We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day The occupation of a member of Parliament would thereupon become an occupation in itself, carried on, like other professions, with a view chiefly to its pecuniary returns, and under the demoralizing influences of an occupation essentially precarious. It would become an object of desire to adventurers of a low class, and 658 persons in possession with ten or twenty times as many in expectancy, would be incessantly bidding to attract or retain the suffrages of electors by promising all things, honest or dishonest, possible or impossible, and rivalling each other in pandering to the meanest feelings and most ignorant prejudices or the vulgarist part of the crowd
– J.S. Mill, quoted in The Times on March 13, 1906, discussing the likely consequences of paying MPs for their service. I hope Patrick Crozier will forgive me more more or less copying his post in its entirety, but it really deserves repeating.
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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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The chief difficulty in most societies is the split between governments and subjects. Governments are Them, the enemy. Even democracies have such a split. I think we need time-share governments, where all citizens have a direct vote on local matters for a small section of the year, and do whatever functions are assigned to governments. I.E. if a person applies for citizenship in May, then they get to all BE the local government for April of next year, though that also involves them patrolling the streets and borders, and doing other communtiy service tasks. Get rid of representatives, get rid of permanent politicians, get rid of a standing army and bureaucracy. then we won’t have political beauty contests. For units bigger than local governments, have conferences with delegates hired for the occasion, from the private sector.
“…honest or dishonest, possible or impossible, and rivalling each other in pandering to the meanest feelings and most ignorant prejudices or the vulgarist part of the crowd”
This is the classical view of democracy and is demonstrably wrong.
Sophisticated actors do not compete to beggar each another, they form a cartel to beggar the public.
Cranmer is at his incandescent best…
http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/
He had his faults – his liberalism blurred into socialism – but this is proof that on certain issues at any rate, JS Mill was as sharp as they come.
Of course, the NuLab/Cameroons would no doubt dismiss Mill as an example of “outmoded” 19th Century values, blah blah….
Brian Crozier advocating in the 70s a ‘no-party’ national-security state suggested to have a professional political class that behaved like this would be a Good Thing. At the height of Victorian liberal empire, Mill couldn’t imagine the corporatism and appeals to fear, nor the stability of political careers through local government, special-advisership, to quangocracy and life-peerage, with parliament just part of the ladder. We’ve got something much more like what Crozier wanted, than Mill warned against.
Mill could only see the cupidity and popularism as simple bribery of the electorate. It is a more refractory problem than that.
Indeed J.P. it is a useful reminder that J.S. Mill was not always “pro freedom in sound, anti freedom in policy”.
As for corportaism.
Well Brian Crozier was not in favour of corruption (institutionalized or other), he (like most writers at one time) was just against both elective dicatorship (and elected government being able to do anything it felt like) and against political party government.
Edmund Burke was the first writer I can think of who argued that poltical party need not mean corrupt faction trying to gain power by promising people wild spending and “laws” to solve any problem.
However, Burke’s own party (the Rockingham Whigs) failed when Rockingham died – even before the French Revolution (which caused Burke and other to break with the Foxite leadership of the Rockingham Whigs) the party was really untenable.
For example, it did not oppose Pitt’s proposal on free trade with Ireland because Pitt wanted to tax Ireland (the reason Burke opposed the proposal – and this tax would have been on top of domestic taxation which, as Burke pointed out, was a much higher proportion of national wealth than taxation was in England), but because Fox and others just opposed free trade period.
Of course Burke appealed to the electors of Bristol on such matters of principle – and they supported the people who favoured the doctrine that government should support various interests. Edmund Burke is a good example of how telling the truth to the public may simply fail – not matter how good one is at writing.
Of course a cynic would say that Crozier had no problem with party government when the party he favoured always won elections – hence his likeing for Bavaria.
Guy Herbert raised the matter of corporatism – and it occurs to me that some people may not fully understand what this means.
A good defintion was recently given by the CEO of General Electric.
Government is “not just a regulator” (bad enough to libertarians of course) but also a “partner and financier”.
Of course the CEO of General Electric regards this as a good thing.
Natural enough for someone who has accepted 138 billion Dollars for G.E. Captial alone, serves on varous government adivsery boards and is expecting various other favours – inb return for the propagand campaign (most recently for the America dream thing about health care – as well as for the environment thing) that he has personally ordered Universal, NBC, CNBC (there was some resistance to the New Order on CNBC but it has been crushed by the direct action of Corporatism Jeff).
I doubt MSNBC needed an order – they engage in constant Corporatist stuff without the need to be told to do so.
However, there are dangers for companies in getting into bed with the government.
For example, General Motors has invested a lot of time and money into hydrogen powered cars – but now their “friends” the government have decided they no longer favour that idea, they prefer electric cars (General Electric wind turbines producing the electricity or whatever) so G.M. is even more doomed than it was before.
But my favourate example is those corporate suits who went on their hands and knees to President Obama, going live on television to promise 2 trillion Dollars worth of cost reductions so that President Obama’s health plans coudl be afforded.
How will these cost reductions be achieved? Shut up say the “watch dog” media (especially the media owned by General Electric of course – see above for their new propaganda campaign backing the President’s plans).
Why did the health companies (the drug companies, the insurers and so on) go along with this?
Well if they did not the mainstram media would have been set on them, and of course ACORN (and other activist groups) would have picketed the houses of managers – spat on their children and so on.
This shows that, in the end, under Corporatism, corporations are not really in charge.
In the end even General Electric will be turned on and dear Jeff (having served his purpose) will be thrown to the wolves. And the media he now controls (or thinks he does) will laugh at his end – at the hands of their true master.
This is the modern world – and I think Guy Herbert would agree that it is NOT what Brian Crozier had in mind.
Indeed wild spending fools like George Walker Bush, leading to Hell demons like Obama, Pelosi (and so on and so on) were exactly the sort of “partyism” and “voting on image” that Mr Crozier wanted to prevent.
At least Brian Crozier did background research, he would not (for example) have believed that Barack Obama was a “moderate, middle of the road person” (rather than the Hell demon he in fact is) simply because various rich and cultured friends told him (at social events) that Barack Obama was such a nice fluffy type.
Brian M likes this quote too.
Indeed, and it turned out to be a hell of a business to get rid of my manifestation of it. I checked if there was a SQOTD today. But not if this one had already been up yesterday.
I should now be present only once. Sorry for the muddle.
“It has long been remarked that England combines within herself the virtues of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy ; while in other states these political principles are at variance, and reciprocally weaken each other. The practical sense of the English soon recovers itself; they have for centuries undeviatingly upheld the equilibrium, the mutual support, and the gradation of the component parts of the state ; always advancing and improving ; always watchful ; never subversive, or supine. Hence the English are far ahead of every other people in political information, and in political tact; nor are the latest efforts of Radicalism to undermine the fabric of the government, to be at all compared with similar attempts in France. In England the tendency is different; and the chances are, that, should Radicalism ever reach a crisis, the English legislature would not be revolutionized, only further reformed. In England, unworthy and noxious elements are rejected, but no disorganization ensues. The oak shakes off the withered leaves of autumn, while the roots hold fast.” – ‘Europe in 1840,’ by Wolfgang Menzel. [1841].
Enough to make you weep.
I’m not certain I follow what RayD was saying here, but if I understand him correctly he is the one who is “demonstrably wrong.” Clearly Mill is correct that career politicians pander to the lowest common denominator among the electorate, and compete among themselves for the right to pick our pockets to buy votes.
Paying a (reasonable) salary to elected officials doesn’t bother me as much as giving them retirement benefits. No one should be in office long enough to consider “retiring” from it; get a real job and retire from that. Term limits is the only solution, and even that isn’t perfect.
Laird, the problem with the salary part is not the cost of the actual pay, but that politics being a fully (and often handsomely) paid job gives the politicians both the excuse and the actual opportunity to “work for us”. I’d much rather they worked for themselves, and only got involved under public pressure when there are truly important decisions to be made. So consider an approach opposite to yours: a politician can represent his constituency for life if they and he so desire, but it is something they do “on the side”, while most of the time actually being part of the people and the community they represent. I actually remember such characters from either Austen or Dickens (or both?). Seems to have worked fairly well.
That’s because “[business] corporations in charge” isn’t what corporatism is. Corporatism is a system in which the state interacts not with the individual, but with the group (the corpus). That includes business corporations, but also trades unions, religious groups, pressure groups and so on. The individual can only take part in governance by being represented by some body which represents a definable group of which he is part.
There are lots of reasons this doesn’t work effectively, but one reason is the same reason parliaments don’t work effectively. The leaders and representatives of the groups are not members of the groups they represent, but instead members of another group, the group of leaders and representatives. Take Alan Johnson, the former post office union leader. He was at one time a postman. Then he became a full time union official. At that point, he ceased to be a postman, and thus his self interest no longer was congruent with that of postmen. His self interest was now directed towards identification with the group called “union leaders”.
Likewise, a member of parliament is no longer part of the same group or class as his constituents. He is now a member of the group of parliamentarians (and more generally, of the Political Class). His self interest is now directed towards cheating his constituents out of as much as he can, while closing ranks with other parliamentarians. The occasional good egg will be idealistic enough to try to overcome this tendency, but will always be a minority. The day a person walks through the gates of Westminster, their self interest is directed towards maintaining his own position and promoting his class (of parliamentarians) and his electors will only get a look in when their interests coincide with his.
There isn’t a way to fix this. Parliament has generally been a shower of useless scumbags, and let us not fool ourselves otherwise. Its main virtue in the past has been a preponderance of parliamentarians who really didn’t give a shit, and thus were not overly malign. The current crop are, in fact, more committed to ruling, rather than doing well out of being an MP, which is why they’re so terrible. The only solution to this would be to abolish the legislative power altogether. Take their powers of lawmaking away, give them a decent living, let them idle their five years away with a moderate state funded level of wine, women and song, doing little harm to the rest of us.
If instead you continue to have a parliament with monarchical powers- which all governments have, even if restrained in one or two areas by a constitution- they are a peril to you. If you don’t have one, another government will arise. The best solution therefore is a government that can do precisely nothing at all, except prevent something worse arising by its mere existence. Any hope of reforming the thing so it does something useful, and is full of representatives who will actual identify with their constiutents, is a hopeless pipe dream. It’s time we gave up on it.
Laird,
Thank you for your reply. I’m always happy to be proved wrong, because I am trying to improve my understanding.
The Mill quote takes the classical criticism of democracy, that parties will compete to pander to the electorate’s whims, and links it to paid politicians. My view is that the classical criticism doesn’t match the world I see around me, and that the linkage to paid politicians is somewhat spurious. I readily agree a professional political class has produced some appalling parliamentarians, but not uniquely bad, I think, in a historical context.
In another thread on this site a commenter made the excellent point that a large part of the current problem with government stems from the fact that since the war the state has been presumed to be acting in the best interests of the people, making criticism difficult, whereas historically that had not been the case. I would argue along similar lines. It not the method of remuneration that is the problem, is is the presumption that the state is benign rather than oppressive that is the problem.
As to parties pandering to the electorate, the UK Parliament’s disagreement with the electorate over the death penalty is a well known example, but an old one. The most striking recent example I can think of is illegal Mexican immigration into the United States. Polls of the electorate show a majority opposed to it, yet neither party seems to find it in its interest to do anything about it. How can this be squared with the classical view?
Pay for politicians isn’t the problem – most of them give up higher-paying jobs in the private sector to be MPs. If anything, it helps reduce the influence of the political class, since it allows common men to become politicians, instead of just the rich. There’s plenty of problems with politics, but I’m not sure this is one of them.
Over at Mises.org, the latest article begins(Link),
This can’t be right, I’m sure that honest Scotsman would have told, don’t you?
Alsadius:
That’s what many of them would have us think, but I am not so sure that this is true. And even if I am wrong about that, are poor people really that more common (in every sense of that word) than the rich? Also consider this: with the role of government reduced to protection from violence, is there really a need for full-time politicians? In this day and age it is technologically feasible to have most routine issues voted on directly, especially following a major decentralization of power. For exceptions, a community can cover the expenses of its representative to travel from time to time to London/Washington/Wherever. Taking a few days off from work can be as easy or difficult for a plumber as for a big-shot CEO, and, come to think of it, exceptionally easy for a homeless or just unemployed person, so I don’t see how personal wealth or poverty come into this.
Parliament today – both sides, but Labour is a particularly bad example – is full of people who went from student politics to being parliamentary researchers to being MPs. The gravy train then often goes on to jobs in the EU or perhaps the house of Lords and can go on for an entire working life. The precise problem is that these people have never had what I would consider a real job in their lives. Once upon a time politics was a part time vocation for people or a vocation for people who had at least done something else with some part of their lives.
Actually politicians sometimes (indeed often) do things that the public did not vote for.
For example, no one voted for President George Walker Bush because they wanted more government Welfare State spending (if they wanted that they voted for Gore and then Kerry) – but that is what they got.
And (this will come as a shock to many people) some people voted for Barack Obama believing he would cut goverment spending and reduce taxation.
Of course he was lying – but the mainstream media did not tell people that.
In Britain who voted Conservative in 1992 so that “we have spend more than Labour promised to spend” (John Major) – no one voted Conservative for that.
You see it is often not the people’s fault – and I am no starry eyed idealist when it comes to them.
Politicians (of all parties) are influenced by the Welfare State (and credit bubble state) ideology they dominates so much of the “great and the good” of our age.
It is much like government education.
J.S. Mill thought that government schools in a democracy would “teach the opinions held by most voters” and he held that to be bad thing.
But actually, of course, government schools do not do this.
They teach the opinions of the leftist elite (such as Bill Ayers on social justice education – compulsory reading at the “best” teacher training colleges in the United States) who have great contempt for the opinions of ordinary voters and seek to brainwash their children.
“Representative Demcracy” (voting for people in office) does not mean that the people have much influence over policy.