Conservatism - the home for grown up libertarians

 Although you can't, of course, use the actual word 'conservatism':

Many of the failures of today’s America are failures of excess regulation, but many others are failures of state capacity. Our governments cannot address climate change, much improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending. Much of our physical infrastructure is stagnant or declining in quality. I favor much more immigration, nonetheless I think our government needs clear standards for who cannot get in, who will be forced to leave, and a workable court system to back all that up and today we do not have that either. Those problems require state capacity — albeit to boost markets — in a way that classical libertarianism is poorly suited to deal with. Furthermore, libertarianism is parasitic upon State Capacity Libertarianism to some degree.

This (and the rest of Tyler Cowan's article) describes what I'd call 'institutional conservatism' - if you want to maintain an effective system not only should it be allowed to evolve but it needs to be well managed. What's happened is that essentially liberal-minded people have realised, as Cowan comments, how "...it doesn’t seem that old-style libertarianism can solve or even very well address a number of major problems...". Cowan cites climate change (where a common libertarian response is simply to deny it) but, more importantly in my view, we should look at how the sociological evidence around social infrastructure, communities and families all leads away from a hyper-liberal approach and towards conservatism.

What's important here is that, unlike (almost all) the left, we need to begin with recognising that markets and capitalism remain an essential part of the solution to problems such as climate change but also need what Cowan calls 'state capacity' to ensure social outcomes - from good public transport and nuclear power through to welfare and health safety nets - are secured.

My instincts are impeccably liberal and I don't consider that government should be the first choice for delivering any service but it seems clear that the social damage done by ultra-liberalism requires intervention - from the growth of loneliness and the collapse of the working class family through to violent crime and class bias in educational outcomes there's a case for government to act in the interests of the working person rather than simply to follow the liberal, utility maximising imperative.

I've long thought that, to oversimplify, economics is liberal while sociology is conservative (and the academy for both of them is filled with socialists). And that the division in national priorities flickers between an emphasis on community, family, security - the conservative instinct - and one on growth, progress, wealth - the liberal preference. Moreover, conservatism is the only practical politics able, at its best, to marry these imperatives in a lasting manner. Sadly conservatives, especially in the USA, have become bogeymen to intellectuals - self-interested plutocrats or rednecks with bad teeth and guns. The former is conservatism as the merely the rich preserving their interests while the latter is a modern urban snobbery about those less well-educated folk outside the city.

Rampant liberalism, the 'Thatcherism' that great lady never believed in that young men with cash and good suits brashly proclaim, has damaged the idea of conservatism as much as has the endemic infections of reaction, racism and small-mindedness. Even if burning fifty quid notes in front of the homeless is a bit of a myth, the sentiment - that the poor are solely responsible for their poverty and for getting out of that poverty - remains too common. Just like absolutist approaches to individual choice (witness the trans ID debate), this hyper-liberal idea is a corruption of decency, moderation and good sense. Plus it denies duty, responsibility and community as central parts of our worlds.

So if you've read Tyler Cowan's "state capacity libertarianism" and find its argument persuasive, I'd like to welcome you to conservatism, to a world of compromise, consensus and good government. Then you can join in making better policy for the families and communities that make up the societies in which we live - get them better lives, safer communities and (as Tom T Hall would say) more money.

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Some more good stuff for your reading lists

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Bradford West Labour Party - more fun for the politics watcher

"We would respectfully ask, out of courtesy, for a full explanation of the NECs decision to impose candidates in our constituency along with an explanation of the specific allegations without having to read in the press first.

"We are deeply concerned that the voice of our membership is being silenced and to this end we would ask the decision to impose candidates in Bradford West is overturned.

"We would welcome an urgent meeting with representatives of the NEC to further explain our concerns on behalf of our constituents."

Simple-minded lefties

Writing in the journal Political Psychology, a team of researchers led by the University of Montana psychologist Lucian Gideon Conway III reports the results of four studies that together call "into question the typical interpretation that conservatives are less complex than liberals." It turns out that liberals and conservatives are both simple-minded, depending on the topic under discussion.

Are the Koch brothers really right-wing?

How, then, are the Kochs members of the radical Right? They are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass-incarceration” policies. They’ve never seized a national park at gunpoint.

Is rhino farming the answer to poaching?

The push to lift the ban on selling rhino horn came from game breeders, John Hume and Johan Kruger, who claim that legalising the trade within the country will reduce rhino deaths - rhino horn is similar to our fingernails, and can actually be harvested without harming the animal. Hume also argued that if the ban on rhino trade continued, he'd no longer be able to afford to keep his 1,200 farmed rhinos.

Don Boudreaux respectfully takes Stephen Hawkings down several pegs

"The above, Prof. Hawking, is, as you know, what people who know nothing of physics often sound like when they rely upon popular myths and personal intuition to make sense of physical reality. And it’s pretty much what you, a brilliant physicist who knows nothing of economics, sound like when you rely upon popular myths and personal intuition to make sense of economic reality."

The dark side of the liberal, progressive left

"Scopes was charged for teaching from a textbook called A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems, published in 1914. The book taught Darwin’s doctrine as fact, but it didn’t leave his conclusions there. The author, George William Hunter, not only asserted the biological difference of races, he insisted on the vital importance of what he called “the science of being well born”—eugenics. Like most progressives of the time, Hunter believed in “the improvement of man” via scientific methods. That meant promoting personal hygiene, proper diet, and reproductive control. A Civic Biology also has suggestions for what to do with “bad-gened” people, in a section called “The Remedy.” “If such people were lower animals,” the books says, “we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity would not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe.”

Tyler Cowen guessing at when we'll have driverless cars

Singapore will have driverless or near driverless neighborhoods in less than five years. But it will look more like mass transit than many aficionados are expecting.

...neoliberal orgasms - why capitalists have the best sex (or something)

Positioned as the ‘peak’ of sexual experience, orgasm is packed with sociocultural meaning. Exploring the construction of orgasm in Cosmopolitan magazine in the context of the shift towards a postfeminist sexuality and the neoliberal shift towards the rational management of sex as work, this article argues that magazines offer a ‘pedagogy of the body'...

Read responsibly.

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...but who will build the roads?

The same sort of folk as built the last lot I guess.

Next question please?

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Ideology, ideology, ideology!

At first the term "ideology" referred to the study of ideas and their origins. Over time this has transmogrified into our modern, familiar - I might say comfortable - definition:

...a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.

It is for this reason that ideology is important yet it has become something of a pejorative term - I recall someone upset by my thoughts on public health sending a screaming tweet: "Ideology, ideology, ideology" it said, as if I would be upset by my observations being basis on a more-or-less coherent set of thoughts.

We have arrived at the point where, in the minds of too many, there are two distinct positions in any debate or discussion - "ideology" and "evidence-based" - where the latter is deemed to be superior. The problem I have is that, without a premise for your proposal, prescription or policy, any amount of evidence won't necessarily tell you that it's the right (or wrong) thing to do.

We're told - repeatedly - that alcohol can be damaging to our health. I'm guessing that nearly all adults and most children are aware of the risks (although not necessarily how to assess or quantify those risk) involved in drinking. Let's assume that some evidence is presented showing that, if we increase the price of drink, then consumption will fall and fewer people will damage their health as a result. Indeed, since there's lots of evidence that increasing price reduces consumption, we could apply the evidence to any activity or product that has negative social consequences.

The point isn't what the evidence says but whether we should enact some policy on the basis of that evidence - is it right to make booze more expensive for everyone because a small number abuse alcohol? This isn't a decision you can make on the basis of evidence, it can only be made on the basis of ideology - a premise that says all population intervention in personal choice is justified on health grounds. The evidence says the decision - putting up the price of beer - will have a positive impact on health but the decision to restrict choice (for that is what a price intervention is) is ideological.

As of course would be the opposite decision - not increasing price because personal choice trumps public health.

Ideology matters.

Our public administration has adopted an ideology that needs, in the interests of democracy and freedom, to be challenged. Yet whenever a challenge to the premise (essentially that government intervention is always justified) is made, the response isn't to present a logical rationale for that ideology but to gather together "evidence" showing how government intervention is a good thing. "What matters is what works", as Tony Blair would have put it.

The result of this outlook - a sort of anti-ideology ideology - is a sterile debate conducted on the basis of fact-checking, appeals to (evidence-supplying) authority and attacks on the critic for basing his argument on 'ideology'. The irony of this is that debates between, say, Marxists and libertarians are more honest and interesting than the faux-debate that dominates much of our current political discourse.

Take a look at the debate over Scottish independence. The Scottish government under its Scottish Nationalist Party leadership has produced a vast tomes setting out the "evidence" for independence with the emphasis on the economic case. And those opposed to independence have, likewise, set out their case for retaining the United Kingdom.

However, the argument isn't about the economy at all. Nor is it about the welfare state or the army or nuclear bombs or any of the other aspects of the debate. The argument is ideological - should Scotland be independent or not. And the voters will, in the main, make their decision to for 'yes' or 'no' on the basis of this ideological debate. Or rather on the basis of an ideological debate that simply hasn't happened because we've forgotten how to lift politics out from the banal and pragmatic and into the realm of ideas.

Accusing someone of "ideology, ideology, ideology" isn't an insult, that base of ideas allows us to make policy choices where the evidence doesn't direct us to a choice - the world of macroeconomics is filled with such choices, for example. And ideology provides the basis for these choices, big and important choices that affect everyone's lives, to be debated and discussed.

Ideology really does matter and we should use it more often.

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Robert Heinlein - America's most important libertarian writer.

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Forget Ayn Rand, ignore Robert Nozick, push aside all the cacophony of recent writing about libertarian ideas. If you want to understand American libertarianism - including the conflicts and contradictions inherent in what it says - go and read Robert Heinlein.

In the early 1970s, according to a survey undertaken at the time by SIL, the Society for Individual Liberty, one libertarian activist in six had been led to libertarianism by reading the novels and short stories of Robert A. Heinlein. Among the prominent libertarians of the late 20th Century who have named Heinlein as an important influence on the development of their own political thinking were Dave Nolan (the founder of the Libertarian Party) and the late Samuel Edward Konkin III.

Here's why maybe?

“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” 

Take some time out to read 'Stranger in a Strange Land' or "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and understand Heinlein's examination of the contradictions and restrictions of modern America in the former and invocation of the US constitution as the guarantor of freedoms in the latter.

Heinlein's words are echoed in libertarian - and, in America's confused polity - conservatives politics today. Here, from 'Stranger in a Strange Land':

 “Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling - oh, Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it "good."

How close this is to Reagan's famous dictum:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'

I'm sure there are people who prefer to hack their way through the turgid forest of Ayn Rand's prose, to try to empathise with her soul-less, cold characters. But next to the reflections of the author in Heinlein - most of his 'political' works feature an older, wealthy man as the vehicle for that politics - Rand's work lacks impact, few read it without political purpose whereas many will have read 'Friday' or 'Doorway into Summer' just for the good read.

Heinlein doesn't analyse, he merely states those freedoms that Americans cherish- whether or not they profess to be libertarians. None of which makes Heinlein a libertarian although throughout his work, and especially his later work, he always using that knowing quasi-narrator figure as the means to play with political argument and ideas. Whether this is the survivalism (and troubling racial stereotypes) of 'Farnham's Freehold', the war fascism of 'Starship Troopers', the attack on organised religion in 'Stranger in a Strange Land' or the libertarian reworking of the War of Independence that is 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'.

In the end Heinlein was a writer who played with ideas, who speculated what they might mean to society, rather than a libertarian polemicist. But his writing always contains that idea of independence, self-reliance and frontier so essential to the American psyche - he doesn't shout or lecture but adopts the stance of the old man sat on the porch dispensing the wisdom of experience and takes his reader with him.

So when people encountered libertarian ideas in Heinlein it was more homespun than the intense, finger-wagging of Ayn Rand or the turgid academia of European writers:

"Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop." Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them "for their own good" — not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.” 

For all that he was more a contrarian - Heinlein was America's most important libertarian writer. And he liked cats.

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Freedom, choice, Nigel Farage and the unpleasantness of The Guardian

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The nannying fussbuckets have been in full cry what with plain packs, banning smoking on hospital grounds and the, almost certainly untrue, estimate that 600 children a day start smoking. Indeed the good thinking folk who advocate that public health is good for us are bouncing around all chipper as government slips down the slope to a controlled, constrained and, incidentally, crime-filled future of health intervention.

This brings me to an especially unpleasant piece of ad hominem in The Guardian. Don't get me wrong, I think Nigel Farage has become something of a self-parody, a sort of avatar for the pub know-all but this attack is unpleasant and incorrect in equal measure:

Nigel Farage's cigarettes are often depicted as one of the most appealing things about him. To date, his deployment of crafty or, occasionally, cheeky ciggies, while all around him conform to public health advice, has been a remarkably well-received token of his libertarian vision.

So the article begins, continuing in this vein with the author (in her left-wing nastiness) seeking to imply that not only does Nigel want us all to die but that this is the essence of 'libertarianism'. The word is used in almost every paragraph until the author realises her argument is pretty thin and decides to deepen it by invoking 'Godwin's Law'  - suggesting that Nigel is really a 'fascist' (on the basis of a couple of uncorroborated stories about his youth).

What depresses me most isn't that The Guardian is publishing an attack on Nigel Farage that is so shallow as to be almost dried up but that the basis of this attack is that he is a libertarian. Not just because - as his party's policies on immigration and gay marriage show - Nigel is anything but a 'libertarian' but because the author suggests that there is something terrible about a belief in personal choice.

And this is the divide. The Guardian and its friends (that, in this matter, include The Daily Mail) do not believe in personal choice and personal consequence. They believe - completely without evidence - that the dark evil of Big Tobacco, The Drinks Industry, The Food Industry and their accomplices in Advertising are combining to force children into smoking, drinking and eating the sort of food a Guardian reader would never allow in the house (far too common).

The truth of this is that Nigel Farage thinks you should be able to drink, eat and smoke legal products without being ostracised, taxed to the hilt or banned. However, he doesn't think people should be able to marry who they wish or that freedom includes free movement.

The Guardian, on the other hand is fine on the marrying bit but doesn't think working-class people are able to make choices about drinking smoking or eating and should be told what to do. The Guardian is also opposed to free movement - especially in Cuba.

Given a forced choice, I'd back Nigel over The Guardian. But there must be a better choice than between 'nanny knows best' social democracy and the slightly xenophobic world vision of Nigel Farage? I read and hear people saying the right things - some right, some left, some muzzy middle - about choice and freedom (that they are rights not privileges granted us by some benign authority) but see too little of this arriving in public policy. There I just see more reasons to interfere with choice and freedom, more of the man in Whitehall knowing best, more regulation, more tax.

And the result is less choice, less freedom, less opportunity and more poverty.

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In which I get a little Marxist in the cause of minimum government

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This is quite a difficult thing for me to write - partly because I'm stepping out from the areas where I'm comfortable with my knowledge but also because it challenges a more or less universal misunderstanding. And it begins with this quote from Engels:

The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not “abolished,” it withers away.

Setting to one side the vast (and largely incomprehensible) corpus of Marxist thinking, it strikes me that there is nothing to disagree with in the idea that the state will become superfluous. And those of the right (or at least the freedom-loving bit of the right) should share the objective - or is it the consequence - of Marxism.

Now I take the view that Marx's historical determinism - that the process from the hypothetical cave to a free socialist life is inevitable - is a load of nonsense. But this doesn't negate the ambition to which Engels alludes - that a perfectly just society would not need government. It is an admirable liberal aim.

The problem - and all the disagreement - comes from the route that Marxists (or rather 'communists', which I understand is a slightly different thing) choose to reach the shared objective of a free society, by which I mean one that does not require governing. Here's another Engels quote:

At the same time we have always held that in order to arrive at this and the other, far more important ends of the social revolution of the future, the proletarian class will first have to possess itself of the organised political force of the state and with this aid stamp out the resistance of the capitalist class and re-organise society.

The contradiction - an acknowledged contradiction - here is that in order to create a world free of the oppression of government it is necessary to seize control of government and through those means 'oppress' any people or organisations ('the capitalist class' is a conveniently broad concept) that stand between today's society and that perfectly just society we desire.

The problem here isn't that Marx's ideas were wrong but that the programme developed with Engels and operationalised by Lenin, Mao and others was wrong. This was a failure of strategy not a mistaken ambition - if we agree that, in part, this ambition is a just society free from the inevitable oppression that comes with government.

What is most bizarre however isn't that some people still adhere to the failed prescription of Engels (although this is somewhat odd) but that Marxists make common cause with Fabian Socialists, who had - and have - a very different view of the state. Here's Mark Bevir:

Fabian economic theories, unlike those of the Marxists, almost required their adherents to call for an interventionist state. The Fabians believed that rents could not be eliminated since they arose from the variable productivity of different pieces of land and capital.  The only solution was for the state to collect rent and use it for the collective good.

We have -on "the left" as we like to call it - an alliance between people whose end game is a free society without government and those who, in a manner reminiscent of Plato's 'guardians', believe that a (courageous) state is necessary for the just society to operate. It seems to me that Marxists are making common cause with people whose ideology is not simply different but diametrically opposed to what they believe. Those who want Marx's end game (and who could argue with that - other than Fascists and Fabians) need to make common cause with people who share the same broad objective but embrace a different strategy, who think making government smaller now makes more sense than trusting to those controlling government rejecting power.

Clinging to a failed strategy is daft. Yet that is what many on the Marxist left are doing - clutching to a belief that controlling the state is what matters rather than joining with those who wish to see a smaller state now. The principles of cooperation, collaboration and coproduction that Marxists applaud are shared but the means to the end are not.

I may misunderstand Marx here, in which case tear what I say to shreds, but if a free, just society is the end - and surely it is - then Marxists, rather than sneering at libertarians, Randians and anarcho-capitalists, should spot the shared ground and see that a society where the state directs or controls over half of human activity is not the sunlit uplands that Marx imagined.

Or maybe not...

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The immigration question - or how to spot a libertarian

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Lots of people lay claim to being 'libertarian'. This credo is quite popular these days as people rant and rail against "statism" and "big government". Calls are made for more free speech, for the dismantling of the nanny state, for the troops to be brought home post haste, for fewer regulations and less government interference. Gay (or rather an ever lengthening string of letters - I think we're up to LGBT now but more may have been added while I wasn't watching) rights are extolled and encouraged and religions are condemned for their outmoded attitudes to all sorts of things - but mostly sex.

And then we get to immigration. At this point I watch as strange contortions go on while people explain how they really are libertarian but that this doesn't mean we can't have a ban on "permanent" immigration. Accompanying this almost Cardhousian contortion is a commitment to the nation state - to Britain or England.

Let me explain - firstly by quoting a pretty good liberal (in the days when liberal meant what we now mean by libertarian):

“The world is my country,
all mankind are my brethren,
and to do good is my religion.” 

Pretty good, eh! But it is a philosophy without boundaries - it's not just trade, speech and enterprise that should be free but movement. To call for tighter restrictions - even bans - on immigration is to reject the essence of this freedom. And that means you aren't a libertarian.

Nor can you hide behind statements about "level playing fields" or misconceptions about immigrants and benefits. These are no different from arguments for protectionism and managed trade - they block our goods so we block theirs, they protect their farmers so we protect ours.

You see folks, you're not libertarians at all really - what you are is conservatives. You like small government, you're a fan of voluntarism, you think business is important and you place great store in the old liberties of England - all that Magna Carta and killing the king stuff. But just as importantly you think place is important - nation, county, town, Your place, my place - a sense of belonging to somewhere that really matters.

A bit like Kipling - who certainly wasn't a libertarian:

 GOD gave all men all earth to love,
    But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
    Belovèd over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
    So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
    And see that it is good.
So one shall Baltic pines content,
    As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
    Before Levuka’s Trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
    The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
    Yea, Sussex by the sea! 

So, my friends, if you are a conservative, have the good grace to admit to it rather than pretend you're a sexy, trendy, Rothbard-quoting libertarian.

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Where is this anti-state rhetoric that Tim Montgomerie fears so much? I don't hear it.

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Tim Montgomerie from his Conservative Home pulpit lays into the 'libertarians'. Not on the basis of a considered, reasoned set of arguments but on the basis of an opinion poll. Dear old Tim shows that most folk prefer this 'vision of society':

"A society where government plays a limited role in society, providing services and a safety net in hard times but where we largely rely on families, education and job creators to create a good society".

I would like to point out to Tim that this 'vision' is wholly compatible with a minarchist libertarian viewpoint. Indeed, it is a pretty good description of what most thoughtful libertarians think. So why does Tim say this?

Conservatives need to drop the anti-State rhetoric. Ensuring comfortable retirements for pensioners, benefits for the sick and assistance for genuine jobseekers shouldn’t be afterthoughts for Conservatives but central to their electoral pitch. Conservatives shouldn’t see these things as a necessary evil but as a privilege for a decent society to provide and for a decent party to enhance. When Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic are as serious about blue-collar wages as the deficit and as serious about cutting taxes on the low-paid as on the propertied class, they will start winning elections again. But not until then.

I just don't get it. The debate isn't about whether we should go for some sort of Randian anarcho-capitalism - or whatever it is that Tim thinks is libertarianism. The debate is about whether the we emphasise "where government plays a limited role in society" or creating "a good society". Since I've been a member of the Conservative Party for almost as long as Tim Montgomerie has been alive, I guess I'm just about qualified to say that this debate - between small government and the desire to advance Disraeli's mission of improving the condition of the people - has always been at the heart of the Party. Once it was 'wets' versus 'dries', now it's a conversation between the standard bearers of the Thatcherite gospel, assorted sorts of libertarians and a  Macmillan (or maybe Heseltine) style activist, interventionist party.

In the end we are - and always will be - a coalition. Today the balance of that coalition has shifted. Where once the party was filled with broad-bottomed, patricians who knew better the needs and cares of the workers, today it is increasingly a place for people who reject 'know better', who dislike government by opinon poll and who believe that wanting a small state is a moral imperative. The same moral imperative that led us to vote Tory in 1979, the same moral imperative that supported council house sales and privatised utlities. The same imperative that cries out for lower taxes.

Tim talks of 'demand for government' without fully explaining what he means. Is there a demand for floors filled with policy officers? Do the public cry out for teams of equalities officers and diversity co-ordinators? Has the mob taken to the street calling for an endless production line of similar - and similarly dumb - special advisors to ministers? Has the angry man of Tunbridge Wells written to complain of how the limited supply of climate change advisors is destroying England?

We didn't demand these things. What Tim Montgomerie has done is to build a lovely libertarian straw man - based on a pretty lousy opinion poll - to enable him to argue for some sort of Tory paternalism. Or worse a version of Blairite government by opinion poll and focus group.

Every single obstacle laid by Tim before us liberals can be pushed aside by reasoned argument, by creative and different approaches to meeting needs. In the end government is the guarantor of freedom - that's what we believe in. And yes, government must concern itself with security but as was famously said many years ago:

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

I'm not a libertarian, Tim. I'm a Tory. And that means freedom - free speech, free enterprise, free trade, free choice and above all the chance to live free.

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Libertarianism is a political programme not a set of economic policy options

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The thing with criticisms of libertarianism is that people fail to understand that it is a political project - a desire to break the state and rebuild a free society - not an exercise in economic choice-making. Hence this:

...if Johnson had been president in 2008, he would have allowed the U.S. financial system to collapse and the country to fall into depression. And if he became president now, he would do his best to strangle the tepid recovery we are enjoying and turn it into another severe recession.

Perhaps but the author is trapped inside and can't see the label on the jar that says "Government Jam - contains no freedom". As with other proponents of national account mathematics as a replacement for economic thinking, this author cannot see that the supposed "solutions" from the US government (and for that matter our government here in the UK) merely stir the 'Government Jam'. Voices will say that lessons have been learnt and that the banks will be controlled but is this not simply to repeat past errors?


Firstly, why is it said that banks cannot be allowed to fail? Are these institutions of state or businesses? If they are the former then why were they allowed to operate outside the direct control of the state? And, if the latter, why are the rules different from those applying to other businesses? If we believe in a free system, then businesses - including banks - must be allowed to fail. Those who argue otherwise do not support or believe in freedom and might as well just toddle off and join the Marxists.

Secondly, when did we decide that the government's job was to "run the economy"? This viewpoint now dominates economic thinking - or rather what passes for it within the corridors or power (and the organs of crypto-fascists like Bloomberg). Again, if we believe in freedom then it is mistaken to believe that government can "run the economy" without curtailing that freedom. And, moreover, the idea that something as complicated as the US economy can be "run" by anything or anybody is hubris. Yet the view that the economy is an institution as opposed to a system still corrupts our thinking:

Speaking in purely descriptive and functional terms, the distributive institutions of society are what makes any given bit of money “your money.”

The flaw in this argument is the same flaw that drives the economic policies of national and international governments and organisations - that the economy is an institution to be managed not a system to be used.

Thirdly - and finally - this entire argument echoes this famous dictum:

"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

Without the state there can be no freedom. Without freedom there can be no prosperity. Therefore the state must be everything. Today this is achieved through dominating consumption through public spending and through the exercise of regulatory control rather than through the more brutal methods preferred by the man whose words are quoted above. But the object is the same - a directed, corporate state under the control of technocratic experts.

In the end libertarianism is a political project setting itself against the established institutions. And it does so because those institutions corrupt the effective operation of the free system. For sure, the proponents of state orthodoxy claim that we are not to be trusted with free enterprise, free trade and free speech (merely moderated shades of these things).

If you reject this system of the world - controlling but failed once and failing again - then you must argue either for the forcible end of free markets or for the advance of liberty. There are some - proponents of the idea that all the money is government's bounteously scattered upon the infantilised masses - who want a totalitarian state of courageous proportions.

Libertarianism is a political idea not an alternative approach to the failed economics of the establishment. If people fail to appreciate this and treat it as just another set of policy options then they are missing the point. The banks should be allowed to fail because to bail them out is an act of corruption, the protection of the wealthy from the consequences of their mistakes. Government's exist as protectors - guarantors if you will - of rights and freedoms not as managers of the economy.

I remain sceptical of this creed - it tips a little towards an anarcho-capitalism I'm sure can't work - but I'd rather take the risk of heading this way than remain in the seemingly inevitable spiral towards state control that current policies imply. I do not wish to live in a world where liberty and choice are limited by government - doled out like sweeties as a way to keep us content but removed whenever those choices or liberties threaten the institutions where power sits.

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You mights as well say "reassert the primacy of democratic politics over physics"

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I'd never heard of Dr William Partlett, so he fits his own description of "obscure scribbler". However, if he is to fulfil his mission - defined as "overcoming the left-right divide" - he'll need to do better. In truth, Dr Partlett's overcoming the left-right divide is about challenging what he calls but doesn't define or describe. "libertarianism". Apparently the "libertarian right" is intellectually dominant which comes as a surprise to this old liberal.

But the weakness of Dr Partlett's argument is as nothing besides his confusion about economics. Now my understanding is that economics is a field of study focused on how scarce resources get distributed, how people respond to incentives and how the "wealth of nations" comes about. And I do not see that economics is the sole preserve of the "libertarian right" - not if Paul Krugman is anything to go by at least!

So when Dr Partlett says:

Despite a strong mandate and wide discussion of a new FDR-style “New Deal”, President Obama has made only halting attempts to reassert the primacy of democratic politics over the forces of economics.

...he is rather missing the point about economics - after all the "New Deal", whatever we may think of it, was an economic development programme. And, whatever choices governments make none of this changes the reality of economics - those actions may work, they may fail but the underlying rules of supply and demand, utility and such, the toolkit of economics, still apply.

We might as well reassert the primacy of democratic politics over physics.

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Freedom is the radical choice for capitalism's reform - lessons (and hope) from a schools debate

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I had a really enjoyable afternoon today at Beckfoot School in Bingley. I went along as a judge in the "Futures" debate - a debate involving five local schools (and something I'd been a little sniffy about).

Two important things came out of this for me - firstly, my faith in tomorrow was restored by the sight of thirty or so young people debating big and grand issues. It wasn't simply an exercise in student political debate about capitalism (although this was broadly the topic) but was surprisingly well-informed. Yes there were the familiar quotes from Marx, Trotsky and such but we also got references to minarchism, Nozick, Schumpeter and William Morris. And mostly these were in context and relevant.

The second important thing for me was that the final session - "Reformed Capitalism vs the Alternative" - featured a bunch of students eager to make the case for capitalism's reform being about a libertarian response. Arguments were made for free trade, free markets and a government charged with administering the rules of freedom rather than seeking to "know better". I witnessed young people who grasped that wanting free enterprise, free markets and free trade is a genuinely radical choice because, for sure, we have precious little of those things today.

All in all a far more inspiring day than I expected. There is some hope for the future.

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On Leeds Salon, libertarianism and the politics of 'red mist'

A nice view of the Cow & Calf that I use to produce calm thought

Friday teatime, sat with a pint of Leeds Best (which is the world’s first oxymoronic beer) in the sunshiny garden of the Midnight Bell and having a conversation with Paul from Leeds Salon. Now before we go on I should point out that Leeds Salon isn’t a hairdressers but a group that hosts debates in and around Leeds. Their next debate – The Myth of Racist Kids with Adrian Hart (who wrote a book with that title arguing that anti-racism campaigns in schools help create racial tensions) – is on 11th October 2010 (details here).

Anyway the conversation was around the decline in the traditional political party, libertarianism and the prospect of a real realignment in British politics. Paul (who described himself as a Marxist libertarian) believes that the traditional left is being challenged by an emerging libertarian left who reject the controlling nature of established socialist thought. And Paul cited the example of Liberty at Leeds a student organisation that organised the rejection of ‘no platform’ policies at Leeds University pulling together students from across the political spectrum in defence of free speech.

Now the more dedicated reader of this blog will know that I have written before about political parties and how they have become institutionalised so as to cover up their increasing social irrelevance. So listening to Paul – from a left-wing perspective – saying much the same thing was interesting and encouraging. Indeed, the libertarian broad church (otherwise know, I suppose, as a cat herd) might be seen to unite in opposition to some of the more illiberal policies and proposals of governments and institutions and especially those around speech, assembly and opinion.

However, my thinking (and remember that in this splittist world I’m not a libertarian) goes beyond that idea of mobilising behind particular issues. After all this is an essentially Trotskyite approach and look where it’s got them! I think we’ve to look at the wider – essentially apolitical – society and find out what pisses them off most. Is it the encroachment of the nannying, controlling, pettifogging bureaucracy? Is it bans and other ‘thou shalt not’ proposals? Or is it the unprecedented assault on free speech from so-called anti-racists, diversity campaigners and such like?

I know of almost no-body who is untouched by these actions. There are some who feel wronged because they can’t have a fag with their pint anymore even though there are people more than willing to provide such a service. Others are enraged by ‘positive discrimination’ and the associated special pleading of narrowly defined interest groups. And still other look out at the procession of uniformed gauleiters that litter our streets with offensive interference – like the Leeds “warden” I witnessed harassing a couple of pedlars for the crime of stopping so as to eat a sandwich.

This is not adherence to a coherent political philosophy but responding to ‘red mist’. Everywhere I go people say of the government – “get out of the way”. In a session entitled “what should we do about the council” that was the theme – help us to do things don’t tell us what to do and, for heaven’s sake try not to bend every sinew to stopping individual initiative and private action.

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Indulgent ramblings on political position and a further chapter in my vain search

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The game of positioning ourselves within some accepted political taxonomy is a fascinating one but, for many of us, we end up wondering just how such positioning assists us. Especially when we encounter other people who adopt the same positioning. Moreover, why should we define ourselves through some game of political positioning and not through other traits, characteristics or preferences?

However, I will indulge you will a little speculation – a moment of wordplay. Here are some words that, on occasion, I have used to describe my self politically.

Conservative; Liberal; Libertarian; Right-wing; Tolerant; Intolerant; Sceptical; Doubting; Cynical; Optimistic; Anarchist; Tory

To this might be added a similar list of descriptions given to my manifest politics by others – some of which might be appropriate in polite company!

Now the wise among you will have spotted just how contradictory some of these words are – how combining them creates a concept as incongruous as to be impossible to parse. However, I do think that such an exercise is useful. If you read about me on this blog, you will see I describe myself as an “occasionally intolerant libertarian”. Clearly a contrary statement? How can you be libertarian and intolerant as the moment you move away from tolerating something you move away from liberty?

So it is with being a Conservative anarchist. After all anarchists wish to destroy, to pull down the state – anarchy is the very antithesis of conservatism. And does not a conservative wish to maintain the proper order of things (I always think of this as librarianship rather than conservation)? The problem comes when the “proper order of things” is wrong – we keep Sauron in power because that’s always been so, it is the proper order.

We live in such a time. For approaching 100 years, the proper order has been for important things in our lives to be ordered by the state – health, welfare, education, protection. This is the proper order – it is what we must conserve come what may and despite the growing evidence that its outcomes no longer serve our interests (where we are the “people”) but instead serve the interests of those who administer the system. The conservatives in this system are not those usually labelled in such a manner but a different group – a group who consider themselves liberal, social, caring and progressive.

So we must change. And the change must allow those people currently conserving a system that does not serve the people to be what they proclaim themselves to be – liberal, social, caring and progressive. And to achieve that we must remove the methodology of the modern state and replace it with a democratic version of that which went before – voluntary action (both individual and collective) overseen by a government tasked solely with upholding the protection of the law and of our freedoms. And within that new order, as conservatives we act to protect and maintain its hierarchy, structures and methods from those who would seek some form of permanent revolution.

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An (almost coherent) look at urban planning, conservatism and libertarianism

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A few days ago I wrote a piece about urban planning arguing that we are overplanned – we have lost the momentum of urban evolution replacing it instead with the utopian dreams of whichever planner or architect currently rules the roost. Despite the driving, dog-eat-dog libertarianism of Ayn Rand, I can think of no better example of the sort than Howard Roark – arrogant, unpleasant, all-knowing and dismissive of “lesser men”.

Despite this, I remain unconvinced by planning – or rather by the ideology of planning. And, as someone at heart a libertarian, I faced a degree of confusion about what may or may not be the proper role of planning. It pleased me therefore to find a real debate about planning from a conservative perspective – something other than the pale nimby-ism that typifies the debate in England. And moreover heads to the heart of what we might mean by conservatism – is it a tea party, a revivalist meeting or a return to the managed decline of “butskellism”?

Here is Andrew Sullivan:

"…ideology has infiltrated everything, it has saturated public and private, it has invaded even something sacred like religious faith, in which the mysteries of existence have been distilled in writing or even understanding the churches into a battle between “liberals” and “conservatives.”

People accuse me of pedantry or semantics in insisting that all of this – on the right and the left – is in fact a sign of the death of conservatism as a temperament or a politics, rather than its revival. But I have been arguing this for more than a decade. Conservatism, if it means anything, is a resistance to ideology and the world of ideas ideology represents, whether that ideology is a function of the left or the right."

Planning is important because it lies right at the centre of what distinguishes the ideological left and right. For sure there are confusions in this but it remains the case that the left view the use of state-directed, planned interventions as both essential and morally right. Sullivan looks back to a time when conservatism was not about ideology – there was no structure or form to what we believed. And we liked it that way. There was no great Gladstonian vision to what Tories believed, no better world that would come about from the righteous actions of government.

This is partly the Conservatism of Dizzy – raising the condition of the working man – and partly the scepticism of the Cecils. But at its core is the ideas of Burke and the small battalions – the idea that it is not great men who deliver change or make a better world but ordinary folk, in small places doing things together because they want to.

Above all what distinguishes the conservative from the libertarian is a sense of place. An idea of community. And the belief that things are worth keeping because they are there and we like them. Conservatives do not wander into the urban planning room with the “something must be done” slogan on their t-shirts. This idea – what can be called “Burkean” conservatism is what the ideologists of left and right are killing. And for some the consequences of planning are culpable in the murder of conservatism.

"…but one important and oft-overlooked one is this modern American landscape of sprawl and steel, of suburbs and hour-long commutes, of strip-malls and vast concrete scissures. The distance created by sprawl is both a material and spiritual one. Something is lost when we tear apart the natural, organic community and replace it with long lines of indistinct houses, well-groomed lawns, and endless stretches of highway. The very wrong sort of ‘individualism’ which so infests the modern American left and right is spawned from such distances."

Crucially, we believe that planners cannot know what constitutes a community and therefore cannot design that perfect community. For most of our places what’s needed isn’t grand design but a little tweaking. The equivalent of a coat of paint and some new wallpaper rather than a wholesale redecoration. What Andrew Sullivan was saying – and what I hope informs a little of what our choice will be in May – is that while planning has failed us (and will continue to fail us), what we must rediscover is how to let small places make their own choices unencumbered by central planning. And if those choices are mistaken, those communities know it was their choice that was wrong not the imposed solution of some politician planner or developer.

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Is government futile? Two premises of government defined.

It’s not often that I’m reminded of this truth – and never before by someone claiming to be a Liberal Democrat!

The first premise of government is that we the people are unable to organise our lives by ourselves. We can’t be trusted not to mess up. Or worse we’ll commit dire crimes such as not recycling, educating our own children or eating the wrong combination of green stuff. But we’re good at looking out for ourselves – its human nature, instinctive, visceral – we don’t need a government to do it for us.

Government organises our lives in the social interests of the rulers not the ruled

The second premise of government is that markets don’t work. We cannot be allowed to trade free from intervention, from rules and from paying the bureaucrat his slice for managing such intervention and rule-making. Despite the fact that we have proof that markets work – under any condition.

Government intervenes with economic behaviour to the economic benefit of the rulers not the ruled.

I am prepared to accept government only under the conditions where the rulers and the ruled are coterminous. Under all other conditions it is my duty to seek to change it so as to achieve such conditions. I must never defend the actions of government just because they accord with my interests – those actions must accord with the interests of all.