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The immense majority of our people consider economic freedom as radically immoral. It scandalises them in the fullest sense of the word. – Daniel Villey, “Economique et Morale”, in Pour une Economie Liberee (1946), quoted in Economics and Its Enemies, by William Oliver Coleman. The latter book is an astonishingly good piece of scholarship. Its passages on the persecution of economists in the former Soviet Union are harrowing. November 21st, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 There are times when I almost feel sorry for conservatives and their confusion over libertarian positions on issues and why those positions appear to shift from time to time. Our position does not actually change though… we just give pragmatic support to one group or another according to what we perceive is the current greatest threat to our principles. There may be disagreements and even splits amongst libertarians over “what should we be doing right now?” These are temporary because the disagreements are over strategy and tactics and fine points of philosophy, not the goals. A conservative may look at the support of our particular faction of libertarians (Samizdata and friends) for the war and believe we are fellow travellers. They do not understand we see al Qaeda and the mad mullahs as such a grave threat to liberty and individualism in the world that we temporarily find common cause with the State. Defense is one thing most (not all) libertarians agree is a function of even a minimalist state. There is a certain pragmatism summed up in the old Arab saying “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”. The Islamic faction which clothes itself in blood and the Koran are most certainly something we can not ignore. The longer you leave them alone, the bigger the war will be in the end. It is easier to cut out a tumor than to go after a metastasized cancer. That does not mean these fruitcakes will always be number one on our anti-hit parade. As their threat subsides libertarians naturally turn their attention to the long term enemy of liberty: The State. I am ecstatic (guardedly) to see things working out in Iraq. Because of that, I too can turn my attention to the State. The State has done much to undermine freedom over the last decade, all in the name of ‘protecting us’. They really believe it. Sadly, they do not seem to have the same love of liberty we do. This has been brought home to me recently by conservative commentators who have denounced critics who took stands I consider obvious and courageous. One woman wrote she would rather die in a terrorist attack, even see her child do so than give up their liberties. She did not like the surveillance state that is being put together in the US (and which is a nearly completed edifice in the UK) in the name of ‘protecting’ her. Some years ago, not long after 9/11, I said pretty much the same thing to a CIA guy I once chatted with over beers. I told him I would rather die under a nuclear fireball than give up one tiny bit of my liberty. I stand by that. Those who fought and died in our wars did not do so for safety. They died to defend liberty and the essential character of America from foreign ideologues who hate individualism, hate liberty and hate the very idea of limits on governance. I sometimes wish I could agree with the anarchist wing that we could completely do without a State. My decades of personal experience and historical reading say otherwise. We need that monstrous ravening beast on occasion. Our problem is how do we keep it starved, chained and caged in the interim? That is a question the founders of America wrestled with. All things considered, they did about as well as could be hoped. It is indeed as they said: the defense of Liberty is the work of every generation. Our job now is to wrest freedoms back from the beast that were taken in the name of defense. (Am I the only one who thinks we should have a Department of War and make it damn clear what it is for?) I consider that excuse tedious and just plain wrong. Defense to me means going over there (like we did) and kicking the crap out of the enemy on their home ground. It also means people at home must defend their liberty by risking their lives on a day to day basis. They must take a personal responsibility for stopping terrorists or at least making them appear failures. People who whinge and cry into cameras for The State to ‘protect them’ are simply weak and contemptible. One expects that from dependent children: not from free adults. An adult stares coolly at the distant watching enemy and shows them that killing a few thousand of us will accomplish nothing except get us pissed off and the enemy and his next of kin and entire way of life very dead. As Heinlein said: “You can never defeat a free man. The most that you can do is kill him.” November 20th, 2007 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable. – Sam Harris, rebutting the daft charge that a denial of belief in the afterlife or a supreme being must open the doors to hell on earth. November 7th, 2007 | 57 comments - (Comments are closed)
I started off wanting to cheer this article – an angry denunciation of the rich folk who often back Green causes – but I then began to wonder whether I was falling for what amounts to an ad hominem argument, and felt rather ashamed of myself. To be sure, it is true that many greenies are extremely well off, or comfortable members of a middle class that feels guilty about material wealth – the legacy of all kinds of crap cultural and political ideas – but is it really a killer argument that a cause X or Y is backed by rich folk like Zac Goldsmith or Peter Melchett? What counts in the end is are their ideas right or wrong? For instance, Bjorn Lomborg is a sharp debunker of eco-cant and I think his take on the more extreme forms of greenery is accurate, but what does it matter whether Lomborg is a middle class Danish academic, heir to a massive fortune, or a humble shop worker? There is a broader point here. At the Libertarian Alliance conference last weekend, I could not help reflecting on the many posh, incredibly rich folk who were old fashioned liberals (or Whigs, as they used to be called). The walls of the National Liberal Club – a fine institution – are adorned with wonderful portraits of gentlemen in frock coats and women in elegant dresses, or stern-looking 19th century businessmen and industrialists. One of the benefits of having an independent income is that it gives a group of people time to think about certain issues that cannot be done by someone working long hours for a salary and who has to please a boss; independence of means also can encourage independence of mind. So Brendan O’Neil is wrong on this occasion, although I share his skepticism on green scares 100%. I do not give a monkey’s whether Jonathan Porritt is posh or not; it is his reactionary ideas to roll back the glories of modern industrial civilisation that bother me very much. November 2nd, 2007 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
He could have taken his article to this conclusion but perhaps he thought the baggage that would come with it would distract from his intended points. In order for my ‘friendly amendment’ to make sense, it is important to understand what “multiculturalism” really means. Multiculturalism is not a recent ideology. Only the name is new. Most of you are far more familiar with it as “separate but equal”. Wikipedia says:
Separate but equal … segregationism. Multiculturalism as an ideology is diametrically opposed to integration and assimilation. Some have noted a difference in the formation of terrorists in America as compared with Europe but without necessarily attributing it to America’s still comparatively high cultural emphasis and expectation of newcomers to assimilate.
So what does this have to do with Richard Miniter? → Continue reading: Richard Miniter stops short September 10th, 2007 | 120 comments - (Comments are closed)
Jim Henley has kicked off a fair old discussion buzz on the blogs in asking the question: do animals have rights? My short answer right away is they do not as the term rights only makes sense applied to humans because humans, being actually or potentially rational creatures, need freedom to exercise that rational faculty, which is not automatic, and hence doctrines of rights have evolved. Humans, by their nature, need liberty to survive and flourish because of how our minds work. Dogs and bunny rabbits do not. Well, that is what I have thought for a long time. But the fuzzy bits that you get with these sort of broad claims have started to bother me. A dog, for example, does not have a ‘volitional consciousness’ in the same way that a human being does, but the dog can respond to signals and its environment; it may not be able to form complex plans, but it can change its behaviour ever so slightly. So a dog needs an element of freedom to survive, too. So if rights are necessary for the furtherance of life, then perhaps they also apply to some other sentient creatures besides we humans. I still think the answer is no, since rights also entail the capacity to respect the rights of others: a vicious dog is not bothered about such things, let alone a white shark or even – may Perry forgive me – a hippo. And then of course, if we start to cut off the application of rights for any creature that does not fully fit the Aristotelian concept of a ‘rational animal’, where does that leave the mentally handicapped, or very young babies that have not yet formed a rational capacity? I think the in the former case, we regard the handicapped as having lost or never acquired something that humans normally would have, but our sheer sense of solidarity and compassion for the frail means we treat the handicapped with respect and care and rightly so. But of course we do not allow severely handicapped people to perform potentially dangerous jobs and in practice, such people tend to be placed under pretty serious constraints about what they can do. The same goes for very young children, or aged people suffering from mental deterioration to do with age. But I must admit that our attitudes towards animals are strange at times. I do not shoot or hunt animals for ‘sport’ – if it was sport, they would be able to shoot back – and I despise factory farming, think people who are cruel to animals deserve to have their gonads removed, and think that cruelty to other species diminishes us as human beings. But the problem is, I really, really feel in the mood for a big cheeseburger. Tibor Machan, the libertarian philosopher – and thoroughly nice chap – gives the standard classical liberal argument for why animal rights do not exist. I strongly urge commenters to take a look at the links on Jim Henley’s post I have linked to above. August 24th, 2007 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
June 20th, 2007 | 57 comments - (Comments are closed)
When Perry referred to the recent comments of US Presidential hopeful Barak Obama, we had another example in the ensuing comment thread of how people lazily refer to the idea that healthcare should be ‘free’. Of course, unless Obama is a total idiot – and I doubt that – he realises that health care, like roads, clean water, defence or food is not free in any sense at all that matters in a world of scarce resources that have alternate uses (such scarcity and the fact they have alternate uses is a classic element of what economics is). Healthcare is not free – it must be paid for, paid out of the time and trouble of other people. The problem, however, is that a lot of people, not just socialists, think that some things in life ‘ought’ to be free although one often finds they are at a loss to say why. Indeed, if you challenge a person by asking, “Why should health, clean water or defence be free”? they will either change the subject, or go bright red with anger, or fail to understand the question at all. To attack the idea that certain services and resources should be ‘free’ is not, alas, all that easy in today’s politically dumb climate. However, I think I have a partial solution in how to frame the point. If you ever encounter a person who says that healthcare should be free at the point of use, and it should be a ‘right’, then point out that this means that someone else has a corresponding duty to be a doctor, a nurse, a hospital orderly or an administrator. Unless people can be forced to perform these roles, then all talk of health as something that ought to be free is meaningless. Of course, at this point the socialist will blather on about incentives and so on, but what if no one wants to be a doctor or a nurse, regardless of pay? Does this mean that anyone who shows an inclination to like medicine should, at an early age, be conscripted into a hospital like a draft for the Army? I ask these rhetorical questions because I think that when we try to frame our arguments, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that actual flesh and blood human beings are involved in talk about “the right to free health care”. Most people these days oppose the idea of military conscription so it ought to be possible to make the case against medical conscription. If we can point out that medical conscription would be a bad thing, then it would be a step in nailing the nonsense that healthcare is a ‘right’. Here is a book I highly recommend about the whole noxious doctrine of ‘welfare rights’ and how they erode respect for the original, far more coherent rights doctrine of classical liberalism. May 30th, 2007 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
Following the brilliant ‘straw man’ quote below, I thought I would list a few regular straw man arguments that I come across in the comment threads of this blog as well as in the wider media/public world where the ideas of liberty, defence policy or the free market are mentioned:
This is often posited as a fact, when in fact law and liberty are necessary for each other. Without laws defining property rights, for example, much peaceful intercourse is impossible.
This boils down to a form of argument by intimidation. Even though many opponents of the operation to overthrow Saddam are stupid, evil or possibly both, quite a lot were against it for prudential reasons.
Many people from all parts of the political spectrum thought overthrowing Saddam, who was a bloodthirsty tyrant, invader of neighbouring nations, sponsor of terror, user of WMDs, was a humanitarian and necessary act.
This is not a start of an argument, but an attempt to shout debate down. It betrays the fact that Greenery is becoming a religion with its own notions of heresy. If anyone plays this gambit, refuse to take it up.
I often see this argument made by bigots as well as more benign folk. In fact it is possible to believe that many human characteristics are inherited but also changeable. And just because we are influenced by genes, it does not mean were are driven in a deterministic way. Free will still exists. The more knowledge we have about human nature etc, the more power it gives individuals, not less.
All that is necessary is that human economic interaction is based on voluntary exchange, not force. How much people want to get rich or not is irrelevant.
In fact, a free society is often much more able to preserve certain traditions, not less so.
This is rubbish: liberals value communities so long as membership is voluntary and further, co-operation is a consequence of liberty, not its opposite. An individualist can enjoy group activities as much as anyone, such as being part of an organisation, club, football team, whatever. The key is that such membership is freely chosen. I am sure that other commenters can think of a few more… April 11th, 2007 | 57 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am quite a fan of the fiction and some of the non-fiction of Ayn Rand, but I am the first to concede that some of the people who call themselves Objectivists are an assorted bunch, to put it politely. I have little time for some of the “official” Big-O Objectivists, like Leonard Peikoff, although I enjoy the writings of Tara Smith very much. The group of folk who liked Rand’s broad ideas but detested the narrow-mindedness and paranoia of some of the “official” group broke off, under the leadership of Dr. David Kelley, to form groups like The Objectivist Center. I like the TOC crowd and have corresponded with a few of them. I subscribe to The New Individualist, the monthly journal edited by the great Bob Bidinotto. What is so refreshing about it is that one does not get lots of shrilll lectures or dense philosophical treatises, but an engaging and assertive writing style coupled with an often impish sense of humour and enjoyment of the good things in life. It is a cracking read, in fact. Bob is also addicted to thriller novels, which puts him in the same bracket as me. Okay, enough creeping from me, now for the nasty part. In the April print edition – the web version does not appear to be up yet – there are two articles that struck some decidedly jarring notes. The first, by Roger Donway, argues that basically, the late Milton Friedman was not a good advocate of capitalism and individualism, and in fact he used arguments that play straight into the hands of socialists. (I am not making this up). The second article, by Bidinotto, includes a defence of the use of torture in ’emergency’ situations, although Bob does not define ’emergencies’ very clearly and leaves begging the question about who gets to decide such matters. But I have pretty much argued on this torture issue before and will not repeat myself here. So I will focus instead on what Roger Donway has to say about Friedman. To try to make this point, Donway argues that Friedman’s attack on the idea that firms have “social” responsibilities itself rests on a sort of utilitarian basis. Does it? → Continue reading: Sometimes, even a superb magazine gets it very wrong April 2nd, 2007 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
There has been a bit of a backlash against what might be called the “self-esteem” movement in psychology and education in the United States and elsewhere. Here is an item. It is certainly true that a lot of intellectually vapid rubbish has been written about this. For a lot of the time, it seems, “self-esteem” is nothing more than a desire to be freed from judgement, hard work and effort. I think there is a danger that in the backlash, that the baby gets chucked out with the bathwather, however. If you think about it, self-esteem is about the idea that as human beings, we are both competent to live and worthy of achieving happiness on this earth. This has nothing to do with a vague, dope-induced “feel-good” sort of sentiment, but is something quite different. Achieving happiness and believing that one is deserving of that is often quite hard. In a culture soaked in guilt about material wealth, where people are constantly told to feel bad about prosperity and “selfish individualism”, it is actually quite gutsy for someone to stand against all this. If one thinks about it, self-esteem, properly understood, is a key component of the idea of human rights. If people are entitled to pursue happiness and the good life, then they need rights to protect and advance that.To believe in the idea of the sovereign individual, one has to believe that individuals are competent to decide their lives and also worthy of such. And a self-confident, happy and proud person is surely what a healthy, liberal civil society needs. I fear that a lot of the people now bashing the self-esteem movement are not just sensible skeptics about the latest fads to come out of academia, but also collectivists and authortarians who fear what might happen if people really do want to pursue happiness and self-fulfilment. This classic on self-esteem is always worth a read, by Dr. Nathaniel Branden. And let’s not forget the important Victorian tradition of “self improvement”, starting with the great Samuel Smiles’ Self Help, which is much more than just getting seriously rich. There is a lot of chaff out there, but a lot of wheat as well. April 1st, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The other night I had a look at the 18 Doughty Street internet-based public affairs TV programme. I quite like what Iain Dale and the others in that outfit are trying to do with internet TV: breaking into the arena now dominated by BBC, ITN and Channel 4, channels that are by and large infused with the meta-context of the liberal-left. 18 Doughty Street is unashamedly pro-liberty, pro-capitalism, pro-America and anti-Big Government in its thinking. My main doubt is whether it can keep going without being able to make hard cash. Anyway, it is also attracting guests from across the spectrum, and it is an appearance by a leftist blogger on the show the other night that got my attention. Dale was interviewing three bloggers about events of the week, and one of the guests was Alex Hilton, the author of the blog Recess Monkey, a leftist site with a sense of humour that may or may not to be to one’s taste. He recently got into a bit of a pickle by posting the ‘news’ that Margaret Thatcher, whom Alex loathes, had died. She is, of course, very much alive. Iain Dale phoned up the BBC after seeing the ‘story’ and promptly Hilton had to retract and publish a rather grubby apology, albeit one with a fairly nasty sting in the tail. What a nob, I thought. Then I saw his appearance on 18 Doughty Street. Fairly boilerplate lefty, I thought, a bit cocky, not a bit ashamed of spreading an untrue story, in fact, denying that that the death of Mrs T. would be a ‘story’ at all (any newspaper editor would turn him down on the spot if he thinks that the death of a famous politician, however old, is not a story. I certainly would). Anyway, the interview went on. I was interested in how Hilton described how he came to hold the views he did, which is always interesting, in my view. His family background is working class – printing and coal mining, two industries that succumbed to the crackdown on subsidy and the trade union closed shop thanks to the Thatcher years (I strongly support both such changes, naturally). Hilton is a reminder, however, that a lot of people experienced the hard side of those changes, necessary though they were. I was a bit disappointed that Dale did not ask the question, “So Alex, are you in favour of massive coal subsidies and the old print union methods, then?”, which was a pity. But at one stage we got a really interesting admission. Hilton was talking about leftist economics bloggers, and said it was a pleasure to come across such folk, because on the whole, “economics is an emotional issue for socialists”, or some such. I certainly remember the use of the word “emotional”. Bang. For a socialist to actually admit that their views on economics are driven, not by logic, factual evidence, by reason, but by “emotion” is a big admission. It is an admission of intellectual defeat if you do not say that you have reason as your main motivator. It is to run up a big, white flag in the battle of ideas. When Marx was writing about class and the rise of the proletariat, he did not present his arguments as “emotional” – though of course they were in many respects. He used the language of science a lot. The left used to talk about ‘scientific socialism’. Their posters had big pictures of factories, machines and aircraft on them, all waxing lyrical about technology and the power of reason. The left is now a very different, post-modernist beast. Reason is out. Emotion is in. Socialism just took another little step towards its coffin on that show. Nice one Alex. Keep up the great work. Just do not try to kill off Britain’s greatest post-war Prime Minister ever again. March 31st, 2007 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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