Society is cooperation;
it is community in action.

As I sit here on the train, reading a book on ethics, I am mindful of being an engineer in politics.

Engineers are quintessentially pragmatic. We get things done, in the circumstances we face, with the resources we have. We may accept falling short of perfection, but we deliver things which work and improve them.

However, we don’t flounder around uninformed. Aeroplanes do not fly thanks to fairy dust and software does not write itself. Aerospace engineering requires the application of correct ideas. Software engineering is little more than ideas implemented.

However, as anyone who has engineered aircraft or software will know, engineering is compromise.  No vehicle travels faster than light and no computer program has found the second Meerten’s Number¹ The former is fantasy. The latter, a practical impossibility.

That is, if you wish to achieve something in the real world, it is important to understand how the real world works, even if you cannot perfectly apply your ideas.

And so we turn to the attitude of the opposition benches yesterday.

Labour’s jeering, self-righteous indignation and lack of remorse over the public finances seems to suggest two premises. The first is that the government has an inexhaustible horn of plenty.  The second is that the financial crisis was an automatic feature of the economy which could not have been avoided.

The Government does not have an inexhaustible horn of plenty. Government funds itself by taking today, promising to take a greater sum tomorrow and debasing the currency. We have reached the limits of all three and the consequence is an entirely predictable crisis.

Thanks to something called the Laffer Curve, it now seems likely that increasing taxes will reduce government revenues.

We are at the limits of government borrowing. As one commentator put it, Gordon Brown’s borrowing was “reckless in the extreme”.  Furthermore, as was argued yesterday in the Commons, government borrowing last year was facilitated by buying from the market with new money government bonds of a value broadly the same as that which the government needed to sell.

Rulers have always debased the currency to pay for their escapades. When they clipped coins of intrinsic value, the immorality of it was obvious. Now that effect is achieved by something which sounds terribly technical (“quantitative easing“) and by the nature of the banking system (private banking with a fractional reserve, controlled by a central bank) the immorality of it is less obvious. However, as Toby Baxendale explains, the pound has lost around 99.5% of its value over the last century. Debasement is a stealth tax, one which redistributes wealth towards those who receive the new money first: it is primarily a tax on those with low and fixed incomes. At its extremes, currency debasement ends in a Crack Up Boom which finally destroys the currency.

As I have explained before, the banking crisis and the wider economic and fiscal consequences are not attributable to the free market. It was all horribly predictable.

Labour’s premises are wrong. There is no inexhaustible horn of plenty from which a benevolent government can dispense unlimited gifts. This crisis is not an automatic result of the operation of the free market, but a result of bad banking law and government intervention.

It is no good the opposition jeering and pointing as they oppose cuts to unaffordable Government spending. If we are serious about human well-being, prosperity and social progress for everyone, then we need to face the world as it really is and find a way through. Neither fantasy nor insistence on defeating practical impossibilities will do.

This begs the question, “How does society work?”. It turns out, of course, that our generation is not the first to ask. The first systematic treatises on the nature of society and social cooperation were written by the Thomist Scholastics of Salamanca in the 15th and 16th centuries. Their ideas resurfaced with scholars including Menger, Bohm-Bawerk and Mises. Their system of thinking may or may not be complete, but it appears to have the greatest explanatory power for our circumstances today.

Where to begin? Mises’ Human Action is perhaps the definitive treatise, though it has been extended and refined over the years. However, if you only have time for a pamphlet, I recommend Eamonn Butler’s primer on Mises, available to download or buy from the Institute of Economic Affairs.

We may not like reality, but we do have to deal with it. Pragmatic we must be, but let’s at least grasp some good ideas.

1. A Meerten’s Number is an integer which is its own Gödel Number: given a sequence x₁x₂x₃…x_n of positive integers, the Gödel encoding of the sequence is the product of the first n primes raised to their corresponding values in the sequence. That is, the problem of Meerten’s Numbers is one simply of arithmetic, albeit of large numbers and large primes. There is at least one Meerten’s Number but if you have found the second or subsequent number in the series, please let me know. [↩]

Via Sex and drug lessons from age 5 – Telegraph, another forcible attempt to reengineer society, irrespective of the wishes of responsible parents:

Under the new curriculum, pupils as young as seven will learn about puberty and the facts of life and five-year-olds will be taught about parts of the body, relationships and the effects of drugs on the body.

Once they reach secondary school, pupils will learn about contraception, HIV and Aids, pregnancy and different kinds of relationships – including same sex unions and civil partnerships.

So-called Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education is to become compulsory in both primary and secondary schools from September 2011, and will be enshrined in new legislation.

Faith schools will not be able to opt out of any part of the new statutory curriculum, Ed Balls also confirmed today, although they will be able to teach topics within the ”tenets of their faith”.

Is it any wonder responsibility is passing away when parents are not even to be allowed to control when their children are educated about sex and drugs?

From Socialism, by Ludwig von Mises:

Proposals to transform the relations between the sexes have long gone hand in hand with plans for the socialization of the means of production. Marriage is to disappear along with private property, giving place to an arrangement more in harmony with the fundamental facts of sex. When man is liberated from the yoke of economic labour, love is to be liberated from all the economic trammels which have profaned it. Socialism promises not only welfare—wealth for all—but universal happiness in love as well. This part of its programme has been the source of much of its popularity. It is significant that no other German socialist book was more widely read or more effective as propaganda than Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, which is dedicated above all to the message of free love.

Labour have got to go.

Further reading

• Right, wrong and education — an article on this site.
• The Aboliton of Man — a review on this site of C S Lewis’ classic pamphlet.
• Socialism, An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Mises

As I was saying to Beth only the other day after reading Roche^*:

Distracted by celebrity, softened up by the education system, we have also succumbed to what you could call intellectual relativism. We have reached a state of affairs whereby people believe that the validity of their views is determined by the strength with which they hold them, not by any reference to empiricism. And so we hear phrases such as “Well that is your truth – it’s not mine”, or, increasingly, the word which is doing untold damage to the concept of objectivity: “whatever”. When confronted with evidence which undermines the current fashion or your own prejudices, simply lift your hand and say “whatever”, and you can avoid all the discomforts of the value of truth, or objectivity, or of being plain wrong.

via We’re in danger of entering a new Dark Age – Telegraph.

This is a great article by Liam Fox and a reason for optimism: we may yet pick ourselves up and change.

* It’s amazing she puts up with it

Consider these news stories:

Pupils will no longer have to be taught the difference between “right and wrong” under draft plans put forward by England’s exams regulator.

via BBC NEWS | Education | ‘Right and wrong’ lessons to end.

Parents should avoid telling their children what is “right and wrong” when discussing sex education, according to a new government leaflet.

via Parents advised to stay away from ‘right or wrong’ in sex advice – Telegraph.

In the context of this moral relativism  and David Cameron’s determination to fix our broken society, Roche’s 1969 book “Education in America” is a fascinating insight into how education has come to fail to prepare individuals to choose freely within a fixed moral framework, to think and act for themselves. He explains, for example, that:

Traditionally, education has not been concerned so exclusively with the mere manipulation of the individual. The teacher found himself within a framework of values, within a situation faced in common by all men. To teach, therefore, did not mean to manipulate the young into some “socially acceptable” pattern. Instead, teaching meant sharing with the student the mystery of being human. Today’s scientistic approach promises to do away with the human condition entirely, putting its own goals and means in place of the individual human being and his feelings, aspirations, and qualifications. C.S. Lewis has predicted that such a change in our educational and social philosophy is a move toward “the abolition of man.”

Throughout history, many have understood that a good society requires both liberty and boundaries. Individuals need to be sufficiently educated to make responsible choices, but this is not our trajectory today: we deny standards of behaviour, of morality, of good and evil, and so deny the possibility of education in any meaningful sense.

A patron saint of the intellectual climate of twentieth century America was J. Allen Smith [...]. Smith, in a moment of reflection, apparently had misgivings about the course of events: “The trouble with us reformers is that we made reform a crusade against standards. Well, we smashed them all, and now neither we nor anyone else have anything left.” 

The experience of thousands of years of human history on which we stand is that this will not promote society’s healthy progress. It’s time to nurture responsibility, discipline and intellect: it’s time for change.