Anyone could do wonders if he could contrive to overcome all resisting influences, and if all mankind would consent to become soft wax in his fingers; but men are resolved not to be soft wax; they listen, applaud, or reject and — go on as before.
Via Robust Political Economy and Realistic Idealism « Pileus:
What criterion should we use to evaluate political theories and the institutions they advocate? In my book Robust Political Economy, I argue that it is the criterion of ‘robustness’. Institutions that meet this criterion are those best placed to cope with fundamental constraints that arise from the human condition. The most important constraints are those of limited rationality (the Hayekian ‘knowledge problem’) and the recognition that human beings respond, at least to a limited degree, to incentives. Judged against these constraints all human institutions are likely to ‘fail’, but some institutions may be better placed than others to withstand the stresses and strains wrought by the human condition.
I’m enjoying Mark Pennington’s superb book at the moment and I’ll blog about it more fully shortly.
Brought forward. I just had cause to share this with a constituent in relation to the Kafkaesque nightmare they face.
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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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UK Public Debt To GDP (via BIS)
A joke doing the rounds by email at the moment1:
While walking down the street one day a Member of Parliament is tragically hit by a truck and dies. His soul arrives in heaven and is met by St Peter at the entrance. ‘Welcome to heaven,’ says St Peter, ‘Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a high official around these parts, you see, so we’re not sure what to do with you.’ ‘No problem, just let me in,’ says the man. ‘Well, I’d like to, but I have orders from higher up. What we’ll do is have you spend one day in hell and one in heaven. Then you can choose where to spend eternity.’ ‘Really, I’ve made up my mind. I want to be in heaven,’ says the MP. ‘I’m sorry, but we have our rules.’ And with that, St Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to hell.
The doors open and he finds himself in the middle of a green golf course. In the distance is a clubhouse and standing in front of it are all his friends and other politicians who had worked with him. Everyone is very happy and in evening dress. They run to greet him, shake his hand, and reminisce about the good times they had while getting rich at the expense of the people. They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster, caviar and champagne. Also present is the devil, who really is a very friendly and nice guy who has a good time dancing and telling jokes. They are having such a good time that before he realizes it, it is time to go. Everyone gives him a hearty farewell and waves while the elevator rises…
The elevator goes up, up, up and the door reopens on heaven where St. Peter is waiting for him. ‘Now it’s time to visit heaven.’ So, 24 hours pass with the MP joining a group of contented souls moving from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing. They have a good time and, before he realizes it, the 24 hours have gone by and St. Peter returns. ‘Well, then, you’ve spent a day in hell and another in heaven. Now choose your eternity.’ The MP reflects for a minute, then he answers: ‘Well, I would never have said it before, I mean heaven has been delightful, but I think I would be better off in hell.’
So St Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to hell. Now the doors of the elevator open and he’s in the middle of a barren land covered with waste and garbage. He sees all his friends, dressed in rags, picking up the trash and putting it in black bags as more trash falls from above. The devil comes over to him and puts his arm around his shoulder. ‘I don’t understand,’ stammers the MP. ‘Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and clubhouse, and we ate lobster and caviar, drank champagne, and danced and had a great time.. Now there’s just a wasteland full of garbage and my friends look miserable. What happened?’
The devil looks at him, smiles and says, ‘Yesterday we were campaigning … Today you voted.
But who now rides on whom?
Which is most amusing but it also gives me an excuse to mention public choice theory:
Public choice in economic theory is the use of modern economic tools to study problems that are traditionally in the province of political science. From the perspective of political science, it may be seen as the subset of positive political theory which deals with subjects in which material interests are assumed to predominate.
In particular, it studies the behavior of politicians and government officials as mostly self-interested agents and their interactions in the social system either as such or under alternative constitutional rules. These can be represented a number of ways, including standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory. Public choice analysis has roots in positive analysis (“what is”) but is often used for normative purposes (“what ought to be”), to identify a problem or suggest how a system could be improved by changes in constitutional rules.[1]
That is, in a nutshell, for a very long time, that joke has been a reasonable characterisation of politics and the consequence is the catastrophic public debt projection above. The Wikipedia article is somewhat biased against the theory and lacks citations but it is still worth reading.
Now, consider this:
What is that change? Some promise solutions from on high – but real change comes from collective endeavour. So we offer a new approach: a change not just from one set of politicians to another; from one set of policies to another. It is a change from one political philosophy to another. From the idea that the role of the state is to direct society and micro-manage public services, to the idea that the role of the state is to strengthen society and make public services serve the people who use them. in a simple phrase, the change we offer is from big government to big Society.
And this:
The era of big government has run its course.
The former is from the Conservative manifesto and the latter from David Cameron’s Hugo Young lecture on the Big Society. One party is telling people clearly that we need a radical change in the relationship between people and government. It is the Conservative Party.
Karl Popper is without doubt my favourite character in political philosophy. He was rational, believing knowledge and truth to be objective, but aware of the boundaries of reason. A scientist but concerned with the mechanisms of society. By humanitarian inclination a social democrat — when that meant “Marxist” — but by reason a liberal: a believer in freedom.
In the course of things, I rediscovered these quotations by Popper, which seem apt today, as we hastily seek solutions to our present difficulties:
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.
Perhaps one from his time, when the foolish utopian experiment communism was still alive in the world:
It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.
And defining ‘tyranny’:
You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence “democracy”, and the other “tyranny”.
On the role of intellectuals:
Why do I think that we, the intellectuals, are able to help? Simply because we, the intellectuals, have done the most terrible harm for thousands of years. Mass murder in the name of an idea, a doctrine, a theory, a religion — that is all our doing, our invention: the invention of the intellectuals. If only we would stop setting man against man — often with the best intentions — much would be gained. Nobody can say that it is impossible for us to stop doing this.
On historicism, but more generally applicable to positivism in economics: trying to produce specific outcomes when ultimately you can only do so by manipulating the actions of individual men and women:
We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.
On freedom and tolerance:
The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
So let us be tolerant then, but only up to the point our open society is threatened, and let us also be reasonable:
There are many difficulties impeding the rapid spread of reasonableness. One of the main difficulties is that it always takes two to make a discussion reasonable. Each of the parties must be ready to learn from the other. You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you.
And also, thinking of the sacrifices we are invited to make today for the future — I think particularly of the world’s desperately poor, who need inexpensive energy1:
Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realised.
We might reflect on whether we are still permitted to apply our intelligence in every area:
The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.
And whether we are succumbing to the temptation to rely on the government for our security at the expense of our freedom:
We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure.
Most schemes of social organisation have been explored and lived through, but one thing is certain: those who follow us will have different ideas and preferences which we cannot know in advance. We must allow room for our successors to develop these ideas and preferences, that is:
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.
This past weekend, we visited the American Museum in Britain. It was thought-provoking: America was of course conceived in liberty but American history, like every nation’s, is filled with examples of man’s inhumanity to man.
The exhibition began with a wall of quotations from significant figures. These particularly stood out:
William Penn (1644-1718):
Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.
Albert Einstein1:
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
Apache Chief Geronimo (1829-1909):
Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.
Thus, beside the lives of pioneers, the museum introduced the history of native Americans and of African-American slaves, terrible experiences which no person should ever know. I was reminded of Karl Popper’s lines in The Open Society and its Enemies:
There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder (including it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as heroes.
Coincidentally, I am just finishing John O’Farrell’s An Utterly Impartial History of Britain: (or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge). Perhaps spotting the gathering dust on my scholarly history books, Beth gave me this book as a starting point. It is at least an entertaining read, but the author’s endless cynicism, though supported by events, combined with his wearisome ignorance of sound economics, produces a tiresome read. Compare O’Farrell’s history with that of, say, This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World or The Welfare State We’re in and we quickly find that history, as the record of acting people, deserves to be understood through sound theories of human action.
Enter one of my preferred writers — Ludwig von Mises — with Theory and History (online). From the back cover:
Theory and History deals with the theory of economics, i.e., the study of purposive human action, and with history, the record of the past actions of individuals. All actions are determined by ideas. Thoughts and ideas are “real things,” Mises writes. “Although intangible and immaterial, they are factors in bringing about changes in the realm of tangible and material things.” Rather than rejecting the study of historical change as a “useless pastime,” Mises considers it of the utmost practical importance. “History looks backward into the past, but the lesson it teaches concerns things to come.” History opens the mind to an understanding of human nature, increases wisdom, and distinguishes civilized man from the barbarian. Moreover, historical knowledge is of the utmost importance in helping to anticipate and plan for the future.
A major part of this book is a critique of Karl Marx and his fallacious view of theory and history. Marx attributes the creation of tools and machines, as well as the economic structure of society, to undefined “material productive forces”; Mises rejects this materialistic view and points out that tools and machines are actually created by individuals acting on the basis of non-materialistic ideas. Marx predicts that society is moving towards socialism “with the inexorability of a law of nature.” Mises responds: “The outstanding fact about history is that it is a succession of events that nobody anticipated before they ocurred.”
The book is a tour de force of the ideas that have shaped human history and their refutations. In particular, bearing in mind O’Farrell’s sneering treatment of the free market:
The history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has discredited the hopes and the prognostications of the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The peoples did not proceed on the road toward freedom, constitutional government, civil rights, free trade, peace, and good will among nations. Instead the trend is toward totalitarianism, toward socialism. And once more there are people who assert that this trend is the ultimate phase of history and that it will never give way to another trend.
And, closing the book, on attempts at predicting the future:
The fallacy inherent in predicting the course of history is that the prophets assume no ideas will ever possess the minds of men but those they themselves already know of. Hegel, Comte, and Marx, to name only the most popular of these soothsayers, never doubted their own omniscience. Each was fully convinced that he was the man whom the mysterious powers providently directing all human affairs had elected to consummate the evolution of historical change. Henceforth nothing of importance could ever happen. There was no longer any need for people to think. Only one task was left to coming generations-to arrange all things according to the precepts devised by the messenger of Providence. In this regard there was no difference between Mohammed and Marx, between the inquisitors and Auguste Comte.
Up to now in the West none of the apostles of stabilization and petrification has succeeded in wiping out the individual’s innate disposition to think and to apply to all problems the yardstick of reason. This alone, and no more, history and philosophy can assert in dealing with doctrines that claim to know exactly what the future has in store for mankind.
Museums and historians must remind us of the wrongs of the past, and do so through the histories of many aspects of human life, even political power. Let us be guided by them to a better and more open future in which people can be free of all kinds of oppression.
Above all, let us use our reason to reflect on our present circumstances and conclude with Karl Popper 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.
The idea whose time has come, the idea which can carry us forward — from difficulties created by people who wished to better the lot of their fellows, by people who wish to better the lot of future generations — is liberty under the rule of law.
Jamie Whyte’s book “Bad Thoughts” is a tremendous guide for those who are seriously interested in the welfare of everyone in society, and who are not prepared to separate moral and intellectual seriousness.
Whyte’s 152-page book is entertaining and relevant and I do recommend it. In the meantime, I offer a brief and possibly inadequate guide to the key points here.
