Jock's OXFr33? Blog

Dear the "Liberal Left"

Jock — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 16:19:58 +0000

Normally I wouldn't want to lend such a misguided group even the few atoms of the oxygen of publicity this blog can offer, but maybe, since oxygen is lethal at high concentrations, this contribution might help to ensure that the breach of trade descriptions that is the new "Liberal Left" group in the Lib Dems is stillborn in the poisonous compound it creates from both words.

For unless they are simply caving into the pressure of Americanisation and the gross corruption of our political language and landscape that has caused (ably assisted by oxy-morons such as "Liberal Conspiracy"), there is nothing either "liberal" or "left" in cosying up to the British Labour Party. By doing so indeed they merely help perpetuate the idea that there are only two viable party forces in British politics and even members of a third party that could and should be distinct from both, as it has been in the past, will have to choose which of these two to which to hitch their fortunes. Or perhaps better put, to which to sell their souls.

There is room for a truly "liberal left" in politics: lots of room. Indeed I'd argue that it is the default human social order were it allowed to develop fully. This is true not just in Britain, but in a globalised world as a whole, championing freedom and cooperation in an era in which states view some emerging technologies and newfound networks injurious to their survival or influence and power and are becoming more reactionary as a result.

But it will never flourish by cowering under the wings of either of our right wing, statist dinosaurs. It will never be allowed to develop properly within a two party system in which the primary consideration is about achieving, maintaining and consolidating power for a political elite, ably assisted, as in the case of this "Liberal Left" ginger group, by a smattering of intellectuals, by manufacturing consent rather than governing by consent.

I confess that, in May 2010, I did see coalition with the Tories as the only way to ensure governance of the country (though I abstained in Birmingham that fateful day), and with it an opportunity to further at least some of the more liberal aspects of our party's policies. In retrospect, had we been behaving as conscientious liberals, not self-appointed power-brokers, we should have left both of them to hang themselves trying to govern on their own while we got on with the task of developing a liberal ideology fit for the twenty first century, and the next election. This essential work has been compromised by coalition, but nothing better will be achieved by swinging, like a dumb pendulum, to the Labour party.

To me true left remains, as it was in 1789 in France, anti-state, anti-privilege. The right is pro-state, whether that is "l'etat, c'est moi" of the ancien regime, the "by the people" state of more modern democracies, or the post-fascist big business states of our contemporary Labour and Tory parties here or the Democrats and Republicans in the USA. The true "liberal left" has no place in this except to expose it for the lie that it is.

If the likes of Linda Jack and Richard Grayson think otherwise, then perhaps they ought to put their subscriptions where their ideas lie and make the jump now, rather than draw out further the pain of reconstructing a party compromised by coalition by pretending Labour is a viable alternative for real liberals. It is not, and has never been, at least since the Fabians and the LRC originally hitched up their wagons together. And for God's sake, whatever shoots of change they may see in that party (which few others can see), the last thirteen years should have proven they are utterly untrustworthy as guardians of liberalism.

Macroeconomics 1: Should I be good, or right?

Jock — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:24:58 +0000

Tee, hee. We had our coursework assignment for Macroeconomics 1. I could have some fun with this...

Individual Assignment Task:

In 2011, Bank of England chose to maintain the Bank rate at its historic low even when the prevailing inflation rate was significantly higher than the targeted level. You are required to critically evaluate this particular policy decision of Bank of England.

Using available information on the UK economy from 2000-2010:

i. Outline the pattern of economic growth, inflation, and interest rate over the past 10 years.

(This task requires that you find annual data on these economic variables over the whole period. You must present the data in a table and you must also present it in a graphical way so that you detect any significant changes in growth, inflation and interest rate over this period. You should then comment on these changes.)

and,

ii. Explain and critically evaluate the policy of Bank of England in relation to inflation for the last one year.

(You should explicitly link the discussion to relevant economic concepts. You should keep in mind the interrelated nature of fiscal and monetary policies and use it to expand on the discussion)

Should I be good, and answer as no doubt they would like us to answer, or be honest and tell the truth about the failure of central banking, the curse of state manufactured inflation and the fiat money system?

Libertarianism is naturally green, George

Jock — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:45:10 +0000

A couple of weeks ago George Monbiot argued that libertarians must deny climate change at guardian.co.uk If he gets anything at all right in this article, it is merely implied: that libertarian types do not appear to articulate often enough our thoughts about how a stateless world might deal with environmental issues.

But the main argument of his article betrays a failure of logic that, in his determination to have a pop at what he thinks of as libertarianism again, leads him to reject one of the simplest and most just mechanisms for preventing, or ultimately punishing, environmental damage. And in thus blindly attacking libertarianism on false premises, he dismisses an entire ideology that offers more hope than the statist quo of creating a sustainable economy with better and more adaptable stewardship of apparently finite natural resources.

His logically challenged argument goes thus:

Libertarians (as if we all are of one opinion - a generalisation he'd probably denounce shrilly if it were levelled at any "right on" heterogenous group he happens to approve of) hold property rights as near sacred.
Libertarians would not presume to circumscribe the uses to which any individual or organisation puts its property.
Consequently libertarians can have nothing to say about people using their property to pollute their neighbours' property, the planet as a whole or to cause any other environmental degradation.

And on the back of this deduction he complains that libertarians can have no coherent response to any sort of environmental concerns such as climate change because we cannot both hold property as sacred and reserve the right to tell people what they can or cannot do with it.

Logically challenged? Surely not, someone as clever and erudite as George? Well yes, you see the very thing he attacks, the sanctity of property rights, is the simplest bastion against environmental destruction you could find. Because the inescapable (and quite obvious with a minute's thought) corollary to me not being able to curtail your "enjoyment" of your property is that you cannot use that property to harm my enjoyment of mine, or my property in myself.

Private property and equity

The ancient legal (Justinian I believe) doctrine of "sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas" meaning something like "one should use his own property in such a manner as not to injure that of another" had established the principle that one could sue another for damage done to yourself or your property or nuisance caused by another's property for centuries. And it appears to have worked pretty well at least until around the middle of the nineteenth century. There are lots of cases on record of firms being shut down or forcibly moved because of the pollution they caused, for example to people living nearby.

What appears to have broken the system a little is that the polluting effects of traditional "nuisance" industries such as slaughterhouses, renderers, tanners and the like was well known, whereas the Industrial Revolution brought challenges people, including courts did not understand. You could tell the horrible smell of a tallow plant was a nuisance, but the science wasn't up to deciding whether that cloud of odourless vapour coming out of your plant was actually responsible for damage to others and their property. In the US at least, it appears that the courts started to take a view on the economic benefits of a new industry and not having the evidence to prove it was dangerous sided with the businesses more than they had previously with the "|traditional" polluting industries.

But it's what happened next that shows that government mechanisms are less up to the job than the courts could be. Once science caught up with the idea that some of these new industries did in fact have damaging effects, government stepped in and imposed limits. But those limits tended to be roughly what the contemporary pollution problems were - i.e. that you could carry on doing what you had been doing but not pollute any more than that. Courts of equity would likely have taken a different view. Even though most propertarian libertarian types would say that if you owned the property before anyone moved into your area new arrivals would be "late comers" and caveat emptor would apply - you could continue running your polluting business as you had done - if something was later discovered to be damaging that wasn't known about before, there could still be a case to answer. Or if the business intensified its pollution or changed its pollution there would be a case to answer.

Perhaps just as important is to look at the environmental degradation in countries where personal property rights are not well defended. In Kenya, for example, source of many of our more frivolous horticultural products like mange tout peas, cut flowers and salad, which gets a lot of criticism for wasting badly needed water, most indigenous farmers can only rent either from the state or large land owners protected by the state. They all too often find that when someone appears with some kind of export revenue generating idea such as growing roses the government are quick to revoke tenancies and force people off their land to make way for these environmentally destructive uses. Same goes for gold and diamond mining in west Africa - tenuous property rights allow states to kick people off the land to make way for massively polluting extractive industries. At the very least if they had strong property rights these farmers could hold out for a decent price for their land.

The state promotes environmental profligacy

But libertarian environmentalism is not restricted to private actions for specific damage to the property of another. Apart from the problem mentioned above that when the state set limits they tended to become "targets" within which companies could operate more or less as they had previously, many state programmes actually promote or reward a certain level of environmental carelessness. The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster is a case in point - as is the entire oil industry. Governments have aggressively promoted exploration, have gone to war to acquire and protect oil supplies, and indemnified firms against losses or limited their liability. In the BP case they also insisted that BP only drill at the edge of their technological ability rather than in shallower waters that might have prevented such an accident becoming a disaster.

State run monetary systems too promote unsustainable production, built in obsolescence and so on, so that firms stand a chance, not only of making enough money to pay their taxes, but to keep up with the monetary devaluation caused by the state run inflation mechanism. They have to run faster, sell more, to stand still. Inflation erodes savings, so people will tend to consume more and invest less.

Private law makes change easier

But probably just as important as any of these, for hard core stateless society types like myself, is that with a private law society, people at large, the "demos" if you will, or its equivalent, could bring about more change, more quickly, than the tortuous process of international treaties and policing them. We've had Kyoto, Copenhagen, Durban and all the rest and still have no binding international agreement, let alone ways of policing them.

Under a private law society, where so much would be handled on behalf of owners by competing insurance and litigation organisations those who wanted could demand and probably pay for their insurer not to do business with proven polluters. Steadily a market consensus would grow, polluters would find their insurance against environmental claims became too expensive. Add this to the idea above that there would be no state to be in thrall to polluting businesses and there's nothing stopping the private, competitive insurance and litigation system putting a pretty swift halt to identifiably environmentally damaging business processes.

So, all in all George (not that you'll ever find this, but my International Relations lecturer might and pass it on to you I guess), I think you'll find that without the power of the state to promote and protect polluters and to prevent private property owners taking action against them by issuing them rights to pollute and so on, we'd have a much more sustainable economy and better stewardship of the planet. If that's what people want. And people like you keep telling us that that is what people want.

Fallacies of state: 1 - only states can establish, maintain and defend property

Jock — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:34:13 +0000

As they say, a fool and his money are soon parted. So, fool that I am, the day it came out at Amazon I went and bought a copy of Richard Murphy's "The Courageous State " (I wouldn't bother, but it's worth buying from Amazon if you do want it as it upsets him and some of his fans to have to do business via tax avoiders). At least it was a Kindle version so no trees died to sate my curiosity, though if they had I suppose it might have had its uses (appropriately enough for Murphy I seem to recall from RAF Cadet camps in my youth that they had some printed with "property of HM Government" on each sheet).

Anyway, this is not a book review, not least because I could only get about half-way through before I started wanting to apply hot irons to my eyes and inject mind-destroying chemicals through my ear-drums, and I had far more interesting things I wanted to read in pursuit of my economics course, which would likely piss him off even more if he knew I was studying the subject he hates and misrepresents so much (even if my academic advisor is one of those - actual economists - that support him and his ideas). But there is one fallacy in particular (of far too many) in the book that underpins his entire argument that I want to take issue with: that only an entity like a state, with a territorial monopoly of ultimate arbitration in disputes (Hoppe, 2011 etc), can define what is and is not property and also defend it.

It is this ability, or, as Murphy claims, unique right of governments to "establish, maintain and defend these property rights" (Murphy, 2011: ch 7) that confers the right to make laws, and to levy tax. Indeed taxation is, he claims, simply rightful payment for that very service of establishing and defending property rights. And because of that, the money governments collect in taxes based on that right to define property are not, as often claimed, "taxpayers' money" entrusted to governments but entirely and unqualifiedly governments' money to do with as they please.

On this basis, he says that governments do not need to be accountable to taxpayers, qua taxpayers, because it is no longer taxpayers' money: just as if you pay anyone else for a good or service you don't have any continuing right as a customer to tell that person what they can and can't do with what is now their money. He does concede, of course (he's a democrat, of sorts, even if he brooks little criticism of his ideas), governments ought to be accountable to citizens qua voters who put the politicians into power to run governments according to their policy wishes. But his entire argument that governments could and should be the underpinning of "The Courageous State" depends on this core role as sole guarantor of property rights: it gives politicians the right to be "courageous" (i.e. for him, actively interventionist) without having to look over their shoulder to see that taxpayers are approving.

The alternative, says Murphy, is that if you do not have a government with a monopoly on the right to define and defend property rights, you can only ever have a set of competing property claims, not rights, that are, ultimately, enforced at the point of a gun such as we see in the one example of a country without a functioning government, Somalia. If we don't want that, he says, we must support the state, its government and its right to behave "courageously" (i.e. to implement interventionist policies advocated by Murphy).

Now, let's humour him for a minute. If the only way of establishing a right to property is to have a single agency with a monopoly deciding what is and is not property, and who owns it; if the only way of peacefully resolving disputes over that property once established is to have the same monopoly agency enforce those property rights on owners' behalf; if the only alternative to this is indeed violence, ultimately at the end of a gun, then Murphy's right, you have, de facto, a state, that territorial - and coercive - monopoly of ultimate decision making. And who could argue with that? In fact, if these propositions are all true then, trade would be impossible without the state: nobody would ever know whether the person they were trying to trade with had the right to sell whatever it was they were trying to buy, nor the seller know whether the money they were being offered was worth something.

However, if these propositions are not true, if there are ways of "establishing, maintaining and defending" property other than through a monopoly state setting its own monopolistic terms for doing so that, if you do not pay you lose your property rights, then the state is nothing but a protection racket claiming sole jurisdiction itself at the point of a gun, or the threat of imprisonment at least. As it is commonly stated: a monopoly of violence. Indeed, the state would be a destroyer of property by expropriating it by force as payment for supposedly defining and defending it.

Interesting as it may be for some of us to rehearse the arguments of people like Murray Rothbard on the origin and nature of property rights (1982: ch 9 etc) or the long history of thought on how law to protect property can be established and enforced privately and competitively, from Molinari (1849) to Hoppe (2006, 2008 et al) or David Barker (2011), I suspect that Murphy and his followers would simply dismiss these as the theoretical ravings of the "rabid right" - even if people seen traditionally as on the "left" like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon shared similar concerns (1840). Fortunately we don't need to get into such theory at all. We just need to look at the world as it is around us to see that we do not actually have a monopoly "provider" of property rights. We live in a world with many nation states, admittedly each claiming a monopoly of such a function within their own territories. But when we trade with someone from a different territory we leave Murphy's cosy world of monopoly protection behind.

If we trade with someone in China, say, we take it on trust that they have a protection system guaranteeing they have a right to sell us the goods we are buying, and they take it on trust that we have a protection system guaranteeing the money we are offering them is worth what we say it is: we happen, usually, to call these our respective governments, though each is not accountable to the other party and neither is a monopoly guarantor to both sides of the transaction. If we don't trust these absolutely, we may choose to take out some form of private insurance or escrow (occasionally this is done through governments, via bodies like the Export Credit Guarantee Department in the UK). If we do have a dispute, we have to decide in which of the two jurisdictions we want to try and obtain legal redress and so on.

And if this can work passably well at this macro, inter-national, level of trade, where we have much less likelihood of actually knowing the counterparty enough to trust them implicitly from the other side of the world, there is absolutely no reason why such a system of competitive property and trading guarantees should not work even better at closer range within an individual territory, even between people in the same town or street. All that is required is for the agencies we each choose to be our own property guarantor to have arrangements with each other on how to resolve any disputes. Indeed, unbeknownst to most of us probably, we in fact do use a form of this all the time. Dispute resolution between parties to a transaction involving the VISA payment system agree that all disputes can only go through the VISA dispute resolution system with no appeal to "higher" authority (Caplan & Stringham, 2007).

So, a core assumption of "Courageous State" is both wrong in theory and doesn't occur in practice. Does this matter? Well yes, of course it does. Such artificial monopolies, enforced by the monopoly provider itself and brooking no competition, have no way of proving to their users whether they are in fact the best arrangement. And this particular monopoly is especially pernicious. This leads us on to a much bigger debate for which there is not the space here. I will simply end, therefore, with this extended quote from one of Hoppe's pieces already mentioned which neatly describes the potential problems with this result of Murphy's fallacy:

Among political economists and political philosophers it is one of the most widely accepted proposition that every "monopoly" is "bad" from the viewpoint of consumers. Here, monopoly is understood as an exclusive privilege granted to a single producer of a commodity or service, or as the absence of "free entry" into a particular line of production. For example, only one agency, A, may produce a given good or service, X. Such monopoly is "bad" for consumers because, shielded from potential new entrants into a given area of production, the price of the product will be higher and its quality lower than under competitive conditions. Accordingly, it should be expected that state-provided law and order will be excessively expensive and of particularly low quality.

However, this is only the mildest of errors. Government is not just like any other monopoly such as a milk or a car monopoly that produces low quality products at high prices. Government is unique among all other agencies in that it produces not only goods but also bads. Indeed, it must produce bads in order to produce anything that might be considered a good.

As noted, the government is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself. Consequently, instead of merely preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will also provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. That is, if one can only appeal to government for justice, justice will be perverted in the favor of government, constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding. Indeed, these are government constitutions and courts, and whatever limitations on government action they may find is invariably decided by agents of the very same institution under consideration. Predictably, the definition of property and protection will be altered continually and the range of jurisdiction expanded to the government's advantage. The idea of eternal and immutable law that must be discovered will disappear and be replaced by the idea of law as legislation — as flexible state-made law.

Even worse, the state is a monopolist of taxation, and while those who receive the taxes — the government employees — regard taxes as something good, those who must pay the taxes regard the payment as something bad, as an act of expropriation. As a tax-funded life-and-property protection agency, then, the very institution of government is nothing less than a contradiction in terms. It is an expropriating property protector, "producing" ever more taxes and ever less protection. Even if a government limited its activities exclusively to the protection of the property of its citizens, as classical liberals have proposed, the further question of how much security to produce would arise. Motivated, as everyone is, by self-interest and the disutility of labor but equipped with the unique power to tax, a government agent's goal will invariably be to maximize expenditures on protection, and almost all of a nation's wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection, and at the same time to minimize the production of protection. The more money one can spend and the less one must work to produce, the better off one will be.

In sum, the incentive structure inherent in the institution of government is not a recipe for the protection of life and property, but instead a recipe for maltreatment, oppression, and exploitation. This is what the history of states illustrates. It is first and foremost the history of countless millions of ruined human lives.

(Hoppe, 2011)

^{Barker, D., 2011. "Welcome to Free America". Lulu.com}

^{Caplan, B & Stringham, E., 2007. "Privatizing the Adjudication of Disputes", Independent Institute Working Paper Number 69, October 2007, available online at http://www.independent.org/pdf/working_papers/69_private.pdf (retrieved 05-01-2012)}

^{Hoppe, H-H., 2006. "The Idea of a Private Law Society". Essay at the Mises Institute, July 2006 available online at http://mises.org/daily/2265 (retrieved 05-01-2012) or speech given at Libertarian Alliance Conference October 2008, available online at http://vimeo.com/20696431 (retrieved on 05-01-2012)}

^{Hoppe, H-H., 2011. "State or Private-Law Society". Speech given at the Mises Institute Brasil, 2011 available online at http://mises.org/daily/5270 (retrieved 04-01-2012)}

^{de Molinari, G., 1849. "The Production of Security". Ed. cited tr. 1977 by J. Huston McCulloch. Available online at http://praxeology.net/GM-PS.htm (retrieved 05-01-2012)}

^{Murphy, R. 2011., "The Courageous State: Rethinking Economics, Society and the Role of Government". London: Searchlight Finance.}

^{Proudhon, P-J., 1840 "What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government." tr. Benjamin R Tucker and published New York, Humboldt Publishing Company, 1890. Text used taken from the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center at http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/ProProp.html (retrieved 05-01-2012)}

^{Rothbard, M. N., 1982. "The Ethics of Liberty", edition cited New York: New York UP, 1998 available online at http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp (retrieved 05-01-2012)}

Housing for the masses: government have been cocking it up for centuries

Jock — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 23:49:03 +0000

Yesterday I suggested that Grant Shapps and others ought to read Herbert Spencer's "The Sins of Legislators" about the folly of overburdensome legislation in regard to his proposal to create an imprisonable offence of subletting your council house.

However there's a more important issue in that great essay (touched on also in his Social Statics) about housing. No doubt most of my readers will be at least passing familiar with the work of Charles Booth who mapped out the extent of squalor in London's Victorian urban slums. From the horrors of his report arose, partly at least, the Liberal reformists, shocked by what Booth found, and ultimately too groups like the Fabians arose: all demanding, as they still do today, that "something must be done".

Well, Spencer lays the blame for that squalor firmly at the feet of ill-guided and probably venal legislators setting out rules that drove the price of new housing out of reach of the poorest and so drove them into the hands of lazy slum-landlords. I post the pertinent section below so you can all read it without having to wade through the entire essay (which is all about how legislation often has unintended but devastating consequences).

Before I do, however, I just want to say that this is still happening. We add bits and pieces to building regulations all the time. Often thinking that they will make the occupants' lives better, or merely because they have been lobbied by the likes of the renewable energy industry and so on. The current stipulation that every home built from whenever it is, 2016 I think, will have to be "Code 6" on the energy efficiency scale at a time when even solar panels have to be subsidised to make them work will just add to the burden.

But never mind - as Mr Spencer shows below, this has been going on for centuries. No sense in stopping it now eh?

Already I have hinted that interferences with the connexion between supply and demand, given up in certain fields after immense mischiefs had been done during many centuries, are now taking place in other fields. This connexion is supposed to hold only where it has been proved to hold by the evils of disregarding it: so feeble is men’s belief in it. There appears no suspicion that in cases where it seems to fail, natural causation has been traversed by artificial hindrances. And yet in the case to which I now refer—that of the supply of houses for the poor—it needs but to ask what laws have been doing for a long time past, to see that the terrible evils complained of are mostly law-made.

A generation ago discussion was taking place concerning the inadequacy and badness of industrial dwellings, and I had occasion to deal with the question. Here is a passage then written:

An architect and surveyor described it [the Building Act] as having worked after the following manner. In those districts of London consisting of inferior houses built in that unsubstantial fashion which the new Building Act was to mend, there obtains an average rent, sufficiently remunerative to landlords whose houses were run up economically before the New Building Act passed. This existing average rent fixes the rent that must be charged in these districts for new houses of the same accommodation—that is the same number of rooms, for the people they are built for do not appreciate the extra safety of living within walls strengthened with hoop-iron bond. Now it turns out upon trial, that houses built in accordance with the present regulations, and let at this established rate, bring in nothing like a reasonable return. Builders have consequently confined themselves to erecting houses in better districts (where the possibility of a profitable competition with pre-existing houses shows that those pre-existing houses were tolerably substantial), and have ceased to erect dwellings for the masses, except in the suburbs where no pressing sanitary evils exist. Meanwhile, in the inferior districts above described, has resulted an increase of overcrowding—half-a-dozen families in a house, a score lodgers to a room. Nay, more than this has resulted. That state of miserable dilapidation into which these abodes of the poor are allowed to fall, is due to the absence of competition from new houses. Landlords do not find their tenants tempted away by the offer of better accommodation. Repairs, being unnecessary for securing the largest amount of profit, are not made. ... In fact for a large percentage of the very horrors which our sanitary agitators are trying to cure by law, we have to thank previous agitators of the same school!

—Social Statics, p. 384 (edition of 1851).

These were not the only law-made causes of such evils. As shown in the following further passage, sundry others were recognized:

Writing before the repeal of the brick duty, the Builder says: “It is supposed that one-fourth of the cost of a dwelling which lets for 2S. 6d. or 3s. a week is caused by the expense of the title-deeds and the tax on wood and bricks used in its construction. Of course, the owner of such property must be remunerated, and he therefore charges 7½d. or 9d. a week to cover these burdens.” Mr. C. Gatliff, secretary to the Society for Improving the Dwellings of the Working Classes, describing the effect of the window-tax, says: “They are now paying upon their institution in St. Pancras the sum of £162 16s. in window-duties, or 1 per cent per annum upon the original outlay. The average rental paid by the Society’s tenants is 5s. 6d. per week, and the window-duty deducts from this 7¼d. per week.” —The Times, 31 January 1850.

—Social Statics, p. 385 (edition of 1851).

Neither is this all the evidence which the press of those days afforded. There was published in The Times of 7 December 1850 (too late to be used in the above-named work, which I issued in the last week of 1850), a letter dated from the Reform Club, and signed “Architect,” which contained the following passages:

Lord Kinnaird recommends in your paper of yesterday the construction of model lodging-houses by throwing two or three houses into one.

Allow me to suggest to his Lordship, and to his friend Lord Ashley to whom he refers, that if,—

1. The window tax were repealed,

2. The building Act repealed (excepting the clauses enacting that party and external walls shall be fireproof),

3. The timber duties either equalized or repealed, and,

4. An Act passed to facilitate the transfer of property.

There would be no more necessity for model lodging-houses than there is for model ships, model cotton-mills, or model steam-engines.

The first limits the poor man’s house to seven windows,

The second limits the size of the poor man’s house to 25 feet by 18 (about the size of a gentleman’s dining-room), into which space the builder has to cram a staircase, an entrance passage, a parlour, and a kitchen (walls and partitions included).

The third induces the builder to erect the poor man’s house of timber unfit for building purposes, the duty on the good material (Baltic) being fifteen times more than the duty on the bad or injurious article (Canadian). The Government, even, exclude the latter from all their contracts.

The fourth would have considerable influence upon the present miserable state of the dwellings of the poor. Small freeholds might then be transferred as easily as leaseholds. The effect of building leases has been a direct inducement to bad building.

To guard against mis-statements or over-statements, I have taken the precaution to consult a large East-end builder and contractor of forty years’ experience, Mr. C. Forrest, Museum Works, 17 Victoria Park Square, Bethnal Green, who, being churchwarden, member of the vestry, and of the board of guardians, adds extensive knowledge of local public affairs to his extensive knowledge of the building business. Mr. Forrest, who authorizes me to give his name, verifies the foregoing statements, with the exception of one which he strengthens. He says that “Architect” understates the evil entailed by the definition of “a fourth-rate house” ; since the dimensions are much less than those he gives (perhaps in conformity with the provisions of a more recent Building Act). Mr. Forrest has done more than this. Besides illustrating the bad effects of great increase in ground-rents (in sixty years from £1 to £8 10s. for a fourth-rate house) which, joined with other causes, had obliged him to abandon plans for industrial dwellings he had intended to build—besides agreeing with “Architect” that this evil has been greatly increased by the difficulties of land transfer due to the law-established system of trusts and entails; he pointed out that a further penalty on the building of small houses is inflicted by additions to local burdens (” prohibitory imposts” he called them): one of the instances he named being that to the cost of each new house has to be added the cost of pavement, roadway, and sewerage, which is charged according to length of frontage, and which, consequently, bears a far larger ratio to the value of a small house than to the value of a large one.

From these law-produced mischiefs, which were great a generation ago, and have since been increasing, let us pass to more recent law-produced mischiefs. The misery, the disease, the mortality, in “rookeries,” made continually worse by artificial impediments to the increase of fourth-rate houses, and by the necessitated greater crowding of those which existed, having become a scandal, Government was invoked to remove the evil. It responded by Artisans’ Dwellings Acts; giving to local authorities powers to pull down bad houses and provide for the building of good ones. What have been the results? A summary of the operations of the Metropolitan Board of Works, dated 21 December 1883, shows that up to last September it had, at a cost of a million and a quarter to ratepayers, unhoused 21,000 persons and provided houses for 12,000—the remaining 9,000 to be hereafter provided for, being, meanwhile, left houseless. This is not all. Another local lieutenant of the Government, the Commission of Sewers for the City, working on the same lines, has, under legislative compulsion, pulled down in Golden Lane and Petticoat Square, masses of condemned small houses, which, together, accommodated 1,734 poor people; and of the spaces thus cleared five years ago, one has, by State authority, been sold for a railway station, and the other is only now being covered with industrial dwellings which will eventually accommodate one-half of the expelled population: the result up to the present time being that, added to those displaced by the Metropolitan Board of Works, these 1,734 displaced five years ago, form a total of nearly 11,000 artificially made homeless, who have had to find corners for themselves in miserable places that were already overflowing!

See then what legislation has done. By ill-imposed taxes, raising the prices of bricks and timber, it added to the costs of houses; and promoted, for economy’s sake, the use of bad materials in scanty quantities. To check the consequent production of wretched dwellings, it established regulations which, in mediaeval fashion, dictated the quality of the commodity produced: there being no perception that by insisting on a higher quality and therefore higher price, it would limit the demand and eventually diminish the supply. By additional local burdens, legislation has of late still further hindered the building of small houses. Finally, having, by successive measures, produced first bad houses and then a deficiency of better ones, it has at length provided for the artificially-increased overflow of poor people by diminishing the house-capacity which already could not contain them!

Where then lies the blame for the miseries of the East-end? Against whom should be raised “The bitter cry of outcast London” ?

[Spencer, H. 1884. The Sins of Legislators, in "The Man versus the State, with Six Essays on Government, Society and Freedom". Edition used ed. Eric Mack, introduction by Albert Jay Nock. Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1981. Available online at the Online Library of Liberty and in audio format by me.]

Only governments can put you in a cage for breach of contract

Jock — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 01:27:51 +0000

So, there's this big hoo-ha that Subletting council houses could become criminal offence with the possibility, so either the Guardian or Grant Shapps, it's not clear which, that "penalties could include fines and possibly imprisonment" because "the rules were too weak".

What a load of nonsense. It's a breach of a contract. If your contracts are too full of holes, people are going to find them and exploit them. Just tighten up your contracts and enforce them. Nobody else gets to put people in cages over a breach of contract. Only if you are a government with a monopoly of violence can you threaten people in such a way with being caged up for a spell that the rest of us have to pay for.

It seems that this government's answer, as with the previous one, is "if there's a problem let's create a new criminal offence". They could do with reading Herbert Spencer's "The Sins of Legislators" before embarking on such a course. If they're too busy for that, they could always pop an MP3 of me reading it onto their iPhones and listen to it while they wait for a division bell some day.

Now there is an abuse that you could help with that's been going on for a long time: dodgy lenders who give money to people to buy their council houses, who then find they cannot afford small print charges and interest costs, who are then offered the "opportunity" to sell back to the lender at a much reduced price and then continue living there on market rent levels. Deal with that first. Hint: mutual banking, free money or some other monetary reform would make this much more difficult and solve a lot of other problems besides.

11/11

Jock — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 18:01:39 +0000

Since lots of other people appear to be doing something similar, I thought I'd take a look at my top eleven postings from twenty eleven. It's been an on and off year with some months having little blogging at all. I've been hovering around the 200 mark in the Wikio UK Politics blog rankings most of the year. It's my usual eclectic mix of stories:

In at 11 we have a post from October 2011, International relations: the problem's in the name, I did while feeling frustrated about an essay on one of my modules. I was frustrated that, as an anarchist, we focus on inter-NATIONAL relations and not so much inter-INDIVIDUAL relations.

At 10, from September, we had Planning Promotes Poverty, a rant at all the groups lining up to try and kill the government's National Planning Policy Framework, a subject I shall return to very soon. The NPPF goes nowhere near far enough to free up the system such that it will bring down land costs and ensure everyone gets appropriately housed without much or even perhaps any state support, but the so called amenity groups opposing the NPPF are entrenching poverty for millions with their objections.

At 9, from June, I was watching a "natural history" series about supposedly "pristine wildernesses" protected by things like national park status around the world, and blogged in Unnatural Histories: the failings of the state in microcosm that it showed how government policies' unintended consequences actually produce a sanitised, manufactured version of "pristine wildernesses" that would rarely be what would have happened naturally whilst often causing much hardship by displacing people and fencing off open country.

At 8, again from October, and again in response to issues in a politics module I wrote And what society is not… defending that hackneyed old saying from Margaret Thatcher that there is "no such thing as society". Society cannot exist without the individuals within it being free to associate and make their own decisions voluntarily.

In at number 7 comes Rigorous Liberalism and the Minimum Wage, yet another October post, which was prompted by a discussion I was having about whether the Minimum Wage was a "liberal" idea, and concluded that it was not - that the focus of my "Rigorous Liberalism" ought to be not artificially inflating peoples' incomes by taking resources from someone or something else (tax or minimum wage, say) but ensuring that all privilege and rent that artificially increases the cost of living and artificially decreases employment opportunity ought to be removed first, before we see whether we still need to make some form of subsidised cash support for the least well off.

At number 6, a fourth top spot for October, I read Paul Collier's "Bottom Billion" in response to a lecture on global development on my course and came up with a jolly scheme in The bottom billion: time for a take-over? that the plight of the bottom billion is so desperate and so intractable that we should put aside all the arguments about "democracy" and "self-determination" and allow entrepreneurs literally to mount take-over bids for countries they thought they could find economic potential in.

Onto the top five then...

At 5, October's fifth post, I wrote about how groups like 38 degrees and the Occupy movement with their claims to represent the "99%" show up Participatory problems for syndicalists? - that the fact that only the "usual suspects" can be bothered to participate in most political activity shows that it would likely be very difficult to achieve "consensus decision making" in an anarcho-syndicalist world.

At 4, this time from November, and in response to a questionnaire about attitudes to political institutions, trust and participation in one of our politics seminar groups, Don't Vote: It just encourages the bastards! wonders why, if people trust the politicians and institutions so little, do they continue to participate by voting and thereby legitimising the very system they say they do not trust.

The 3rd most read post of the year (according to my Drupal access logs at least and a little bit of nifty SQL querying), from way back last January, I picked up on a piece in the Economist in which I suggest that The Economist pushes "Rigorous Liberalism" for World Economic Forum.

In the runner's up spot, with the top two way out ahead of these others, comes "Economic Liberals" and the Social Liberal Forum's Straw-man, a response to a post at Matthew Gibson's "Solution Focussed Politics" blog and...

The most read post on this blog from 2011 was a suggestion I made back in April, about different ways of financing Higher Education, in Mutual funding for Higher Education.

So that's that then! I hope to do better, in both quantity and quality, in 2012 and as the ideas given me in my degree flow more freely!

"Economic Liberals" and the Social Liberal Forum's Straw-man

Jock — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 01:22:29 +0000

Thanks to Lib Dem Voice's "Golden Dozen" I stumbled upon this post at Matthew Gibson's "Solution Focussed Politics" blog that seems to epitomise the lack of understanding of what "economic liberalism" means by the sort of folks who side with the "Social Liberal Forum". Apparently there's some new research out from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (pdf) examining more evidence for the hypothesis in "The Spirit Level" that inequality within a society leads to damaging social and health outcomes. Matthew says that:

the debate is very important to the Lib Dems. The Social Liberal Forum endorse the Spirit Level and propose policies to promote equality, while those more economic liberals have argued that this is not a good strategy to pursue.

Indeed. If memory serves, the SLF was more or less established as a result of Wilkinson and Pickett's work. And ever since it has been building a straw man argument against "economic liberals" that says that our argument that more government, more "policies" to address the issues thrown up by The Spirit Level, means that we don't care about those issues.

In fact, Matthew makes the point several times, using the tired analogy of economic liberals as Tories by another name:

this is basically what the Tories have based their entire existence on – that people should be allowed to get rich and it doesn’t matter how much richer than those at the bottom

and later...

For those who believe in inequality and that it is a good thing this report won’t change their mind

…each time suggesting that economic liberals somehow equal Tories and that neither care a whit about inequality and are never likely to change. For this economic liberal at least, the main problem with the Spirit Level is not so much what its data purport to show, but that it (and this new JRF report) goes beyond reporting these "facts" and pushes the authors' solutions, their "policy suggestions". And in both cases these come from a pre-existing belief in the power of the state to change these inequalities through well crafted "policies".

It's not that I don't care about inequality, but that I don't share Gibson's, the SLF's, Wilkinson and Pickett's or Karen Rowlingson's (of the JRF report) faith in the state to do something about it. In fact, I go further: I blame the state for most inequality. I keep mentioning this quote, and it is worth repeating once again, from the Preface to Kevin Carson's "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy":

...coercive state policies are not necessary to remedy the evils of present-day capitalism. All these evils--exploitation of labor, monopoly and concentration, the energy crisis, pollution, waste--result from government intervention in the market on behalf of capitalists. The solution is not more government intervention, but to eliminate the existing government intervention from which the problems derive. A genuine free market society, in which all transactions are voluntary and all costs are internalized in price, would be a decentralized society of human-scale production, in which all of labor's product went to labor, instead of to capitalists, landlords and government bureaucrats.

While the sort that consort together at the Social Liberal Forum refuse to acknowledge we share common goals, nay, worse, portray us having entirely different, exploitative goals, there can be no real conciliation between us. If they stop building their straw-man, then perhaps we can unite around liberalism as our central passion.

Don't Vote: It just encourages the bastards!

Jock — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:47:18 +0000

Apropos of my post the other day about trust in the political system, in this week's Introduction to Politics seminar we had a little questionnaire to complete about trust and patriotism.

After questions like "how much confidence do you have in Parliament?" (not a lot, said most), "Do you regard yourself as a convinced supporter of a political party?" (very few, it seems) and "On the whole, are you …very satisfied…. Satisfied…. Fairly satisfied….. not very satisfied…. Dissatisfied….. with the way democracy works in your country?" (most said not very) we got "Thinking about voting. If there was a national election tomorrow would you vote?" where lo! and behold, most said "yes".

Even the seminar leader was surprised. Surprised not just at the overall lack of trust and confidence shown in the system (she's from South Africa and compared to there her trust in the British establishment is much greater than any of us gave it credit) but obviously also surprised that having shown such little trust most people there would go out and vote if asked to.

There were many different reasons: that if you don't vote you don't have a right to criticise; that it's the only system we've got so we should support it, even if we don't think we can make a difference; that we should be proud in the system even if we don't have trust in the people in the system and so on. Few did seem to believe they would achieve change by voting, indeed.

It's an age old debate amongst libertarians and anarchists too. Should you try and achieve change by joining in the corrupt, venal, illegitimate system you despise because it's the only one we have? That's where libertarian political parties come in. Is voting actually giving your consent to that system even if you loathe everything about it - even if you spoil your ballot to try and make that point?

I've come down previously on the side of P J O'Rourke: "Don't vote, it just encourages the bastards" (2010) but that a spoiled ballot, done properly, with a brief explanation of why you are abstaining is at least seen by the candidates and their agents. It will achieve nothing, but let's face it, the politicians are not going to go away just because only a few of us bother to turn up and vote. They'll just get a "mandate" on an ever smaller number of positive votes. So we ought to try to tell them why we are not consenting to their system.

Lysander Spooner concedes one possible circumstance (Spooner. 1870: para 2.8) in which voting might be acceptable for an anarchist, and that is if you can positively help, by voting, to prevent something worse, and I know a lot of people who think that is a reasonable way of thinking. I just think that the chances of your vote being decisive in that sort of situation are so relatively small that the credence you give to the system by joining in outweighs the potential for your vote to be decisive in preventing something worse, that it's probably not worth it.

Hoppe, on the other hand, says that if you could identify a policy you could vote for that is a step toward liberty, then it might be acceptable to do so, but that since political parties stand on a bundle of policies, out of many of which perhaps one is pro-liberty, the chances of being able to support that one policy whilst not advancing the state through their other policies are next to nothing (from a vaguely recalled lecture of his, possibly during a MisesU session).

Neither therefore offer particularly defensible reasons why one might vote. Spooner, in particular, ought to be recommended reading for this part of my course!

Oh, and I got a 62 (B or 2:1) for the first essay we got handed back in the seminar this week too. Not good enough for my assault on the Nobel Prize perhaps! But passable I suppose for four hours' work starting at four in the morning having not read the rubric properly and having to rewrite my original piece. 44 years of political socialisation was quite difficult to fit into such a short piece as those half my age had to. Well, that's my excuses and I'm sticking to them!

O'Rourke, P.J. 2010. Don't vote: it just encourages the bastards. New York. Atlantic Books

Spooner, L. 1870. No Treason No 6: The Constitution of No Authority. Boston. The Author.

Political simony

Jock — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 03:05:24 +0000

If there's a sure fire way of undermining the trust that, it is said, is needed for democracy to function properly, it has surely got to be making us all pay for it. If I was ever minded to vote again, the thought of having to pay for the privilege would put me off for good.

Of course, I have an interest: it suits my agenda just fine if, because of big donations from either business or unions, politicians are seen as venal, untrustworthy, policy for sale money grubbers. They are, for the most part. And the more people know it the better.

If political parties cannot live within their means, then what does it say about their ability to run an entire economy. What does it matter if they are bankrolled by the very interests we know they each kow-tow to anyway? Oh yes, that's right, they don't want us to believe they each have any vestige of ideology left, just that they can each promise us what we want and get their pensions afterwards.

People will always find a way to buy influence, just so long as there are people it is worth their while influencing: people with the power to do favours for rent-seekers. Reducing the amount individual donors can give hasn't prevented some people I know of finding ways of evading the disclosure limits by getting others to donate on their behalf: every time one door is closed someone will find another one.

The man currently charged with finding a new funding mechanism ought to know, after all: former member of the Midlands Industrial Council (itself a vehicle for hiding donations in the past), now "knight of the realm" and father of a Tory MP. The noise you hear is the revolving door spinning.

But if you try and make me pay for voting if I choose to do so, I shall do my damnedest to encourage everyone I know not to bother in future as well. At some point your legitimacy must run out for all to see, surely.