Oxford Libertarian Society Blog

Where the Theorem doesn't Apply

2010-12-06T18:34:00.003Z

I was discussing free trade with a friend a while ago when he said something that struck me as a good example of easy false superiority.

“Comparative advantage only works between rationally self-interested individuals.”

The law of comparative advantage is a very important one, which shows what wide circumstances trade can be useful; even when one party is strictly superior to another. But, as for any theorem in maths, or physics, it’s important to know the scope of the law; the law only holds given some assumptions. Not knowing about comparative advantage makes you ignorant, but to understand it you have to be able to distinguish the cases where it applies from those it doesn’t.

For comparative advantage, these are not that both agents are rational and self-interested (or even rationally self-interested, which I’ve just realised is different). In this case, the domain of the law of comparative advantage is neither a subset nor a superset of the set of rationally self-interested individuals.

For example, it can work with irrational agents; if nothing else, you might be a not-bad approximation of a rational agent. I think it only collapses to the extent that irrational agents don't have a utility function, at which point it becomes ill-defined what exactly constitutes a benefit for an agent without a utility function. You could trade with a paperclip maximiser though.

It can also work between an altruist and an egoist: the altruist might buy food to give to the poor from the egoist, in return for his programming skills, or whatever.

It could also work between two altruists, but if they both knew each other to be perfect altruists it'd look exactly the same as division of labour, so it's not a very interesting case.

And it doesn't always apply with rational self-individuals.

There's the trivial case, where both agents are identical, and there are no returns to scale, so neither has anything to gain from trade.

There's the 'high costs of trade' case, where shipping, communication, etc. are too expensive. I suspect this is the most common one, and highly prevalent in the modern world: if there weren’t transaction costs, there would be no reason for involuntary unemployment.

There would also be no war; if it weren’t for lack of information and so on, the two countries could just work out what the peace treaty would look like, and use that as a basis for negotiation; both gaining, because they don’t actually have to pay the costs of war.

There's the 'diminishing returns to scale' case, rising marginal costs mean we don't want to trade. A special case of this is where you want to do something because you value being the sort of person who can or does do that thing in itself: you might be a better cook than me, but I still cook for myself because I want to be the sort of person who can cook.

There's the 'my ultimate goal is to kill you' case, where I'm not really interested in your ability to make shoes more effectively than me, and the 'I want to turn the world into paperclips, and you're part of the world' case, which are the same case really.

There’s the prisoner’s dilemma for a known (finite) number of iterations, where it’s in my self interest to defect. (Or at least, it is on the normal decision theories. If you run Timeless Decision Theory, you might cooperate)

There's the 'you have no ability to produce anything I value, or destroy anything I value' case, where I have no reason at all to care what you do. If you were in a very distant land, or another universe, or a lot smaller than me, this could follow. Alternatively, if there are more agents that coefficients in my utility function, it could be that there’s no point my trading with some of those agents; there are other agents with whom it would be more profitable for me to trade.

Finally, there’s a lot that’s abstracted away from the impression given by the Law of Comparative Advantage. It shows that there are mutually beneficial trades; but not which one will be enacted. Bargaining, bluffing and negotiation help determine which particular deal is done, and even with friendly deals the strategy of conflict is still important.

So the law of comparative advantage actually has a very different – and perhaps smaller – domain than we might have thought. It does seem it applies for quite a lot of the sort of human activity we care about though, like international trade. Also, it gives a rigorous account of one mechanism whereby two agents can both become better off through trade. But it isn’t magic, and doesn’t solve all problems.

Easy False Superiority

2010-09-29T21:56:00.003+01:00

Like many people, I was an atheist before I was a Libertarian. Or, if atheism and libertarianism are the defaults that everyone implicitly accepts until they confuse themselves with theology or philosophy, I was a self-identified atheist before I self-identified as a Libertarian.

I spent quite a lot of time on atheist websites, reading new arguments, and retellings of arguments with theists. And then, when I became a Libertarian, I did the same; Econlog and Cato and a lot of Austrian Economics.

In retrospect, many of the articles took the same pattern. First, they would refer to some religious argument, or socialist person, and thus get rationality points for not arguing against strawmen. Then, they would offer a counter-argument; something straight out of Economics 101, or the lists of logical fallacies. As the reader, I’d understand the sentences the other person said, and I’d understand our response, and feel so clever: here was a great truth that I knew, and these other people didn’t! My opinion of myself, and my opinion of my opinion, rose. Wait till I showed the world this new thing!

In retrospect, of course, I was being an idiot.

Because everyone experiences this.

It’s so clear now, but it wasn’t to an obnoxious teenager. Socialists have Why Libertarianism Makes you Stupid, and a thousand other pages. They have it whenever a politician renounces ‘unrestained capitalism’.

And think how silly those guys look, who say stupid things like ‘Libertarians don’t understand monopoly’ or ‘Libertarians don’t realise that markets aren’t magic’ or ‘Libertarians ignore behaviourist economics because it’s against their religion.’

You don’t want to be one of those guys, whose both so arrogantly superior, and wrong, do you?

So, I’m not really sure why it’s so tempting to do this.

There’s a study in psychology (Mueller and Dweck) where they investigated the effect of praising children for intelligence, compared to praising them for doing something intelligent, or working hard. It turns out that the first group of children end up self-identifying as intelligent, and then become massively risk averse, avoiding hard problems so as not to spoil their reputation by failing. Which is not a very good long term strategy.

Maybe a similar thing is going on here: you read people arguing, and apparently doing the right thing, and then some of the halo effect washes of onto you.

Maybe people, given a load of training data biased towards one side, assign such low probability to socialism or conservativism or whatever that they don’t think it’s worthwhile investigating? This would require people to evaluate positions and facts in a totally stupid manner, but we know people do that anyway.

Alternatively, there’s the idea of an Affective Death Spiral. People basically think affectively: they have good or bad associations with concepts, and these dictate much of their thought and actions. Actual verbal propositional thought, the kind we think of as thought, is less important.

The major problem is when having a positive opinion of one aspect of something improves for opinion of it’s other aspects, for no good reason. And then you start looking for evidence, and by selectively filtering you become even more sure, which makes all the associations even better... and after a massive positive feedback loop, you end up with beliefs tangentially at best related to the truth.

But I’m not really very sure about any of that.

Getting over it this easy false superiority is hard. Stopping reading pundits (e.g., most blogs! – but thinks like Marginal Revolution are probably ok) Also, costly; it means having to miss chances to take digs at the accursed enemy, and potentially missing chances to signal your loyalty to your team. But at the moment, so much argument simply goes straight past each other. It’s not surprising that no-one ever changes their mind.

But this should be ok! We might appear to lose some arguments if we don’t have access to the dark arts of propaganda any more, and limit ourselves to evidence of a higher standard. But if we actually engage with the values and opinions that the others actually hold, maybe more people will be taken by the throat and forced by the evidence to change their mind.

And if it turns out that, in the cold light of the truth, we were wrong about something, or everything? I don’t think I can put it better than Gendlin;

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.

—Eugene Gendlin

Traditional Socialist Values

2010-09-27T08:07:00.006+01:00

Are Socialists Inherently Evil?

If you can’t be bothered to read the rest of the article, I’ll just jump straight to the conclusion and tell you the answer is no.

For the more intrepid reader...

There’s a really great post by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the sorts of values Capitalists actually have, rather than Socialists would like them to have. How Traditional Capitalist Values are more about

“Mak[ing] things that people want, or do things that people want done, in exchange for money or other valuta. This is a great and noble and worthwhile endeavour, and anyone who looks down on it reveals their own shallowness.”

than

“grab all the money you can get”

I wanted to a mirror one, on traditional Socialist Values. Except, because socialists actually are evil and immoral, I’ll have to invent some values that hypothetical, non-evil (merely delusional) socialists might have.

And these are the values and arguments you should be considering, when you evaluate different systems. If there are stronger arguments they could be making, that appeal to more humanely realistic value systems, it doesn’t matter if all the socialists you meet are idiots who don’t understand that Rothbard proved them wrong decades ago, that value being ordinal disproves their system.

We’re Libertarians; we didn’t pick our beliefs from those offered by the main political parties, and there’s no reason why we should pick our considerations from those offered by other ideologies. If there is a stronger case and you ignore it, you’ve lost your epistemic virtue; Libertarianism has become your fantasy, rather than actually about the world.

How not to argue like your opponents are characters in Atlas Shrugged.

By the time you’ve shown that socialism is the rejection of life and the worship of death, you’ve shown your point. The hard part is to get from actual positions that people take to Atlas Shrugged; getting from Wesley Mouch to some kind of contradiction is not the important part of an argument. And for that, we need to understand the values they’re starting from; maybe to understand that they’re human too. Values like,

“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” – not looting from the productive to keep the Twentieth Century Motor Company afloat, but each individual proud to achieve the best he could, in the knowledge that he was helping those in need, rather than making the rich richer.
“Every socialist movement’s proud and beautiful goal is a society based on freedom, mutual cooperation, and solidarity, where all exploitation is abolished and each individual’s free and harmonious development is the condition of everyone’s free development.”[1]
“Democratic socialism is an international movement for freedom, social justice and solidarity. Its goal is to achieve a peaceful world where these basic values can be enhanced and where each individual can live a meaningful life with the full development of his or her personality and talents and with the guarantee of human and civil rights in a democratic framework of society.”[2]
That it is outcomes that matter, and a millionaire who fails to help the suffering masses is as bad as one who inflicts suffering upon them.
That death or suffering is always bad, whether it is wrought by nature or man, and we should try to prevent it either way. We should not be a bourgeois state and ignore the former.
That it’s crazy, in an era of industrialised farming and genetic engineering and the internet, for us to not be able to feed the world. That it’d be comic, if it wasn’t tragic.
That advertising destroys the self esteem of millions of people by presenting them with unobtainable targets. If we move beyond profit-obsessed corporations and media manipulation, we can acknowledge the full range of human values, including honesty, and allow people to flourish in their own manner.
That inequality generated by Capitalism is morally wrong, because it fragments society and prevents us from relating to one another. Can the tycoon in his luxurious penthouse relate to the pensioner shivering in her flat, or the unemployed man waiting for the bus in the rain?
“What does it mean to be a intellectual of the field? To muddy your boots, to swat mosquitoes, to eat out of the common pot, to listen to questions, to accept criticism. To adjust theories to workers experience. To adapt to changes as well as to defend principles.”
That, if there were no other effects, it might be better to have a richer but more unequal world, if it made everyone better off. But at the moment, we’re not on that margin: redistribution from the pampered elite to the starving masses will make them better off, not worse.
That Feudalism was wrong to assign a child a station at birth, and Capitalism is wrong to assign it a socio-economic class.
That it is wrong for huge corporations to manipulate governments, especially of poor countries, into weakening environmental laws to allow for greater profits: the public good of the atmosphere, and other parts of nature, needs protection.
That people should be defined by their own values and projects, not by their job.
That ‘positive freedom’ matters; we might quibble over the semantics of whether or not this counts as freedom, but whatever it is, actually being able to achieve your goals is important.
That the view of human nature as rational, egotistical agents is slander; our other values, like community, family and fellowship are important, but ignored in a Capitalist Society.
“To love the country; do it no harm
Serve the people; do no disservice.
Follow science; discard ignorance.
Be diligent; not indolent.
Be united, help each other; make no gains at other's expense
Be honest and trustworthy; do not spend ethics for profits
Be disciplined and law-abiding; not chaotic and lawless.
Live plainly, struggle hard; do not wallow in luxuries and pleasures.”[3]
"It's easy to offer an "opportunity" that in practice goes to a few; the hard and serious task is to ensure the means of flourishing to all." HT: SarahC
It is better to live for others than only for yourself .

[1] Swedish socialist leader Nils Karleby, quoted in Timothy Tilton, The Political Theory of Swedish Social Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990), p. 73.

[2] Socialist International, Declaration of Principles.

[3] http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200604/11/eng20060411_257606.html

Getting Past the Words

2010-09-25T21:23:00.000+01:00

‘Libertarianism’ is just a word.

Ideologies are not some kind of special, ontologically privileged thing.

Rather, an ideology is just a strongly compacted set of beliefs about the world.

You don’t arguing for an ideology, you argue for those facts about the world. The ideology is just a convenient categorisation; something that will fit on a bumper sticker. The goodness or badness of a policy isn’t caused by whether or not it’s libertarian; it’s caused by facts about the world.

Because libertarianism is just a word, you should be able to justify your beliefs without having to appeal to the word ‘libertarian’. You should be able to taboo ‘statist’ and still argue against higher taxes, be able to advocate free speech without appealing to ‘liberty’.

If you can’t follow the chain of concepts back to brute facts about the world, then your beliefs aren’t rooted in the real world: they form a free floating bubble, each idea backing up each other one. But because your beliefs are independent of the real world, they no longer provide evidence about it. If you would believe them regardless of the physical state of the world, then they’ll always recommend the same policies, regardless of whether or not those policies are the best; they no longer restrict anticipation.

And your evidence can’t just be ‘The Soviet Union was terrible’. There’s more than two options, and you need to have evidence to distinguish between Libertopia and a stable western mixed economy, not a straw-man.

Take healthcare. You should be able to trace your belief back past liberal pieties like ‘free choice will cause competition and improve standards’ to actual facts about the world. You should know of the RAND health insurance experiment, in which thousands of poor Americans were given varying degrees of health insurance, and ten years later those with total coverage were no healthier than those without. Then you’ll know your position has empirical, not just rhetorical, support.

And you’ll stump any socialists you argue with. Won’t that be grand? Instead of your talking in Libertarianesse, and his talking in Socialesse, you’ll be basing your arguments in the same reality he lives in.

And as politics makes everyone stupid, he’ll never expect it.

But you can’t stop there. You can’t just look for the evidence you want to find – you have to take into account all the consequences of the evidence, even those that don’t fit neatly into a ‘libertarian’ shaped box. And you can’t help but find evidence on both sides.

You have to notice that the RAND study didn’t investigate catastrophic care, and so isn’t evidence either way on the value of public funding for really expensive, but effective, treatments.

You have to notice that the RAND study is also evidence that privately funded medicine isn’t that useful either. Not as strong evidence as it is against publicly funded medicine, because the people in the control group still bought private medicine, but if private and public money is buying the same type of medicine...

Or take trade unions.

You can argue that trade unions are monopolies, and that monopolies make consumers worse off. But that’s not obviously true for all monopolies; what about natural monopolies? Or what if the benefit to consumers, in the form of companies and then shareholders, was outweighed by the benefits to workers, who value money more?

What does your opposition to trade unions actually imply about the world? How much lower would prices be without them? What would be the difference in working conditions? If you’re not willing to put your money where your mouth is on these issues, you shouldn’t base your beliefs on them.

Instead, you could read Robert Wiblin’s post. It turns out that trade unions don’t transfer income from evil capitalists to hardworking workers: they transfer money from hardworking workers to unionist workers.

We can use Libertarianesse to communicate between Libertarians. If we already agree on a lot of things, you can transmit information very quickly just by saying something like ‘conscription is slavery’. But without the shared background, the agreement on things like differing conceptions of the good, the opportunity cost of time, the effectiveness of slaves in combat, the effect of wars of war domestically and abroad, the incentive problems involved with slavery... without this, saying ‘conscription is slavery’ is just rhetoric. You need to be able to dissolve the question, and get at the underlying facts.

Looking for Proof

2010-09-25T00:20:00.004+01:00

Freedom's pretty great, huh?

I’m pretty sure it is.

Maybe I’ll go and look for some more evidence today; read some articles in economics journals or something. And then I’ll be even more sure that Libertarianism’s the best. Infact, the longer I study, the more confident I’ll be. If I knew all the arguments and all the facts, I’d be absolutely confident.

...

Except that’s impossible.

Your expectation of your level of belief after the new evidence you’re going to find must be the same as your current level of belief. If there’s a big chance of becoming a little more confident, there must be a little chance of becoming a lot less confident to match it. Only one will be the case, and your level of belief will change, but you can’t know in advance which way, or how much.

If you already knew that, after reading that book, you’d be more sure of the Law of Comparative Advantage, why not just update your belief now? Afterall, you’d have evidence of evidence – and that’s as good as actually having evidence. If you expect to become more confident, or less, you should have already done so.

To say it a different way, lets suppose we represent our levels of belief using probability.

Are we allowed to do this?

We're not allowed: we have no choice. Anything else is just plain wrong, and if you do anything else you will lose.

Let H be our hypothesis, and E be some piece of evidence we’re going to look for. We can easily represent our expected level of belief in the proposition thus,

P(H|E)P(E) + P(H|¬E)P(E)

but we can break up our current level of belief in exactly the same way

P(H) = P(H and E) + P(H and ¬E)

= P(H|E)P(E) + P(H|¬E)P(¬E)

Yes: our expected new level of belief is the same as our current level. There’s a conservation of expected evidence.

So you can’t go looking for proofs of Libertarianism.

Well, ok, you can. But if you don’t find them, if it turns out to be ¬E rather than E, you have to become less confident in Libertarianism. We may be right, but we’re not magic, and the laws of probability bind us too.

James Tyler - The Importance of traders and the evils of bankers

2010-07-18T12:33:00.001+01:00

James Tyler gave the following talk to the society on 27th May 2010 at Christ Church. It is also available at the Cobden Centre.

Trader: One whose business is trade or commerce.

Trade and commerce is the lifeblood of wealth creation. Without specialisation and exchange, we would all starve. You have oranges, I have apples. Individually we are bored, together we have a fruit salad.

For specialisation, exchange and commerce to work its magic, firstly we need some common ground: a market. Now, mention that word to a Socialist, and he starts to froth and foam at the mouth. The evil of markets, how the market forces this and exploits that, blah blah.

Unfortunately, they are confused. You see a market is just a bit of space, physical or virtual, where people who want to buy meet those willing to sell. That’s it. It has no power of its own. No influence. No horns and a pointy tail.

However, badly aimed as their invective is, they do have a fair grievance lurking in those passionately beating breasts. What they are trying to say is that they object to those who have power in a market. Who wields the power in a market, and where does it come from? That is a fair question to ask.

I contend that power always comes, ultimately, from Government. They hold the monopoly on power, they set the rules, and their arbitrary decisions can mean life or death for any businessman taking a risk. They get the keys to the gun cabinet.

Markets and traders

Only loons attack commerce between good old wholesome types looking to exchange the hard earned fruits of their labour for other stuff they need: I exchange my apples for your oranges.

Unless, that is, you want pears. The free interaction of people that is the market decided on a clever mechanism to get around this problem. It created an intermediate commodity called money.

Money is just a commodity like any other. The free market chose something that was durable, portable, respected, and consistent. The free market originally chose gold and silver as money, and gold remained money until governments came along and nationalised then destroyed it. Money now is a fraud – the greater fool theory of acceptance only because somebody else will too.

The creation of money was a fantastic innovation – a neat solution to the problem of the double coincidence of wants… or rather what to do when there wasn’t a coincidence.

But what happens if an orange farmer wants to sell next year’s crop now? Maybe there is a great demand for oranges and the farmer has cultivated trees to meet the demand, but does not want to take the risk of a craze for plums depressing the demand for oranges. A consumer of oranges may only want to buy what he can pick up and select. A grocer may not want to tie up his cash in something so far off into the future.

What is needed is someone in the middle. Someone willing to guarantee a price for those oranges now, take them in the future and then sell them on when they are needed. This is where the speculator steps in and provides a vital service.

Ahh… the evil speculator, now there is a ripe target!

How can somebody who produces nothing, does not employ physical labour, and does not reorganise the factors of production, be in any way productive in society? Off with their heads!

Speculator: one who speculates on abstruse or uncertain matters

The key is uncertainty. The future is not known; if it was, then the central planners might stand a better chance. But the future peculiarities of individual desires and wants can never be known, so there are always highly uncertain outcomes inherent in planning for the future. The world is too complicated to simplify into maths or bureaucratic diktats. The risks are too great and the mistakes too expensive. What we need is a mechanism to attempt to put a price on future outcomes. We need to “crowd-source” the answer to the problem of resource allocation. And, that’s what speculation is…

I risk my own shirt to take on risks that others do not want. I’m proud to say I speculate. I speculate that I will be able to find another buyer for those risks at a future point in time, and then I charge a fee for my services.

Some say that this is making money from nothing, but I say I provide a service to the world in smoothing out the jagged pointy edges. If things go wrong, I will have to pay the price personally.

The act of speculation is important in the signals it sends out. If prices rise, it signals a shortage which stimulates extra production to satiate demand. Or if the speculator successfully sells short some shares, the falling price will send out a signal that not all is well with that company.

Let me quickly clear a couple of things up …

Markets are not efficient

This is a stupid, indefensible idea peddled by neo-classicist eggheads. Information is often wrong and therefore people err. Mistakes are made, but I contend that the mistakes made by crowds are much smaller than when Government gets its grubby hands on a ‘problem’.

Markets work in waves and ripples and patterns, not aggregates, averages and efficiencies

Early adopters get rewarded the most; late arrivers are penalised. The crowd sometimes gets carried away, and prices rise too much or fall in an unwarranted way, but by and large, when not unduly influenced by power, markets are a remarkably efficient way of making a myriad mind-numbing decisions that all hang together. Markets are smart in the way a regulator can never be.

Short Sellers

Secondly, I want to sing the praises of those great unsung heroes of stock markets: the short sellers.

Selling short is the process of selling something you do not own, in order to profit from a fall in prices, then buying it back at a lower price.

Short selling is a dangerous game. You are hated by all and sundry. Governments, regulators, corporate bosses, and fat cats. Everyone, it seems. You are always at risk of being targeted for a ’short squeeze’. But short selling is vital for two reasons:

1) Buyers need a seller to buy from.

If you want to buy some shares – who do you think it is that will sell them to you?

It’s not usually an investment fund, or a pensioner, or your mate. It’s the ‘market’, and it is more than likely that the person you bought them from will not own them, but will scrabble around for the rest of the day trying to find them a penny cheaper. Can you be bothered to do that?

The stupidity of banning short selling is that it stops the market working – meaning that movements are likely to be bigger, and the falls greater.

2) Short sellers are the policemen of the markets – a much better (and more fearsome) regulator than the FSA.

Without short sellers, Enron and WorldCom would have got away with their fraud for a lot longer. It is a tragedy that the short sellers of banks were not bigger and better armed during the run up to the sub-prime crisis.

Don’t get me wrong, short sellers were there, playing their lonely game, but they were just too small in face of the great money/banking juggernaut carelessly careening away. Stronger short selling might have seen off the sub-prime fiasco earlier and with less pain.

As a society, we should desperately be encouraging short sellers in situations like this. Big business needs to respect the short seller – it keeps them honest. When prices are rising in a rampant fashion, usually no good comes of this. This is when we need the short seller to tame the wild beast.

Speculators do a much better job of sifting through the morass of conflicting signals to fish out the price for the best allocation of resources in a way that Sir Humphrey, sitting in an ivory tower in Whitehall, could only dream about.

So, traders and speculators are vital for a productive and fully-functioning capitalist economy. In a pure and free economy, they are a force for efficiency and part of the crowd-sourced resource allocation system.

But unfortunately, we do not have free markets

The sub-prime fiasco has shown us that markets, especially financial markets, are anything but pure. Markets are distorted by power, and it’s important to turn your swivel gun onto the source of that power….

The one thing you should always know about busts is that you can’t stop the pain at that point: it’s too late, the damage has already been done. The boom may have felt good at the time, but those tequila slammers at 2am always seem like fun. Remember the feeling in the morning. Trying to alleviate the hangover by more of the same is the action of an alcoholic. It’s the boom when assets are wildly misallocated, and that’s where we should focus.

The sub-prime crisis started with government, was promoted by government agencies, and was taken to the dizzying heights of stupidity by a banking system fuelled with masses of cheap money, produced by central banks that panicked after the previous cheap money bubble went pop in 2001.

The bankers perceived an inexhaustible supply of cash that could be lent at a profit to people who had no chance of paying back. The Mexican strawberry picker given a $750,000 loan to buy a house he could never afford to repay. A cleaner running a buy-to-let portfolio of 4 houses, with zero down payment.

What’s the problem with banks, after all, it’s a free world?

Banks are not run by kindly old bespectacled men, carefully lending money to young families to give them their first break. Remember It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart – the friendly banker looking after good ol’ townsfolk? Scrub it from your mind.

Banks are vast hedge funds, with vast trading floors of speculators, all doing “God’s” work, as some idiot once said.

One UK clearing bank has been described as a huge smart hedge fund, with a mediocre provincial bank bolted onto its underside. That’s probably true for all of them.

A few starters on banks:

1) They are licensed by the government. I cannot start up a bank – neither can you, unless you go through the various hoops, fires, and barriers erected in front of you. You need mountains of capital. They make it difficult to join their club.

2) They operate under a specially loosened set of accounting rules.

Normally, companies are required by accounting rules and law to make sure they provide for their liabilities as they fall due. If you order a load of gear on credit, you have to show that you have the ability to pay for it – and pretty rapidly. Companies are expected to make their creditors ‘whole’

Look at the accounts of Vodafone and in their balance sheet they have to provide for ‘current liabilities’ and ‘long term liabilities’, but not so for a bank. Banks get away with a broad ‘liabilities’ section, with no attempt at sorting near term risks from long terms assets. It doesn’t matter whether they owe money tomorrow and are due to cover it in 5 years time.

3) Banks thrive on red tape, loopholes, fuzzy wording and obfuscation

For instance, 75% of people in this country believe that when they place their hard-earned money in a current account, it remains their money. It most emphatically is not. You hand your money over, and you get a promise. Well, I say promise, but the bank goes to great lengths to hide this fact. You are given a statement, which shows your money proudly sitting there, waiting for you – all safe and sound.

Except it’s not.

It is being lent out to Dubai World! Or passed onto the trading floor, and being pushed into Alphabetti Spaghetti Derivative Hooplas, funnelled into their massive casino operation.

Even though you might spend it tomorrow, the bank will not have your money. If you want it, they have to get it from somebody else’s account, or go onto the money markets and borrow it.

4) A bank is an operation designed to make profits from money that is not their own.

When you put your Tesco’s money into a bank, you are investing in a hedge fund, except you don’t get any of the profits. If it all goes wrong, as it did in 2008, then the taxpayer pays for all the losses.

Even in the good times, the taxpayer insures deposits (explicitly or implicitly), leaving the banks free to gamble away. Does this seem like free market capitalism to you?

What is the problem with this, after all, it’s a free world?

Well, it’s not. As I said before, banks operate with privilege and monopoly rights, with taxpayer backing. And we can add a final potion into the mix: incentive and liability

The sub-prime crisis cost Wall Street and the City trillions, or rather it is costing taxpayers that much. If I lose money, I remortgage my house; otherwise I don’t come back.

When Goldman Sachs put all its eggs in the AIG basket, they should have received a bloody nose – at the very least. Yet uncle Sam paid them out 100c on the $ and Goldman scored a slam dunk. God’s work, eh? A miracle indeed.

A trader called Howie Huber recorded the single biggest loss ever at a bank. He cost Morgan Stanley over 10 billion dollars, but he got to keep the 24 million dollar bonus he earned the year before.

Dick Fuld at Lehmans faced some devastatingly hard questions from some horrible congressmen, but retired a very rich man.

It was the taxpayer who paid the price. Private profits and socialised losses – emphatically NOT what I’d call free market competition.

Now I don’t mean that we should round these guys up and shoot them, or even take their bonuses back – they signed contracts, and we respect the rule of law, and contracts. It’s the basis of our freedom and we risk tyranny if we selectively choose to violate these rights.

We have to recognise that bank traders get a free option. You can bet it all on red or black: win, you get a bonus. Lose, you may lose your job – but then probably use your ‘reputation’ to walk into another one.

The system is wrong, and something must be done about it.

In terms of dealing with the crisis we have to understand that damage is done before we are aware of it. In the sub-prime crisis, it was done in those happy days of 110% mortgages, up front discounted rates, and more freshly printed money than you know what to do with. We were killing our economy with cheap money love.

When gravity asserted itself, and the inevitable bust came we faced a simple choice: take the pain, or hide it.

In 1982, 100 Keynesian economists wrote a letter to the times saying that the government’s economic policies were suicide. It’s a bit of a coincidence, then, that that was the exact moment the real economy started to grow. Time and again, history shows us that if we take our medicine early, we get through the illness quicker.

Or we could take the Japanese/Keynesian approach, and hide it with fiscal aggregate kabalah nonsense. And lose twenty years in the process

But banks.. what should we do with them?

Some suggestions:

1. Firstly, banks should not speculate with your beer money – unless you understand this, and you explicitly sign it off.

2. Banks should be audited as strictly and as thoroughly as normal companies are – no favours.

3. Banks should legally have to provide for liabilities as they fall due – as every other company should.

4. Banks should offer accounts that are 100% reserved. That is where your money is kept safe, not used to speculate – and it remains your property.

5. Speculation should be undertaken by hedge funds and specialist trading groups, not by deposit-taking institutions, or by the likes of Barclays, that can borrow money from the Bank of England at 0.5% and walk over to the craps table.

6. Anybody, or company, that offers fiduciary advice should face 100% liability in case it goes wrong.

And most importantly,

7. Any person paid more than a certain amount by a bank, should be liable when things go wrong.

The contract that Dick Fuld signed should have meant he lost his house when he crashed Lehman’s. Howie Huber should now be serving Big Macs. And Lloyd Blankfein should be a little more circumspect when talking rubbish about doing God’s work.

God is watching you mate… be careful.

Can classical liberals avoid gender trouble?

2010-07-10T22:18:00.001+01:00

I’ve recently read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, a key text in contemporary feminist and queer theory. It is provocative, with many interesting (and perhaps even true) ideas. It also says a few things that are either trivial, though maybe they weren’t so trivial in 1990, or just plain misconceived. It has a reputation for dense unforgiving prose, but the best bits of it are no more difficult to understand than a detailed argument in analytic philosophy. Indeed, without the silly numbering and lettering that litter some analytic philosophy, the argument reads as much smoother prose.

The worst paragraphs follow a pattern of disconnected quotations from various French thinkers presented as opposed perspectives but without much explanation of their theories, ending with a few questions that fall somewhere between the speculative and the rhetorical: “X says ‘this’, Y says ‘that’ but if Y is right, what does it mean for X’s fundamental theory?” She often doesn’t explain in these exchanges why we should care about these theories. Butler’s discussion of psychoanalytic thought, in particular, sinks into this pattern. I suppose these references are unavoidable in academic discussion where the ability to cite a broad literature is a prerequisite for presenting a fresh view. However, Butler is much better when she commits to making and defending an argument of her own. In Gender Trouble, this is a broadly Foucauldian strike on multiple fronts against all forms of sex and gender naturalism and determinism.

The key idea is that there is no stable ground on which to found a universal normative idea of sex (let alone gender). There is no past or future utopia of a ‘true’ sexuality that remains hidden by existing power structures. One cannot scour the psyche for a pure sexual desire or practice that is divorced from social or political power, at least not in a straightforward way, since even repressed sexualities (like lesbianism) are formed as distinct identities using the same forces that oppress them. It is heterosexuality that creates the homosexuality one sees practiced and desired. In fact, ‘sex’ as an institution is generated by social practice, a set of acts that are grouped together using various ethical, medical and juridical discourses.

This ‘troubles’ some feminists as it means that their primary category of political representation (women) is constituted by the very forces of power and domination that their theories attempt to oppose or reform. But, of course, it should trouble anyone who cares about human freedom since according to Butler, sexuality and gender are in no sense natural facts, but unchosen arbitrary institutional impositions on individuals. In fact, they even generate our individual identities and create, police and punish transgressions against them. Quite a lot of her critique hits the mark but I am going to look briefly at two weaknesses. They point to how classical liberals might answer the charge that the free institutions we espouse rely unthinkingly on the domination constituted by the social practices of sex and gender.

Butler’s critique of biological naturalism

One of Butler’s key points of attack is the binary distinction between sex and gender, or the classic idea that one ‘is born female, but becomes a woman’. She attempts to demonstrate that it is not just gender that is the product of social forces, as theorists have traditionally maintained, but that sex itself is a product of discourse. We are undifferentiated beings until discourse groups together certain physical characteristics and inscribes a sex on a body (in fact, constituting the very notion of a ‘body’ by doing so). We are not born even biologically male or female, but have these identities thrust upon us.

Butler holds the discourse of the biological sciences to be a product of this binary and solidified notion of embodied sex and, in turn, a site where the construction of sexuality is hidden behind a façade of nature. How does she argue this? In an early chapter, Butler seems to imply without any argument whatsoever that biology is a site of strategic action, where scientists carefully reproduce ‘common sense’ sexual discourses in order to establish the legitimacy of existing social divisions. In a later chapter, she bolsters this point with reference to a single scientific article on genetics, where scientists discuss their search for a master gene that will explain why some people with XY chromosomes fail to display typically male traits, and some with XX chromosome fail to have fully fledged female traits. She criticises their use of the label XX-females and XY-males which she says introduces the very assumption that needs proving, that genes correspond to actual observed sex. But it is unclear whether she is taking issue with this one article, the hypothesis one group of scientists are trying (and apparently failing) to prove, or the entire field of biological science. Beyond the search to explain exceptions, the correspondence between XX/XY chromosomes and female/male is certainly sufficiently durable that to deny it is to rapidly descend into Python-esque levels of radical obscurantism.

More generally, Butler offers a fairly skewed and partial interpretation of what biologists and geneticists are doing. Scientists use the male/female labels in a variety of ways which seem far from reinforcing and policing common sense notions of sex. They are completely unperturbed with the idea that plants have both male and female parts on the same body. They aren’t troubled by the notion that some amphibians can spontaneously change sex according to social context. Indeed they are fascinated by this discovery. That some lizards can reproduce by making something akin to clones of themselves is, similarly, not making trouble for a biologist. So one cannot assume, as Butler seems to, that the use of sexed labels in biology implies any specific reinforcement of strictly binary sexuality that one sees propounded by some in the human sciences. Natural scientists would generally be fascinated rather than troubled by the discovery of a distinct third or fourth biological sex within humans.

In fact, it seems more likely that scientific discourse (when used properly) has played a role in breaking down essentialist notions of sex. We know through evolutionary biology that the existence of sexed bodies is not a stable fact of any obvious normative consequence or significance, but the result of contingent (often random) mutations over the course of millions of years that have impacted on the way humans reproduce. There is no intrinsic reason why reproductive functions couldn’t have been divided up in a different way to how they are; it just happens that a two-sex divide generally holds amongst humans, but only in the same way that we generally have two feet, two hands and two eyes. Of course, why people should have their body inscribed and defined by their reproductive functions is another matter and one much more in need of critique, but it isn’t scientific discourse that contributes especially to this process.

Targeting biology in this way is particularly ill advised, considering that even Martin Heidegger (who sits at the roots of much post-structuralist theory and had a major influence on Foucault) was, at least on some accounts, a realist with respect to the entities of natural science. Of course, once one introduces a human element to a practice, such as in medicine with its notion of wellness and illness, then you have lost the unique scientific perspective that Heidegger called de-worlding (the studied treatment and analysis of entities as divorced from the human world and its values), but to claim that biology falls into this category requires rather a lot more proving.

Gender as a ‘social formation’

Butler’s references to classical liberalism are quite basic, treating it essentially as adherence to consent and contract as a foundation of legitimate power. She does not discuss classical liberal social theory at all. This is unfortunate as elsewhere Butler seeks out a concept that breaks down the binaries of natural facts and social constructs, and free will and determinism. She notes that although always acting within or against a set of boundaries defined by social institutions, freedom can be found through elaboration on or even parodying of existing practices. Hence, she emphasises the role of queer sexuality in opening up new possibilities in human discourse. Such a concept, of a contingent social framework that structures individual will and identity, or something very close to it, can be found in Hayek’s social theory.

‘Social formations’, for Hayek, are emergent institutions that are the product of human action but not of human design. Like, for example, natural rock formations that are formed over millions of years, they look so elaborate that one assumes they are a product of intelligence. In fact, they are hewn over generations of human interaction, discourse and commerce, not according to a single plan or design. Institutions like language, law and property all fall under this category. So, for example, there is no author of the English language, but a designer trying to come up with an easy means of verbal communication could hardly have come up with a better system (Esperanto, a ‘rationally’ constructed language, never took off). It is unavoidable that people come to be defined and identified by many of these social formations, whether as English speakers or as subjects of common law, and this is prior to the deliberate decisions and designs of individuals or Governments, which have to contend with what a post-structuralist might call the ‘always already’ present aspect of these institutions.

Social change is characterised by the piecemeal adaptation of these institutions. What a liberal wants from these institutions is a framework through which people can form and pursue plans of action without being constantly interrupted and disrupted by the arbitrary powers of others (whether it is being arrested, attacked or having one’s property expropriated). In carrying out their plans, individuals have an imperceptible but eventually decisive role in shaping the future of their social world.

Gender and sexuality fit this notion of social formation quite well. They are institutional impositions that provide a durable set of norms, practices and mutual expectations within a social field. That heterosexuality developed and flourished as a norm when reproductive capacity was scarce and in demand is unsurprising. Now, however, heterosexual norms, enforced either legally or socially, operate like a trade union’s closed shop, restricting access to and legitimating only some kinds of sexual interaction and preventing possible innovations in human relations. Some people continue to benefit from this asymmetrical enforcement of sexual norms, while others find themselves excluded. In addition, the policing and prohibition of sexuality has led (as with most prohibitions) to unintended consequences that are both interesting and sometimes tragic, which is a parallel idea to Butler’s explanation that juridical prohibitions help to generate the very subversive sexual desires they avowedly attempt to snuff out.

Sex in a free society

It goes almost without saying that classical liberals believe that consensual sex should not be subject to any legal regulation, that medics should have no power to decide what kinds of sex are healthy (though they would remain able to offer advice to those willing to listen), and that marriage should not be instituted by the state at all. All these things, to some extent, arbitrarily exclude and punish individuals who are merely pursuing their own personal plans. But what would a classical liberal expect sexual relations to look like in the absence of these juridical and medical impositions? Could sex as a concept disappear to be replaced by more generalised notions of simply ‘adults at play’? Or would everyone have their own unique notion of sexuality?

My hunch is that most people would be satisfied with following a set of sex and gender norms in the same way that most people are happy to pick out a style of clothes that suits them (and in a sense comes to define them), rather than making their clothes from scratch. What you would see, as we already witness, is more choice. In other words, the question would not just be whether one is to identify as gay or straight, but a whole range of possible practices and lifestyles. In this context, ‘queer’ individuals would take the role of social entrepreneurs or pioneers, experimenting with new ways of living, with the more successful, interesting or aesthetically engaging lifestyles being imitated subsequently by others. Just as owning an IPhone has advantages because they are so popular and compatible with various other products, so most people will tend to define themselves along relatively popular lines just for ease of co-ordination and participation. The important thing is that popular identities are not protected and policed through violence or law, and that alternatives and elaborations on existing sexualities are allowed to flourish. And, of course, they should always be available for parody. This is one liberal response to gender trouble.

John Stossel on America's drug war

2010-06-21T20:32:00.001+01:00

John Stossel is doing a lot on the Fox Network to spread the libertarian view of prohibition.

Waldron's dangerous dignitarian doctrine

2010-06-15T04:00:00.004+01:00

Contemporary liberals often have a more 'nuanced' approach to speech than classical liberals. Sure, free speech sounds great in theory BUT, they will say, as Jeremy Waldron does, it can also be used to drown out minority expression, or to demean vulnerable people in society.

The issue is, of necessity, a little more complicated than giving everyone a free rein to say whatever they like. We don't necessarily give a mafia boss the benefit of the doubt when he 'implies' that someone should be beaten or killed. We don't demand that only the people pulling a trigger are actual criminals. So it is clear that various threats, incitements and conspiracies (that might all be forms of expression) might indeed be subject to criminal sanction.

Problems arise when we start to extend potential restrictions on speech to content that attacks someone's basis of self-respect, or their dignity. It sounds rather subjective and could amount to the de facto outlawing of offence, which liberals have traditionally defended (how else can society progress but without the occasional controversy?). When Canada introduced human rights against 'hate speech', their various Human Rights commissions investigating speech complaints developed a near perfect record of convictions. That sounds awfully like a purely victim-definied notion of 'hate speech'.

Victim thinks it is hate speech = it is hate speech

Obviously, this isn't any decent way to legislate. Almost any expression outside accepted norms could be subject to prosecution if a 'victim' can be found. Controversial speech could be strategically silenced by opposing activists, and soon no debate will be able to happen freely.

I put this sort of problem to Jeremy Waldron at a recent free speech discussion. I used the example of pornography and asked what kind of evidence would we need to say that a particular instance of pornographic expression was having harmful effects (usually, supposedly, on the interests of women). I find that current evidence surveys, at least those which include aggregate studies examining the effects that pornography appears to have at the societal level, indicate that pornography has either no relationship with harm to others, or may even have a moderately beneficial effect on others (slightly reducing sex crime and improving people's attitudes towards relationships).

Waldron responded that there was clear testimony from women, amongst others, for pornography's harmful effects. It ruins relationships, it creates impotence, it makes women feel objectified by men when they go out on a dates with them. It is responsible for violence against women.

The problem, I find, with this sort of testimony (this book is a massive collection of the stuff), is that it presents narratives that connect pornography with social harms without actually making the logical or empirical argument that pornography causes these harms. Many of these testimonies look transparently bizarre to anyone not already buying into the 'pornography causes rape' memes. This applies especially to the narratives offered by male sex offenders who are delighted to hold their pornography use as decisive in encouraging them to rape and abuse others. It is only in this instance when people seem suddenly willing to take rapists and sex offenders at their word.

It is true that victims of abuse also sometimes (but far from in every case) associate pornography with their abuse. But, once again, it is a narrative that tries to find some sort of explanation for what is really just morally weak people doing incredibly evil things. The vast majority of people can look at pornography without being adversely effected. And overall, pornography is not associated with any increases in sex crime. This suggests the problem lies with the people, not with the media they are watching.

Waldron suggested that, in any case, there should be no presumption of liberty here. It is up to defenders of pornography to demonstrate its beneficial or non-harmful effects in order justify its continued expression. This seems to make free expression a hostage to testimony. I am sure people in the past blamed rock n'roll, jazz or Catholicism for many of those social and personal ailments that are now blamed on pornography, and offered pursuasive narrative arguments for it too. I am sure a quick dip onto the Internet would find people happy to blame a Jew-dominated media for the breakdown in relationships between men and women. What we won't find is reasonable independent evidence to back up these sort of claims, just as with pornography. Should we pull Jerry Springer and David Baddiel off the airways anyway? After all, I don't think I can provide any reasonable independent justification for allowing either Jerry Springer or David Baddiel to speak on TV, so perhaps we should take some anti-semite's word for it, or at least test their hypothesis for a few years.

Traditionally things like impotence and sexual immorality were blamed on the devil. The testimony of people like sex offenders is just a repetition of 'the devil made me do it' hysterics. Pornographers and porn users are just the current generation of witches. What we need to know is how contemporary liberals would design their 'hate speech' codes to avoid the occasional repetition of the Crucible.

In this respect, Waldron drops another clanger from the perspective of any robust conception of the rule of law. He suggests that a senior prosecutor in a state should have a veto on whether to action a free speech case. This doesn't seem much of an answer. It is an admission that speech codes are probably too ambiguous to be trustworthy guides to what can be prosecuted in any given case. So it will just be some public official with a 'I know it when I see it' approach to sift through the possible cases. It replaces settled law with the opinion and preferences of one official. Speech and expression deserves more protection than that.

The benevolent hand of the State

2010-06-14T17:35:00.000+01:00

It just wants to know more about You (via Cato):

Atomistic, moi? Classical liberalism's sociability

2010-06-14T03:44:00.001+01:00

In The Modern Liberal Theory of Man, Gerald Gaus sets out a fairly rough and ready distinction between classical liberalism and modern liberalism which he, I think, correctly dates from John Stuart Mill onwards. He says that classical liberals 'share a vision of men as essentially independent, private and competitive beings who see civil association mainly as a framework for the pursuit of their own interests'. By contrast, he suggests that modern liberals are 'more apt to stress mutual dependence over independence, co-operation over competition, and mutual appreciation over private enjoyment'.

This is a prudently put distinction, one that is rather harder to refute than the more typical 'classical liberals are selfish bastards' strawmen that get put up against us in more ordinary discussion. However, I think it is wrong. Take Herbert Spencer, usually considered an archetype individualist classical liberal and a contemporary of J.S. Mill. Is he against co-operation? Not at all, he is just in favour of voluntary co-operation:

'If, instead of using the word "cooperation" in a limited sense, we use it in its widest sense, as signifying the combined activities of citizens under whatever system of regulation; then these two are definable as the system of compulsory cooperation and the system of voluntary cooperation. The typical structure of the one we see in an army formed of conscripts, in which the units in their several grades have to fulfil commands under pain of death, and receive food and clothing and pay, arbitrarily apportioned; while the typical structure of the other we see in a body of producers or distributors, who severally agree to specified payments in return for specified services, and may at will, after due notice, leave the organization if they do not like it.'

Considering the problem a little more analytically, we can see that, in fact, as Sheldon Richman has pointed out, co-operation implies competition. Trade is one kind of simple mode of co-operation. Each person gains by exchanging something they value less for something they value more. So long as both sides of the trade are satisfied, and if the trade is consensual it usually is, then that is a successful co-operative venture. A 'competitor' is simply a potential trader whom someone has decided not to co-operate with on that occasion.

Unless one were to construct a system where you somehow co-operate with absolutely everyone (in the nation, in the world?) simultaneously, there will always be successful co-operators and a few competitors who wished they had been able to co-operate. The only question is how one chooses the co-operators. Many modern liberals seem keen to restrict choice of co-operation between people, and sometimes mandate particular politically chosen co-operators. But you haven't abolished competition that way. You have simply shifted the decision making from the voluntary marketplace into the political arena. There will still be plenty of annoyed potential co-operators who didn't have the political nous to gain a license to trade, or a particular contract with the Government, for example. So I think it is for modern liberals to demonstrate that they are not anti-co-operative rather than for classical liberals to show that they are.

Co-operation isn't the only thing that classical liberal emphasise either. In fact, the ability to partake in perhaps the highest forms of sociability, friendship, was a key success of the classical liberal tradition. Do classical liberals boil down friendship as an institution into the pursuit of one's own interests? Far from it. In fact, as Allan Silver points out in his survey of Scottish Englightenment thinkers, it is the ability to engage in wider forms of commercial endeavour that allows people to pursue friendship for the sake of it.

In the past, people's personal associations were pretty much defined for them by family, church, feudal lords and other political structures. You were 'friends' with those who could protect you, serve you, or help provide for your subsistence. Once the political structures became more liberal, allowing widespread co-operation between relative strangers, one could dispense with these forced associations and actually just hang out with people you liked for the sake of it. You also have more options about who you can 'socially acceptably' fall in love with. It is no coincidence that as market economies develop, even the most primary institution of the family starts to take on more voluntary aspects.

When markets work, they allow you to get the annoying little things like food and shelter out of the way, so that you have more time to pursue more important interests. What do classical liberals hold those interest to be? With their emphasis on friendship as a principle, it seems that intimacy and sociability are classical liberalism's highest values.

Adriana Lukas - "Rescuing Privacy from the Internet"

2010-06-08T00:20:00.001+01:00

Since founding the Big Blog Company in early 2003, Adriana Lukas has advised companies in Europe and the US on how to make sense of the web and 'social media' hype and if and how to use blogs, feeds, wikis and tags, social networks in their communications and beyond. She is also working on the Project VRM and runs the Mine! project, desiging a tool that helps individuals manage their personal data online. She is an editor of Samizdata.

Fed up with people claiming privacy is dead? Privacy is to identity what freedom is to morality - one can't exist without the other. Adriana Lukas describes how recent developments on the Internet have destroyed our ability to maintain private information and how we can get it back.

What would Rawlsian budget cuts look like? Kind of like what we have now.

2010-06-02T05:36:00.000+01:00

A few days before David Laws’ exposure and resignation over his housing expenses, classical small-government liberalism seemed to be enjoying a surprising ascendancy, as a shared doctrine among the ‘dries’ of the Conservative Party and the Orange Bookers within the Liberal Democrats. Combined with the rolling back of ID cards and the promise of a Freedom (Great Repeal) Bill, democratic politics in the UK seems (or at least seemed) suddenly to be pointing in a libertarian direction. Who could have imagined that the LibDems could supply some much needed economic sanity during the current crisis?

Stuart White challenges this Orange Book ideology over at Next Left. Due to their background in economic theory and competence, Stuart diagnoses a paucity of contemporary political philosophy. Their economic liberalism seems to demand that more money, where possible, should be left in people’s pockets; that people have a presumptive (if not absolute) entitlement to their incomes. In other words, the proper baseline from which to consider the distribution of wealth is the one produced by voluntary market interactions.

As a liberal egalitarian, Stuart rejects this baseline and is disappointed that a liberal-left consensus based on the political philosophies of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin hasn’t yet developed between Labour and LibDem activists. This sort of liberalism treats equality of wealth as the correct baseline to have between fellow citizens. It is deviations from this distribution that need to be justified on policy terms; not people’s earned incomes, which are considered to be too closely tied to the overall system of social co-operation as to be considered deserved by individuals. For example, Rawls, according to his difference principle, considers inequalities to be justified only when they are part of an economic scheme that improves the position of the least well off in society.

I have three points about why this Rawlsian liberal egalitarian approach might prove difficult to get off the ground in current circumstances and significantly into the future.

1. It is not clear how different a Rawlsian policy would be from what LibCon coalition is doing right now. During fat years, it is easy to talk about more egalitarian distributions of goods. We are going through lean times right now, and it is the distribution of pain (through budget cuts), which are on the agenda. One can apply a sort of Rawlsian policy to this situation, and concentrate cuts on services to the better well off.

In fact, this seems to be more or less what the coalition Government is trying to achieve. Healthcare, primary and secondary education all seem to be fairly well insulated from cuts for now. But in a year or so, subsidies for University student fees are likely to be significantly reduced. As well, they should. Government funding of University places is one of the most obvious transfers of wealth from the less well off to the (children of the) relatively wealthy. Stuart criticises the abandonment of Child Trust Funds. However, while one can see the value of such a policy in Rawlsian terms, the current scheme does not seem especially well targeted at the least well-off nor significant enough to make a large difference to social outcomes. In a context of a fiscal crisis, it doesn’t seem unreasonable (even from a Rawlsian perspective) to cut it, assuming one accepts that the cuts have to come fairly thick and fast sooner or later. Put simply, the justification to save a non-essential service right now (like a boon to 18 year olds) needs to be extraordinarily high in present circumstances.

2. Related to this is the problem of a bloated public sector. Say what you like about Child Trust Funds, at least their eventual recipients don’t vote yet, and the entitlements aren’t bound up in complex employment contracts that are costly to terminate. That probably made them a viable target for the initial cut more than anything else. Around half of the UK’s GDP is currently spent by the state, and beyond a certain point, it is not enough simply to demand more resources for the state to distribute. You actually need to work out more effective ways of delivering these resources to the least well off in society. As even the strongly left Chris Dillow is apt to repeat, a large state does not equal a larger share of resources going to the poor. In fact, a large state could just as easily be an additional source of rent extracted from the poor.

Right now, respecting the essential services that are provided through state funding, there are an awful of rent-seekers in the public sector. And they don’t come from the least well off elements of society either. This puts labour and social democratic wing of the LibDems on a sticky wicket, who count public sector workers amongst their client voters. Truly pursuing the needs of the least well off would involve the prudent pruning of public sector jobs and perks. As Hayek was always keen to point out, guaranteed pay and conditions for public workers may look affordable when an economy is growing but suddenly become crippling during a down turn. Essentially, a budget that increases and diminishes in line with the successes and downturns of the productive economy has to contend with a series of absolute and unchanging demands from a protected public sector. In this context, these job protections and perks harm all those who labour without them.

Of course, it is true that there are plenty of privately funded actors who also engage in very successful rent-seeking (most of the activity in the City of London is probably an example of that). A Rawlsian approach to political economy would demand tackling all areas where the better off and better connected are capable of extracting more wealth than is absolutely necessary in order to provide for the goods and services they are meant to provide to society. However, I am far from convinced that the Liberal left possess either the incentives to tackle the cosseted rent seekers in the public sector, nor the competence to root out socially destructive practices from the banks and other independent bastions of middle class wealth augmentation. Which is not to say that the LibCon coalition is necessarily going to fare much better, but at least the direction of travel seems to be towards some sort of sanity and reckoning with economic reality.

3. A more general and perhaps more fundamental point of cleavage on the Left is how to deal with immigration and globalisation. What do we owe citizens of other countries that travel or trade with the UK? Rawlsian liberalism has two equally troublesome approaches. The first is essentially to deny the existence of immigration! Individuals all live and die in one nation-state with no possibility of exit. As Will Wilkinson has argued, what use is a political theory that won’t tell you what duties you owe the people who built your house?

The new flavour is cosmopolitan. Duties of social justice flow freely from one state to another and, essentially, we are all citizens of the world. But what would this mean in terms of practical policy? Should immigration be restricted and on what grounds could it? Do new arrivals in the UK instantly gain access to public services, like free health, housing and social insurance, or do they have to work harder to show their commitment to British institutions? In a cosmopolitan theory of social justice, such requirements would easily appear arbitrary.

This pokes at a weak spot on the left. Regardless of the economic optimality of immigration (more skills, greater division of labour, vastly more opportunities to produce wealth for new arrivals) the existing working class in the UK discerns (correctly, in some cases) that immigration increases competition for jobs in some sectors, driving down some native incomes. From a cosmopolitan Rawlsian perspective, these complaints don’t really amount to all that much. The lowest earners in the UK are phenomenally well-off by world standards, and it is mostly by world standards that a cosmopolitan egalitarian theory would find and support the least well-off. Hence, another traditional supporter of the left, the existing working classes, risks being sidelined by the rigorous demands of a non-arbitrarily interpreted liberal egalitarian moral theory.

For these reasons, liberal egalitarianism as a fighting creed on the left might prove to be more divisive than unifying. It does not look all that different in practice to what the LibCons will implement anyway (in the short term). It brings into sharp relief the separate interests of the existing working classes in the UK, the global working classes, and the more protected and wealthy public sector workers. Moreover, the basic unit of political community in Rawls’ original theory, the nation state, seems terribly dated in today’s more connected world where primary identities are as likely to be trans-national or sub-national.

In this context, a more minimalist neo-liberal attitude to the state seems more tenable. It is a provider of public goods and services that encourage trade and co-operation between individuals who might otherwise have remarkably different concerns, pursuits, origins and identities. The state, on this account, is not a locus of moral obligations, a political community, or demands of social justice. It is a service provider. And service providers don’t last long by re-distributing wealth from valued customers to others. Instead, they can demand some taxes in return for effective service provision.

Is there anything for libertarians to do?

On a closing tactical note, the LibCon coalition (should it survive any length of time) is likely to sap the strength of the social democratic wing of the Liberal Democrats significantly. Social democrats will be uncomfortable at how easily the Orange Book liberals are able to co-operate with the Conservatives. For libertarians, by contrast, this coalition might turn out to be the best form of Government one could hope for in democratic politics. It is a coalition of two parties where their only common ground are their truly liberal elements. This means that now might be the time for libertarians to join Jock Coats amongst the Liberal Democrats, in order to strengthen their Orange flank. With luck, they could provide an enduring check on the social conservatism and, doubtless, soon to re-emerge cronyism of the Tories.

Mark Pennington - "Democracy and the Deliberative Conceit"

2010-05-25T14:24:00.007+01:00

Mark Pennington is Reader in Public Policy and Political Economy at Queen Mary, University of London. He has written *Rescuing Social Capital from Social Democracy* (with John Meadowcroft) and *Planning and the Political Market: Public Choice and the Politics of Government Failure.* His most recent work, *Towards the Minimal State,* will be published soon.

Dr Pennington discusses the theories of deliberative democracy, including the work of Jurgen Habermas. He argues from a Hayekian perspective that the case against the social democratic state rests with the superior capacity of markets to extend communicative rationality beyond the realm of verbal discourse. Deliberative democrats privilege discourse above other more successful forms of communication and expression instantiated in free market institutions.

Jan Lester - "A Pre-Propertarian Theory of Libertarian Liberty"

2010-05-20T01:42:00.003+01:00

Dr Jan Lester is the author of *Escape from Leviathan:* *Liberty**, Welfare and Anarchy Reconciled* (2000) and *The Dictionary of Anti-Politics* (forthcoming). He has also written two philosophical dramatic dialogues: *The Naked Politician* and *The Philosophical Genie* (available on request; performances encouraged).

The liberty that libertarians promote is not inherently about self-ownership and private property. A pre-propertarian theory of libertarian liberty is possible. And from this theory, self-ownership and private property are derivable as contingently normal but not inevitable. This pre-propertarian theory of liberty explains how libertarians are not “just propertarians without a real interest in liberty”. It also enables solutions to various traditional paradoxes and novel problem cases that arise with private-property libertarianism.

Scott Sumner and Kevin Dowd: "What caused the financial crisis?"

2010-05-18T01:13:00.003+01:00

Scott Sumner is Professor of Economics at Bentley University. His research interests include the role of the gold standard in the Great Depression, liquidity traps, the use of market expectations in guiding monetary policy, and the history of macroeconomics. He blogs at the Money Illusion. Kevin Dowd is Emeritus Professor of Finance at Nottingham University and a Senior Fellow at the Cobden Center. His research interests are in risk management, free banking and financial regulation, macro and monetary economics, and political economy.

They discuss the causes of the recent financial crisis, and whether it was a failure of short-term monetary policy or an exposure of more fundamental flaws in modern economic theory. Martin Cox chairs the discussion.

Deirdre McCloskey - "Liberty and Dignity"

2010-05-17T01:17:00.003+01:00

Deirdre N. McCloskey is Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was Visiting Tinbergen Professor (2002-2006) of Philosophy, Economics, and Art and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Trained at Harvard as an economist, she has written fourteen books and edited seven more, and has published some three hundred and sixty articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, and law. In this talk, she discusses the ethical foundations of the modern world and how free trade and bourgeois values help to generate the conditions in which human dignity may flourish.

Deirdre McCloskey - "It's Good to be a Don if You're Going to Be a Deirdre: Gender Crossing in Academia"

2010-05-15T01:24:00.002+01:00

Deirdre N. McCloskey is Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was Visiting Tinbergen Professor (2002-2006) of Philosophy, Economics, and Art and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Trained at Harvard as an economist, she has written fourteen books and edited seven more , and has published some three hundred and sixty articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, and law.

In this talk, Prof. McCloskey discusses her experience of crossing gender during her academic career and the unique challenges she has faced while doing so.

Scott Sumner - "It's Complicated: The Great Depression in the US"

2010-05-13T21:36:00.006+01:00

Scott Sumner received a BA in economics from the University of Wisconsin and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. Since 1982 he has taught economics at Bentley University, 8 miles west of Boston. His research interests include the role of the gold standard in the Great Depression, liquidity traps, the use of market expectations in guiding monetary policy, and the history of macroeconomics. He blogs at the Money Illusion.

In his talk, Sumner argues that the Great Depression in America had two main causes. The initial contraction was triggered by a big drop in aggregate demand caused by worldwide gold hoarding (especially in America and France). Then the recovery was slowed by a large drop in aggregate supply resulting from President Roosevelt's high wage policy. He also discusses the Depression in other countries, and some modern parallels.

For the video of our next event, a discussion on the causes on the causes of the current financial crisis, featuring Scott Sumner and Kevin Dowd, click here.

For the rest of our videos, click here.

Language of Liberty

2010-05-10T03:26:00.004+01:00

For three years now, I (Nick Cowen) have been attending an English camp each summer run by the Language of Liberty Institute. I highly recommend this experience to all libertarian students and graduates with an interest in teaching. It involves meeting lots of young people in Eastern Europe (and now parts of East Asia and Africa), encouraging them to practise their conversational English and being willing to impart some aspect of the philosophy, social theory or economics underlying free societies. Besides being great practice for a variety of skills, it is a great way to make new friends and learn things for yourself. Teaching places are unfunded (although there might well be appropriate funding opportunities available within the network of libertarian societies) but the accomodation and expenses are relatively cheap. Check out their website for more details. This is their latest promotional video.

Dennis C. Mueller - "Religion and Liberalism"

2010-05-08T23:39:00.002+01:00

Dennis C. Mueller is Professor of Economics at the University of Vienna. He previously taught for many years at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Public Choice, Profits in the Long Run, Constitutional Democracy, and others. He is a past president of the Public Choice society, the Southern Economic Association, and the Industrial Organization Society. Here he discusses the relationship between individual liberties and constitutional rights, and how religions can pose threats to both individual rights and liberties.

Don't Vote

2010-05-06T01:27:00.007+01:00

In response to our more collectivist friends over at Liberal Conspiracy, we present our general election talk by Christian Michel - "Why I am not a democrat (I prefer freedom)." President of the Libertarian International, he makes the case for alternative forms of social change and for refusing to participate in the exploitation inherent in state power.

Here is the discussion that followed:

Stephen Davies - Time to Revive ‘Individualism’?

2010-03-12T14:51:00.004Z

Stephen Davies is a Program Officer at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. Prior to joining IHS, he was Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Economic History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Dr. Davies received his PhD in history from St. Andrews University in Scotland and recently completed a book on modernity and the history of the world since 1250.

In recent years there has been a clear revival of a political philosophy or coherent set of beliefs, which currently tends to go by the name of ‘libertarianism’ or (among intellectuals) ‘classical liberalism’. This tends to be identified with a particular economic perspective, centred on free markets, but in fact that is only one part of it and in many ways a secondary one. At the moment there are two related problems or obstacles. One is that these ideas tend to be associated with conservatism and a set of other ideas, which in fact are often opposed to them. The other apparently trivial but in fact significant is that of the name given to them. The argument is that it is time to revive the label that they had in the past, that of ‘Individualism’. The history of this term and movement is set out and the benefits of reviving it. The application of the ideas to the present are also set out.

In the video below, Stephen Davies answers questions on his thesis that classical liberals should call themselves (again) individualists.

'Taxation is theft; donations are donations'

2010-03-10T02:04:00.003Z

This was the startling note that Terence Kealey ended with on Newsnight this week, a rare proclaimation on the BBC's flagship news programme, during a discussion of state funding of universities.

Terence Kealey spoke to the society on the myth of science as a public good last year.

Hicham Yezza - 'Arbitrary Detention in the United Kingdom'

2010-03-08T03:00:00.004Z

The Speak Easy is a regular forum organised by the Oxford University Liberal Democrats, Compass Oxford and the Oxford Libertarian Society, with discussion topics of interest to liberals of all kinds.

Hicham Yezza is a writer and activist. He has edited Ceasefire magazine since its founding in 2003 and is also a founding member of the Nottingham Peace Movement. In this talk, he discusses his experience starting in 2008 of several long periods of arbitrary detention under the Government's anti-terrorist and immigration powers, as well as the Home Office's attempt to deport him.

John Meadowcroft - 'How Markets Solve Social Problems'

2010-02-27T13:02:00.004Z

John Meadowcroft is Lecturer in Public Policy at King’s College London. He is the author of The Ethics of the Market (Palgrave, 2005), co-author with Mark Pennington of Rescuing Social Capital from Social Democracy (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2007), and editor of Prohibitions (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2008). He is also Series Editor of the twenty volume Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series published by Continuum from 2009 to 2011, to which he is contributing the volume of James M. Buchanan.

In this talk he argues that markets can, do and should solve social problems, but to allow them to do so requires the rejection of the idea that elite political actors should determine what constitutes a social problem and then select the correct solution. It will be argued that a market approach offers the prospect of genuine popular empowerment that political processes are unable to deliver.

Recorded at Christ Church, University of Oxford, 25th February 2010

Jock Coats - An Introduction to Mutualism

2010-02-25T00:27:00.002Z

Mutualism is a left branch of the libertarian family tree that particularly draws on the tradition of the American Individualist Anarchists. As its best known contemporary exponent, Kevin Carson, describes, its philosophy is to "build the structure of the new society within the shell of the old" before we try to break the shell. Jock Coats, an Oxford based Mutualist, looks at some of the possibilities and practicalities of what he prefers to call "viral anarchism".

Chandran Kukathas - 'The Labour Theory of Justice: A Critique of G.A.Cohen'

2010-02-15T16:13:00.004Z

Chandran Kukathas holds the Chair in Political Theory in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. He previously taught at the University of Utah and at the Australian Defence Force Academy. He is the author of Hayek and Modern Liberalism (1989), Rawls: A Theory of Justice and Its Critics (with Philip Pettit 1990) and The Liberal Archipelago (2003).

G.A.Cohen has defended a conception of justice as equality, according to which departures from equality are warranted only when people are rewarded for making greater effort or undertaking more burdensome work. This talk presents a critical analysis of this view of justice, and of the presuppositions that underpin it. The Q&A following the talk is below.

Jamie Whyte - 'The Financial Crisis: too much freedom or too much regulation?'

2010-02-13T02:40:00.001Z

Jamie Whyte is a former lecturer of Philosophy at Cambridge University and winner of Analysis journal’s prestigious ‘best article by a philosopher under 30’ award. He has written extensively for The Times newspaper and had several books published including ‘Crimes Against Logic’, ‘Bad Thoughts’ and ‘A Load of Blair’. He is famous for dissecting confused logic and public political nonsense.

In this talk, he discusses whether the financial crisis was the result of too much freedom in banking or too much regulation. Jamie also scrutinizes the new regulatory proposals and examines their likely effects.

Yaron Brook - 'The Morality of Investing and Financial Markets'

2010-02-10T00:20:00.004Z

Yaron Brook is the president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, which promotes the novels of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism. He served in the Israeli Army military intelligence, is a former professor with a PHD in Finance and cofounded and is managing director and chairman of BH Equity research, a financial advisory firm. He frequently features as a radio and TV having appeared on Fox Business News, Fox News(*Glenn Beck*,*The O'Reilly Factor, Your World with Neil Cavuto, At Large with Geraldo Rivera*), CNN (*Talkback Live*), CNBC (*CNBC Reports, Closing Bell*and*On the Money*), and C-SPAN.

Dr Yaron Brook explains how and why it is moral and appropriate to be a professional investor or in the financial markets, contrary to popular opinion which holds that investors are just feeding off of those “real capitalists” who make products. He argues that, in fact, professional investing, can be a profoundly moral profession.

Co-host: Capitox capitox.com/

The two videos beneath are the Q&A session which followed his talk.

Brian Micklethwait, Tony Brown, Chris Mounsey - 'What YOU can do for liberty'

2010-02-06T20:34:00.005Z

Chris Mounsey is leader of the Libertarian Party UK and blogs at the Devils Kitchen, which was voted the second most popular libertarian blog by readers of Total Politics magazine. Brian Micklethwait was a pamphleteer for the Libertarian Alliance and now blogs at Samizdata. Tony Brown is the editor of Libertarian Press. Here they discuss how to spread libertarian ideas in the 21st century.

The Speak Easy and contemporary liberalism

2010-02-02T02:20:00.003Z

The Speak Easy, a series of discussion events with which we are collaborating with the Oxford University Liberal Democrats and Compass Oxford (a mostly Labour party group) has attracted the attention of NextLeft. Stuart White hopes that these sort of combinations could represent a revival of liberalism as a political force, so long fractured by a left-right divide that tends to put civil liberties activists in different political parties and unable to combine to protect individual rights.

These sessions look promising and some interesting points have already emerged. The last session began with a discussion of the recent ban on extreme pornography, but moved onto the related topic of intellectual property rights and how to deal with filesharing. On this point, libertarians (usually seen as 'pro-business') and liberal democrats (often sceptical of giving business the full value of their product) seemed to switch sides! Many libertarians, especially those following Hayek's scepticism of using property rights in any other way than to co-ordinate scarce resources, reject intellectual property law in principle. Once a piece of music, or text, or film has been created and released into the wild, no intervention is justified in order to maintain the rights of a copyright owner.

The LibDems, by contrast, while eager to reform the existing system of intellectual property, consider products like music to be public goods (non-rivalrous and non-excludable, for which, of course, they are right) and in need of special protection. Otherwise there would be a lack of quality music produced. This sounded a bit implausible to my ears (can you imagine a world where music can be played, copied, and transfered freely with no government intervention that wasn't positively filled with music?). But the additional point was that musicians deserve to have some ownership over their products and that they would be deprived of existing income streams if the whole edifice of intellectual property were torn down. For libertarians, however, what one deserves has comparatively little to do with income. The important thing is that no one is forcing you to create music, not that you can derive some specific amount of value from the creation if it proves to be popular. If some people are tempted not to create music in the absence of intellectual property, then that might be an indicator that it is a government distortion in the market right now which is directing too much effort towards music creation.

This illustrates that there are no simple stereotypes of libertarian or liberal policies. Indeed there is probably more disagreement in some areas within these doctrines than between them. On the other hand, I think there is something perhaps more distinctive about some of the methodology underlying the policy arguments. Liberals tend to place extra emphasis on the rational justification for particular policies, holding them up against substantive values of fairness, liberty and equality. They also have a confidence that state action can play a major role in respecting these fundamental human interests. Libertarians, by contrast, in sharing one or two ideas with conservatives, tend to emphasise the likely unintended consequences of explicit rational reform by planners, favouring instead a basic set of rules that allow individuals and communities to pursue their own interests without bumping into each other and suffering too many disputes.

So for example, although Karl Popper was, in practice, a liberal social democrat, he makes a frequent appearance in libertarian discussions because of his emphasis on epistemic fallibilism as the grounds for an open society. He rejected broad social reforms in favour of piecemeal experimentation, albeit via democratic means.

Everyone but the anarchist lies somewhere on a spectrum, respecting a role for explicit laws of a political regime in some ways, while rejecting them in others. For all liberals, the goal is to find a way of respecting the individual life of every human being.

Finally, there is the difference of historical perspective. Liberals see government policy progressing slowly to make the social world safe for individuals. They still see many left at the hands of forces (market or otherwise) beyond their control, preventing them from planning their own lives peacably. Libertarians, by contrast, will tend to look at all the interventions enacted by the state, now in existence for so long that laissez-faire is almost unimagineable in entire spheres of life, and see them as responsible for many of the continuing problems that plague individuals; problems that if left alone would have been resolved voluntarily.

The most recent divergence on the historical view is, of course, the financial crisis. Liberals seem to see the crisis as an indictment of a 'free market' system, pointing to the de-regulations that happened a few years before the meltdown. By contrast, libertarians will tend to point to the underlying structure of our economic system, the fact that we have a fiat currency system with national interest rates decided by central banks, and the whole thing resting on the actions of a small group of people running the Federal Reserve in the US. As this tremendous video that has been doing the rounds on the econ blogs this last week suggests, we're likely to be going back and forth on these points for a while yet:

Islamic radicals should be free to express their views

2010-01-26T01:11:00.004Z

In response to news that Oxford University has called in the police to tackle Islamic extremism on campus, Nick Cowen, President of the Oxford Libertarian Society, commented:

“If students were advocating murder on the streets, then obviously the University would be right to intervene.

“But there are many fewer Islamists now than there were hardcore Marxists advocating the overthrow of the state back in the day. It’s a fuss over nothing.

“What they’re effectively saying is that it’s alright to whinge about democracy if you’re white, but as soon as the criticism comes from a theocratic angle, it is seen as threatening. We need more free speech not less to promote the liberal interpretation of Islam.”

Full story here.

Helen Evans & Shane Frith - 'Alternatives to Government-Run Healthcare'

2010-01-23T14:53:00.005Z

The ubiquitous assumption in British political discourse is that state control of healthcare is a necessary policy to ensure universal access to high quality care, free from profit-motivated decision making. Our speakers challenge this assumption, arguing that evidence from voluntary schemes around the world present a compelling case for rejecting the deference to state-run systems of healthcare. Arguing from her experience as a senior nurse in the NHS, Helen Evans tackles the reform of healthcare provision, criticising the rationing and bureacracy of NICE, and the special interests served by the state's position as a monopolist in healthcare. Shane Frith discusses alternatives means of funding healthcare, in particular examining the possibilities of health savings accounts and private medical insurance as means of lowering costs, reducing moral hazard (the tendency to overconsume healthcare because it's 'free' to the end user) and encouraging medical innovation. The second video is the Q&A session following the talks.

Dr. Helen Evans is the Founder and Director of Nurses for Reform, a UK think tank that campaigns for more consumer-led and sustainable healthcare systems in Britain and throughout around the world. A senior nurse with more than twenty years experience in the NHS, her career has seen her work in some of Britain's leading hospitals, including the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust, the Royal London Hospital NHS Trust and St. Bartholomew's Hospital. She holds a degree in Health Management, and was awarded a Ph.D in Health Economics from Brunel University in 2006. She is a Health Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, and has recently published Sixty Years On: Who Cares for the NHS? via the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Shane Frith is the Director of Progressive Vision, a London-based think tank that promotes classical liberalism and free markets, and founder of Doctor's Alliance, a pan-European network of medical professionals seeking better ways to deliver healthcare. Formerly Chairman of the International Young Democratic Union, he is active in centre-right politics in the UK and his native New Zealand, and has worked at Reform, the Centre for Policy Studies and Open Europe in recent years.

Recorded at Christ Church, University of Oxford on 3rd November 2009

Globalisation and equality

2010-01-23T01:49:00.004Z

Via Tom Palmer and Marginal Revolution, we learn that global poverty is falling, is doing so fast, and much more so than previously expected. Equality is increasing as a consequence. This is very cheering news, and it means far more for so many people in the world than all the news stories about bad laws, bigger government, and even attacks on civil liberties. The story probably has countless more implications for human prosperity than climate change.

Yet while this can be a moment of celebration for libertarians, who can appreciate that slowly but surely more people are having the opportunity to pursue their own happiness, it receives a rather muted response on both the left and right. Of course, this is partly because good news doesn't sell like disasters, but there are deeper reasons why this doesn't get the billing it should. The left still rely on a narrative, whether implicit or explicit, that all the wealth that the West currently enjoys is the result of exploitation elsewhere in the world, via the system of global capitalism. Libertarians, by contrast, can appreciate that, despite the frequent predations within currently existing capitalism, the results of genuinely free trade are there to see and represent a positive addition to wealth that benefits everyone.

The right, in their turn, frequently deploy a frightening narrative in which impoverished masses are about to swamp the West. But what if those masses turn out not to be so poor, and to be more eager to sell us insurance or a laptop than destroy our way of life? Why then there would be no need to introduce bans on burkas after all, or clamp down on immigration. Both the left and the right need the world to seem like a much scarier place than it necessarily is. This is not to say that we shouldn't be critical of currently existing global capitalism, or that we shouldn't be alive to the risks out there in the world. But amongst the gloom of the recession, we should appreciate that things, overall, are looking much much better for hundreds of millions of people.

Tom Palmer's classic talk on poverty from 2008 is well worth reviewing on this topic.

UPDATE: Having claimed above that neither the left nor the right are all that interested in the good news about globalisation, I am now forced to retract such a claim at least in the case of the liberal-left blog Liberal Conspiracy, who have kindly put up a version of this post.

Passenger demand, not state panic, should decide air security

2010-01-18T19:48:00.002Z

(The following appeared in Oxford Student, 0th Week, HT10 - January 2010)

How do you turn a failed bomb plot into a successful act of terrorism? Just add government overreaction, and some clever marketing from security companies.

The recent attempt to blow up a plane by a UCL engineering graduate was pretty pathetic when measured up againstprevious attacks. Before they had the advantages of intricate planning and simultaneous execution. But just like the BBC, Al Qaeda's Xmas schedule becomes less exciting with each passing year, and considering the explosives were hidden in Mr Abdulmutalla's underpants, the phrase 'damp squib' seems more pertinent than ever. Yet there is no act of terrorism so sloppily planned and half-arsed in execution that it won't be used to introduce crazier controls on the public.

The addition of full-body scanners to the airport panopticon is just the latest symptom of the British Government's psychosexual obsession with getting under the skin of its citizens. The scanners may or may not turn out to be bad for travellers' health, but they don't do much for our dignity. Indeed, no one has yet shown how these £100,000 systems would have prevented this latest attempt, but rather less well-funded Somali authorities recently had no trouble spotting a
similarly equipped would-be terrorist.

The solution is to remove airport security from the Government's portfolio. Ensure airlines are liable should their planes fall out of the sky and you will find them perfectly capable of handling the issue themselves. Airlines could compete, offering different policies depending on whether customers valued a faster check-in or tighter security. Some would use armed marshals like some Israeli flights already do, others could rely on having more advanced bookings and
data checking.

But the pomp of security theatre like full body scanners, popular with Governments rather than customers, would be off the agenda.

Nick Cowen is President of the Oxford Libertarian Society

Eric Mack - 'Q&A on Natural Rights and Property'

2010-01-02T22:23:00.003Z

Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University, Eric Mack is a leading classical liberal political philosopher, with special interests in the foundations of moral rights and property rights. This is the second half of his session with the Oxford Libertarian Society, where he defends his views from challenges ranging from issues of environmentalism, children's rights, the concept of freedom and intuitionism.

Recorded at Christ Church, University of Oxford, on 18th November 2009

Christie Davies -'The Right and Duty to Tell Politically Incorrect Jokes'

2009-12-15T19:01:00.005Z

Author of Jokes and their Relation to Society, The Mirth of Nations and The Right to Joke, Christie Davies is Professor Emeritus of Sociology. His research concentrates on the comparative and historical study of humour and morality, in which latter field he has published The Strange Death Of Moral Britain. He argues here that we have not only the right to tell politically incorrect jokes that may offend all manner of sensibilities, but often a duty to do so as well.

Recorded at Christ Church, University of Oxford, on 21st October 2009

Eric Mack - 'A Defence of Natural Rights'

2009-12-08T20:09:00.005Z

Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University, Eric Mack is a leading classical liberal political philosopher, with special interests in the foundations of moral rights and property rights. He frequently publishes on these and other topics, and has edited for Liberty Fund two libertarian classics - Auberon Herbert's The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays, and Herbert Spencer's The Man Versus the State. He has recently completed a new biography and critical exposition of the work of John Locke and is widely regarded as an authority on natural rights. Here he speaks about the moral foundations of natural rights, drawing on the work of Locke amongst others, and defends the right to acquire and retain property without interference.

The Q&A, which follows this discussion and concentrates more on property rights specifically, will be uploaded in the near future.

Petition against Green Protectionism

2009-12-07T19:12:00.006Z

Question: What do privileged aristocrats, economic nationalists, agricultural special interests and environmentalist doomsayers all have in common?

Answer: they all reject international trade and voluntary exchange as the primary means of tackling the major problems facing humanity, despite the extraordinary miracles that have resulted from the freeing of trade barriers.

As the most recent of these - the push for environmentally-justified reductions on imports, the efforts to 'keep trade local', and consume only locally-grown produce - rears its ugly head, the Freedom to Trade campaign, which assembled a coalition of economists to oppose the spectre of protectionism in response to the financial crisis, is again coordinating a petition to reject the misanthropic case against free trade:

"We call upon the World’s leaders to resist calls for green protectionism. Trade enables specialisation, which results in the development of new technologies and leads to the creation of wealth. In the past two decades, trade has enabled over a billion people to escape poverty. Trade is the most powerful weapon in humanity’s armoury to fight poverty and environmental ills, including climate change. Trade restrictions are not desirable, nor are they an effective means of addressing climate change."

Click here to sign.

Kenneth Minogue -'How Political Idealism Threatens Our Civilization'

2009-12-06T08:35:00.003Z

Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the London School of Economics, Kenneth Minogue is a well known conservative political thinker. An avowed opponent of rationalism in politics, his 1985 book Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology dissects and refutes the dominant ideological strains of the first part of the 20th century - fascism and communism - whilst his earlier work The Liberal Mind discusses the characteristics and deficiencies of liberalism, in both its modern and classical variants. He is presently a director of the Centre for Policy Studies and a trustee of Civitas, and a former Chairman of the Bruges Group. Here he discusses the threat posed by political idealism to civilization as a spontaneously emergent phenomenon.

Nigel Farage MEP -'Too Much Government: Westminster and Brussels'

2009-11-30T16:39:00.002Z

Nigel Farage MEP -'Too Much Government: Westminster and Brussels' from oxford libertarian on Vimeo.

Leader of the UK Independence Party until 2009, Nigel Farage is a Member of the European Parliament for South East England and one of Britain's best known Eurosceptics. First elected to the EU Parliament in 1999, then re-elected in 2004 and 2009, where UKIP beat Labour and the Liberal Democrats into second place, he is a vocal advocate of British withdrawal from the European Union and limited government within the UK. He announced in September his intention to fight for a seat in the UK parliament at the next general election over the issue of MP expenses, challenging the newly-elected Conservative speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, in his Buckinghamshire seat. Here he speaks about the growth of the state in recent years and the most effective means of rolling back government intervention at a European and national level.

A Modest Case for Sacking the State

2009-10-25T22:55:00.008Z

The society welcomed back Tom G Palmer, Vice President of the Cato Institute, last week, to speak on the case for 'sacking the state' in place of voluntary, spontaneous systems of law. The talk traced the emergence of the state, from nomadic bands, through medieval duchies and up to the present day, examining its common features and popular justifications.

The Q & A session afterwards was highly eclectic, including discussion of immigration and the case for abolishing border controls, Islam & freedom, the war on drugs, private law enforcement, and free trade.

The video of Dr Palmer's previous lecture to the society (entitled 'Liberty as the Remedy to Poverty: Socialism as a Cause'), can be found here. He has also recently published an edited collection of his essays, entitled Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History and Practice, which which defends libertarianism from its critics, and ably sets out, with one eye on history, the case for individual freedom and property rights.

Postscript (28/10/09): Tom emailed shortly afterwards to correct an error with statistics that he mentioned concerning the comparative income of the poorest in free and unfree economies. According to the latest edition of the Fraser Institute's annual Economic Freedom of the World report, the average income of the lowest decile of the population in the most free economies is $9,105, in contrast to $896 in the least free.

The Birth of the Database State: Planned Parenthood or Accident?

2009-10-25T22:32:00.006Z

Guy Herbert, General Secretary of NO2ID, was the society's first guest speaker this term. He discussed the ideology behind the database state, explaining it as the product of two distinct trends: a maternal, 'enabling' view of the state, which wants to empower people, and a paternal, authoritarian tool of social control. He presented a persuasive case that their convergence in recent years on surveillance and monitoring as a means of advancing both causes is a worrying trend that should be resisted by civil libertarians.

" Private property is a social construct"

2009-08-24T16:17:00.003+01:00

I was arguing with someone recently about the standard kind of topics that libertarians argue with people about; the role of the state, the justice of taxation, stuff like that. Anyway, one of the counter-arguments the made was one which seems to crop up everywhere and which is the title of this post: "Private property is a social construct" (call this claim 'P').

Now, there are quite a few different senses in which P can be taken. One, which even libertarians can agree with, is the descriptive (i.e. non-normative) claim that the institution of private property relies essentially for its existence on a certain level of popular support, and that, if 'society' (i.e. a critical mass of people) did not believe in its legitimacy, private property rights would no longer be enforced. And without quibbling over details, this claim seems pretty plausibly true. But, because it is not a normative claim, this interpretation of P does not get opponents of stringent private property rights where they need to go. One can certainly believe, as I do, that property rights are both dependent on a certain level of goodwill among the population and yet that they are also morally justified.

But of course, when people use P in arguing against private property, they don't mean it in the sense above. Rather, their intended interpretation is indeed a normative one, and goes something like this: "The institution of private property is a wholly artificial one, the construction of society, and it therefore reflects no pre-political or pre-social moral truths. In evaluating private property from an ethical point of view, the sole relevant considerations to take into account are the prevailing social attitudes; and if (as is the case) the prevailing social attitudes regard government taxation of earnings as justified, well, then there are no legitimate grounds for complaint about taxation of earnings." I hope any readers will agree that this is a sentiment which they have actually encountered, and that I am not attacking a straw-man.

But this argument is a remarkably silly one, and, indeed, one that I don't even think most of the people who employ it really believe. Let's take a concrete example to see why: segregation in the Southern United States. In some periods, the owner of homes in certain areas were forbidden, by law, to let their houses to black people because of racist zoning policies. Now, suppose further, as I believe is a matter of historical fact (although I am not a historian and this is probably debatable), that such policies had widespread and popular support and reflected prevailing social attitudes. People who use P to argue against private property ought to be committed to endorsing zoning laws which enforced segregating housing; a conclusion I seriously doubt they would swallow.

The point is really that when opponent of property say "private property is a social construct," they do so in a very misleading way. They don't really mean that it is wrong or meaningless to attempt to evaluate different property regimes independently of their social context, because, on pain of accepting the legitimacy of segregated housing (something that, to their credit, opponents of property do not frequently do), they happily engage in such evaluations themselves. What they usually do mean is that they disagree with the particular pre-political standards of morality that proponents of private property endorse and would rather use their own; and this is a perfectly coherent position to take (although of course I disagree with it), just one that is not compatible with blunt assertions that private property is simply a social construct.

GA Cohen and libertarianism

2009-08-17T00:07:00.001+01:00

For those of you who don't follow political philosophy, you might not have known that G.A. Cohen, the former Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls, died last Wednesday. There are a whole bunch of tributes and obituaries (many of which are indexed here) floating around the web, but I wanted to write about something a little different, namely, what libertarians can take from his work.

This may initially sound a little strange given that Cohen was, early on at least, a Marxist. Whether or not that was true later on in his life, he remained a steadfast egalitarian to the end. It might be asked, what can libertarians possibly learn from a guy who disagreed with us about so much? The simple answer is, quite a lot: despite his egalitarianism, Cohen wrote the very fine book Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality. Although it is billed as an attack on libertarianism in general and Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia in particular, I highly recommend it to any libertarian who wants to (as we all should) seek out the strongest counter-arguments to their views.

Anyway, what is particularly interesting in SFE is that it contains Cohen's extended reaction to the principle of self-ownership, which says, in his own words that "each person enjoys, over himself and his powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that he has not contracted to supply." Most libertarians have heard of, and might even believe in, some principle along these lines - although Nozick only mentioned it once in ASU Cohen is quite right when he says that it plays an essential role in his thought, and Murray Rothbard certainly believed in something of the kind. Cohen's real interest in self-ownership, though, only came about when he realized that something like it is latent in the standard Marxist accounts of exploitation of the working classes: for A to exploit B, B must already be the rightful owner of what is transferred. And so if the capitalists exploit the workers, then it must be in part because the workers are the rightful owners of their own labour - something like self-ownership, in other words.

If justice is a matter of distributing goods according to the Marxist pattern 'from each according to ability, to each according to need,' then workers cannot be entitled to the full value of their own labour, since maintaining that pattern will require taking the product of some workers' labour and giving it to the need. Conversely, if people are entitled to the full value of their own labour, they are entitled to it regardless of whether or not the distribution of holdings in society adheres to the above pattern. But if workers are not entitled to the full product or value of their labour, the Marxist moral concerns about capitalist exploitation lose their force - after all, what are the capitalists doing wrong but unjustly taking the labour of the workers? So a serious Marxist must give up either '...to each according to need' or their critique of capitalism as exploitative, because the two are mutually incompatible. Cohen chooses the pattern, but he takes the problem with utmost seriousness - to the extent that he even thinks Marxists should jettison their concern with exploitation altogether (a cynical reader like me might say that this is because he realizes that distribution according to need will be necessarily exploitative; exploitative, that is, of those who produce what is needed and have it taken from them.) This is, needless to say, great fun to know when arguing with any Marxist friends you may have, because it really puts them in a pickle if they haven't thought deeply about it.

So self-ownership seems to preclude any kind of equality: if people, as a matter of moral right, own themselves and their labour, then it is very hard to see how anyone can legitimately enforce material equality. I say 'very hard' rather than 'impossible' because Cohen has several arguments in his book in which he attempts to show that self-ownership is compatible with material equality, mainly by trying to sever the connection between property in one's person and property in the external world (or something like that; I think the arguments are more designed to make trouble for libertarians than to argue for self-ownership together with equality). These arguments, in my opinion, fail. The whole debate gets very pernickety at this point, and I might do a post on it in the future if I have time, but if anyone has read Cohen and is interested in responses Tom Palmer has a good article here, and Eric Mack, who is an excellent philosopher and who, incidentally, will be giving a talk for us here in Oxford on November 18th, has a pair of devastating (to Cohen) and in-depth papers here and here.

This post is getting too long, so I'll stop now. Next time I want to say something about Cohen's argument in his Freedom and Money (have a read in the meantime) which has been very influential and which is, I think, an extraordinarily bad argument. Anyway, that will have to wait!

Total Politics #20 Libertarian Blog!

2009-08-16T21:54:00.002+01:00

Flatteringly (and surprisingly) enough, we have been voted by Total Politics readers as the 20th best libertarian blog in the country!

Here are the other top 20:

Thanks to everyone who voted for us, and I promise there will be some more posts up soon. I am currently writing one about what libertarians can learn from the recently deceased philosopher GA Cohen, but it's looking to be a long one and will most likely take a little while.

The Myth of Science as a Public Good

2009-05-23T16:52:00.002+01:00

The society yesterday hosted Terence Kealey, Vice Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, to discuss his fascinating and controversial arguments against government funding of science. Dr Kealey rejects the conventional economic analysis which declares science to be a public good, that is, one that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable, and therefore necessitating government subsidy. The orthodoxy amongst economists being that science is a public good means that the available research into correlations between science funding and economic growth is limited, but what exists plainly contradicts the theoretical justification for intervention. Front and centre of Kealey's case is a 2003 OECD report which finds "a marked positive effect of business-sector R&D, while the analysis could find no clear-cut relationship between public R&D activities and growth, at least in the short term." It can only be hoped that Kealey's argument is to government funding of science what Coase's was to government taxation of externalities - a thorough empirical refutation of dogmatic assumptions.

The talk and discussion afterwards was extremely stimulating and eclectic, including CERN, the Wright Brothers, public schools, 'Pure' science, the role of philanthropy, tuition fees, patents and pharmaceutical regulation:

Kealey's thesis is expanded on and defending most entertainingly in his recent book, 'Sex, Science & Profits,' wherein he develops an alternative economic explanation of scientific progress through a wide-reaching historical study of the interaction between the government, science and the market.

Defending Pay Inequality

2009-05-21T14:52:00.005+01:00

On Tuesday evening, the society hosted Professor Len Shackleton, Dean of the Business School at the University of East London. His topic was pay inequality, and he made the case against popular concerns regarding bankers' bonuses, the 'exploitation' of the poorest and the pay gap between men and women. The video is now available, and supplies an excellent antidote to the hysteria about city fat-cats and the worrying extension of state power at the heart of the new Equality bill:

Professor Shackleton's recent monograph on the causes of the pay gap, 'Should We Mind the Gap?' is now available online from the Institute of Economic Affairs, where he also contributes to the blog. We are extremely grateful for the complimentary copies of the book that the Institute provided for the event.

Happy Birthday, Hayek!

2009-05-08T22:53:00.003+01:00

As reported on the Volokh Conspiracy (where it was announced a little prematurely), today marks the 110th birthday of the seminal Austrian economist and - in his own words - political philosopher in the 'Old Whig' tradition. The photo to the right shows Hayek meeting the society's founders in the mid-1980s, shortly after they established the Hayek Society, which is now the Libertarian Society.

There's a fascinating article celebrating the anniversary by David Gordon at mises.org, in which he discusses Hayek's teaching style whilst a visiting professor at UCLA:

"Hayek delivered his lectures seated at a desk. He never used notes, but his lectures could easily be printed verbatim. When a student asked a question, Hayek would pause and then deliver an answer in language as equally exact as his lectures. He would sometimes twist his head in order to hear the question better. He said that he found it an interesting historical coincidence that he was deaf in the left ear, and Karl Marx had been deaf in the right ear."

Also, via Cafe Hayek, see this excellent interview from 1985. Well into his 80s, Hayek still comes across as a careful and lucid expositor of the ideas of freedom and free markets:

Both barrels

2009-03-24T21:14:00.004Z

Via the Spectator's Coffee House blog, Dan Hannan MEP delivers an excellent rebuttal to the government's exculpatory propaganda barrage concerning its handling of the financial downturn:

The absurdity of insisting on maintaining free-trade to an institution whose trade barriers and export subsidies for agriculture alone forms almost half of its budget is farcical. If - as Hannan points out - Gordon Brown genuinely believed in the internationalist sentiment behind his appeals, there could be no excuse, save political expediency, for belonging to a group that arbitrarily excludes the most efficient producers based solely on their geographical location. For a more consistent advocacy of free trade, see this petition (unfortunately not modelled on the candlemakers') from the Atlas Global Initiative.

Douglas Carswell MP, Hannan's coauthor on 'The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain', discussed other aspects of the deterioration of Britain under New Labour and his preferred strategy to return to limited government, in his talk to the society at the end of Hilary Term. The video is now available, here.

Regulating for Fun

2009-03-15T12:58:00.005Z

News comes via Samizdata of a recently concluded investigation by Ofcom, the UK body that regulates broadcast media, into the illegal activities of a local radio station:

[The] UK regulator has issued a "yellow card" warning to GWR FM for failing to play music the kids want to hear, accusing the Bristol-based station of aiming for an older audience. UK radio stations are licensed on the premise of appealing to a particular crowd, and providing a particular kind of content. For GWR that means locals aged under 44 and a combination of "contemporary and chart" music, which Ofcom interprets as anything recorded in the last two years...

Ofcom spent three days listening to GWR, and concluded that while classics are permitted to add "spice" to the mix they shouldn't make up the majority of content. But even discounting a daily feature of the station, the "Time Tunnel" broadcast daily between 9 and 10am, Ofcom found that 53 per cent of the tracks played were more than two years old - and thus outside the station remit and the stated boundaries of the "contemporary".

From Ofcom's press release, this paragraph was the most galling (not least for its use of the word 'spice'):

In this respect, Ofcom’s expectation of a “contemporary and chart station” such as GWR FM is that the main musical diet should be current music, reflecting the UK singles charts of today and recent months. Older, classic tracks are not necessarily out of place in this type of format, but only acting as complementary ‘spice’ to the main offering.

[emphasis added]

It is one thing for there to exist an organisation whose stated objective is to protect some vaguely defined notion of 'consumers' interest' or 'fairness.' It is quite another for it to reject completely the daily vindication of the station's popularity, proven by the decisions of hundreds of thousands of listeners to tune in to the current programming schedule, in pursuit of its own priorities.

Which better determines what listeners want: the discipline of the marketplace and popular support, or the arbitrary, indefensible criteria of politically appointed apparatchiks?

Localism and Libertarianism

2009-03-13T11:33:00.003Z

The society was delighted to host Douglas Carswell, Conservative MP for Harwich & Clacton, last night to speak about his new coauthored libertarian/localist manifesto, 'The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain.' The speech was extremely stimulating, and points to an intriguing way for libertarians to return responsibility for the functions of the state down to the lowest level possible - the local community, and in most cases, the individual. One of the subtle points that suggests localism should be forefront amongst the agenda of libertarians is that it provides a counterweight to the politically powerful tool of big government - the client state. By empowering individuals to choose their children's school or be in charge of what healthcare they receive, and how much they pay for it, a new orthodoxy can be established in which rational individuals refuse to surrender their newfound rights to the central government. In this respect, localism has a self-replicating mechanism which, by competition between councils, encourages best practice to be emulated, and, by giving individuals a wider range of choices, irrevocably breaks the monopoly of the central government.

The video is below:

(It starts ~30 seconds in to the talk - hence the discontinuity at the beginning)

Deja vu, all over again

2009-03-13T01:41:00.004Z

" In any event, the practice of intervening for the benefit of banks, rendered insolvent by the crisis, and of the customers of these banks, has resulted in suspending the market forces which could serve to prevent a return of the expansion, in the form of a new boom, and the crisis which inevitably follows. If the banks emerge from the crisis unscathed, or only slightly weakened, what remains to restrain them from embarking once more on an attempt to reduce artificially the interest rate on loans and expand circulation credit? If the crisis were ruthlessly permitted to run its course, bringing about the destruction of enterprises which were unable to meet their obligations, then all entrepreneurs — not only banks but also other businessmen — would exhibit more caution in granting and using credit in the future. Instead, public opinion approves of giving assistance in the crisis. Then, no sooner is the worst over, than the banks are spurred on to a new expansion of circulation credit."

Ludwig von Mises, 1928 (!) - quoted in a excellent profile of Mises by Richard Ebeling, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the publication of Human Action. HT: The Austrian Economists blog.

The Parasite State

2009-03-11T10:47:00.005Z

Douglas Carswell MP, who will speak to the society tomorrow*
about his coauthored libertarian manifesto, 'The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain,' has an excellent post at ConservativeHome on the parasitical nature of the modern social democratic state:

"The modern British state has many of the characteristics of a parasite; it grows and feeds off each of us. Far from nurturing, it infantilises us and stifles society.

Ever more tax is collected from us to pay for the livelihoods of remote officials whose sole purpose is to tell us how to live our lives. Tax is not simply too high, but at times seems designed to punish those who try to do the right thing.

Savers, taxed once on their income, must pay tax on their prudence. Older folk, forced to pay for their long term care, find virtue penalised and a lifetime’s thrift ignored. And after all that income tax, national insurance, road tax, VAT, license fee, petrol tax, what’s left over? For many families, little more than pocket money."

You can tell he's been reading Atlas Shrugged. There is a growing resentment among the productive and prudent in society that current government policy is actively designed to penalise them, and - since a crisis is something that shouldn't "go to waste" - that things will only get worse. It was excellently captured by the comments of Rick Santelli, CNBC financial reporter, that have ignited a new wave of protests:

It's little wonder that 'Going Galt' is catching on.

* The talk will be held in Lecture Room 1 at Christ Church. It starts at 8pm on Thursday 12th March, and all are welcome. For more details, see here/here.

Some thoughts for "Fairtrade Fortnight"

2009-03-02T19:27:00.004Z

Philip Booth on Fairtrade (emphasis added):

Some of the political campaigns of the Fairtrade Foundation - though certainly not its well judged campaign against cotton subsidies - might well, if they were successful, damage free trade and harm the world’s poorest people. But we should not pit “fair trade” against “free trade”. Fair trade arises from the free choices of individuals. There is no free market case against fair trade, as is sometimes suggested, but there are pragmatic reasons to think twice before being caught up in the slipstream of this movement.

The Fairtrade mark is, of course, a great marketing coup. Who wants to be seen as “unfair”? But to imply that free transactions are not fair unless they are stamped and certified by one particular organisation is wrong.

Legislative Addiction

2009-02-23T17:41:00.003Z

Randy Barnett, quoting the opening of this article he wrote on drug prohibition, draws an interesting comparison between drug addicts and legislative addicts:

"Some drugs make people feel good. That is why some people use them. Some of these drugs are alleged to have side effects so destructive that many advise against their use. The same may be said about statutes that attempt to prohibit the manufacture, sale, and use of drugs. Using statutes in this way makes some people feel good because they think they are "doing something" about what they believe to be a serious social problem. Others who support these laws are not so altruistically motivated. Employees of law enforcement bureaus and academics who receive government grants to study drug use, for example, may gain financially from drug prohibition. But as with using drugs, using drug laws can have moral and practical side-effects so destructive that they argue against ever using legal institutions in this manner.

One might even say--and not altogether metaphorically--that some people become psychologically or economically addicted to drug laws."

The entire post is worth reading, as an intelligent response to the oft-heard critique that libertarian ideas are 'too impractical' to be implemented.

The White Flag

2009-02-17T00:24:00.002Z

Coinciding perfectly with the society's fourth event of term, the Daily Telegraph today leads with an article detailing the fears of ex-MI5 boss Dame Stella Rimington that the government is "frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties," thereby helping to achieve "precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state." This perceptive observation - that in the name of protecting us from terrorism, we are increasingly subject to many of the same restrictions on speech, free association and privacy that terrorists and their apologists favour - should be deeply concerning; even more so, as the comments come following the recent announcement of a proposed database to store comprehensive details of every telephone call, instant message transcript and email in Britain.

These proposals, which strike at the heart of the rule of law and the presumption of innocence, should be strenuously fought by any citizen concerned with their right to privacy. To that end, the society will be hosting Dominic Raab, author of 'The Assault on Liberty: What Went Wrong With Rights,' to discuss these and other breaches of our traditional freedoms this evening (Tuesday 17th Feb) at Christ Church, 8pm. Further details here and here. As ever, entry is free and all are welcome.

Doing Nothing

2009-02-16T17:45:00.005Z

Brian Micklethwait links, via Samizdata, to this interesting blog post on 'doing nothing' to resolve the current economic downturn. It makes several excellent points against 'doing something', my favourite being this:

"Much of the justification for government intervention comes from the assertion that markets have failed. One money manager scoffed at this idea. “The markets are working fine, but they’re giving people answers that they don’t like, so people cry market failure.” Stocks and bonds low? That’s because investors are afraid of a prolonged depression and continued government interference. House in a jobless region of Michigan worth almost nothing? A place with 50% of its former jobs only needs 50% of its houses. There are plenty of former steel towns where the price of a comfortable house stabilized at $20,000 decades ago and has barely moved since."

David Friedman discussed the misuse - and the economic implications - of 'market failure' as a justification for government intervention when he addressed the society last term. And, on the subject of effective dissemination of ideas, Brian's talk last November contains excellent advice on spreading this meme.

Free money

2009-02-14T17:34:00.003Z

Via the Independent Institute, Robert Higgs discusses the politics and economics of 'stimulus,' and the need to allow markets to adjust to the new economic realities, painful though it might be in the short term:

Chandran Kukathas' dilemma for libertarians

2009-02-12T19:40:00.003Z

At the beginning of Michaelmas 2007, Professor Chandran Kukathas gave a talk to what was then the Oxford Hayek Society entitled "The Libertarian Dilemma". The paper has now been published as Chandran Kukathas, "Two Constructions of Libertarianism," Libertarian Papers 1, 1 (2009).

From the abstract:

The libertarian first principle—a belief in individual freedom—can lead to two different and not necessarily acceptable societies from the standpoint of liberty. One is the “Union of Liberty,” in which communities, associations, and intermediate bodies are held to rigorous standards of voluntariness (and thus face sharp limits on their internal associational freedom because of the knowledge that children will be born into them). In the other, the “Federation of Liberty,” they are not (thereby allowing children to be born into locally unfree environments).

The whole thing's just 13 pages long, and well worth a read.

[via the IEA blog]

A Real Partnership

2009-02-12T18:05:00.003Z

Today's topic: public sector pay.

The brilliance of this clip lies its exposition of two mechanisms of political - as opposed to productive - life: firstly, the ignorance of the long term, 'unseen' costs of policy. The beneficiaries here and now are actively incentivised to project their costs onto future generations, resulting is an economically ominous and deeply immoral debt burden. The real-life evidence of this in public sector pensions is astonishing. In 2007, the IEA published a monograph, 'Sir Humphrey's Legacy,' in which the cost of unfunded public sector pensions liabilities was estimated to exceed £1 trillion as a result of special final-salary arrangements, exacerbated in recent years by the growth in public sector salaries. The other mechanism the clip illustrates is the trading of favours that the political process facilitates. The romantic view of disinterested civil servants executing the will of the people embodied in their democratically elected representatives was demolished by James Buchanan et al. But only when personified in the character of Sir Humphrey does the reality of self-interest in the public sector - and the tendency to employ one's power for personal gain - become fixed in the public mind.

Biden on the stimulus bill

2009-02-11T02:05:00.004Z

"If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there’s still a 30% chance we’re going to get it wrong"

The National Education Service

2009-02-10T22:12:00.003Z

Continuing the week's theme, in advance of Friday's talk by Yes, Minister co-writer Jonathan Lynn.

Today's topic: choice in education.

James Stanfield - who introduced his talk to the society earlier this term with this very clip - told us that he uses it in a teacher-training session he gives, on the topic of 'Privatisation.' Sir Humphrey is the embodiment, he argues, of a snobbish paternalism: that the 'discerning' classes can make good choices, but that ignorant ordinary people must have their choices made for them by Platonic guardians - to which group the proponent of the argument invariably belongs. Immediately, Stanfield pointed out, the caricature of government schooling as a beneficient device is dispelled: instead of the market's discipline and pressures to raise standards, state-control of schools is a means, as Sir Humphrey acknowledges, of making sure everyone has an equal chance of a terrible education.

As Sir Anthony Jay - Lynn's cowriter - remarks, in the preface to the IEA republication of a series of excellent essays, 'Government Failure: E.G. West on Education,'

"The system rested on the denial of choice to all parents except the wealthy. Those who deplored this inequality sought to remove it not by extending choice to the less well-off but by denying it to the better-off as well. The defence of the system rested on the absurd argument that politicians, educationists and ofﬁcials know better than parents what education our children need unless they are in the top income bracket. The argument absolutely demanded a place in our comedy series."

The point that Jay makes might be countered by the observation that whilst wealthy parents can afford choice, it is monetarily out of the reach the vast majority of people. It is for this reason that there is outrage whenever a politician in government is found to send their children to a private school. Most recently, this was heard over the decision of Barack Obama to send his two daughters to a private school. The outrage shouldn't be over how much he paid, though. It should be that, though the state is spending the same amount, it retains control over where it can be spent. It is the worst of Friedman's four ways of spending money: spending other people's money on other people. Unsurprisingly, neither the quality nor the price are comparable to when people spend their own money on themselves.

The Compassionate Society

2009-02-09T10:45:00.010Z

One of the toughest challenges in advancing libertarian ideas is to rid people of the notion that the choice is between the imperfections and inequalities of the market and seamless government intervention with negligible costs. It is like the joke about you and a friend being chased by a polar bear: you only need to out-run your friend. In the same way, it suffices to undermine the myth of beneficent government by advancing the case that intervention, whilst nominally beneficial for some specified group in the short term, is accompanied by distorted private incentives, political lobbying and bureaucratic mismanagement. The writings of Bastiat and Hazlitt are the most lucid examples of the first point, while the work of the Public Choice school challenges the assumption that actors in government are altruistic and efficient.

In recent years, one of the most effective popular media for communicating this idea has been the BBC sitcoms, Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. This Friday, the society will be hosting Jonathan Lynn (Facebook details here), the series co-writer, and each day this week, the blog will feature one of the best clips satirising government.

Today: healthcare provision.

Lynn discusses the scenario in a Q&A on his website:

The basic idea of each episode came in a variety of ways... Sometimes completely out of our own imaginations. An example of the latter would be the episode on the National Health Service in which we invented a hospital with five hundred administrative staff but no doctors, nurses or patients. This hospital won the Florence Nightingale Award for the most hygienic hospital in the country. After inventing this absurdity, we discovered there were six such hospitals (or very large empty wings of hospitals) exactly as we had described them in our episode, notably one in Cambridgeshire in which there was only one patient: the Matron (head of nursing staff) who had fallen over some scaffolding and broken her leg.

Helen Evans, director of Nurses for Reform and author of 'Sixty Years On: Who Cares for the NHS?,' draws attention to a finding that suggests the NHS bureaucracy doesn't harbour the romantic illusions of its advocates:

As Sir Humphrey says later in the same episode, in response to Hacker's outrage at the waste in public funds designated to make sick people better:

No, no, no, no, Minister: it is make everybody better - better for having shown the extent of their care and compassion. You see, Minister, when money is allocated to the health or social services, Parliament and the country feel cleansed, purified - absolved. It is a sacrifice. And when a sacrifice is made, no one asks the priest what happened to the ritual offering after the ceremony... We don't measure our success by results, but by activity, and the activity is considerable - and productive. Those five hundred people are seriously overworked...

The Fraud of the Liberty vs. Security Tradeoff

2009-02-08T14:08:00.003Z

Dominic Raab - author of the excellent The Assault on Liberty - discusses the fraudulent claim that we can be made more secure by sacrificing our personal liberty and privacy:

This video is one of a series prepared by the organisers of the Convention on Modern Liberty, a non-partisan event to highlight the many ways in which our personal freedoms have been trampled in the last decade.

Dominic Raab will be addressing the society on Tuesday, 17th February (5th week) at Christ Church, discussing the restrictions on civil liberties in recent years and his proposed remedy: a strictly formulated Bill of Rights to curb the expansion of government in the economic and civil sphere.

Maybe we don't know better than you: so what?

2009-02-08T02:25:00.003Z

The new President's view on stimulus:

"Then there's the argument, well, this is full of pet projects. When was the last time that we saw a bill of this magnitude move out with no earmarks in it? Not one. (Applause.) And when you start asking, well, what is it exactly that is such a problem that you're seeing, where's all this waste and spending? Well, you know, you want to replace the federal fleet with hybrid cars. Well, why wouldn't we want to do that? (Laughter.) That creates jobs for people who make those cars. It saves the federal government energy. It saves the taxpayers energy. (Applause.)

So then you get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? (Laughter and applause.) That's the whole point. No, seriously. (Laughter.) That's the point. (Applause.)"

Michael Rozeff points to an extraordinarily candid statement of vulgar Keynesianism: any spending will suffice to boost economic recovery, and it is immaterial whether it is spent less efficiently than private sector actors otherwise would. The Wall Street Journal decimates this logic as being "so manifestly false that we doubt Mr. Obama really believes it," but it strengthens the case that, in times of crisis, politicians act in order to be seen acting - not in order to resolve genuine problems. If they have to do something, maybe they could at least follow Jeffrey Miron's first principle: do no harm. Indeed,

"If the cure is worse than the disease, it is better to live with the disease."

Making Employees Pay

2009-02-07T17:28:00.007Z

"In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences. " Henry Hazlitt

Any political argument which overlooks this simple objection is destined to fail. In a piece entitled, 'Redundant workers to get bigger payoffs,' the Independent unsuprisingly commits the error, and, again unsuprisingly, is completely devastated by Guy Herbert's refutation at Samizdata:

The Independent has what it thinks is good news for employees:
"The minimum amount of money that employers must pay staff they make redundant is set to be increased by the Government, The Independent has learnt. In another attempt to ease the pain of those worst affected by the recession, ministers have launched a review of the minimum payments to which people are entitled by law when they lose their job. With around 1,500 posts being axed each week, unemployment will soon pass the two million mark and could eventually rise to more than three million."
So, what is the predicatble effect of making redundancies more costly to employers? ...

Yes, Purnell minor, if the cash lost by making people redundant increases, they will be made redundant sooner, and firms will be more averse to taking the risk of hiring.

Those firms that do not make such precautionary sacrifices increase their risk of total failure, and none of their workers getting redundancy pay. So higher redundancy pay means more redundancies and more business failures, in an uncertain proportion.

What's worse, it is likely that such a change in the rules that is signalled in advance will mean large, well-informed and unsentimental corporations (which are typically more risk averse, and more capital intensive, anyway) reducing their headcounts to get under the wire. Even "a review" undertaken to give an impression of doing something, and as a sop to the trades unions, is likely to influence hiring and firing policies. And not in a good way.

I doubt even Henry Hazlitt could have disposed of the argument quite so quickly.

This type of headline policymaking represents a further slide into what Robert Higgs calls 'regime uncertainty', whereby investors can have no confidence that the rules of the game will be the same tomorrow as today, and understandably become reluctant to engage in long-term projects. In the current economic climate, making private investors and employers more risk-averse is precisely the opposite of what the government should be doing; this undermines the crucial role in economic growth of the entrepreneur, and creates self-fulfilling space for further government intervention. If only there were an employment policy that would allow employers and employees to find the right balance.

Economic Impotence

2009-02-06T14:35:00.004Z

Via the Truth on the Market blog, Reason.tv presents a bona fide cure for the economic woes:

Russ Roberts discusses what - if anything - government should be doing to expedite a return to economic growth in a thoughtful op-ed.

I'm a fourth child: so shoot me

2009-02-02T12:37:00.007Z

Timed perfectly to coincide with the society's second event this term, there was an article in yesterday's Times under the headline, 'Two children should be the limit, says green guru':

"COUPLES who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.
Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population...
“I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate,” Porritt said."

The implications of this green fanaticism is deeply alarming and should be rejected by any humanist mindset. Porritt is not objecting to population growth because he fears it will lead to a diminution in human living standards, but because the impact of an increased number of individuals will harm the earth - whose preservation he treats as an end in itself. By some unexplained metric, Porritt has decided that 2 children (conveniently the number that he himself has) is an acceptable burden for the earth, but that 3 is intolerable and deserves ostracism. We find some of the evidence upon which he based his calculation in this excerpt:

"The Optimum Population Trust, a campaign group of which Porritt is a patron, says each baby born in Britain will, during his or her lifetime, burn carbon roughly equivalent to 2½ acres of old-growth oak woodland - an area the size of Trafalgar Square."

So,

EV[2 children] > EV[5 acres of old-growth oak woodland]

but

EV[3 children] < EV[7½ acres of old-growth oak woodland]

where EV is a measurement of the ethical value of inanimate trees and conscious humans. He enables us to add some additional constraints with this snippet:

"Many organisations think it is not part of their business. My mission with the Friends of the Earth and the Greenpeaces of this world is to say: ‘You are betraying the interests of your members by refusing to address population issues and you are doing it for the wrong reasons because you think it is too controversial,” he said."

[emphasis added]

Whence we infer that the desire of people already living (in particular, a certain subset of that category: Greenpeace members, Friends of the Earth members, & Jonathan Porritt) to enjoy a certain environment and moral smugness trumps the right of as yet unborn people to live. QED.

In reality, the most dangerous thing about this type of public statement is that it stretches the boundaries of acceptable discourse, and makes it ever more realistic that what begins as a 'moral duty' turns into a legal duty, with government subsidy (which Porritt's report advocates), and ultimately Spartan birth control policies. Not only are these ethically incomprehensible claims, but their supposed justification finds no support in the empirical social sciences. Professor Nicholas Eberstadt, an expert in demography, analysed the claims of overpopulation - and the proposed solutions - in his 2007 Sustainable Development Network paper, "Too Many People? Addressing the assertions that world population will unsustainably double over the next century,

"the grim and inescapable connection between population growth and mounting economic problems that is posited by today’s anti-natal doctrine is hardly faithful to the actual record of global demographic and economic development over the past century . But the apparent anxiety that some proponents of “stabilising world population” experience in contemplating a future with 11 billion, 14 billion, or more human inhabitants of our planet may also be misplaced for a more prosaic reason: to judge by current trends, such levels may never be achieved.

To be sure: long-term population projections are extraordinarily problematic. No robust scientific basis exists for anticipating desired parental fertility in any locale – much less for the world as a whole – very far in advance. Since it is fertility levels that largely determine future population trajectories, this is more than an incidental inconvenience. The experience of the past four decades, however, is worth bearing in mind. In the four decades since the early 1960s, global fertility levels are thought to have dropped by almost half: from a “total fertility rate” (TFR, or births per woman per lifetime) of around 5 in 1960/65 to one of about 2.6 in 2000/2005. Over that same period, the average TFR for “developing countries” is thought to have dropped by over half, from 6 to under 3. Although there is a well-known and general correspondence between increasing affluence and lower fertility , material progress alone does not account for this tremendous decline in birth rates in low-income countries. Equally important has been the largely overlooked fact that parents still caught in Third World poverty have been choosing to have ever-smaller families."

If this trend continues, there is no reason to have any faith in catastrophic population projections - either as a cause of poverty or environmental destruction - and to correspondingly eschew the paternalistic recommendations of the Sustainable Development Commission. As Eberstadt points out,

"Advocates of anti-natal population programs must make a fateful choice. They must either opt for voluntarism, in which case their population targets will be meaningless. Or else they must opt for attempting to meet their population targets – in which case they must embrace coercive measures, like China’s one-child policy. There is no third way."

Brendan O'Neill, editor of Spiked and co-founder of the Manifesto Club, will be speaking at the society this Wednesday (4th February) on green restrictions on freedom, of which population is only one component; the title is, 'Why Environmentalism is the Enemy of Liberty.' The event is at 8pm at Christ Church - entry is free and all are welcome.

Depression Economics

2009-02-02T01:11:00.004Z

There's an interesting discussion at skepticlawyer of the responsibilities of job-seekers in declaring their medical and personal history to prospective employers. It springs from an ongoing case in which Cheltenham Borough Council are seeking £1million in damages from a former Managing Director who left her post due to depression after two and a half years of fractious employment. The council claims that the employee knowingly failed to disclose her history of medical treatment for depression when applying for the post, and, in stating that she didn't suffer from a disability and was in good health, she deliberately misled them. The implication of the council's argument, however, might backfire: if they accept depression a disability, they might find themselves deluged in applications for parking permits.

An alternative that is presented to the expensive legal battle now underway is the contract at will, wherein employer or employee can terminate the agreement at any time for any reason. Richard Epstein defends this arrangement as economically optimal - both in individual employment affairs and in legal construals of incomplete contracts - in a cogently argued paper. In it, he counters the typical claim of employer exploitation of dispensable workers in such arrangements by observing that the institutional structure of contract at will incentivises employers not to frequently and arbitrarily rotate staff:

"Any party who cheats may well obtain a bad reputation that will induce others to avoid dealing with him. The size of these losses tends to differ systematically between employers and employees - to the advantage of the employee. Thus in the usual situation there are many workers and a single employer. The disparity in number is apt to be greatest in large industrial concerns, where the at-will contract is commonly, if mistakenly, thought to be most unsatisfactory because of the supposed inequality of bargaining power. The employer who decides to act for bad reason or no reason at all may not face any legal liability under the classical common law rule. But he faces very powerful adverse economic consequences. If coworkers perceive the dismissal as arbitrary, they will take fresh stock of their own prospects, for they can no longer be certain that their faithful performance will ensure their security and advancement. The uncertain prospects created by arbitrary employer behaviour is functionally indistinguishable from a reduction in wages unilaterally imposed by the employer. At the margin, some workers will look elsewhere, and typically the best workers will have the greatest opportunities. By the same token the large employer has more to gain if he dismisses undesirable employees, for this ordinarily acts as an implicit increase in the wages to the other employees, who are no longer burdened with uncooperative or obtuse coworkers."

[emphasis added]

Now, extending the purview to that which is not seen, Epstein argues that increasing the burden of proof on an employer when firing employees is only superficially beneficial for the working class:

"Where an employer might have been more willing to take risky employees under an at-will rule, he will now be less willing to do so under the for-cause rule because any subsequent demotion or dismissal will be an open invitation to a lawsuit by an aggrieved employee. Furthermore, in most at-will situations, the dismissed employee is replaced by another, so it is hard to see how employees as a class benefit from a rule that can only hamper general mobility in labour markets."

The same point is made by skepticlawyer:

"Instead of just giving Ms Laird the sack (the virtue of the contract at will), Cheltenham Borough Council (and others like it) — all doubtless hamstrung by employment laws that make it hard to sack people when they’re clearly skiving off for whatever reason — would like to make it extra difficult for all people with mental illness to get work. The many are made to pay for the sins of the few."

As is invariably the case with policy judged and implemented solely on the basis of good intentions, the widespread unintended consequences are more subtle and pervasive than the short-lived immediate gains to certain specific beneficiaries.

Digging yourself into a hole

2009-01-20T03:11:00.003Z

Nick Gillespie, at Reason magazine, responds succinctly to Republican Whip Eric Cantor's request for ideas (anyone?) on how to 'stimulate' the economy:

Via Cafe Hayek, Arnold Kling brings into perspective the breathtaking arrogance of those thinking that government officials can spend money more wisely than the millions of individuals from whom they're taking it:

How many people will have meaningful input in determining the overall allocation of the billion stimulus? 10? 20? It won't be more than 1000. These people--let's say that in the end 500 technocrats will play a meaningful role in writing the bill--will have unimaginable power. Remember that what they are doing is taking our money and deciding for us how to spend it. Presumably, that is because they are wiser at spending our money than we are at spending it ourselves.

The arithmetic is mind-boggling. If 500 people have meaningful input, and the stimulus is almost $800 billion, then on average each person is responsible for taking more than $1.5 billion of our money and trying to spend it more wisely than we would spend it ourselves. I can imagine a wise technocrat taking $100,000 or perhaps even $1 million from American households and spending it more wisely than they would. But $1.5 billion? I do not believe that any human being knows so much that he or she can quickly and wisely allocate $1.5 billion.

An apposite analogy

2009-01-11T19:32:00.004Z

Freedom of Religion has long been a central tenet of Western liberal culture, a basic value which meets with no opposition in polite company. As an integral component of this, the separation of church and state is defended by all liberal thinkers.

It is curious, then, that in other areas of life, there remains a willingness to enforce moral judgements in the political sphere. One sees the compulsory participation aspect of religious intolerance with anti-discrimination laws or sensitivity training; and the state promotion of one set of views over another with such policies as subsidies for the arts.

The point was driven home by an eccentric essay featured in 'A Plea for Liberty' called 'Free Libraries.' Its conclusion eloquently draws the analogy between the advocates of religious subsidy and other cultural subsidy:

"Free Libraries are typical examples of the compulsory co-operation everywhere gaining ground in this country. Like all State socialism they are the negation of that liberty which is the goal of human progress. Every successful opposition to them is therefore a stroke for human advancement. This mendacious appeal to the numerical majority to force a demoralizing and pauperizing institution upon the minority, is an attempt to revive, in municipal legislation, a form of coercion we have outgrown in religious matters. At the present time there is a majority of Protestants in this country who, if they wished, could use their numerical strength to compel forced subscriptions from a minority of Catholics, for the support of those religious institutions which are regarded by their advocates as of quite equal importance to a Free Library. Yet this is not done; and why? Because in matters of religion we have learnt that liberty is better than force. In political and social questions this terrible lesson has yet to be learned. We deceive ourselves when we imagine that the struggle for personal liberty is over—probably the fiercest part has yet to arise. The tyranny of the few over the many is past, that of the many over the few is to come. The temptation for power—whether of one man or a million men—to take the short cut, and attempt by recourse to a forcing process to produce that which can only come as the result of the slow and steady growth of ages of free action, is so great that probably centuries will elapse before experience will have made men proof against it."

Craig Smith discussed this modern advocacy of coercion in pursuit of a moral goal in his address to the society in November, as part of a speech entitled 'The Errors of Social Justice':

(relevant excerpt ends at ~23:10; entire video is here)

The entire book is to be highly recommended; that it is available freely via the Library of Economics and Liberty is a nice irony.

"I will not minimise my reasons so that they are palatable... I do not answer to the state"

2009-01-06T16:09:00.004Z

Via Reason, my attention is drawn to the Western Standard's 'Liberty 100,' a list of Canadian activists and journalists who have resisted the encroaching growth of the state's power. Topping the list is Ezra Levant, a former newspaper editor who republished the controversial cartoons of Mohammed first featured in Jyllands Posten in September 2005. Following a complaint by two local Muslim groups, Levant was dragged in front of the Alberta Human Rights Commission, under the charge of 'publishing Islamophobic hate speech.'

The case caught the imagination of bloggers (where I first heard of it) after Levant recorded the first interrogation and uploaded it to youtube. In it, he subjects the civil servant inquisitor to a furious barrage reminiscent of a Howard Roark or John Galt monologue. From his introductory statement:

"It is my position that the government has no legal or moral authority to interrogate me or anyone else for publishing these words and pictures. That is a violation of my ancient and inalienable freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and, in this case, religious freedom, and the separation of mosque and state. It is especially perverted that a bureaucracy calling itself the Alberta 'Human Rights' Commission would be the government agency violating my human rights... We have a heritage of free speech that we inherited from Great Britain that goes back to the year 1215 and the Magna Carta. We have a heritage of 800 years of British Common Law's protection of free speech, augmented by 250 years of Common Law in Canada... For a government bureaucrat to call any publisher, or anyone else, to an investigation to be quizzed about his political and religious expression is a violation of 800 years of Common Law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, our Bill of Rights and our Charter of Rights... It is a system that is part-Kafka, and part-Stalin."

And, when quizzed about the intention behind publishing the cartoons:

The full set of videos are here, and supply a refreshing challenge to the widespread belief in the superiority of group rights - in particular, the right not to have a group's beliefs offended - over individual rights. Fortunately, in this case, good sense prevailed: one of the complainants withdrew, and Ezra Levant was found not guilty of the other accusation.

Pragmatism; or, why I'm always right

2008-12-21T02:16:00.004Z

Via Randy Barnett at the Volokh Conspiracy, there's a good piece at National Review Online on the universally acclaimed principle of pragmatism:

"When people praise a policy or a politician as “pragmatic,” they’re often simply praising themselves for being open-minded. They are projecting a false pretense of objectivity, premised on the conceit that they are utterly free of ideology while their opponents are mired in prejudice. In fact, a so-called pragmatist’s support for a policy indicates only two things: that he agrees with the policy’s goal, and that he believes the policy is likely to achieve the goal in an efficient way. But these are precisely the controversies at the core of every old ideological dispute: Which goals should we strive for? And what is the best way to achieve these goals? Pragmatism as a catch phrase does not displace those ideological questions, but does a great deal to obscure them. It is, to borrow from Kant, a vain delusion and a chimerical vision of mankind. Which, on second thought, might explain its popularity in the age of Hope and Change."

The commenters at VC so far seemed to have missed the central point of the essay. It is not to criticise those who pragmatically endeavour to achieve certain ends, in which context the paradigmatic area of foreign policy is mentioned. Rather, it attacks the vacuous notion that describing a policy as pragmatic is sufficient to discredit all opposition to it; or, correspondingly, dismissing a positive proposal on the grounds that it is ideological or extreme.

A similar sentiment was raised a few days ago at Against Politics on the oft-heard criticism by George Soros, Joseph Stiglitz et al, that classical liberals are obsessed "market fundamentalists."

"A major problem with the phrase market fundamentalism is that it simply assumes that to be reasonable one cannot advocate the most extreme position on an issue. But as many historians can point out, views that would have been considered extreme or fundamentalist hundreds of years ago have become mainstream in contemporary society. Furthermore, with some creativity any position can be phrased to be a middle of the road view. “Surely you agree that shooting political opponents is the moderate policy between not prosecuting them at all and torturing them.” Finally, the pejorative use of fundamentalism can backfire at progressives. With similar arguments, conservatives can argue that liberals hold fundamentalist views on other issues such as human nature and society (all nurture, no nature).

But perhaps the biggest problem with the accusation of market fundamentalism is that facts or arguments have been made irrelevant in favor of appeals to reasonableness. Does it even matter if there are logical, empirical, or moral arguments to prefer markets over government? One argument to generally prefer markets over government is that for a voter the cost of being irrational is close to zero. Another argument (and observation) is that we should get better results from competition than from monopoly, even if both mechanisms are not perfect. And last, but not least, logical and epistemological arguments favor the presumption of liberty, and thus markets over government."

[emphasis added]

This is the most pernicious aspect of the use of 'pragmatic' as a generic term of approval. The "appeal to reasonableness" disguises the fact of the diversity of ends people have, in favour of some pretended universal common end. It reduces vigilance against creeping violations of liberty by framing them in the context of statesman-like acts of necessity, taking as an unchallengeable given the objectives - normally "social justice" or "progress" - which the policy is necessary to achieve.

Liberal Lending Standards

2008-12-17T19:20:00.003Z

Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum draws attention to a curious Clinton-esque strategy now appropriated by the Bush administration - legalistic stretching of the term, 'financial institution':

"White House Press Secretary Dana Perino observed: "Congress spoke last night. They don't have the votes to do anything." Perino said the administration therefore was looking for "a short-term mechanism to help prevent a disorderly bankruptcy that we think could devastate further an already very weak economy"...

The one "short-term mechanism" that Perino mentioned, using money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), is plainly at odds with the intent of Congress. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which created TARP, authorized Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson "to purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase, troubled assets from any financial institution," the aim being "to restore liquidity and stability to the financial system."

Paulson already was stretching the law when he decided instead to purchase stakes in banks (presumably on the theory that shares of their stock constituted "troubled assets"). But a carmaker is not a "financial institution," and loaning it money is not purchasing "troubled assets.""

As Sullum points out,

"A Treasury Department spokeswoman put it even more clearly than Perino did. "Because Congress failed to act," she said, "we will stand ready to prevent an imminent failure until Congress reconvenes and acts to address the long-term viability of the industry."

This is the argument of every strongman, dictator, and president-for-life who has ever overriden uncooperative legislators: They won't let me do what I want to do, and this is an emergency, so I'm going to do it anyway.""

This tactic reminded me of a previous occasion on which a similarly duplicitous subterfuge was used to undermine individual privacy, as documented in Judge Andrew Napolitano's A Nation of Sheep:

"Since the 1970s, the FBI has had the ability to gain access to records from financial institutions through use of self-written search warrants or National Security Letters already mentioned in terrorism and espionage investigations. But the IAA [Intelligence Authorisation Act] for 2004 has redefined the scope of the term 'financial institutions' to include not only banks; credit card companies; and finance corporations; but also stock brokers; investment bankers; loan companies; currency exchange agencies; any issuer, redeemer or cashier of traveler's cheques, cheques, and money orders; travel agencies; insurance companies; jewelers; pawn shops; Western Union and other businesses that transmit funds; casinos; real estate agents; car dealerships; phone companies; FedEx; and even the post office!"

More on the illegality of using TARP to bailout automotive manufacturers by Mike Rappaport here and here.

Tom Palmer's talk

2008-12-12T01:47:00.005Z

As with the video of Craig Smith's talk, I'm posting this without any attempt to summarise or comment. If I think of anything incisive to add having re-watched the video, I'll post my thoughts at a later date. For now I just wanted to make the video available for those who missed the talk, or wanted to see it again.

Tom's talk lasts a little over an hour; the rest of the time is given over to a Q&A session. The graph to which he refers is this one:

Historical warnings of the dangers of intervention

2008-12-11T20:35:00.005Z

Via Tim Worstall, Polly Toynbee betrays her historical amnesia as well as her usual economic ignorance, with the claim that Herbert Hoover's response to the Great Depression was laissez-faire:

"The Conservatives, taking the anti-Keynesian line, have planted themselves firmly on the laissez-faire side of the argument – where Herbert Hoover was in the Great Depression"

Yet, Hoover, just like Toynbee, in fact dismissed laissez-faire economists as 'reactionary', and advocated and practiced unprecedented economic intervention, as his highly revealing summary of his programme during his 1932 presidential campaign demonstrates:

"We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action…. No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times…. For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered…. They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.

Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for … "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom…. We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction."

So is it that Polly is ignorant of programmes such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the 1932 Revenue Act and the infamous Mexican Repatriation Programme, or does she simply believe 'laissez-faire' to be a synonym for unsuccessful or undesirable?

For more examples and analysis, see Murray Rothbard's essay on 'Hoover's attack on Laissez-Faire', from his 'America's Great Depression'

A Freudian slip if ever there was one

2008-12-10T20:10:00.003Z

Gordon Brown lets slip a hint about how important he thinks he is.

Update: A Nobel Laureate thinks he might be right.

Winning the fight against database-statism

2008-12-05T01:20:00.001Z

Good news from Strasbourg:

"Two British men should not have had their DNA and fingerprints retained by police, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.
The men's information was held by South Yorkshire Police, although neither was convicted of any offence...
The judges said keeping the information "could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society".
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she was "disappointed" by the European Court of Human Rights' decision.
The database may now have to be scaled back following the unanimous judgement by 17 senior judges from across Europe.
Under present laws, the DNA profiles of everyone arrested for a recordable offence in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are kept on the database, regardless of whether they are charged or convicted.
The details of about 4.5m people are held and one in five of them does not have a current criminal record."

Though the justification seems a little vacuous - what is "necessary in a democratic society," as a concept, is open to so many lines of attack, and it is unclear why such a policy contradicts democratic forms of government - this is nonetheless a good decision. There is no justification for retaining the DNA of innocent people who have been erroneously accused of criminal activity by the state unless there is a justification for sampling the DNA of the entire population. This policy attaches no value to individual liberty, nor considers the serious difficulties of protecting such sensitive data on a widespread scale.

The functional argument made by advocates of DNA sampling beyond convicted criminals is that it increases the probability of catching repeat offenders - because those who come into contact with the police are more likely to be offenders.

"In its submission to the court - and in parliamentary answers and ministerial statements - the government cites data, suggesting that by September 2005, the national database held 181,000 DNA profiles from suspects who would have been entitled to have their records deleted, under a "no conviction, no DNA" rule.
It says that 8,251 of these individuals were subsequently linked with crime-scene stains, which involved 13,079 offences including 109 murders and 116 rapes."

The problem with such claims are that they fail to distinguish whether the detection of the DNA of a person was a determining factor in their prosecution - and, indeed, as pointed out by Genewatch, "not all DNA detections lead to prosecutions or convictions." This explains the reluctance of ex-Home Office Minister Joan Ryan to make definitive inferences from these impressive and substantial sounding figures:

"As far as we are aware, there are no definitive data available on whether persons arrested but not proceeded against are more likely to offend than the population at large."

Moreover, as pointed out by the authors of a report published by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics,

"There is very limited evidence indeed that the retention regime of England and Wales is effective in significantly improving detection rates, above and beyond that which may be achieved by retaining only those profiles taken from individuals convicted of a recordable offence (as is the case in Scotland), or by simply searching against stored profiles, but not retaining the DNA profile indefinitely. The match rates between stored subject profiles and new crime scene profiles loaded onto the NDNAD in England and Wales, which is 52 per cent, can be contrasted with that of the Scottish DNA Database, which has a higher match rate of 68 per cent. This demonstrates clearly that the more limited retention policy in Scotland does not necessarily negatively impact upon its subsequent match rates."

More analysis of today's ruling here, with the full judgement here.

Patent Nonsense

2008-12-05T01:19:00.000Z

Via the Volokh Conspiracy, an interesting new proposal for a patent:

"As many of you know, "patent trolls" are parties that buy up issued patents for the sole purpose of using the patents offensively to collect licensing fees (or, failing that, to sue for infringement) from 3rd parties...
In a new wrinkle, it appears that Halliburton, Inc., has filed a patent application claiming a patent for the process of patent trolling!"

Naturally, of course,

"Halliburton claims that it does not intend to "apply the technique offensively" -- i.e., it's not trying to monopolize the business of patent trolling -- but rather it "intends to use any patent that may issue from this application defensively to discourage entities that engage in such tactics.""

I think they'll find that they aren't the first institution to have the idea that they ought to be have a monopoly in deciding who benefits from the artificial, immoral scarcity of ideas. The patent application should fail, then, because Halliburton have no novel idea of which they were the originators.

Video of Craig Smith's talk now online

2008-12-03T01:15:00.001Z

View it at Google Video or embedded below.

Non-Fed central banks and the financial crisis

2008-12-01T23:43:00.006Z

Commentators on the financial crisis often bring up the role of the US Federal Reserve. By holding the Federal Funds rate so low for so long, it is argued, the Fed fuelled the massive increase in subprime mortgage lending that has been at the heart of the crisis. The Mises Institute guys like to go on about this a lot.

Brad Setser, whom I just had the pleasure of hearing speak at Exeter College, has another story. What follows is a very simplified version of it, but I think it retains the essential features of Brad's argument. In recent years, China and the oil-exporting countries have both had very large current account surpluses. The offsetting deficit has overwhelmingly been in the US current account, but there has been no great depreciation of the dollar. The reason for this is that the central banks of the surplus countries have been pegging their exchange rates to the dollar by buying up huge quantities of dollar-denominated assets. Central banks were mainly interested in safe assets like Treasuries (US government debt) and Agencies (debt issued by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae). They bought lots of these from private financial institutions, who then used the cash to invest in riskier assets like mortgage-backed securities. The rest, of course, is (recent) history.

A good summary of the argument can be found on Brad's blog, where he writes:

[T]he origins of the credit crisis cannot be entirely separated from the Bretton Woods 2 system — a system where many emerging markets pegged (or managed) their exchange rates at levels that implied large ongoing current account surpluses and the resulting reserve growth financed large external deficits in the US and to a lesser degree in Europe…[I]f central banks hadn’t provided so much financing to the US for so long — and kept lending to the US in dollars at low rates even as the United States (gross) external debt rose — the US wouldn’t have built up the same kind of vulnerabilities either. Remember, private investors, by and large, weren’t willing to lend to the US on anything like the same terms as central banks."

So it seems the monetary policies of developing countries' central banks had perhaps as much to do with the US housing bubble as the Federal Reserve itself.

The Double 'Thank You'

2008-11-29T19:39:00.006Z

Via the Adam Smith Institute, I came across this delightful Thanksgiving Prayer at Overcoming Bias:

"Dear Global Economy, we thank thee for thy economies of scale, thy professional specialization, and thy international networks of trade under Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage, without which we would all starve to death while trying to assemble the ingredients for such a dinner as this. Amen."

Which gives me a convenient opportunity to link to this plaque featured on Econlog, following Bryan Caplan's recent visit to Singapore:
More on the 'double thank you' phenomenon which underlies free trade and "with which [our] future prosperity must ever be identified," by John Stossel.

And, since it isn't too tangential, a statue of my favourite 19th century British free-trader, Richard Cobden, from St Ann's Square in Manchester:

Let my people lend

2008-11-29T12:20:00.002Z

"Internationally people say to me, 'Your prime minister has been transformed. His standing has soared.' People really do look to him like some Moses figure who is going to lead them away from this economic mess to the promised land."

So claims Peter Mandelson, in a surreal interview with the Guardian which came to my attention for other reasons. If any biblical analogy is suitable for the current Prime Minister, it is the role diametric to Moses: the Pharaoh of Egypt, whose reckless and imprudent government inevitably brings the plagues of retribution upon his people, all the while fixated on chasing and binding the productive element of society with ever higher burdens.

In justification of the recent Pre-Budget Report's plan to increase income tax to 45% for those earning above £150,000, Lord Mandelson offered the following argument;

"There would have been a public backlash if those who are so clearly better off and have gained so much in the last 10 years were not seen to be shouldering their fair share of the burden."

It seems like a rather easy line of attack to observe that "their faire share of the burden" is simply rhetoric, for which a government minister can substitute any level of taxes they want to. With well-defined property rights, people bear the costs of the damage they impose on others, as well as the costs of freely-contracted agreements: when political distribution is involved, they bear the costs others impose on them, and agreements made without their consent. The debt that governments have built up should fall on those who built it up, not on innocent taxpayers - as Murray Rothbard argued, we "have to rid ourselves of the fallacious mindset that conflates public and private, and that treats government debt as if it were a productive contract between two legitimate property owners."

This, though, was that originally drew my attention:

"Mandelson is already thinking of the future shape of British industry. In a speech next week, the Hugo Young lecture, he will map out a new industrial activism for his department, a role he believes British industry is craving. "They don't want us to pick winners, but they do want a route map.""

The worrying spectre of a return industrial policy, with select government favourites being guaranteed protection against the vicissitudes of the market, causing the stagnation and retardation of industries by crowding out innovation and competition, is the worst of all worlds. Hidden behind such innocous terms as a "route map" is the implication that individual preferences exhibited in the marketplace will be disregarded in favour of a centrally dictated destination. It is impossible for the government to objectively determine which industries and which methods of production best cohere to the diversity of constantly-changing subjective preferences held by individuals.

His efforts, too, in "drawing up plans to choose which businesses and industries are important enough to be saved in the event of their going bankrupt as the recession bites," sound reasonable, until it is understood that which firms are "important enough to be saved" - that is, those which are best managed and most financially sound - is already decided by the market. The mechanics of price discovery in the marketplace is the only way to efficiently aggregate the diversity of knowledge and preferenes. Any alternative mechanism to deciding which businesses succeed and fail in which government determines winners and losers is ripe for rent-seeking and special interest manipulation. If "British industry is craving" increased "industrial activism," that is all the more reason for the wider public to be concerned.

Nonetheless, in the credit markets, Lord Mandelson - financial guru that he is - seem to thinks he knows the correct lending policies.

"They have lent too much at too cheap a price for too long. But they are now overreacting to that in my opinion in too conservative and restrictive a way. They are in danger of substituting one set of problems for another, and in the process doing themselves further damage by underlending and not strengthening their balance sheets and profits in the longer term. They are close to cutting off their noses to spite their faces."

Perhaps so. If Mandelson has spotted a profit opportunity and wants to further experiment with lax lending standards, he's free to do so. Preferably, though, with his own money, not with ours .

Do as I say

2008-11-23T22:40:00.005Z

Via Instapundit, the Cato Institute's blog observes that

"When they move from Chicago to D.C., Malia and Sasha Obama will be moving from the prestigious private Lab School to the prestigious private Sidwell Friends school — Chelsea Clinton’s old stomping ground."

As every time that a politician's children are found to be attending private school (whilst the same politician proclaims the infallibility of monolithic state provision), there's an outcry in the media about the substantial fees - in Obama's case, $25,000 per year - of these schools.

"And while many reports will no doubt trumpet the $25,000+ tuition at Sidwell Friends, implying that this is extravagantly beyond what is spent in D.C. public schools, they will be mistaken. As I wrote in the Washington Post and on this blog, D.C. public schools also spent about $25,000 per child in the 2007-08 school year.

It’s not that president-elect Obama is against spending a lot of money on other people’s kids — he’s just against letting their parents choose where that money is spent."

There can be no doubt that, if the objective of education is to educate (and not to indoctrinate), parents should be empowered to choose which schools to send their children to. The discipline of the market, in a field where customers are especially sensitive to the quality of the product, is the only feasible means of achieving this in local conditions. The oft-heard complaint - that some children will fall through the cracks, due to parental indifference or the necessity of school foreclosures - lacks substance, unless alternatives procedures can be constructed that will resolve these minor issues without diminishing the dynamic and benign benefits of market order. Throwing more money at a problem - without decreasing the amount of state interference - invariably rewards stagnated methods of schooling and their entrenched special-interest advocates, at the same time crowding out better alternatives. Indeed, empirical evidence supports the stronger claim that if the state would simply get out of the way, private schools for the poor would emerge here as elsewhere without state-funding, unhampered by top-down curricula, state-licensing laws and government targets.

More on school choice at reason.tv:

Brian Micklethwait: Don't dilute your arguments, and don't bundle them together

2008-11-21T02:21:00.003Z

Last Friday evening, blogger and former Libertarian Alliance pamphleteer Brian Micklethwait addressed the Oxford Libertarian Society on the subject of "Propagandising for Liberty". The video of the talk, including the Q&A session at the end, is embedded below. It can also be viewed on Google Video.

Brian's talk was full of interesting anecdotes and digressions, and if you've got the time it's well worth watching in full. What follows is a summary of what I thought were the most important "take-home" points about how to spread libertarian ideas, as well as some other highlights.

What makes libertarians different?

Early on in his talk, Brian argued against using words with ambiguous meanings (a theme he returned to later—see the very end of this post):

[02:03] My only complaint about this evening's event is that you called it "Propagandising for Liberty"…I personally don't like using liberty as a synonym for libertarianism because almost everybody in the western political tradition believes in "liberty".

So what is it that distinguishes libertarians from other believers in "liberty"?

[04:24] We attach enormous importance to the idea of consent—more, by the way, than we do to the idea of harm…[Libertarians] often talk about the principle of harm (you can do what you like so long as you don't harm others). That's not right. Consent trumps harm, as is the case with, say, a violent boxing match. When you take part in a boxing match you are consenting to the possibility of serious harm being done to you…[L]ibertarians in practice don't believe in the harm principle, but I sometimes hear them using it without thinking it through…In fact, if you take the principle of harm seriously, you open the door to a world of government intervention…so it's a word to avoid.

Don't dilute your arguments

He then went on to set out his "first rule of propaganda":

[06:38] [I]f you want to persuade somebody to believe in something, the first step is to say it—all of it—to say what you want him to believe. And that may sound a crushingly obvious proposition, but it is very surprising how many people, although they might dismiss that as obvious and true, actually don't do that and conduct themselves in actual arguments in a quite different way from that.

According to Brian, many libertarians believe that in order to be effective propagandists, they must "dilute" their ideas, that is, to argue for watered-down versions of their preferred policies:

[08:43] It's rather like a drug dealer is supposed to behave—you give them a "gateway drug". The same sort of principle—a sort of "gateway argument" principle—is being followed…I think that is a very foolish way to behave—but why do people do this? I can think of several possible reasons why they might believe in diluted arguments as opposed to straightforward, honest, in-your-face statements of the entire principle. And I think probably the biggest reason…is electoral politics.

Brian concedes that standing for election on a radical libertarian manifesto would get you nowhere, but he argues that the rules of electoral politics do not apply when you are propagandising for abstract ideas. When listening to a politician, people are constantly screening for things they don't agree with, because they have in mind the scenario in which the politician gets elected and enacts their proposals. People are more open to hearing radical ideas from non-politicians, Brian argues, because there is no immediate prospect of those ideas being put into practice. Politicians must constantly be concerned with whether their audience agrees with what they're saying; as propagandists for abstract ideas, we can afford the luxury of adopting controversial positions and engaging people in debate. Outside the electoral context, there is no need for libertarians to moderate their positions. It may actually be more effective to present the most "extreme" version of a given idea. Firstly, setting out the most radical proposal expands the scope of the policy debate, and so makes smaller steps in a libertarian direction look moderate by comparison. Secondly, such arguments have a "shock value" which makes them memorable.

My personal experience is particularly supportive of this last point. When I first came to Oxford, I was a paid-up member of the Labour Party. I turned up to my first Oxford Hayek Society event expecting to disagree with most of what was said. The talk, given by Professor Pascal Salin, was entitled "The Ethical Roots of Liberalism". It was, as I remember it, a very "extreme" (i.e. thoroughgoing) presentation of "natural rights" libertarianism and Austrian school methodology. To the Blairite social democrat I was at that time, Salin's talk had tremendous "shock value". I still have a log of an IM conversation which makes this point abundantly clear. In it, I describe Salin as "this militantly liberal French guy", and mention that "a lot of what he said was utter ****". I was, however, impressed with his logical consistency—that he simultaneously advocated both economic and personal freedom. Salin's talk by no means persuaded me to become a libertarian, but it certainly piqued my curiosity in a way that a talk in favour of a 2% tax cut never could have. By the start of my second term, that spark of curiosity had led me to devour huge quantities of libertarian propaganda, and indeed to adopt libertarianism as a political philosophy. Two years later, I'm still not sure I'd agree with everything Salin said (I'm ambivalent about the concept of natural rights, and I think Bryan Caplan has it pretty much right on the Austrian school), but the point is that it was the radicalism of the talk that made me sit up and pay attention, and got me started on the road to becoming a libertarian.

Infiltration is possible

Back to Brian's talk. His next big point was that, although it is important to control your own media, it is sometimes appropriate to try to introduce your ideas into places where somebody else controls the agenda. He cited the late development economist Peter Bauer as a good example of someone achieving success in this manner.

Radicals don't have to be angry

The next big theme of Brian's talk was the prevalent but unthinking assumption that people with "extreme" views are necessarily obnoxious, and that only moderates are capable of engaging in well-mannered, reasoned discussion. He held up Professor James Tooley as the living embodiment of the idea that it is perfectly possible to hold extreme views (in Tooley's case, that private schools are more effective than state schools in developing countries) and at the same time to be a model of politeness and academic integrity.

Brian then went on to advocate the "conversation" model of propaganda over the "bombardment" model:

[26:22] I think the word "propaganda" suggests some kind of blaring forth—shouting, often electronically assisted—of an agreed truth to which the masses will be subjected. I think that's what a lot of people actually mean by the word propaganda, and why they don't like the word. I use the word in its literal Latin sense: "that which should be propagated", which I do not think necessitates bad manners or excessive decibels.

Separation vs bundling

Next came my favourite section of the talk, which was about the advantages of separating out different arguments (and indeed, different parts of arguments):

[35:38] There is nothing more annoying than having a discussion with somebody who attributes to you some opinions you hold, but some opinions that you do not hold…and says, "You believe all of that, don't you?"…Don't do it to yourself—don't bundle your ideas all together and say, "You have to accept all of these otherwise you're the spawn of Satan," and don't bundle together all of [your opponent's] ideas, and say, "Because of that one thing you've told me I know everything else you think, and that's rubbish." That's foolishness.

[36:47] One of the reasons that I liked doing pamphlets was simply that each pamphlet could contain a separate idea…[38:22] I can remember times when I would arrive at a conference with a bag…full of Libertarian Alliance pamphlets—about half a dozen copies of each one—and I would cover three tables with [them]. And people, including people who didn't like all of libertarianism by any means, would see things they liked.

[40:56] Don't make everyone listen to everything you have to say. If you do that, they won't listen to anything you have to say. Separate out the notions, let them pick and choose…

Libertarians at universities

The final section of Brian's talk focused on patience and optimism. Propaganda can take a long time to have an effect, and so patience is generally a virtue. However, he argued that universities are a special case where impatience pays off, and where the only real crime is to do nothing. In relatively closed communities like universities, messages "bounce around", and people often receive the same message from several different directions:

[49:40] [Universities are] great amplifiers of ideas if you can only get your ideas into them in the first place.

Brian argues that even a very small group of libertarians at a university can make an important contribution because of this amplification effect. This is why the efforts of Students for Freedom to set up societies around the UK are so important.

Libertarianism by the back door

I think the most interesting point to come out of the Q&A session was that libertarians don't have to get themselves elected to have an impact on policy:

[1:07:40] Politics is not only finding out what the public wants and telling them that you're going to give it to them. There is also the process that comes afterwards…

[1:12:08] The Adam Smith Institute, during the Thatcher years and John Major's time as well—and perhaps also during David Cameron's forthcoming government if that's what happens—they were very good at looking at the world from the point of view of politicians (also from the point of view of free-marketeers) and saying, "What are your problems? What are you trying to do? Maybe we've got a policy that will help you."

[1:14:08] You get this demand for ideas. Ideas are not just put out there—supplied to people, depending on how cleverly you propagandise—they're also sucked in to political decision-making, and often in a way that is out of all proportion to the number of people who merely believe these things or have studied them.

[1:16:57] In other words, there is a future for libertarian ideas if you separate them out and present the relevant ones to politicians.

Other highlights

Brian on soundbites:

[19:54] People who aren't eloquent hate soundbites, but they're jolly good things from a propaganda point of view if you can do them.

On the "Devil's Kitchen" approach to propaganda (in response to a question):

[54:04] I'm in several minds about that. One of the things I really loathe is fake anger…Pretending to be angry about everything I despise and warn you strongly against…On the other hand, there's something to be said, if you really are angry, [for] saying so.

On exaggeration:

[57:13] One of the things I really don't like is libertarians who confuse misguided policies—rather annoying policies—with absolutely catastrophically evil, horrible policies. I'm talking about the kind of libertarian who says something like, "There is no difference between Gordon Brown and Adolf Hitler." Yes there is. Don't say things like that—it just isn't true.

On technology:

[1:00:45] [Gadgets] are done really well, and that's because they're considered not really very important by the politicians, thank goodness. If the politicians cared about digital photography you can forget about cheap digital cameras—they wouldn't exist. Lucky is the trade which the politicians consider to be beneath their contempt…[1:01:53] We've now got politicians who are fascinated by the internet, God help us, and they're going to start controlling it (or trying to).

On vague political rhetoric:

[1:04:35] Electoral politics thrives on using words that mean literally as many different things as there are people in the room hearing it. A classic electoral word would be something like…I'm just making something up…change—now there's a word…Put it this way: I would rather be disagreed [with] by somebody who understood what I thought and what I'd said than to be agreed with by somebody because he didn't understand what I actually thought and said. I'm interested in spreading actual ideas, as opposed to merely spraying a kind of benign mist over everybody and the only clear notion is "Vote for me". That I find deeply dull as an activity and…very undignified.

Creative Destruction

2008-11-15T14:50:00.003Z

Via Will Wilkinson's blog, this piece by Megan McArdle highlights the underlying problems of bailing out firms - in particular, the proposed bailout of the Big Three automotive manufacturers - which would normally fail in a free market:

"But whatever your feeling about government intervention in the economy, or the correct level of income inequality, I think there's one thing we can all agree on: for the world to get better, things that don't work have to fail. We cannot keep alive every company, every car and every job that someone once liked, because that way lies stagnation and death. Places where production decisions are made based on how much labor they can consume, rather than how much value they can produce, make everyone in society worse off in the long run."

Which is curiously dissonant with her justification for the (ten times larger) bailout of the financial sector:

"In an earlier thread, someone said, roughly, "I don't buy on credit and my company invests on retained earnings. I can sit this out for a couple of months." The problem is, the effects of really rapid contractions don't last a couple of months. They last years. Can your company withstand the bankruptcy of some major clients with large outstanding accounts? How many people will it have to fire if its order book drops 40%? Can it cover its fixed expenses even on half staff?"

As Arnold Kling points out, simply claiming that "finance is weird" hardly suffices to explain the diametric position taken here. If the justification in one case ultimately rests on a pretend measurement of the degree of 'interconnectedness' of a bank, perhaps she ought to be less dismissive of the auto-workers's union President's claim that "the auto industry is the economic driver of our nation." On the other hand, she could bring the clear and compelling logic of her opposition to the auto-industry bailout to argue that bad business investments in the financial sector should be purged, not propped up.

Elephant in the Room

2008-11-14T02:54:00.004Z

Bush Warns Against 'Too Much' Government In Markets...

Wow.

Seriously?

The guy whose definition of fiscal responsibility includes increases in discretionary non-defence spending exceeding LBJ's retains any credibility as a fiscal conservative?

Who pushed for a government bailout of financial institutions, claiming that "a large amount of money is necessary to have an impact on our financial system?"

That people are still treating him - as well as Commissar Greenspan, who oversaw the government price-fixing monopoly in currency - as representatives of the free-market is further evidence for Roderick Long's thesis that conservatives have succeeded in conflating free-markets with their peculiar brand of corporatism and state control, and that this myth has become widespread because it has been encouraged by the left as an easy target, and been unchallenged (or rhetorically defended as the lesser evil, reacting to Naomi-Klein-esque histrionics) by classical liberals.

As David Friedman put it, a few weeks ago:

Someone had asked another Usenet poster:
"How do you feel about the line, "I want you to vote for me, because I support smaller government"?
I replied:
1. It gives me very little information about what he will do if elected.
2. But it does mean that, since he is pretending to be one of us, we will get blamed for what he does, even if it has nothing to do with the views we support.

Or, in the profound words of P J O'Rourke,

"The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."

Brian Micklethwait: shameless libertarian propagandist

2008-11-12T14:52:00.007Z

The society is delighted to host Brian Micklethwait, prominent libertarian blogger and pamphleeter, to speak on the subject of 'Propagandising for Liberty,'* a discussion of the best tactics for advancing free markets and individual liberty. The talk is at 8pm on Friday, 14th November, at Christ Church, Lecture Room 2. Entry is free and all are welcome to attend.

Entry to the college (A on the map) is via St Aldates:

View Larger Map

* The title was Brian's idea. :)

Video of David Friedman's talk

2008-11-12T13:27:00.003Z

The video of David Friedman's recent talk at the Oxford Libertarian Society, 'Market Failure: the Case For and Against Government' is now online. You can watch it in the embedded player below or on Google Video. The video only shows the talk itself, but the full session including the Q&A at the end is available as a podcast.

Corporations vs. the Free Market

2008-11-10T20:50:00.007Z

Via Reason, there's an interesting new piece by libertarian philosopher Roderick Long at Cato Unbound, a Cato Institute project in which leading academics debate an issue of libertarian interest each month. This month's lead essay, on the subject of corporatism, challenges a popular myth about libertarianism: that it's a front for corporate interests.

"It is no surprise, then, that throughout U.S. history corporations have been overwhelmingly hostile to the free market. Indeed, most of the existing regulatory apparatus—including those regulations widely misperceived as restraints on corporate power—were vigorously supported, lobbied for, and in some cases even drafted by the corporate elite."

This reminded me of the case of meatpacking in early 20th Century America, recently featured in the Freeman (the monthly journal of the Foundation for Economic Education, copies of which society members receive free copies during their course in Oxford):

"As popular myth would have it, there were no government inspectors before Congress acted in response to The Jungle and the greedy meatpackers fought federal inspection all the way. The truth is that not only did government inspection exist, but meatpackers themselves supported it and were in the forefront of the effort to extend it!...
In the end, Americans got a new federal meat inspection law. The big packers got the taxpayers to pick up the entire $3 million price tag for its implementation as well asnew regulations on their smaller competitors, and another myth entered the annals of anti-market dogma."

Long makes the point that it is only by the deliberate conflation of the free market and plutocracy by the ideological enemies of classical liberalism that such a myth persists. And it is precisely this erroneous conflation that leads opponents to seek further regulation and control over the free market, which cyclically is captured by big business to be demonised as 'untramelled free markets' by the next generation of opportunistic politicians. As the eloquent P J O'Rourke testifies, via Econlog:

"The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too."

Read the entire piece at Cato Unbound. Some of it is a little speculative and conjectural for my taste, but there's much to be thought on. The other contributors, whose essays will be forthcoming over the next week, are unfamiliar, with the exception of Steve Horwitz, whose 'Open Letter to my Friends on the Left' does much to dispel the notion that the current crisis is the fault of free markets.

On a related note, the Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize was awarded at this year's Libertarian Alliance conference to Keith Preston, for an essay entitled, 'Free Enterprise: The Antidote to Corporate Plutocracy.' It can be found at the LA's blog.

Report from last Thursday's Free Kareem rally in London

2008-11-10T18:07:00.011Z

Last Thursday afternoon, student representatives from Oxford, UCL and the LSE converged on the Egyptian Embassy in London to protest the continued imprisonment of Kareem Amer.

As officials scurried between their cars and the Embassy, they were greeted not only by the London drizzle but also by defiant chants of "Free Kareem!" We also caught the attention of the staff working on the upper floors of the Embassy, who didn't seem to appreciate the vocal aspect of our protest.

Unlike last year, no officials came out to speak to us, but a young man from the adjacent office came over to ask who Kareem was. He seemed nervous, as if afraid to be seen talking to us. After we explained to him what we were protesting about, he expressed sympathy for Kareem's plight, but was (quite understandably) reluctant to sign our petition. A sad reminder of the shadow of fear cast by the Egyptian government, even over its own employees.

A couple of passers-by stopped to ask about Kareem's case, and kindly added their names to the petition. At the end of the rally, we attempted to deliver our petition (with 51 names) to a member of Embassy staff, hoping to discuss Kareem's case. We tried at the entrance at 26 South Street, but the man who opened the door resisted our attempts to hand him the petition as if it were a live cobra. We got a very similar reaction at the entrance round the corner on South Audley Street, so in the end we had to settle for posting our petition through the letterbox.

Many thanks to everyone who attended this year's protest, and to those who contributed to the petition. I hope to see as many people as possible at the next rally.

A note for future London protests: South Audley Street seems to get a lot more foot traffic than South Street, so we might catch the attention of more members of the public by protesting opposite the Embassy's South Audley Street entrance.

Tullock on voting

2008-11-08T21:40:00.003Z

This is a few days old, but it made me laugh anyway:

Via The Austrian Economists.

Tullock's real thoughts on voting; even for himself.

Proof that you can trust the government with your private details

2008-11-06T16:20:00.004Z

This really is first rate.

On a related note, the society will be jointly hosting an event with Oxford Students for Liberty on 'ID Cards and the Database State' on Friday 21st November at 8pm at Worcester College. Attendance is free, and the speaker will be Chris Rimmer, Chairman of the Oxford branch of No2ID (the organisation whose badge is placed over the Home Secretary's speech in the image). It was on his old blog that I came across this inventive method of undermining the database state.

The Wrong Side of the Public Good Trap

2008-11-06T02:42:00.008Z

"I want you to imagine that it's about 500 years ago, and you are one of a line of men with spears, and the spears are pointed that way. And the reason they're pointed that way is that coming at you is a line of men on horseback, and they've got spears too. You do a very rapid cost-benefit calculation... Given what everybody else is doing, what should I do? If everybody else stands, my best chance is to run; there are 3000 of us in this line, and whether I run has a tiny effect on whether the charge will succeed. On the other hand, if they're going to run, my only hope is to run faster... And so, all of us in the line rapidly do this calculation, we all run and most of us die."

"Welcome to the dark side of rationality. That's market failure."

So began a delightfully eclectic lecture on 'Market Failure: the case for and against government,' by David Friedman, libertarian heavyweight and Professor of Law at Santa Clara University.

[Update 2008-11-12: The talk is now available as a video.]

But back down to earth. Starting with a definition of market failure - in which either some goods are underproduced, since their full benefit cannot be privatised (the public goods problem - eg street lighting), or overproduced, since their full cost is not borne by the producer (the negative externality problem - eg pollution) - Professor Friedman illustrated how many such problems, theoretically posed as insoluble, had in fact been resolved by private agreement and clear definitions of property rights. The underproduction of television and radio programs, due to the inability to restrict who receives the signals, had been mitigated by the combination of advertising and content. Meade's famous case of beekeepers, who profit from the proximity to agricultural land but who cannot be made to bear the cost thereof, is found to be resolved by contractual agreements between farmers and beekeepers. Even more famously, the case of the lighthouse, which had been universally thought an archetypical public good requiring government intervention from Mill to Samuelson, was shown by Ronald Coase to have historically funded in Britain by 'light dues' paid by ship owners, not out of general taxation.

These imperfect solutions certainly pale into comparison with the possibilities of a "world run by an all-powerful, benevolent and all-knowing regulator" - but that isn't the alternative. Indeed, the alternatives to laissez-faire are beset by exactly the same type of problems as free markets are, but suffer from them to an even greater extent. On the political market, the cost of investigating all the issues in an election, discovering the various candidates' policies, weighing up the relative merits and flaws in each, and then queueing up to vote has a substantial cost. Its concomitant reward? "To increase by one the number of people voting for the good guy." There's an excellent video (which I thought was a parody, but turns out is in fact a genuine moveon.org attempt to rally the vote for Obama - though the customization is pretty cool) which propagates the ridiculous notion that one vote can be the deciding factor in an election.

Rather, "it's much more fun to say, 'this guy is handsome, I like him,' or 'this person is saying things that make me feel good' and vote on that basis." How apposite. This problem of Rational Ignorance, where the cost of acquiring information exceeds the expected benefit from it, stands in the way of an efficient outcome on the political markets. Indeed - it exacerbates an inefficient outcome.

Another problem in the political solution to market failure comes from the distorted payoffs for government employees, and the corresponding sub-optimal levels of risk taking in government regulated fields. Professor Friedman illustrates this by considering the incentives structure of a government regulator:

"Suppose you are working for the FDA, the regulatory organisation that decides whether it's legal to introduce a new medical drug onto the market. You say to yourself, 'There is a new medical drug. We don't yet know for sure if it's safe. If it's safe, it'll safe quite a lot of lives. If it's unsafe it'll do bad things. Should I approve it or should I either reject it or insist on further testing?' And you say to yourself, 'If I reject it - and it was safe - nobody will ever know.' Because, after all, if it's rejected, we won't discover if it's dangerous, and while it's true that rejecting it will kill 1,000 people per year, that's a statistical 1,000 people. There won't be any person I can point at and say - 'he died because of that.' Typically, the new drug means that instead of curing 52% we now cure 55%. Nobody knows who the 3% would have been cured. On the other hand, what happens if I approve the drug and it turns out to have serious bad effects. The answer is, my career is over. Can you say thalidomide?

The rational individual decision to 'play safe' by regulators therefore causes them to persistently err, without the proper feedback mechanism - the opportunity to profit - to incentivise making correct decisions.

A third instance of government failure can be seen by considering the parallel of a popular concern about the free market - monopoly and market dominance. Free trade, it is acknowledged near-universally amongst economists, is almost always beneficial to the country that practises it. Despite this, there are only two periods of substantially free trade in history: post-Corn-Laws 19th century Britain and post-war Hong Kong. This is explained by the concentration of special interests - agricultural lobbyists, automotive groups, trade unions &c - who can exploit the political machinery to use coercion against their competitors, from which they reap the majority of the benefit. In contrast, the cost of these policies is dispersed amongst a general public, each member of which pays fractionally more for goods than would be the case under free trade. Each additional cost being small, it isn't worth the individual effort to oppose it. But the combined cost of a tariff across the entire population is substantial, raising prices domestically and weakening exporting sectors of the economy, which have fewer customers due to less trade between domestic citizens and foreigners in the protected goods. So,

"when people say, 'an auto tariff is needed to protect American workers,' I say, 'Yes, it's needed to protect American workers from American farmers.' So the effect of an auto tariffs is that in situations where it's cheaper to grow cars [by exporting agricultural products and importing cars with the income] than to build them, we still build them."

It is the dispersion of costs that the political process permits - far wider than most externalities of private exchanges - that explains a remarkable paradox observed by Gary Becker: in countries with small agricultural populations, farmers are greatly subsidised; in countries with large agricultural populations, they are heavily taxed. That the farmers are a concentrated interest in the former case, and that the volatile urban masses, who benefit from redistribution from dispersed farmers, are concentrated in the latter case is the most compelling explanation of the extraordinary negative correlation between the number of farmers and the degree of agricultural subsidy.

Professor Friedman concludes with a clear and compelling statement:

"Market failure indeed exists on ordinary private markets, and prevents them from reaching the ideal result; but it not only exists, but is endemic, on political markets. Market failure is really coming because I'm taking an action in which a sizeable part of the cost or benefit is going to other people. If you think about the markets on which political decisions are made - the market where we elect politicians, or the market where politicians trade favours and such - almost every case, the people making the decisions are bearing a negligible fraction of the cost or receiving a negligible fraction of the benefit... If what you're considering is, 'Should the production of food, automobiles, schooling or anything else, be handled by a private market or by the government?,' the logic of this argument is that market failure will result in both doing a less than perfect job, but it is likely to have much more serious problems for the political option."

Following the main talk, there is a wide-ranging questions session, taking in topics as diverse as pirate democracy, life extension, nanotechnology, selling citizenships, private law enforcement, Saga-period Iceland, direct democracy, the psychology of voting, Sarah Palin, prayer and Usenet (to the latter of which Professor Friedman is a prolific contributor).

One particular remark from the questions is memorable for its sense of proportion:

"As catastrophes go, global warming is a pretty wimpy catastrophe. Global warming, on current estimates, in 100 years, is going to raise sea levels by a foot or two, and raise the temperature of the earth by about 3 degrees centigrade... That could be bad for some people - it might even be bad on net, we don't really know. It could be good for some people, certainly bad for some. [gestures to his new book, Future Imperfect] I've got three different technologies that could wipe out our species in less than 100 years."

Free Kareem rally in London on Thursday, 6 November

2008-10-31T16:21:00.008Z

This coming Thursday, 6 November 2008 marks the completion of Kareem Amer's second year in prison. Kareem is a 24-year-old Egyptian student imprisoned for a total of four years for the simple act of expressing his opinions on his blog. His alleged "crimes" were: "defaming Egypt's President, incitement to hate Islam, and highlighting inappropriate aspects that harm the reputation of Egypt." While in prison, Kareem has been confined to his cell, denied access to visitors, had his books confiscated, and suffered beatings at the hands of other inmates and prison guards.

Protests against Kareem's continued imprisonment will be held in several cities around the world. There are currently eight cities confirmed and four others being considered (updates will be posted to the Free Kareem blog). Anyone who cares about freedom of speech and religion should try and attend one of the protests if they can.

The London protest will begin at 14:00 outside the Egyptian Embassy at 26 South Street, W1K 1DW. At 14:40, we will make the 20-minute walk down to the Egyptian Consulate at 2 Lowndes Street, SW1X 9ET. This is where people come to collect their visas, so hopefully by protesting there we will draw wider attention to Kareem's cause. Visa collections end at 16:00, after which we will head back to the Embassy to continue our demonstration and submit a petition for Kareem's immediate release. Depending on numbers and interest, we may go for drinks or a meal afterwards.

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It would be great to see as many people at the rally as possible. There's no pressure to stay for the whole protest - even if you can only make it for half an hour, your support will be very much appreciated. If you can't get to London on Thursday, but would still like to take part, please send me your name, affiliations and any messages of support and I'll add them to the petition. If you are planning to attend, please join the Facebook event (and invite all your friends!). If you want to contact me on the day (for example if you're planning to join halfway through and want to know where we are), email me and I'll send you my mobile number. My email address is andrew [dot] gimber [at] balliol [dot] ac [dot] uk.

A group of us will be taking the Oxford Tube or espress down to London. A student day/next day return ticket costs £13, but you won't need to pay for travel in London because the Marble Arch bus stop is very near the Egyptian Embassy. We'll be meeting at 12:00 noon at the Queen's Lane bus stop in Oxford. If you're in Oxford and you'd like to join us, email me so we know to wait for you.