Political blindspots

It’s not too much of a simplification to say that modern American conservatives believe the national government to be ignorant, bumbling, and corrupt when it meddles in the U.S. economy, but sagacious, sure-footed, and righteous when it meddles in foreign-government affairs.

Nor are the boundaries of acceptable simplification breached by saying that modern American “liberals” believe the national government to be sagacious, sure-footed, and righteous when it meddles in the U.S. economy, but ignorant, bumbling, and corrupt when it meddles in foreign-government affairs.

I think that quote from The Freeman works quite well in British politics too (although “conservative” doesn’t necessarily map to “Conservative” and “liberal” doesn’t necessarily mean “Liberal [Democrat]” – it’s more a broad left/right thing).

For my part I’m definitely too gung-ho with foreign interventions and very sceptical of domestic government action. The argument that “Something Must Be Done” never works on me in a domestic context, because I usually think that government action, however well meaning, tends to pervert incentives and have unintended consequences. I need to carry that attitude over to my view on foreign gubbins.

Does Vince Cable know what “business-like” means?

After the recent elections and referendum, Vince Cable:

has attacked the Lib Dems’ Tory coalition partners as “ruthless, calculating and very tribal” but insisted their alliance would continue

presumably because they had the temerity to campaign, you know, for the results they wanted.

But he also said:

We’ll continue the coalition in a business-like way.

Vince  Cable actually has some business experience, as Chief Economist for Shell (although that was only for a couple of years and it seems the rest of his experience was in politics, but that’s better than a lot of politicians). But it sounds like he has no conception of what “business-like” actually means.

For his information, a business-like relationship tends not to include public attacks on the character of your business partners.

I wonder if he thinks that business-like simply means unfriendly, or worse. Thing is, for the most part that is not how businesses behave. A business can have suppliers, partners, and clients. Suppliers are providing you with goods or services that you require and presumably can’t or won’t provide internally, and these goods/services are presumably critical for your business or you wouldn’t be paying for them. Ditto partners, you are working together for mutual advantage. And clients of course pay your bills, so you need them on side too.

Of course, some businesses are rubbish at these things. Promises are broken, people don’t communicate well. But this usually augurs the end of the business relationship, as the customer decides to stop buying your products or a business lets a supplier go because they are not working well together.

The other kind of business relationship is of course competitors, and here there may be little or no incentive to get on. In practice though, people will tend to know other people in their industry who work for competitors, and there will be industry groups and conferences and so on that serve to keep things cordial.

Perhaps Vince thinks that the LibDems and Conservatives are competitors, and that is the business relationship he is referring to. They usually are, but in the Coalition they are business partners, not competitors.

Shock: grown-up thinks grown-ups should make their own decisions

Norman Baker, a Lib Dem transport minister, has provoked outrage by saying that he doesn’t wear a bike helmet when cycling, and points to evidence that cars tend to drive more carefully near cyclists that aren’t wearing helmets.

Firstly, apologies for using the “provoked outrage” phrase beloved of newspaper headline writers. Saying Norman Baker provoked outrage implies he is somehow at fault. In these instances, “outrage” is usually the fault of the outraged – the jumped-up, thin-skinned campaigner who can’t tolerate others disagreeing with them; rather than the outrager, so to speak.

Second, I tend to agree with Norman Baker’s assessment of the risk, and I totally agree with his assertion that he has the right to wear or not wear a helmet as he damn well pleases.

Helmet’s aren’t the be-all and end-all of road safety when riding a bike. I would suggest that the following are much more important:

• Be visible, really visible. High-viz in the winter, and lights around dawn and dusk, not just night-time proper.
• Be predictable, really predictable. Traffic rules are mainly there to make people’s actions predictable. If we can predict the actions of others, we are less likely to crash into them. So even if you can safely break the rules, don’t. If you break traffic rules, it means is that the traffic around you now has no idea about what you will do next, and this is a dangerous position to be in.
• Don’t be an idiot. Seriously, you’d think the way some people cycle that there was no other traffic around. It’s only a matter of time for them…
• Assume other people aren’t looking. The road where I’ve had the most near misses (two) is where it’s a one-way but the cycle lane goes in the opposite direction. This means that cars pulling on to the road look down hill, because this is where the cars are coming from, but not up hill, where the cyclists come from.

Helmet’s help if (a) you get knocked off your bike and (b) you hit your head. The safest thing to do is minimise the risk of (a) happening in the first place.

Why drugs should be legalised

Hat-tip to Adam Smith

Why I like Nick Clegg

The Observer has a cracking interview with Nick Clegg on the new Protection of Freedoms Bill. According to Henry Porter:

The bill is a creditable start and it tells us that the Blair attack on liberty is spent.

My favourite bit is when Clegg says this:

“I need to say this – you shouldn’t trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.”

You can’t go wrong with a bit of disarming candour from a politician.

Had he followed the implicit advice of the many carpers in his party he would be in a position to do absolutely nothing about it.

Human nature, and why you shouldn’t get in a tizzy about it

I’m currently reading Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand, sub-titled “Why dense cities, nuclear power, genetically modified crops, restored wildlands, radical science and geoengineering are essential”. It’s a cracking book, with a light touch of style that leavens a wide-ranging, quote-heavy discussion on a lot of environmental issues.

A standard eco-pessimist could announce almost triumphantly in 1992:

“Modern humanity is rapidly destroying the natural world on which it depends for its survival. Everywhere on our planet, the picture is the same. Forests are being cut down, wetlands drained, coral reefs grubbed up, agricultural lands eroded, salinised, desertified, or simply paved over. Pollution is now generalised – our groundwater, streams, rivers, estuaries, seas and oceans, the air we breathe, the food we eat, are all affected. Just about every living creature on earth now contains in its body traces of agricultural and industrial chemicals – many of which are known or suspected carcinogens or mutagens.

As a result of our activities, it is probable that thousands of species are being made extinct every day. Only a fraction of these are known to science… By destroying the natural world in this way we are making our planet progressively less habitable. If current trends persist, in no more than a few decades it will cease to be capable of supporting complex forms of life.”

(That was Edward Goldsmith’s opening salvo in The Way: An Ecological Worldview. His worries are accurate individually, but they are selective, one-sided, and over-aggregated into a paralysing spasm of angst.)

I don’t entirely agree with Brand’s point that Goldsmith’s fears are “accurate individually”, but I agree with his general conclusion of a “paralysing spasm of angst”.

The question to ask of that statement is: What is it for? What is the point? No doubt it made Goldsmith feel better in writing it, but what could it possibly achieve? It’s all very well “alerting” people to what you perceive to be the state of affairs, but as I’ve said before, “raising awareness” can be a complete waste of  time, if not actively unhelpful. Reading that paragraph, assuming you take it as correct, how do you feel? Do you feel energised to go and find out about what he is talking about, to understand the problems, and to find and implement solutions? Or do you feel like it is all too much, and why bother trying?

This is the perpetual problem that environmentalism has – presenting your view in order to impress upon people the magnitude of the problem as you see it makes the whole situation seem an insoluble mess.

However, a lot of people do find out more, they do look for causes (if not necessarily solutions), so the awareness raising isn’t necessarily wasted. But all too many people come to the conclusion that the problem is human greed. The obvious corrollary to this is that if we solve or eliminate greed, the problems will be solved.

Let’s step back a bit from the idea of greed. It’s an emotive term, let’s think about it. Think about greed as being a subset of the more general human desire to want more stuff. Not all stuff-wanting is bad. A starving man wants more stuff – to eat – so that he doesn’t die. He also wants more stuff so that his family doesn’t die either. He will then want more stuff so that he and his family are protected to some degree from the elements and from misfortune; and then so there is surplus, enabling his children to go to school instead of having to work. And so on. At some point on this scale of actually having more stuff, people declare that the point at which all reasonable demands are satisfied, and that any more is just plain old greed. Probably, most people think that that point is just a little bit above where they are on the having stuff scale.

So, the point at which greed starts depends on where you are on the scale, and anyway it is the result of a hard-wiring that we have which makes us want more stuff because, for essentially all of evolutionary time, we have only ever been a couple of pieces of stuff away from death. That’s quite an incentive.

Now, consider diving in football. Diving is a perfectly rational response for as long as the potential benefit (getting a free kick or penalty) outweighs the risk (being caught and booked). Apart from the diver no-one really likes diving, so lets get rid of it! According to the greed-causes-environmental-problems hypothesis, what we need to do is instruct the players to slightly diminish their will to win. After all, if we were all less greedy we wouldn’t have environmental problems, right? So if footballers were all less keen to win we wouldn’t have any more diving. Yeah right.

Newsflash: human action is dictated by human incentives. Get used to it.

You won’t get rid of greed, however the hell you define it. Even if it were true that greed does cause environmental problems you won’t “solve” greed, so you’d better look somewhere else for your solutions.

But why do people plump for the greed hypothesis (and by implication the non-greed solution)? Because the presentation of environmental problems as an existential crisis that can only be understood or appreciated in the abstract invites similarly abstract, existential solutions.

If the problem is presented in discrete chunks, solutions are easier to conceptualise, develop, and ultimately implement. And you don’t have to change human nature to do it.

“Real” socialism has never really been attempted

That’s what they say when backed into a corner – “Well, real socialism has never really been tried” which, when read between the lines, means “Go away you filthy reactionary; my motives are pure, my theory perfect, how dare you say it doesn’t stand up to cold hard reality?”.

Perhaps it’s true that real socialism has never been attempted, but even so people have attempted to attempt socialism on plenty of occasions. If even trying and failing to do something causes such ructions, perhaps that says something pertinent, no?

Fighting for economic freedom

Allister Heath of City AM has declared that it is time to fight for economic freedom (hat-tip to Adam Smith).

It is high time for a proper debate about the relationship between the individual and the state. In a classically liberal society, people’s incomes are seen as theirs, to be spent, invested or donated as they see fit, with taxation kept to the minimum necessary to provide certain services and help the poor (the size of these activities are, of course, subject to debate). The present, collectivist mood in the UK sees it differently: earnings are implicitly treated as public property, to be divided up according to what politicians see fit; tax cuts are even seen as a “cost” to the Exchequer, as if it were automatically entitled to everybody’s wealth.

…

There are plenty of voices around today fighting for free speech, civil liberties and “social” freedoms. It is a shame there is no equal enthusiasm when it comes to defending individuals’ economic freedom.

Hear, hear.

It frustrates me when left-wingers denounce the excessive power of governments and large corporations, but at the same time support the very factors that lead to this power – namely high taxes and expensive regulations.

Money is power, so the higher the tax-take the greater power the state has. If you want the state to do lots of things, as lefties do, this will increase the power of the state.

Market share is also power, so the greater the barriers to market entry the greater power the incumbent corporations have. If you want businesses to be massively and expensively constrained, as lefties do, this will increase the power of  incumbent corporations.

Working hard at something doesn’t mean you are good at it

Two recent stories from politics got me thinking about working hard.

First, alleged dissatisfaction amongst Birmingham Conservatives with David Cameron’s support for an open primary to select the Conservative mayoral candidate:

Under Mr Cameron’s leadership, the Conservative Party has also sought to encourage people from outside politics to stand as MPs.

But the policy has been controversial among some party activists, who felt hard-working local councillors and party stalwarts were being sidelined.

Another story I heard on the radio (sorry, no link) was about proposals for elected police chiefs. A local councillor in Essex who is on the local police board was talking earnestly about how hard she and her colleagues worked at her job. Going to meetings with the police, with residents, listening to concerns, providing oversight. She feared that elected police chiefs who overshadow or supersede the role she currently fills.

In neither case do I doubt the hard work and conscientious, honest approach of the people concerned.

But working hard does not mean you are good at your job, or that you deserve by rights a shot at the top job.

Just because you are a “hard-working local councillor” or a “party stalwart” does not mean that you will naturally be good at being a mayor. If you would be good at it, then you will be the cream that rises to the top of the open primary process.

Just because you work hard and go to a lot of meetings doesn’t mean that you are effectively representing the concerns of Essex residents with regards to policing. Perhaps you are – but if you want to justify your role you have to say how effective you are, not how hard you work.

In defence of Ed Miliband

But first, things I don’t defend Ed Miliband for.

Ed Miliband is a self-defined “socialist” and as such I can’t imagine I will agree with anything he says that isn’t self-evidently motherhood and apple pie. On the defining issue of politics in the UK over the next few years – debt and the deficit – he is not part of what Guido describes as the reality-based community. Finally, he was a major player of the previous, disastrous government.

Having said that…

• He is not Gordon Brown
• The strange electoral system by which he won the Labour leadership is not his fault – they were the rules, everyone played by them and he won fair and square.
• His association with the previous government – a party kicked out of government is hardly likely to elect a leader without significant minsterial experience. Even if he should be repudiating a lot of what it did, you can hardly do it over night.
• He doesn’t get a fair hearing. Like William Hague and IDS in previous years, the media seems to have made up it’s mind that he is a poor leader and everything is reported from that viewpoint.

The last point is especially important and dispiriting, because it means the debate about where the country is going is stunted. I don’t think the coalition is doing enough, so my analysis is the opposite of Ed Miliband’s, but that’s not the point. By casting Ed Miliband as a total loser irrespective of what he does or may do, the media are effectively disenfranchising a whole swathe of the electorate who may agree with him if he got a fair hearing.

I can’t get too worked-up about it though; having always supported the Conservatives the feeling of schadenfreude gives me a little warm glow inside – Labour had this media-pack phenomenon work in their favour for years.