Sometimes the reforming radicals are those
who also seek to conserve.

It seems sometimes that there is little truly new thinking to be done, merely the attempt to catch up with previous dismissals of foolish and destructive ideas:

Of course, there will always be individuals and groups of individuals whose intellect is so narrow that they cannot grasp the benefits which social cooperation brings them. There are others whose moral strength and will power are so weak that they cannot resist the temptation to strive for an ephemeral advantage by actions detrimental to the smooth functioning of the social system. For the adjustment of the individual to the requirements of social cooperation demands sacrifices. These are, it is true, only temporary and apparent sacrifices as they are more than compensated for by the incomparably greater advantages which living within society provides.

…

The contractual order of society is an order of right and law. It is a government under the rule of law (Rechtsstaat) as differentiated from the welfare state (Wohlfahrtsstaat) or paternal state. Right or law is the complex of rules determining the orbit in which individuals are free to act. No such orbit is left to wards of a hegemonic society. In the hegemonic state there is neither right nor law; there are only directives and regulations which the director may change daily and apply with what discrimination he pleases and which the wards must obey. The wards have one freedom only: to obey without asking questions.

The Wall Street Journal said that Human Action “ought to be on the bookshelf of every thinking man”; I concur. It’s free online here.

Good intentions, of course.

Chris Huhne proposes to introduce a bill to repeal the legislation that has stripped away our rights. So far, so good:

There has always been a problem for civil libertarians. The sacrifices of freedoms made by successive governments often seem small, particularly when they are pushed through at times of panic about terrorism. Each time, the government argues that you only need to give up a modest amount of freedom or rights to win greater security. And what could be more free than life itself? Yet the cumulative effects of this salami-slicing have now become deeply corrosive to the free spirit of a civil society. Like some sci-fi horror movie, we are slowly becoming the authoritarian threat that we are fighting.

via Chris Huhne: Our new freedom bill calls on the government to repeal the legislation that has stripped away our rights | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

And, like all of us with good intentions, he rails against human suffering in the form of grotesque inequality:

I want the party to be true to its beliefs, as expressed in our constitution, to “balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community”. These three stand or fall together; inequality shackles freedom and undermines community. It was this recognition, that however much one removed political and legal constraints to freedom, the social and economic barriers of poverty, ignorance, unemployment and ill-health remained, that underpinned the new Liberalism of the early twentieth century. This was when British Liberals became a social liberal party, accepting that government intervention – in the shape of pensions, national insurance and progressive taxation, laying the foundations of the welfare state – was justified to enlarge liberty.

via Liberty, but equality too | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
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A fascinating book by The Economist‘s Central and East European correspondent, Edward Lucas:

First a medieval fortress and then the citadel of Soviet totalitarianism, the Kremlin’s rose-red walls have rarely made lovers of liberty and justice feel at home. It is as if Britain’s government were based in the Tower of London, or France’s in the Bastille. Certainly the ideas now bubbling under its onion domes would have been all too familiar to its past occupants: put bleakly, Russia is reverting to behaviour last seen during the Soviet era.

For the justification of these remarks, see the book: it is recommended reading.

At a friend’s request, I spoke to a sixth form class on “The Spell of Plato”, explaining how Plato’s philosophy is relevant today.

As the title suggests, I used Popper’s critique of Plato’s philosophy to explore these two propositions:

Government ought to control us to ensure social, political and economic justice.

We ought to control ourselves within the law to ensure freedom and progress.

We discovered that Plato’s Spell — his plan for building the perfect state in which every citizen is really happy — was at the root of some of the worst governments in history and we explored the echos of his philosophy in today’s political debate. We discussed Popper’s conclusion:

We must go on into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure, using what reason we may have to plan as well as we can for both security and freedom,

asking whether we should look to the state for every answer or whether we should take responsibility ourselves for making the world a better place.

It was a real pleasure to meet post-modern young people who were intelligent, thoughtful, attentive, polite and independent. They are another reason for optimism.

---

As an aside, I just rediscovered this in the preface to the 1950 second edition:

I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous — from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows. For these troubles are the by-products of what is perhaps the greatest of all moral and spiritual revolutions of history, a movement which began three centuries ago. It is the longing of uncounted unknown men to free themselves and their minds from the tutelage of authority and prejudice. It is their attempt to build up an open society which rejects the absolute authority of the merely established and the merely traditional while trying to preserve, to develop, and to establish traditions, old or new, that measure up to their standards of freedom, of humaneness, and of rational criticism. It is their unwillingness to sit back and leave the entire responsibility for ruling the world to human or superhuman authority, and their readiness to share the burden of responsibility for avoidable suffering, and to work for its avoidance. This revolution has created powers of appalling destructiveness; but they may yet be conquered.

Bureaucracy: from Stalin and Trotsky to David Cameron, we all know we loathe it. What is it?

In “Bureaucracy”, Ludwig von Mises explains:

Bureaucratic management is management bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body. The task of the bureaucrat is to perform what these rules and regulations order him to do. His discretion to act according to his own best conviction is seriously restricted by them.

“Bureaucracy” is a slim book of only 101 pages, thoroughly readable and insightful. Mises uses his understanding of economic calculation to explain succinctly the differences between bureaucratic management and profit and loss management in the free market. His argument has far reaching consequences: it demonstrates that public administration must become uneconomic and irrational.

Here’s a favourite section:

The history of Sweden can be treated with almost no reference to the history of Peru. But you cannot deal with wage rates without dealing at the same time with commodity prices, interest rates, and profits. Every change occurring in one of the economic elements affects all other elements. One will never discover what a definite policy or change brings about if one limits his investigation to a special segment of the whole system.

It is precisely this interdependence that the government does not want to see when it meddles in economic affairs. The government pretends to be endowed with the mystical power to accord favours out of an inexhaustible horn of plenty. It is both omniscient and omnipotent. It can by a magic wand create happiness and abundance.

The truth is that the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody. A subsidy is never paid by the government out of its own funds; it is at the expense of the taxpayer that the state grants subsidies. Inflation and credit expansion, the preferred methods of present-day government open handedness, do not add anything to the amount of resources available. They make some people more prosperous, but only to the extent that they make others poorer.

So we begin to see how the Austrian school of economics explains how the policies of the left create the very inequalities and injustices that they rail against: inflation hits savers and credit expansion widens inequality (the poor don’t invest with leverage). The intentions of the left are very well, but their impatience to use the power of the state to advance social, economic and political justice is a great enemy to progress in every area.

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent on abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office.^[Lenin] Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau, what an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!

No one likes bureaucracy. Detailed rules and regulations abolish much in life for which we strive: they destroy progress and extinguish hope. We need another way.