Some of my (hopefully!) more interesting photos from Northumberland may be found here.
This emotive shot is most likely to be used again:
(Click image for all sizes - Creative Commons licensed)
I was pleased with this falcon(?) too:
It was hunting on the updraft around Dunstanburgh castle, with a swift(?) bouncing in playfully:
Ex-fighter pilots and relatives of war heroes joined commemorations as Sir Winston Churchill’s stirring ’so much owed by so many to so few’ speech was read out, prompting tears in the crowd.
The actor Robert Hardy began reading out the speech at 3.52pm, exactly 70 years after the wartime prime minister delivered it in Parliament.
via War planes mark 70th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s Battle of Britain speech – Telegraph.
You can find the text of the speech here.
In preparation for an article to be published in the Autumn, I just reread The Open Society and Its Enemies – Volume 1: The Spell of Plato. The book traces mankind’s opposition to change and the consequent rise of the myth of destiny, technically, historicism: the belief that history unfolds according to laws which can be discovered.
Popper argues that the strain of civilisation causes us to seek to return to a supposed harmonious state of nature, a heroic age of tribalism, rather than face the burden of personal responsibility. This is, he argues, what gives rise to totalitarianism.
In chapter 6, Totalitarian Justice, Popper presents an argument about the use of the words individualism and collectivism in combination with egoism (selfishness) and altruism. He explains that “individualism” is used in two senses: in opposition to collectivism and as a synonym for selfishness. But Popper explains that collectivism is not opposed to egoism: class egoism is a common thing. However, someone who is anti-collectivist — an individualist — can also be an altruist, one ready to make sacrifices for another individual.
Plato makes the mistake of thinking society faces a choice between collectivism or selfishness. In fact, altruistic individualism is possible, without individuals living constantly in a state of subjection and sacrifice for some group. In our time, as in Plato’s, this error provides a defence of collectivism which is unjustified.
Society is the cooperation of individuals. In my view, one great advantage of a society based on equality before the law, freedom, peace and property is that it can bear selfish individuals without harming the whole of society. More than that, perhaps such an order is the only one which exploits the selfish individual to the benefit of other people.
These are ideas to be developed another time. Meanwhile, I am struck that many contemporary complaints against individualism fall into Plato’s trap and that some of the deeper green ideologues seek a return to a long-lost harmonious state of nature. I wonder if they realise where their ideas may lead?
Via Tory: Coalition partners Lib Dems could ‘disappear’ (From Bucks Free Press):
SUGGESTIONS the Lib Dems could ‘disappear’ because of the ’shift in politics’ have been dismissed by the party’s Wycombe leader – following a neighbouring councillor’s defection.
There is an excellent explanation of the structure of political ideas in the author’s preface to Living with Leviathan (David B Smith, IEA, 2006). Smith posits as a replacement for the conventional and flawed left/right spectrum what he calls Hayek’s Triangle:
From Living with Leviathan, Smith 2006
On this scheme:
These days, Conservatism is not the avoidance of change – perhaps it never was – but its embrace: big society not big government, social responsibility not state control. This is the new politics. Either you embrace a more dynamic future based on productive relationships between individuals or you are stuck in a past which relied on big government, on imposed state solutions which never seemed quite to work.
Could the LibDems disappear? Possibly, perhaps probably. More important are the practical questions which impact on people’s lives: Where can I give birth? Is a good school place available? Is my income secure? Where will my next job come from?
The fact is, as I said during the campaign, all parties are coalitions. The important political question is this: can we best answer those practical questions through freedom and responsibility or through state control?
In response to my remarks on the illegitimacy of banning particular items of clothing, I have been criticised for asserting the concept of self-ownership: the idea that each of us has an inviolable property right in our own person. It turns out this is a difficult concept:
Property is the most fundamental and complex of social facts, and the most important of human interests; it is, therefore, the hardest to understand, the most delicate to meddle with, and the easiest to dogmatize about.
– William Graham Sumner, quoted in Boundaries of Order.
However:
The conflicts, disorder, and destructiveness that are so expressive of modern society arise from our confusion over the nature of property as a system of social order. So insensitive have we become to the role of property as the most important civilizing influence in our world, that we have even learned to regard the infliction of our wills upon the lives and property of others as expressions of “socially responsible” conduct.
– Boundaries of Order, Butler Shaffer, 2009.
Questions relating to society are rarely considered in terms of property, and yet it is the most fundamental of social facts. What is property, how is it to be controlled and by whom? What does “ownership” mean? These are some of the questions which Butler Shaffer sets out to answer in Boundaries of Order – Private Property as a Social System.
Shaffer shows that control is the defining factor in the ownership of property. Liberty is not an abstract philosophical principle, but a way of describing the autonomous nature of life in its myriad forms. Liberty and spontaneity express the essence of living systems. Shaffer’s book is about how and by whom authority is to be exercised over individual lives. He demonstrates that whether or not we choose to claim self-ownership goes to the heart of what it means to be a free person and that liberty and self-ownership are synonymous: “We are free only insofar as we insist upon the exclusive authority to direct our own energies and other resources.”
I shall leave the subject here. If you wish to explore the concept of self-ownership and property as the basis of a peaceful, cooperative society, then I recommend Shaffer, which may be bought or downloaded here.
In the meantime, in the words of Number 6:
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
At the end of an interview at a community event at Sir William Ramsay School, I was asked to comment on recent discussions regarding banning the burka (we might more accurately have discussed the niqab):
CREATING a law to ban the burka would be “just absurd”, Wycombe MP Steve Baker says.
The wearing of the Islamic face veil has been the subject of a heated debate this week.
It follows Tory MP Philip Hollobone’s comments that he would not meet constituents wearing a burka unless the veil was lifted.
Read more: Wycombe MP Steve Baker : burka ban ‘just absurd’ (From Bucks Free Press).
I wasn’t particularly prepared for the question, so my remarks lack polish but I am content with the sentiment: within the bounds of public decency, the law should be silent on what people may wear. It is a matter of free choice.
Those debating the question often point to the counterexamples of wearing motorcycle helmets in petrol stations or balaclavas in banks. Neither counter-example is particularly useful: banks and petrol stations both suffer specific problems with theft, so it is wholly reasonable for owners of these types of property to require customers to reveal their identities by showing their face. Such property owners might require everyone to show their faces as a condition of business, and that would be a reasonable requirement1. This is not the same as a general legal prohibition on a particular item of clothing.
Resolving these questions requires values. On this question, I am applying equality before the law, freedom from arbitrary government and property rights. The law should be blind to people’s identity: everyone should receive the same treatment under law. We should know in advance how the law will treat us: parents taking their children out on halloween shouldn’t have to worry about whether their children are illegally covering their faces. That is, the law should be simple and universally applicable: it would be utterly wrong to target a particular item of clothing worn by a particular group of people.
Moreover, a person has a right to wear what they wish, since we are all self-owning, and the act of wearing an item of clothing affects no one else’s property, even if it is not to that other’s taste. Where would we be if we started legislating for clothing to avoid offending anyone’s sensibilities? Strictly Come Dancing would be off the air for a start! However, a property owner is entitled to refuse to do business with someone who appears to be equipped to steal from them.
This may mean some property owners choose to be culturally insensitive. We may have to put up with that, but we should not ban the burka.
The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard is a difficult book to which few could subscribe in full.
It is difficult partly because it is concerned only with ‘that subset of the natural law that develops the concept of natural rights, and that deals with the proper sphere of “politics,” i.e., with violence and non-violence as modes of interpersonal relations.’ The book is not concerned with the ethics of personal morality, simply ‘a political philosophy of liberty’.
In confining itself so, it presents an ethic which is surely untenable to most minds, perhaps minds unaccustomed to separating fully personal morality and politics, as Rothbard does. It is nevertheless useful on the subject of self-ownership, a concept which most people would accept, and gladly insist upon.
Read more
Today, I found myself standing by the exit into the aye lobby for the state opening of Parliament. The text of the Queen’s Speech, for which I was lucky to be able to enter the House of Lords, may be found here:
The Queen, seated on the Throne and attended by Her Officers of State, commanded that the Yeoman Usher should let the Commons know that it was Her Majesty’s pleasure that they attend Her immediately in this House.
When they had come with their Speaker, Her Majesty was pleased to speak as follows:
“My Lords and Members of the House of Commons, my Government’s legislative programme will be based upon the principles of freedom, fairness and responsibility.
The first priority is to reduce the deficit and restore economic growth.
Afterwards, I was delighted to discover my office allocation: windowless, but not shared, for which I am grateful. Now looking forward to the debate on the Speech and beginning the real business of fixing the nation’s finances, getting the economy going, reforming public services, encouraging individual and social responsibility, reforming Parliament, restoring trust to politics and, finally for the moment, restoring freedoms and civil liberties.
We can say this for Labour: they have not made our task boring.
David Cameron has said that the era of big government has run its course. The foreword to our manifesto sets out the rotten state of Britain (see also Butler) and the change we offer: from big government to big society.
What then is the history of big government? How did it come about? Has it run its course? Why has big government failed? All this prompted me to read again, but carefully this time, Martin Van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State.
Van Creveld argues that government and state are emphatically not the same. He explains that the government “is a person or group which makes peace, wages war, enacts laws, exercises justice, raises revenue, determines the currency and looks after internal security on behalf of society as a whole, all the while attempting to provide a focus for people’s loyalty and, perhaps, a modicum of welfare as well”. On the other hand, he writes, the state is merely one form of government which may be considered neither eternal nor self evident.
The book’s range is astonishing. Van Creveld begins with prehistoric forms of society before charting the rise of the state, the state as an instrument, the state as an ideal, the spread of the state and, more recently, the decline of the state. Tribes without rulers, chiefdoms, city-states and empires all reached their limits. The monarchs triumphed against church, empire, nobility and towns. Bureaucracies were created which provided infrastructure, monopolised violence and, in short, delivered Leviathan. The state was idealised and used to discipline the people. Money was conquered and total war discovered. The state spread across the world. Major war waned, partly due to the impossibility of total war in the nuclear age. State welfare went into retreat. Technology spread internationally. Finally, the people withdrew their faith in the state.
Read more
This post originally appeared at The Cobden Centre.
In the course of things, I had cause to quote Bastiat, a French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly: “The state is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.” This prompted me to dig out the original essay.
As the UK’s national debt doubles and after a period within which QE was used, creating space in the market for that debt, one wonders how much longer we can go on like this before we are forced to rediscover the truths in this classic work.
I wish that someone would offer a prize, not of five hundred francs, but of a million, with crosses, crowns, and ribbons, to whoever would give a good, simple, and intelligible definition of this term: the state.
What an immense service he would render to society!
The state! What is it? Where is it? What does it do? What should it do?
All that we know about it is that it is a mysterious personage, and certainly the most solicited, the most tormented, the busiest, the most advised, the most blamed, the most invoked, and the most provoked in the world.
For, sir, I do not have the honor of knowing you, but I wager ten to one that for six months you have been making utopias; and if you have been making them, I wager ten to one that you place upon the state the responsibility of realizing them.
And you, madame, I am sure that you desire from the bottom of your heart to cure all the ills of mankind, and that you would be in no wise embarrassed if the state would only lend a hand.
Read more
Courtesy of We7.com:
I would have included more Rage Against the Machine but their language is distinctly unparliamentary.
Update: One BFP reader felt this was a little frivolous in the context of our floundering economy. I recommend my economics posts.
Today is the anniversary of one of the most extraordinary battles fought during the Cold War.
The battle by the (Glorious) Gloucester Regiment against an entire Chinese army at the Imjin River was one of the most exceptional moments of the war against totalitarian socialism. So, please, if you are minded, do join me to remember what price people paid on all sides in the battle between freedom and state control.
You can find a related video here. I will be helping in another constituency today, while reflecting on this quote:
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.
– Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 1 (Volume 2).
It turns out The Prisoner is being remade, but it’s not all good news. Via Why The Prisoner remake is dire – Times Online.
Here’s the good news about the remake of The Prisoner that’s heading to ITV screens this month: you get to see what Ian McKellen, who plays Number Two in Patrick McGoohan’s Orwellian dystopia, would look like if they ever cast him as a Bond movie villain. The answer is he’d be slyly, sinisterly magnificent. And the bad news? The bad news is that this is pretty much the only good news about this venture.
What a pity. It’s one of my favourite series. Here’s why:
I am grateful to Cliff Webb, the franchisee of McDonalds, High Wycombe, for a visit yesterday. Cliff employs over 200 people.
It seems to me that McDonalds comes in for some unfair criticism. The franchise succeeds because it provides food that people want at the right price and level of service. Those who don’t like the firm and its food don’t have to eat there.
Notwithstanding Super Size Me, it’s common sense that one cannot live by McDonalds alone. I wonder if it is strictly necessary for the government to say so. If substantial numbers of people now cannot figure out for themselves what a healthy, balanced diet looks like, how did this come to pass and are the self same people reading the government’s guidelines?
One of my fine academic colleagues has supplied this quote:
McDonald’s has made more millionaires, and especially black and Hispanic millionaires, than any other economic entity ever, anywhere.
– George Will, “Lovin’ It All Over”, Washington Post, December 27, 2007
Via The view from Wycombe: Big Brother or the Big Society? – Big Brother Watch, I respond to the recent Guerilla stickering in the town:
In the last few days, we have had a round of guerrilla stickering in Wycombe. There was the sticker of the week. Then there was talk of prosecution at the Bucks Free Press. Finally, the sticker returned.
Now, it is a good photograph. As a totem for the surveillance society, it is superb. Perhaps some even find it superficially funny to see all-round “CCTV in operation” signs, a draconian alcohol prohibition, an exhortation not to urinate or defecate in the street and, as if in some final act of absurdity, a restriction on feeding the birds.
But why? Why was it thought necessary to watch, to prohibit and to spell out a requirement of common decency?
the insidious accretion of power to a benign and democratic state, through the use of the legislative process to restrict what we do and shape who we are, is more destructive in the long run because it creates a society of pliant individuals who look for someone else to help them out. Personal responsibility is destroyed and gives way to a notion that the state or one of its many agencies will provide everything. We become dependent upon others rather than on ourselves; supplicants and clients of the state.
The Georgian recipe for “an amazing transformation”:
See also: Tory conference: Georgia’s Prime Minister makes surprise appearance.
Hat tip to Dr Tim Evans
I just finished Virginia Postrel’s challenging The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress. It is an appeal to embrace the dynamism of life and overcome our fears for the future. It is about real progress, not state-driven, top-down control.
Consider for example this, from page 42:
Conserving only the underlying stable rules, while letting individual decision making drive change, is a concept that a century of technocracy has made foreign to most people. It does not fit neatly into the comfortable old left-right dichotomy and does not line up with technocratic assumptions about the powers and uses of government. It has a hard time making its case, because it promises only general patterns of improvement — spontaneous order and discovery — not specific results.
In the context of our present system of stifling technocratic control and horror of the future, it’s a fascinating read. In the context of having cared for the homeless this morning in Wycombe’s night shelter — something operated by local churches and volunteers, not the state — it raises a challenge: how shall we care for the disadvantaged in a world of spontaneous order and yet ensure we leave none behind?
The answer is as simple as it is difficult. Individuals must learn to enjoy their freedom responsibly, not choosing to make themselves slaves to others, but helping wherever they can.
Postrel is the editor of Reason magazine.
This post originally appeared at cobdencentre.org.
Via FT.com, Ofgem urges a shake-up of the energy market,
Sweeping reforms of the UK’s energy market must be brought in urgently to protect energy supplies, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deliver the £200bn investment needed in the power sector, the energy regulator said on Wednesday.
Ofgem said options for reform would include placing more stringent legal obligations on energy suppliers, and “improved market signals”, which could include a higher price on carbon dioxide emissions. More drastic options could include a centralised renewables market and a central buyer of energy for the whole of the UK.
Which all seems very well, until you realise that this is the fruit of an ideological aversion to the free mutual cooperation of individuals and corporations. Ofgem apparently tell us, “It would mean taking away the market’s role in delivering that investment.”
We need to make our minds up about whether planned or free economies can provide us with the means of our survival and prosperity. History’s answer is clear: planned economies cause misery and then collapse.
Via the Institute for Economic Affairs, we discover the state devouring the economy – ie, the cooperative actions of free people – for over a century:
See also The Times Online, ‘Soviet’ Britain swells amid the recession:
The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies.
And Mises in Planning for Freedom:
The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments.
And so it is coming to pass: a pity socialism means despotism and ruin, not utopia. There is another way.
News feed