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Further to my recent post about new measures from our Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. Foreign readers may be surprised that we have a department for children schools and families (sic). I, on the other hand, am alarmed: even the name indicates the totalitarian intent of the New British state.
Prompted by a clip on TV news, I have now found the full text of Ed Balls’s speech given to the Fabian Society yesterday. Didn’t the resolution to announce new policy to parliament, not outside bodies – in this case a para-Party body – last a long time? It bears close reading:
Excerpt I:
Our ambition must be that all of our young people will continue in education or training.
That is what our Bill sets out to achieve – new rights for young people to take up opportunities for education and training, and the support they need to take up these opportunities; alongside new responsibilities for all young people – and a new partnership between young people and parents, schools and colleges, local government and employers. ….
But it is important to make clear that this is not a Bill to force young people to stay on at school or college full-time. They will be able to participate in a wide range of different ways through:
* full-time education, for example, at school or college
* work-based learning, such as an apprenticeship
* or one day a week part-time education or training, if they are employed, self-employed or volunteering more than 20 hours a week.
But the Education and Skills Bill is a bill of responsibilities as well as a bill of rights.
Because if young people fail to take up these opportunities, there will be a system of enforcement – very much a last resort – but necessary to strike the right balance between new rights and new responsibilities.
Phew – not necessarily locked up in schools then, but on probation otherwise (as will of course any employers be – they’ll have to have enhanced CRB checks, of course). This is enlightening as to what Mr Brown means when he talks about a Bill of Rights and Duties, “building upon existing rights and freedoms but not diluting them – but also make more explicit the responsibilities that implicitly accompany rights…”. It confirms what many listeners will have guessed: you have the right and freedom to do exactly what the big G tells you to. This is the traditional line of Calvinism and Islam, is it not?
Don’t you love that “our young people”? Völkisch, nicht wahr?
Excerpt II:
The second building block [after mucking around with exams and the curriculum some more – GH] is advice and guidance – so that young people know and understand what is out there, and can be confident that they can make choices that will work for them.
First, this means local authorities taking clear responsibility for advice and guidance as part of the integrated support they offer to young people – making sure that youth services, Connexions and others who provide personal support to young people come together in a coherent way.
Second, clear new national standards for advice and guidance.
Last week my colleague Beverley Hughes set out clearly what we expect of local authorities as they take responsibility for the services provided by Connexions.
Third, a new local area prospectus available online, already available from this September in every area – setting out the full range of opportunities available, so that young people can see the choices available to them clearly in one place.
So not only will whether you do something state-approved be checked, but what you do will be subject to state advice and monitoring and made from a menu provided by the state. For the uninitiated Connexions is a formerly semi-independent, and notionally voluntary, database surveillance scheme for teenagers set up under the Learning and Skills Act 2000.
Exciting news for British schoolchildren. Early leavers ‘will not be jailed’ (PA). Except of course they will be under control orders, in effect; incarcerated and enslaved part-time. “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance,” ran the old slogan. This policy is pretty clear evidence that what’s offerred to many in the state school system is not education. If you have to force people to take something, then it is not plausiible that it is of use to them. There is no problem selling education and training to those who want it. Even very poor parents in London often find money for extra lessons or private day-schooling on top of the taxes they pay to imprison other people’s children. The prison function of the system reduces its value to others.
Put aside for the moment whether it should be paid for from taxes or not. How much more cost-effective would state education be if it were voluntary, and the classes were full of eager participants and even the grumpiest teenagers present were those whose parents or peers had persuaded them it was worthwhile? How much better would the curriculum be if it had to attract an audience by being interesting or useful, rather than prescribed by bureaucrats? How much better would teachers feel about their work if it didn’t include the roles of commissar, bureaucrat and gaoler?
Teenagers who refuse to stay in education until they are 18 will not face jail, Schools Secretary Ed Balls insisted ahead of new legislation to raise the leaving age.
The reform – hailed as one of the biggest in education for half a century – will be included in the first Queen’s Speech of Gordon Brown’s premiership on Tuesday.
Mr Balls said the legislation, which will raise the age to 17 by 2013 and 18 by 2015, will be backed by a “robust regime” of support and sanctions including spot fines and court action.
Since if you are at school you are barred from employment without the permission of the authorities, I imagine they will pay the fines with the proceeds of robbery and prostitution. Well done, Balls!
The BBC is reporting one of the most grotesque things I have seen for a while…
Individuals can no longer be held responsible for obesity so government must act to stop Britain “sleepwalking” into a crisis, a report has concluded.
So, you are not responsible for what you stick in your own damned mouth. Think about that and the implications that pulse out of those words like a neutron bomb’s radiation.
I have long said that in the western world the fascist approach to control (you may ‘own’ the means of production but you must used them in accordance with national political directives, i.e you are completely regulated and thus have liability without control) has completely triumphed over the socialist approach to control (the state, euphemised as ‘The People’, directly owns everything and you are simply a politically directed deployable unit of labour). And of course ‘labour’ means you and what you do with your body. This particular means of production is already only ‘owned’ by you provided you use it in a politically approved manner. And that will soon include what you may eat or may not eat.
This BBC article makes me wonder if the time to start throwing rocks could be closer than we like to think.
Pondering some of the recent stories about changes to UK inheritance taxes (the government’s ‘cut’ is in fact less impressive than it first appears), it occurs to me that there is one fairly respectable argument for worrying about huge inheritances, namely, that if people who work incredibly hard watch as other folk sail into positions of power and business wealth through the pure luck of having a rich family inheritance rather than through merit, it can be demoralising and encourage resentment against the broader capitalist system. Hence, so the argument goes, even though inheriting wealth per se is not wrong – it is the right of X to transfer legitimately acquired property to whomever he or she wants, period – it is sensible to foster an economic environment in which people feel they get a fair shake at what life has to offer.
I once was quite attracted by this idea of taxing inheritance to encourage some sort of ‘level playing field’, but I am no longer so sure. For a start, if an economy is expanding rapidly, it is hard to see how the presence of rich kids really demoralises less fortunate people. The economic process is not a zero sum game. Arguably, a sense of anger (“I’ll show those rich bastards”) may even spur the latter group to work incredibly hard to overtake the former. Rich kids may find they have to work harder, too, to impress people in certain ways who resent their wealth, and so on (I have seen this in action).
If a society is a closed one and the state controls most, if not all, of the key parts of an economy, then the existence of a small but influential case of rich people able to pass on their wealth without hindrance might also be a problem, but the solution to that is not to tax inheritance, but shrink the state.
A final point worth repeating over and over is the old example provided by the late Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher. He famously trashed egalitarian attacks on inherited wealth by rejecting the model that egalitarians use of society as a justification for their views. He said, if memory serves, that egalitarians tend to view life as a closed circuit, like an athletics track, and that if a person inherits a fortune, it is like an athlete starting a race 10 yards ahead of his fellows. But there is no fixed end to which people in society are racing, as they are in a 100m sprint. Instead, society is simply the short-hand term we use to describe the network of relationships between people exchanging things with each other to get what they want. To say that if I inherit my father’s dashing good looks or wealth means I have an “unfair” advantage over X or Y is meaningless in the context of an open society.
There are many practical, utilitarian reasons to object to inheritance tax (although other taxes are arguably even worse). But the moral case against it also needs to be made and the collectivist, zero-sum assumptions on which anti-inheritance views are made also need to be challenged for the errors they are. We cannot expect that job to be done by George Osborne.
(Update: over at the left-wing blog Crooked Timber, a contributor argues that the focus for inheritance tax, which is regarded as a good thing, should be on the beneficiaries, not the bequesters. But of course; if you are an egalitarian, it is natural to want to push the focus away from the right of people to dispose of their property to those that receive it. But the comment makes no reference whatever to why inequality that may arise from inheritance is in and of itself a bad thing. Such inequality is just assumed to be a bad thing, period. No actual argument, from first principles, is given as to why).
There is one thing more wicked in the world than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey.
– W.K. Clifford (1845 – 1879)
In the Daily Telegraph of Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 there is the following letter from Lesie Watson of Swansea (in Wales).
Ireland, Scotland and Wales have all introduced smoking bans without problems. But we read “thousands of smokers defy [English] ban” (report, July 2). What does this say about the English?
If the report is true Lesie, it means that there is still sometimes a reason to be proud to be English.
The most invidious part of ‘health authoritarianism’ is that it takes a very reasonable aspect of a state’s responsibility, that of defending against the truly collective threat of infectious plagues, and debases it to interfere with non-infectious diseases which only pose a risk to people who voluntarily enter private property where certain very obvious conditions pertain.
And so we have the smoking ban on enclosed non-residential private property in Britain being imposed by classifying private property as ‘public places’. Never mind that you do not have to enter that privately owned property if you do not like the smell of it, or that the owners should be able to exclude people they want to exclude (such as smokers or for that matter, non-smokers) or that employees who do not like the working conditions can quit and go work somewhere else.
No, the political class loves the idea of eliminating emergent civil society and extending political control ever deeper into people’s lives (this is usually described as making things “more democratic”), and the idea that private property is actually private is an intolerable obstacle to those whose world view is based on violence backed control of the lives of others.
Many people have a deep seated psychological need to see others controlled, not because they are genuinely threatened by them but because they simply get off on controlling other people. The world is full of curtain twitching busy bodies who feel enlivened by calling down the power of the state on those of whom they disapprove for no other reason that it ’empowers’ them (it used to be ‘queers’ who got reported, now it is different types of nonconformists). No totalitarian system that has ever come to power has been able to sustain itself for long without appealing to this all too common psychologically defective demographic, relying on denouncement and informers to perpetuate a political order.
And the only way to resist is to, well, resist. Find ways not to obey the rules. Subvert the meaning of statutes. Do not accept the ‘rightness’ of the prevailing bigotries. Speak out against the orthodoxies of though that underpin the control freaks. Call them what they are. Just find ways to be awkward, find ways not to cooperate, and confront those who assume they on on the moral higher ground and pour contempt on their world view. Just do not meekly cooperate.
It is a story told of more than one matinée idol, and no doubt actionable, so let us call him The Star.
The Star was rumoured in a big Hollywood prostitution case to have been one of the most regular [I almost wrote “biggest”] clients of the latest martyred madam. An interviewer caught up with him.
– “Mr Star, is it true you hired call-girls.”
– “Now I’m not going to comment on the case, and I never had any contact with Miss X; but it is no secret I have used call-girls plenty of times in the past.”
– “But Mr Star, you are known as one of the sexiest men in the world. You could surely have all the girls you want for free. Why pay anyone for sex?”
– “I didn’t pay them for sex. I paid them to go away afterwards.”
It seems our madly interfering government now wants to police our private lives a bit more closely, and thereby make them a bit riskier. According to The Times:
Unmarried women and men will be able to make claims against their partners to demand lump-sum payments, a share of property, regular maintenance or a share of the partner’s pension when they separate. They will also be able to claim against their partners for loss of earnings if they gave up a career to look after children.
The reforms are to be published by the Law Commission, the Government’s law reform body. It is expected to drop any proposal for a time stipulation, so that only couples who had lived together for, say, two years, could bring a claim; or any bar on childless couples.
Plans that would have made it harder for the partner who stays at home to lodge a claim have also been dropped. Courts will no longer have to be satisfied that the unmarried couple jointly decided that one of them should give up their career and stay at home and that the decision was not made just by one of them. […]
The reforms would apply to both opposite and same-sex couples in “an intimate relationship.” But the Law Commission emphasises that the plans are about granting individuals a remedy, not rights, when they split, and says that the measures will not undermine marriage but make the law fairer.
A marriage or civil partnership is a clear, deliberate, decision. I don’t think the state should control the form of family that is possible, but at least those particular controlled forms are optional, and formally delineated. This opens the way for officialdom to delineate and the courts to investigate any relationship for an actionable degree of intimacy, and for divorce lawyers to open a whole new field of speculative actions. Divorce lawyers will just love the idea that there’s no minimum length of ‘intimate relationship’ involved, and that unilateral reliance by one party can create a liability for the other. And they’ve been agitating for it for years (e.g. in Solicitors Family Law Association, Fairness for Families: Proposals for Reform on the Law on Cohabitation, 2000 – sorry, can’t find that online).
It would be an impressive feat on behalf of the state to make both marriage less attractive (some of its appurtenances – for those who want them – would come free) and at the same time to make sex and friendship outside marriage more risky – and possibly more risky the more affluent you are.
It might do some good of course, undoubtably there are people who are mistreated by partners or mistaken about their rights. But to punish every other single person in Britain for the cruelty or ignorance of a few is an appalling way to go. The parade of motivated winners tells you what you need to know: mad clingy girlfriends, scrounging scrubs of boyfriends, family lawyers, smug marrieds, investigators, officialdom, and prurient tabloids.
I can see a spin-off gain for the proprietors of anonymous, deniable, premises for lovers’ assignations. (Brighton?) Perhaps the Argentinian or Japanese speciality hotel businesses would get emulated here. But that would still be risky for the rich and famous. The only people certain to come out with improved credit (in both senses): proper, professional, prostitutes.
Some people get disgusted – I guess it is the ‘yuck!’ factor – at the idea that a person can sell his or her own kidney for money, for example. We seem to live in an era of warped values about the donation and use of human body parts, as this article in Reason makes clear. It appears that in some jurisdictions, just about everyone is allowed to make money from the business of using human tissue and bone for medical purposes – except the people from whom the tissue and bone is taken (I think we can take it as read at a liberal blog like this that killing people for their body parts is wrong).
Virginia Postrel, the US-based writer, underwent surgery to give one of her own kidneys to a friend and made sure said friend is alive today (what a great woman Virginia is). As a classical free marketeer, Postrel does not understand why it is so terrible that such acts should be done for financial gain. She has a long and typically thoughtful piece on the subject here. She responds to those who fear that poor or gullible people might be led into selling their body parts out of financial desperation, but that is an argument about curbing poverty, not reducing human freedom. Ultimately, I own my body, and not the state, not the rest of the UK population, not Tony Blair, not god or the Great Cheese Monster in the sky. Of course, a “market in organs” may attract shysters and unscrupulous doctors, but as the Reason article I alluded to makes clear, there are plenty of shysters in the system now.
Of course, in a country like Britain where a lot of the population drink like fish, it is debatable whether anyone would want to buy our kidneys, or even take them for free.
The Edmonton Aging Symposium was held at the University of Alberta last weekend, and a number of important anti-aging scientists attended , such as Aubrey de Grey and Gregory Stock. The Symposium discussed the prospect of developing and implementing many anti-aging technologies, with the Methuselah Foundation and the Supercentenarian Research Foundation providing positive positions on the technology.
The Symposium featured a debate between Gregory Stock and Daniel Callahan, a bioethicist from the Hastings Centre for Bioethics, on the virtues and vices of anti-aging technology. Callahan’s bioethics appears to be a code for denying individuals choice on the grounds that society has more urgent goals:
Dr Daniel Callahan, a renowned bioethicist from the Hastings Centre for bioethics, argues that focusing economic resources on aging science would be negligent for a society that’s faced with so many other pressing problems.
“Are there any present problems in society that would be helped by longer life? Global warming? Terrorism?” he urges, adding that “individual desire [for a longer life] is not legitimate.”
Callahan further speculates that although we may be able to extend life, we are unable to predict what the quality of that longer life would be. He suggests that there are other means to pursuing health in old age, and that pouring money into radical life-extending science might not be the answer.
“Most of the improvement in the health of the elderly is coming from the background socio-economic conditions …. something like 60 per cent of the improvements have come from that directive, rather than from medical care or medical research. It seems to me that there would be a fundamentally greater value of putting money into improving our understanding of prevention, lifestyle and behaviour issues,” he asserts.
Gregory Stock provided a reported response that did not reject the bioethicist’s assertion that research funds, usually paid for by us, be redirected to societal goals:
His opponent, Dr Greg Stock, director of the program Medicine Technology and Society at UCLA, predicts exactly the opposite economic situation. He contends that the economic gains achieved by eliminating the diseases and detriments of aging would outweigh the costs of research.
“The savings in [medicare and social security] of extending the human health-span would be … so immense that that they would justify the rather modest amount of money that would be spent on research,” Stock states.
These incidental benefits would be byproducts of the research. Yet, we should be grateful that anti-aging research is tarred as immoral by bioethicists. Research into lifestyles and prevention is a code for science that justifies directed diet and behaviour. This will ensure that controls are placed on those behaviours, foods and enjoyable activities which conflict with the list of societal goals, as decided by the state.
Supporting anti-aging research is a private and public good.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has increasingly wielded its regulatory powers in recent years, as infertility treatments have become more common and diverse. Some of the regulator’s decisions have been criticised as arbitrary or inappropriate, using an ethical calculus to coerce parental choice when it is not required. Their latest intervention is controversial, though based upon clinical outcomes.
At present, multiple embryos are implanted in the womb to increase the probability of a successful birth. This has potentially undesirable consequences if the health of the mother or the children is impaired. Studies have monitored infertility treatments and demonstrated these drawbacks.
Half of the mothers of IVF twins give birth prematurely and the babies are below the minimum ideal birth weight of 5lb. They run a much higher risk of dying, lung and heart problems, having cerebral palsy or developmental difficulties and facing chronic conditions as adults. Many spend time in special neonatal care units in hospitals. Mothers who conceive more than one baby after IVF are far likelier to suffer a miscarriage or dangerously high blood pressure than women who have one child naturally.
This should be viewed as additional information that clinicians would take into account when advising their patients and making a diagnosis or a recommendation. If the regulator had drawn attention to these studies and noted that inspectors would wish to see these taken into account during diagnosis, no observer could criticise such diligence. However, we live in New Labour Britain, home of targets and micromanagement:
Shirley Harrison, the HFEA’s chair, will this week defend the decision to put medical safety above the rights of childless women to choose how many embryos are transferred. She will cite research showing that having just one embryo implanted does not reduce a woman’s chance of conceiving.
Doctors will retain the freedom to use their clinical judgment to decide if a woman rated a ‘poor responder’ to fertility treatment should still get two embryos. Clinics will be told to reduce the number of multiple births through IVF over time from 25 per cent to somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent.
This is a decision that should rest between the doctor and the patient. If the patient is aware of the risks and responsibilities, they may then take the difficult decision required in this matter. It is not up to HFEA to usurp clinical practice and private judgement in this matter.
I read the headline of John Lloyd’s article in the FT Magazine this week, and I read it again, and again. Every time it seemed to make less sense than before:
Personal politics: There are times when the government is right to intrude into the realm of private morality
Regardless of what it is or is not right for the government to do, state intrusion means something is no longer a matter of private morality, or morality at all. It is certainly not private, once the state is involved. And regulation displaces morality. The capacity for choice is required for morals to play a role.
Reading the article was even more perplexing. To the extent Lloyd’s piece is about the Catholic/gay-adoption argument, it is as tedious as most of the vacuous discussion on the question. What engaged and enraged me were his premises. Mr Lloyd in this discussion treats the state as a kind of super person, possessed of its own opinions and moral sense, and that hectoring people who do not conform to those pseudo-desires is legitimate.
The morality of the welfare state depends on contribution and responsibility. Since some people don’t contribute and many are irresponsible, the choices of those who do contribute and are responsible is [sic] either to tolerate the free riders, refuse to pay for the effects of their irresponsibility or trust the state to educate them.
False dichotomy and all, this is the authentic voice of the New Labour branch of civic republicanism: ‘citizenship’, which is to say personhood, defined by duty to the state-collective. He notes entirely accurately that:
[T]he British state has progressively, and under New Labour very significantly, delved deeper into both the prejudices and the private behaviour of citizens, and sought to reform both […] ensuring that society as a whole observes the new order.
The square brackets there stand for the omission of two and three-quarter paragraphs, so apologists for the New Labour point of view may object that the last clause refers only to removing some disadvantages from homosexuals. But I am not being unfair. Ensuring that society as a whole observes the new order is the key to the project.
Despite there being other theories of the welfare state that I and other Samizdatistas might reject but that are less repugnant to human autonomy, we are now offered a Hobson’s choice: be treated as drone in the sense of a worthless idler – or become a drone in the Borg sense, actually not a fertilising drone but a sterile ergate, emptied of all capacity for moral choice.
What is the eGovernmental equivalent of soft hands, marking the unproductive drones out for hounding to destruction of their dronish identity? Inadequate contribution. Failure to comply with whatever compliance is required.
You will not will incorrectly. You will comply.
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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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