the rest of world moves to AMD chips. Heh.
Jacques Chirac has announced that Britain must give up its rebate on its EU contributions as a £3 billion (5.5 bn US dollars) ‘gesture of solidarity’ with Europe, whilst at the same time adding the France would do nothing of the sort itself when it came to agricultural subsidies.
Tony, not surprisingly, sadly declined Jacques kind suggestion that he publicly commit political suicide in Britain. I guess they never saw that coming in Paris.
A general strike now… will it evolve into more forcefukl resistance to Mugabe’s thugs? I certainly hope so but do not underestimate the violence that Mugabe and his cotery will use to hang on to power (and their lives).
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