Jock's OXFr33? Blog

If you think the state "could do better" at...

Jock — Sun, 27 May 2012 18:12:23 +0000

Lots of people I know at least seem to think the state “could do better” at delivering services such as education. Many even think there is room for improvement in things like health care. Not a few “tut tut” at how many potholes or death trap pavements they stumble across.

Some might even suggest that introducing a little “healthy competition”, whether for profit or not (or even self-organised such as home schooling), might induce some improvement in the state provided equivalent services. But for me, that leaves an enormous elephant in the room that people dare not, in general, even look at:

If you think that the state “could do better” at these relatively simple things, why on earth do you think the state is at all competent to do the really big, complicated things such as “run the economy” to ensure as many people as possible have the economic means to sustain themselves or determine right from wrong in the form of laws and the administration of justice?

And even if you do for some perverse reason think that whilst it may be hopeless at getting a bunch of eleven year olds to read well it can choose accurately exactly what businesses to support to ensure as many people as possible have jobs they enjoy, why do you think that electing rank amateurs to do the job would give the best chance of them doing it properly?

No, if you think a little competition to the great state monopoly can be good in the relatively trivial things it purports to provide, shouldn’t you also think that applies even more so when it comes to issues of live and death, freedom, justice and economics? Shouldn’t you, in short, be a market-anarchist?

On property, protest and politicians

Jock — Sat, 26 May 2012 14:09:04 +0000

So, in a refreshing change from coverage of the progress of some large gold Ronson lighters around the country, Saturday has been set alight instead by the news of several people eating cake in the street outside Deputy Prime Minister Clegg’s London mansion (his description, or at least Vince’s, not mine!). If they’re anything like half of the rest of Britain, his neighbours will be wondering who lives near them who can attract such a fuss, maybe a philandering footballer, or an infamous paediatrician. Those of them who have had opportunity to borrow a cup of sugar from the nice Spanish lady next door, might be wishing they had already privatised the streets.

The reaction to this has been interesting. Some of course think it’s appalling that, even if they loathe the coalition, a politician’s home should be “targeted” in such a way. I disagree. I used to be of the opinion that politicians are, after all, only human, should be allowed private space and forgiven for human foibles.

I no longer do. They set themselves up as extremely powerful people, doing a job that not only do I think is unnecessary but is usually evil, if not by design then so often by its unintended consequences. There is no shortage of competition for political power. We should rightly hold them to a higher standard and they should rightly be subject to a different standard of “privacy” than the rest of us. From some of the images it is clear they also have a different standard of “security” in the form of a great three deep line of police, to protect them from such an invasion of privacy, even though this is, presumably, a public thoroughfare.

However, privatise the streets and we get a whole different kettling of fish.

First, in order to stop and protest, you need somewhere on which you have a right, either of property or permission, to do it: a residential street is much the same in this regard as the private community owned and controlled access areas, lifts, staircases and corridors in some other kind of residential layout, such as a towering apartment block. As a resident I would rightly expect to be able to hold the management company, and its staff such as the concierge, private security firm and so on perhaps, liable if protestors accessed such areas to get close enough to my defensible private space to make me uncomfortable. As a visitor, you are usually permitted access so long as you conform to rules set out by the management company or the residents association and no more. I see little reason to treat a horizontal, ground level lay-out residential community any differently from the towering apartment block.

Second, if we did this, there would be far fewer of these political figures, if any, with such concentrated and controversial power over others’ lives, to attract this sort of a protest. Whilst it is not for the want of trying to gain more access to and control over our own private space, politicians justify and accumulate these powers in order to bring some kind of social order to the “public realm.” Reduce the reach of that “public realm”, and where more visibly than in the form of so-called “public space” - streets and so on - and you devolve power away from them and to the owners, operators and occupiers of myriads of different streets, neighbourhoods and communities. Successive governments of course tell us they would like to do such devolution but never deliver in terribly meaningful terms (precisely because it involves significant loss of power and prestige for themselves).

And finally, I wonder if, like millions of households up and down the country, chez Clegg has a pothole in the street or a sticking up paving slab (being a Lib Dem he’d probably have one made especially so he can pose for photos next to it if not). I know I have a few near me, waiting to trip someone up or cause damage to valuable property. And every time I side-step one I think what an awful system we have that if I make a fuss, I’m usually told something like “you’re on the list for resurfacing in 2043, if we have a budget for it”. Or that the next best I can do is wait every four years for someone to come along, promise they’ll do something about it and hope I put a tick next to their name in some election involving all sorts of other issues that may, once elected, take their minds off my ever deepening version of a sink hole outside my house.

When a developer builds a new row of houses, even without a planning officer to tell them so in a private law society, they are going to want to build a way for a potential buyer to get to and from the lovely house they built. If, as that buyer, you, and those you eventually sell your home to later, want to come and go along that street you are going to need to contract with the management company for access, and in return will expect a service level agreement that gets those pesky potholes fixed without having to wait to elect a sympathetic neighbour to a position meddling in others’ affairs whom you probably neither know nor care terribly much about.

Privatising the streets would be then what I would call a “win, win, win” situation - more accountability to those most directly connected to these spaces, less opportunities for power-hungry politicians to control things, and so fewer targets for protest disturbing their neighbours. The only remaining question then is whether the likes of Nick Clegg would in fact be able to afford to live in such salubrious surroundings and attract protest to his neighbourhood. I doubt it.

I encourage government to press ahead with privatising the streets, in the hope that they do not understand the impact such will have on their own power!

Do we need a Professor for the Public Understanding of Economics?

Jock — Mon, 21 May 2012 22:52:17 +0000

…or economists?

I was very lucky at the weekend to be able to get to the second of Dr Diane Coyle’s Tanner Lectures hosted by Brasenose College at the Said Business School in Oxford (I’m afraid, and maybe a little sorry now, that a good wind down drinking session with colleagues at the White Hart Headington’s Beer Festival took priority on the Friday evening!). I had only even noticed the event as Diane mentioned it on her blog which I have followed ever since noticing that her “The Soulful Science: What Economists Do and Why It Matters” was on our reading list for one of my economics modules last semester.

Anyway, it also turns out that on Monday morning she was on BBC’s Start the Week (apparently the Tanner lectures will be up on the STW website too) with another favourite of mine (though not ideological companion) Michael Sandel and Grigory Yavlinksy, so I’ve had what you might say is a double dose of Diane this weekend, alongside a fascinating panel discussion after her lecture on Saturday with Peter Sinclair, Kate Barker, Nick Crafts, Peter Oppenheimer and Dave Ramsden (see, I can name drop like the rest of them, but if you’re not an economist you’ll probably be glazing over by now!).

So, as with the Soulful Science and a lot of her blog, much of Coyle’s lecture, which was entitled “The Public Responsibilities of the Economist”, was about explaining what economists do, contrary to much popular misunderstanding that it is, as she puts it, to “go on the news/Twitter and pronounce confidently (albeit differently) about growth, austerity, the Euro etc”. That despite the fact that what most people see are neo-classical macroeconomists (or as I call it Voodoo Economics) who they may blame, often correctly, for not predicting the recent crash, or who seem to spend endless hours playing the politics of how to get out of the recession via macroeconomic means (Keynesian or neo-liberal policy), economics has actually come a long way, largely “under the radar” in sub-disciplines like Behavioural Economics, in better analysis of real world events and problems.

Coyle is, of course, an applied microeconomist and seems, like me, to have a slightly dim view of standard neoclassical macro. Economic analyses, especially of these newer schools that are successfully integrating concepts of value (if not happiness exactly, then at least things like generational equity, environmental value, civic value, that Michael Sandel bemoans the loss of in his new book) other than the monetary value of the assumed rational markets of the neoclassicals, do play an important part in policy and ought to be more celebrated. Instead, people get into arguments with anyone called an “economist” because they are assumed to have a political position they are promoting rather than an objective analysis to offer.

Coyle offered the example of the spat in the Lancet last autumn between Allyson Pollock and economists writing that there was evidence that market reforms could make a positive difference in health care, albeit with significant provisos. Provisos that people like Pollock largely ignored because they were focussing on the possible misunderstanding that these economists were in fact just acting as “policy based evidence” for the government’s NHS plans.

In order to better educate the wider public in science issues, we have Professors of the Public Understanding of Science, some of whom have been fantastic, others of whom may arguably have used these posts to promote their own contentious points of view. Science is of course extremely important. But so is economics. It pervades everything we do. Maybe we need a similar Professor for the Public Understanding of Economics. I nominate Dr Diane Coyle if so!

Or maybe we're content to reduce public education about economics to this sort of politically loaded "spin".

If you are interested, here is the unedited mind map I made during Diane's lecture on Saturday. The Headington beerfest made me far too woozy to continue the same through the equally illuminating panel discussion unfortinately!

The Non Aggression Principle and Psychological Harm

Jock — Mon, 21 May 2012 22:45:53 +0000

An issue has just come up on a blog I follow that I wanted to respond to but find by Google searching that there is very little literature or guidance on it.

Does or should the libertarian "non-aggression principle" include psychological harm? The context in which the question arises is a discussion of torture short of physical violence resulting in visible, physical injury. So, apart from the being locked up part, which of course would be coercion and violence, would playing loud noise for prolonged periods with the intent of inducing some kind of psychological response ("breaking" a victim to make him talk for instance), forcing them to stay in a brightly lit room, or confusing them by forcing them into an unnatural circadian rhythm through changing light and dark exposure and so on.

What about taking it further - into less extraordinary situations - would constantly yelling at one's partner, or one's children, constitute "aggression" in terms of the non-aggression principle? Such that for example retaliation on the part of the person so abused could be defended as self-defence against aggression?

I know it's all arm-chair theorising stuff. But the context was something close to an accusation that libertarians have no response to such psychological harms. My thought is that since the NAP is based on property rights, first in one's own body and concomitant to that in one's acquired physical property, then any action that causes you to be no longer in control of your own faculties, temporarily or permanently, amounts to an aggressive act.

Yes, perhaps harder to prove, but where it can be proven it would surely be grounds for successfully claiming the right to act in self-defence when countering it?

Your Stateless Society Needs YOU!

Jock — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:54:15 +0000

By the wonders of the interwebs I was chatting on Facebook with a friend from school I hadn’t been in touch with for more than quarter of a century last night (that does make me feel old!). We had discovered via a Facebook alumni group that another of our number is an ex Royal Marines colonel and Special Boat Service chief and now “head of global security” at a private security and defence contractor and I made a comment about him maybe being a good person to have known when we finally reject coercive government and become a private law society.

My friend quickly replied that he had read Hans-Herman Hoppe, who has made “Private Law Society” his signature phrase to describe a stateless society (i.e. one based on the private competitive production of law and security rather than the monopolistic state legislative law), and we got chatting off the group for a while. Needless to say I was delighted to find someone else, and one of my best friends at that back in the day, thinking along the same lines as me.

And as we were chatting about whether, and how, we might one day be rid of coercive government, we got stuck on just how we could get from here to there. And whilst I suggested a few possible approaches that I’ll get onto, we did I think conclude that there is no one way, and that the process of delegitimising the violent state and building new civil society (or “Freed Market” as I prefer it) institutions to take over some current functions, would take the work of all sorts of people with many different skills, interests and motivations.

Not everyone, for example, who takes us a step toward eradicating the state from our lives need have that ultimate aim in mind. They need not share my belief, say, that however much some state intervention may be well-intentioned, and even though some of it might do a little good, those goods cannot outweigh the bads the monopoly of force causes in other areas.

They may simply believe that they can see a way of doing one thing better than the state in one area of life that particularly interests them. One might hope, though, that if they believe this about their pet policy area, they may accept that other people with a background in other areas might also be right. In other words if they expect the rest of us to accept their professional judgement in one area, they might at least reciprocate that belief when someone in another area proposes something.

Yes, there are what we might call “big ticket items” like political philosophers delegitimising the democratic political state as much as possible, economists discrediting (what an appropriate pun!) the fraudulent and destructive money system, but it also means novelists spinning yarns about possible futures; technologists building mechanisms to get round state intrusion in our lives or platforms in which new forms of society can develop; entrepreneurs and lawyers developing less confrontational and monopolistic arbitration systems.

It means educators learning from their own experiences and developing new pedagogies and curricula fit for people who may very well live well into the twenty-second century; creators of knowledge and art finding ways to make money out of their workwithout handing a big share to media oligarchs. And it means people in neighbourhoods and communities up and down the land telling bureaucrats that they can take responsibility for their own local affairs.

And what that all means is that everyone potentially has a part to play in achieving a stateless society. To use an old and perhaps tired analogy: how does one eat an elephant? Well, maybe it’s not one bite at a time but that one gets a lot of other hungry people round to help!

Is it just the line of least resistance that we continue to vote for and so legitimise politicians who to most of us appear to be useless at best and venal liars at worst when they tell us they can achieve these things better that we can if we just give them our support?

No place for Hayekian heterodoxy?

Jock — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 22:08:31 +0000

A comment on a Lib Dem Voice post about whether the state should borrow heavily or not to invest in “infrastructure” that would produce valuable state assets has got me a bit riled. Commenter “RC” wrote in response to a previous comment I had made:

“Can I ask, have you studied economics at university level? I’m just curious because I can’t believe anyone who had studied the subject in any depth or breadth and had to justify their arguments in relation to actual facts could actually believe in Hayekian theories.”

Now, I readily acknowledge that I am only in my first year of undergraduate studies in economics, but I have been reading around the subject for years. Unlike many who ought to have known better if you judge by the level of their formal learning, and long before I had ever really come into contact with any “Austrian” economics, I was predicting a debt/credit crisis of world-shattering proportions the better part of a decade ago as I observed the build up of debt in the system. You’ll just have to believe me or ask my friends since I wasn’t blogging a decade ago! You don’t have to be an Austrian to have seen it coming: left-leaning green economists like Michael Rowbotham and virtually all Georgists I know, saw the signs and often warned about it.

As it happens, my comment about Hayek was not about the Austrian Business Cycle anyway, I merely mention I had predicted the financial crisis on my own to show that one doesn’t need to be “schooled” in conventional academic economics to be able to understand something about the subject (and possibly, dare I say it, be better able to see the wood for the trees as a result of that unschooling). Indeed I still maintain, after just over half a semester of Macroeconomics that it would almost be better if people weren’t so schooled because we are spoon-fed statist economic voodoo and would not even know to look at monetary inflation as a predictor of booms and busts.

In fact I was responding to someone who had asked me whether I was advocating a “return to the Gold Standard”, and, as I have mentioned before here, I said I was not a “gold bug” but a “free money” advocate like Hayek, which was what prompted RC’s comment above. One suspects that RC might have had less trouble if I were advocating, let’s say, a more statist solution like the “Positive Money” idea (which I used to), James Robertson’s “Creating New Money (pdf)” (which I used to), Social Credit (which I don’t, but at least I largely understand it which I’ll bet most conventionally educated economists don’t since we don’t seem to be taught any alternatives to the mainstream macroeconomic orthodoxy, let alone more wacky-cranky ones), or the non-statist Proudhon and Warren’s “Mutual Banking” (which I still do)

No, I was merely advocating the idea that Hayek put forward for a “A Free Market Monetary System” as opposed to supporting outright a commodity backed system. Maybe RC simply resiles from anything in which Hayek’s name is mentioned. It seems to me that it’s pretty low to say that nobody with formal education in economics can possibly believe such heterodox ideas relate to or explain the “real world” as those put forward by one of the greatest names in the Economics academy of the last hundred years.

Let’s face it, by and large it has been (a variety of schools of) heterodox economics that have both predicted this bust and proposed a number of remedies that might both solve the problem and prevent a recurrence in future. Whilst even those in the mainstream of macroeconomic thought “running” the country have been claiming to have “ended boom and bust” and patted themselves on the back for having created “the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in history” through the inflation of asset bubbles and loose money policies and that more of the same will somehow dig us out of the situation.

Fortunately, a later commenter came to my rescue by pointing out that both Vince Cable and Meghnad Desai - both of whom are very much to the leftward end of mainstream orthodoxy - have publicly opined that “in modern times, the best analysis has come from Friedrich Hayek” and that “the current crisis is very much a Hayekian crisis” and that both have, indubitably, “studied economics at university level.”

There, I’m glad I got that off my chest! FYRC, whoever you are!

Macroeconomic Voodoo

Jock — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:03:17 +0000

So, I’ve sat through nine weeks now of Macroeconomics lectures and seminars: there’s not many of us who have not missed a week! I’ve turned in what must rank as the weakest essay in defence of orthodox macroeconomic monetary policy imaginable. And only now have I discovered the perfect antidote to this fiction in the form of Detlev Schlichter’s “Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown.”

If that sounds a little apocalyptic I can say I am three quarters of the way through so far and have not reached the apocalypse, but what I have read so far is a very readable, easily understood exposé of the fundamental problems of mainstream macroeconomics. It ought to be if not compulsory then at least strongly recommended reading for anyone on a Macroeconomics 101 type course. And whilst I myself am no “gold bug” as Schlichter seems to be (and certainly not a fan of even commodity money if still administered by the state) - I would prefer the free market to decide what form money should take - the lessons from the book could be used to assist such a free money marketplace decide what was working well or not.

If, like me, you kind of knew there was something inherently wrong with quantitative easing or interest rates so low that no ordinary saver is even inflation proofed by them but could not explain it, Schlichter makes it very clear. If you felt deep down that all these macroeconomic indicators that politicians and the media commentators get all excited about every month, economic growth, money supply, inflation and the like, seem not to reflect the world you inhabit, this book reveals why.

And it is a tale that should make you angry. Angry that whenever someone pulls those macroeconomic “levers” someone always loses out. And, as we have seen with bank bailouts and quantitative easing these past few years, it’s not the bankers or the powers that be that lose out, but individuals and businesses, usually those individuals who can least afford to lose out and those small and medium businesses with least connection to the corridors of power.

Macroeconomic policies, tinkering with money supply and interest rates and so on, are a gigantic fraud perpetrated by the powerful and well connected, politicians, bankers and economists, against the poorest and least well connected. They - those politicians, bankers and economists - must know this yet still they go on fleecing the innocent. They teach it as economic orthodoxy as if there is no alternative, and so a new generation of undergraduates is inducted into this dismal “science”.

The New York Times currently has a fascinating and timely debate going on about how we should change the way we teach economics in universities to reflect the huge turmoil of the past few years. By pure coincidence this is something I raised at my economics department student reps’ meeting the other day. Whilst I am no great fan of Robert Skidelsky as a great defender of Keynsianism, I wholeheartedly echo his call to “make economic history and the history of economic thought compulsory in all undergraduate teaching of economics.” And as a fellow Austrian, I like Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s idea that “we would have great jumps in knowledge if we avoided teaching [currently fashionable] models, and replaced them with anything, even gardening classes”.

I now understand, thanks to Schlichter, why Joe Salerno would claim that as a result of the financial crisis, macroeconomics is dead. For the sake of future generations it needs cremating, quickly, in our universities, before even one more cohort of graduates goes out into the world to practice its black magic against the real people and businesses in the real economy.

Surveillance, Society and Revolution

Jock — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 07:20:29 +0000

I’m sure I’ve quoted this before in a post but it seems apposite again in these dark days of tales of yet more government noseying about in our private business. Lest you think the state’s desire to spy on its citizens is anything new the following was penned by one of my political heroes Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in his “General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century” in 1851:

“To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. And to think that there are democrats among us who pretend that there is any good in government…”

Who knew that the “Big Society Network” was just something to be monitored and snooped upon? You ask us, the governed, to trust you, the government. Yet all you want to do is spy on us. We get told everywhere that if we don’t like the idea of this innocent surveillance we must have something to hide. Not true, we simply value our privacy. You, on the other hand, are scheming, suspicious, distrustful even of the people who put you in power. Well you might be, for as a result of your actions we will soon be so angry that there will be nothing you can do to win back our trust or faith in government.

It seems we need that revolution as much if not more today than France did in 1851.

“No more Authority! That is to say further: free contract in place of arbitrary law; voluntary transactions in place of the control of the State; equitable and reciprocal justice in place of sovereign and distributive justice; rational instead of revealed morals; equilibrium of forces instead of equilibrium of powers; economic unity in place of political centralization. Once more, I ask, is not this what I may venture to call a complete reversal, a turn-over, a Revolution?”

Scumbags the lot of you. Piano wire is too valuable to waste on you!

Morals Bar rumours: the truth is simpler than you think

Jock — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 22:12:43 +0000

Before I restart blogging on economics and politics and the like, a quick one on the saga that is Morals Bar.

Rumour has reached me that the reason for the bar closing has something to do with a relationship gone wrong between two people somehow involved in managing or running the bar.

Well, I suppose the gossip mill was bound to create its own version of events, but I’m afraid the reason for the bars’ demise (and I use the apostrophe there deliberately because you cannot separate the closure of Morals from the earlier closure of Harts or the Venue at Headington Hill and indeed the transfer of the shops to the catering contractor) is much more mundane.

It is all down to historical mismanagement by the Students Union. Most, if not all of it predates the current management and certainly the present executive. Four or five years ago, with turnover declining following a previous decision to axe popular club nights in favour of new formats the then executive wanted to try out, the union decided it must be to do with the state of decor in the bars, not the disastrous decisions to axe popular nights.

They spent a small fortune revamping the Venue and Harts and had earmarked more for Morals. The auditors pointed out after they had spent the first tranche that they weren’t taking enough money to depreciate that capital expenditure over a period normal for bars so they were told to write it off straight away.

It was at this point that a decision was made that the SU were not really cut out to run commercial facilities and that they could not afford to take such losses in future since this would impact on their ability to put money into student advice and representation.

Like I say, much more mundane than any fanciful stories about affairs and so on. I hope they will go no further. Apart from anything else it’s wrong to imply that the university or the Students Union would ever make such a big decision on the basis of personal relationships.

A grand blogging kilometre mark

Jock — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 12:13:07 +0000

It’s been a quiet month, chez moi, having put myself in a coursework procrastination purdah. And it was only on loading all my previous posts into my new copy of MacJournal, that I discovered that my previous post was in fact my thousandth blog post.

Now, I’m neither cruel nor conceited enough to think that there are any posts in those six years’ worth that you really need to read again. In fact as I look back there are a fair few I’d be somewhat embarrassed to write nowadays (my enthusiastic support for Chris Huhne perhaps most notable!).

But I did think it might be worth picking out some trends. Probably most notably, the volume of posts has declined dramatically. Like many bloggers I started by picking on things in the news on issues that interested me, like land tax, drugs policy, Lib Dem news and monetary reform. I’d sometimes post several a day, and in months like November 2006 I notched up 58 posts. February 2009 was a busy month as well.

But many months in the past couple of years have drawn complete blanks. But reflecting my growing disillusionment with the political system, I’ve tended over the past couple of years to focus on “think pieces” about aspects of how things might work in a stateless anarchist society.

So where will the next thousand take me? Well, I am particularly keen to follow up my idea of “Rigorous Liberalism” and to work towards covering as many “policies” for attaining the aforementioned stateless society. Hopefully with more regularity and frequency again. I might even celebrate in the next couple of months with a design refresh! And maybe some more audiobooks.

Happy reading!