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John Louis Swaine wrote in with an interesting piece about his own ‘road to Damascus’. “It took approximately 8 years to move from being a Labourite teenager to a Libertarian at the age of 23. I used to blog quite a lot so I felt the urge to write something about it. Since the Samizdata weblog has been one of the most important contributing factors for this change, I thought I would submit it to you.”
Most people have a “Summer of ’69” they can relate to; a magic period of youthful exuberance, tempered by important life experiences and left to bake softly in the warmth of the July sun. Mine was in 2001, I was 16 and beginning to ask the bigger questions about society and life.
I had opinions, I suddenly cared about issues. Like virtually every young person I came to the conclusion that equality was of paramount importance and that the only means by which to achieve it was through the prescription of schemes and initiatives by Government. After all, is that not what my generation had been taught? The importance of civil duty, of taking part in the organs of governance and through them making life better for your fellow man?
I dutifully signed up to the Observer brigade. Things could change, things could be fixed and crucially, the fix was always within the grasp of Government.
I did have the benefit of a decent grounding in knowledge of markets. I rather suspect you cannot have spent a significant amount of time growing up in Hong Kong without absorbing it – capitalism and free markets are in the air there, mixed in amongst the toxic levels of pollutants and exhaust fumes. Your chances of developing lung cancer or respiratory disorders may be high but you will also assimilate at least some understanding of how a financial system works.
Tony Blair’s governing ideology therefore seemed intoxicating – using the state to care for one’s fellow man whilst reforming the public sector and embracing free markets. Everything fitted nicely into place.
The first cracks in my political viewpoint began to appear on the 11th of September, 2001… → Continue reading: 180 degrees in 8 years
Jack Straw, it is amazing to relate, has been touted as a potential Prime Minister. Who knows, if the implosion of the Brown government gets worse, he might still be in the running for the top job. So it might be useful to realise that among his gifts is one for sublime comedy:
The constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor has commented that when the history of this era is written, the last 10 years will be seen as heralding a “quiet revolution” in the way in which the UK is governed. He is correct.
Quiet or not, there have been major changes. In case our Jack needs a bit of assistance, here are some of them:
- Emasculation of the House of Lords
- Erosion of the right to trial by jury
- Removal of the double-jeopardy protection in court trials
- Extension of blasphemy laws
- Law enabling the creation of a centralised state database and ID card system
- The passing of more than 3,000 criminal offences
- Anti-social behaviour orders – many of which can be imposed without full due process of law
- Civil Contingencies Act, giving sweeping powers in the case of “national emergencies”
- Erosion of right to hold public demonstrations
- Erosion of rights of private property owners to use their premises as they seek fit: bans on smoking in pubs and restaurants, for example
- European Arrest Warrant
Okay, I think you get the general idea. And on the other side of the balance sheet, what can Straw suggest? He talks about the Freedom of Information Act and EU “human rights” legislation. The former is an improvement but hardly compensates for the list above; the latter is a mish-mash: some of the “rights”, as my sneer-quotes imply, are not rights in the classical liberal sense as acting as brakes on coercion, but rather entitlements, or claims, and which interfere with things like freedom of contract, etc.
The general thrust of policy over the past few years has been towards more regulation of personal behaviour in the fields of health, the environment, family upbringing, smoking and diet. About the only emphatic move in a libertarian direction is on the area of booze: 24-hour drinking; yet the government cannot get itself in a consistent frame of mind when it comes to drugs – and alcohol is a serious health hazard when consumed to excess – so we continue with a largely unwinnable war on drugs, which by the way operates to the detriment of our campaign to undermine the likes of the Taliban, etc, and the poppygrowing druglords of Asia, etc. On sex, yes, the government has lowered the age of gay sexual consent to 16 and permitted gay civil partnerships, but a properly liberal approach would be to get the state out of the business or regulating marriage completely.
Generally, an appalling record. The challenge for the Tories, if they have any gumption, is to reverse it, lock stock and barrel (oh, did I mention that the right to self defence is pretty much dead as well?).
The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, those somewhat indistinct eras between the end of the Renaissance and the start of the Napoleonic Wars, were when the modern world was born. It was when rationalism emerged from the previous millennia where superstition and obscurantism were mankind’s norm and goring a sacred cow could bring down the wrath of the powers-that-be.
Yet it seems that there are still those in the west who hanker after having their beliefs protected by the force of the state in ways that other sets of personal values are not. So rather than surrender to Christian authoritarians who wish their views to be protected by law, thereby quite reasonably handing even loonier Muslims a tool to protect their equally preposterous views, a little final clean up work, a final long overdue flourish of Enlightenment thought, is needed.
Abolish every last one of the ludicrous blasphemy laws. Right now.
And anyway I wanted to see what it would feel like ordering a three hundred quid starter
– Giles Coren, reviewing the St James’-Ukrainian restaurant Divo for The Times.
The capacity at will to do something improbable (and quite possibly stupid) in order to find out what it feels like is to my mind the measure of a society worth living in. Mr Coren did not have to consult religious authorities about that starter, and no government inspector determined for him whether it was fair or appropriate fo him to do so, or insisted on him having counselling first, or afterwards. He is not confined in a fixed universe of approved experiences. For how long? The vigilantes are abroad, though they are coming for the poor first. And everyone ought to be free to be daft, not just oligarchs.
Republican Presidential Candidate Ron Paul seems to have attracted a lot of attention with his big fund-raising day, although Mark Steyn says that although he now has money his poll rating is still very low. If you don’t know what he looks and sounds like, watch him being interviewed by Jay Leno.
The most interesting thing I have encountered about Ron Paul is this, from Jonathan Wilde:
On the heels of the big fundraising day, I’ve noticed that a lot of people I know are declaring themselves Ron Paul supporters. Many of them are not just not libertarian. If anything, they’re big government advocates. They justify their support with vague statements like, “He’s shifting the landscape” or “The system needs to be shaken up”. I don’t think they have any idea what Paul actually stands for.
Maybe they will learn. I have long thought thought a way for libertarianism to spread will be when people get that it is a different sort of mischief they can make to the usual kind. This was surely the appeal of Marxism, while it had appeal. Now, the world is still full of Marxists but they keep quiet about it, and wrap it up as other things, like Greenery. Where’s the mischief in that? That won’t shake up the system. That is the system. But libertarianism is a kind of mischief making that dares to speak its name, and if done, would cause serious embarrassment to thousands of politicians and lobbyists and subsidy guzzlers.
Of course, much of Paul’s appeal is that he is mounting a non-left attack on US military involvement abroad. But if many are backing him because of that, they may also become acquainted with the notion that maybe seriously cutting back big government is something that a decent man could genuinely want to do. Paul wants to cut government spending on foreign wars, and rather than blowing what is ‘saved’ on schools and hospitals and other foolishnesses, he says: let the citizens keep their money.
I presume that Ron Paul has lots of domestic personal policy positions concerning how to get there from here, so to speak, as any serious political candidate must. I do know, because he said this to Leno, that he wants to phase out welfare addiction very gradually, rather than just cold turkey it, for example. But that makes sense (‘cold turkeying’ it might also make sense, I think, but what do I know?)
I’ve yet find an area that I’ve studied extensively where the arguments justifying the state stand up to historical evidence. I think the state’s takeover of these aspects of human life occur for different reasons than the reasons currently given for the state in those areas, and that what we see is a lot of ex post rationalisation to justify the state. I haven’t looked at every area, and certainly may find some where I wouldn’t make that argument. But I have yet to find one.
– Bruce L. Benson (one of the speakers at the LA/LI Conference last weekend) talks about his work to Patrick Crozier – the whole thing lasts a little over 15 minutes
I say “recorded conversations” because I never know quite what the definition of a ‘podcast’ truly is. Is it a podcast if you just record it and sling it up at your own blog? So anyway, yes, I have recently done a couple of these.
First, I recorded Antoine Clarke and me having a discussion about the thinkings and writings of Sean Gabb, and person often mentioned here. We are, and accordingly were, somewhat critical. Blog posting by me here.
Second, Patrick Crozier recorded him talking with me about modern architecture, “Modern Movement” architecture, skyscrapers, horrible housing estates etc. Blog posting by Patrick here.
Both last about 40 to 45 minutes. If you have that kind of time to spare, enjoy.
And, Patrick Crozier and I have fixed to do another one of these things next week on the subject of Northern Ireland. Peace (so far, touch wood etc.) may not generate news, but we think it deserves to be at least talked about. I will certainly be re-reading the comments on this posting here before doing that.
I have argued in the past that violent repression, gulags and mass murder are not in fact the defining characteristics for a state to be ‘totalitarian’. The defining characteristic is, as the word itself suggests, that control over people be pervasive and total… mass murderousness, goose-stepping troops, waving red (or whatever) flags are merely an incidental consequence and which can be better described in other ways (such as ‘tyrannical, murderous, dictatorial, brutal, national socialist, communist, islamo-fascist etc.).
As a result my view is that we in the west are already well on the way to a new form of post-modern totalitarian state (what Guy Herbert calls ‘soft fascism’) in which behaviour and opinions which are disapproved of by the political class are pathologised and then regulated by violence backed laws “for your own good” or “for the children” or “for the environment”.
And so we have force backed regulations setting out the minutia of a parent’s interactions with their own children, vast reams on what sort of speech or expression is and is not permitted in a workplace, rules forbidding a property owner allowing consenting adults from smoking in a place of business, what sorts of insults are permitted, rules covering almost every significant aspect of how you can or cannot build or modify your own house on your own property, moves to restrict what sort of foods can be sold, what kind of light bulbs are allowed, and the latest one, a move to require smokers to have a ‘licence to smoke‘. Every aspect of self-ownership is being removed and non-compliance criminalised and/or pathologised.
The person suggesting this latest delightfully totalitarian brick-in-the-wall, Professor Julian le Grand, says some very telling things:
“There is nothing evil about smoking as long as you are just hurting yourself. We have to try to help people stop smoking without encroaching on people’s liberties.” […] But he said requiring them to fill in forms, have photographs taken in order to apply for a permit would prove a more effective deterrent.
No doubt Julian le Grand thinks that makes him seem reasonable and sensible, because he does not want people to have their civil liberties encroached upon… and he then proceeds to describe how he would like to do precisely that in order to ‘deter’ you from doing what you really wanted to do.
The reason for this seemingly strange approach is simple to understand because to the totalitarian, something does not have to be ‘evil’ to warrant the use of force to discourage it, you merely have to have (a) coercive power (b) disapprove of another person’s choices regarding their own life. That is all the justification you need, simply the fact other people are not living the way you think they should, in your presumably infinite wisdom.
Notice how coercive actions imposed by state power are described as ‘helping’. We will force you to pay more, force you to go to a doctor…but we will throw your arse in gaol if you dare try to circumvent our unasked for ‘help’.
The ‘paleo-totalitarian’ simply uses force if you disobey, no messing about… however the post-modern totalitarian prefers to add a morally insulating intermediate step that allows his kind to talk about ‘civil liberties’: first he gives you a nice regulation to obey and only if you dare not comply with that do the Boys in Blue get sent to show you the error of your ways.
I can think of quite a few ways I would rather like to ‘help’ Julian le Grand and his ilk in order to mitigate their pathological need to interfere with other people’s lives. All for the greater good of society, you understand.
The other day I encountered this argument, which I failed properly to swat away and as a result, got rather rude to my interlocutor and he went off in a huff (sorry about that mate). What he said that made me go red was this:
“You libertarians keep banging on about the terrors of regulation. Yet you also slag off massive lawsuits and things like that. But if you want to get rid of huge payouts for things like people suing for damages, you need regulations. So why are you so hostile to them?”
As I pointed out, this is what is called a straw man argument.. Such “arguments” hold up a false, or in some cases deliberately false and weak, version of a point of view that a person wants to knock down easily (hence the “straw” bit). So let us fisk it.
First, I do not know any liberals or libertarians who argue that regulations are and always are a bad thing. Private sector bodies and voluntary associations of all kinds have them. A privately owned hospital, for instance, would regulate the behaviours of people who entered the premises. Why? Because that hospital would not want its reputation and bank account to be wrecked by outbreaks of disease, which lead to nasty insurance payouts. So it is in the self interest of said institutions to operate regulations, and more important perhaps, to be seen to do so. Another case is the London Stock Exchange. Long before modern financial regulators like the Financial Services Authority came along, the LSE was founded (back in the 18th Century, I think) and it had rules, albeit not always formal ones, but rules nonetheless (“my word is my bond”, etc). Trust is the key. And if you do not have trust, and have ways of enforcing said, then networks of commercial or other transactions do not work so well. So let us dispose of the canard that classical liberals are agin regulations. They are not. What we are against is one-size-fits-all regulations imposed heedlessly by the state. This is the crucial thing. Regulations, to be useful, need to be tried and tested, and if need be, discarded. State regulations tend not to be like that, but rather resemble clumps of ivy climbing up the side of a tree. They are much harder to reverse.
Okay, so now we come to the idea that libertarians hate expensive lawsuits. I suppose it is true that we hate frivolous, massively costly lawsuits, by definition (and who does not, except lawyers?). But sometimes you need to have lawsuits because you will not always have perfect knowledge of the kind of problems that can arise. Take the example of the hospital again – its managers may not know about new diseases that can be transported into the building in unexpected ways. A lawsuit following a disaster may be the trigger for a new rule. In this sense, lawsuits, although unpleasant for those on the receiving end of them, act as a sort of discovery process about what sort of problems exist. Lawyers have their uses.
In other words, this is quite a complicated argument. I just will not make the same mistake of trying to explain it after two beers and a 13-hour day at the office.
It is interesting that the French government is now apparently seriously trying to stop people eating Ortolan, a delicacy I once tried some years ago (that said I ripped it apart rather than the traditional method of eating it whole). A small matter to be sure but It really does seem to me that the control obsessives like to pick on the people who have tastes or habits some despise, as a way to gradually control more and more aspects of civil society.
Smoking is another interesting example: wait until social attitudes mean smokers are not in the majority and only then use the force of law to repress the hard core. This dynamic is why I have often thought that people who are statists and also homosexuals, i.e. who are members of a group that is always going to be disliked by a significant portion of the population, are really quite stupid. There will come a time when they reap what they sow.
I suspect all of us do something that a lot of other people will dislike and there is an entire class of people out there who use that fact to convince ‘us’ to support the use of the state to “do something about that”.
This essay, which I found while browsing the excellent website of Stephen Hicks, will resonate on both sides of the Atlantic.
As a farmer’s son, I sympathise with its message, but more optimistically, I’d argue that in some ways, life in the countryside is still a lot less regulated than in the towns, perhaps rightly, since when people live in close proximity and have to get along, more rules are required, if only tacit, rather than written, rules. But the sort of restrictions this farmer writes about are not caused by that sort of issue, but by the ongoing move by the state to regulate agriculture.
Cynics may argue that farmers have signed a Faustian pact with the state; they have accepted massive subsidies and can hardly be surprised if the providers of said increasingly demand to control the actions of the recipients. I agree with this. The sooner that the Common Agricultural Policy and its equivalents are obliterated, the better.
This is a public service announcement to save time for those who would rather get on with irrelevant vituperation and not bother digesting the point of my post: In a moment I’m going to say something positive about Gerry Adams.
First, consider this from The Washington Post:
The government’s terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list’s effectiveness.
A range of state, local and federal agencies as well as U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or even during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists, as well as a growing amount of information from various sources, including airline passenger data. The government said it was planning to expand the data-sharing to private-sector groups with a “substantial bearing on homeland security,” though officials would not be more specific.
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Jayson P. Ahern, deputy commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said focusing on arrests misses “a much larger universe” of suspicious U.S. citizens.
“There are many potentially dangerous individuals who fly beneath the radar of enforceable actions and who are every bit as sinister as those we intercept,” he said.
Gotta love those adjectives: “Potentially dangerous”, not “dangerous”. “Dangerous” would invite the question: How dangerous, exactly? And: What mayhem have these invisible pseudo-threats caused that the forces of security could not have created all by themselves? As for the visibly suspicious, the “sinister”, just how threatening they are is shown up by the US Customs and FBI’s own account – a “small” number of arrests, not necessarily related to terrorism, a number in the hundreds turned back at the airport. Which can happen even if you have been arrested without charge at some other time in your own country and didn’t realise that in consequence you need a visa.
Which brings us to Mr Adams. → Continue reading: State security theatre
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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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