Taking up a theme from Prague where the big hitters of Catallaxy have been cavorting on the world scene, not to mention the table tops of the discos and the wine bars, What is to be done? as Lenin said before he got to work in Russia.
Who poisoned the wells of thought so the ideas of socialism, big government and nanny statism have become the default option? How come they are the orthodoxy that has to be constantly challenged rather than a collection of theories like Ptolemy’s astronomy and Freudian psychoanalysis that are recognised as ideas that were important in their time but are now part of the history of false trails?
As you would expect, the rot starts at the top, like Australian journalism.
Actually I was going to do a post on Aggressive Hedging which is a topic on the garden show at the moment but I realised that the Cat readership, coming back from church or the other devotional practices that we follow on Sunday morning to keep our minds pure and focussed on the higher things in life would not want to be distracted by trivial issues. In fact the matter became less trivial in Britain where the courts became clogged with cases of neighbours suing each other for damage and other kinds of disadvantage resulting from some particularly nasty trees that had become popular for hedges. Eventually when a murder and a suicide occurred the Government moved to legislate to control nasty hedges, as the NSW Government did for the same purpose a few years ago.
Fortunately that digression on tree planting has brought us back to the central issue. Trees have become sacred, and the natural order has been reversed, the natural order being a situation where you can eliminate or trim any tree on your property that you don’t want. Just to avoid the issue of native vegetation in the country I am talking about closely settled places. The building codes have over-regulated to the extent that you can hardly drive a stake into the ground without the possibility of the local authority taking exception, but if you want to take down any tree that you or a previous occupant have planted, then you need permission from the local green snoops to do it. It can be argued the Green councillors in rural Victoria have blood on their hands where they refused to allow people to trim trees that were fire hazzards to their properties. Tree worship gone mad.
Getting back to the wells of thought, a finger of suspicion points at the philosophers. Philosophy was always supposed to be the queen of the sciences, everything started with philosophy, which developed into science (natural philosophy) and in another direction into moral philosophy (economics and political science). There are two aspects to this (1) what do we find in the Great Philosophers, above all in Plato, given that the history of western philosophy has been described as footnotes to Plato (and Aristotle)? And (2) what do you learn if you do Philosophy at uni or go into your local public library and read the Philosophy books (which are likely to be filed adjacent to Religion, so be careful).
This post will soon be too long for busy Cats who have to finish the chores in time for the Bolt Report, so I will finish with the comment that in the works of Plato we find some very nasty mines or booby traps for classical liberals. Like hatred of democracy and distrust of the common people “they fill their bellies like the beasts”, we find the leader principle elevated to the first order of political business (who shall rule?), we find a mode of thought that focusses too much on the “essential meaning of terms” instead of problem-solving and we find the principle of collectivist justice which is the driver of socialism and the nanny state. The antidote is to read and promulgate the ideas of the best liberal critics of those ideas, Lord Acton, J S Mill, Jacques Barzun, Ludwig von Mises, Hayek, Isiah Berlin, R. G Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott, Karl Popper. But how many academics do you know who even have copies of their books on their shelves? Or know what they look like. Thank god for Hayek.
The Left wing agenda is easy to sell. You tell those with less, that they deserve more, then you set up big government to take from the rich and give to the poor. Eventually you end up like the USA where only 53% of people pay tax and 47% receive free benefits funded by the 53%. Not long after this you become like Europe where more than half the economy is the Government. Everyone likes freebies, the Left instutionalises the lie that it is sustainable.
John Comnenus
9 Sep 12 at 10:00 am
“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”
Robert Anson Heinlein, an often overlooked moral and political philosopher, although I note he gets a run in the Liberty Quotes.
Cato the Elder
9 Sep 12 at 10:09 am
It is entropy at work, it takes considerable and continuing effort to avoid its clutches. The illusion of an easy life is entropy’s siren. Look at how Gina Rhinehart was pilloried for pointing out that it was within the reach of all to be prosperous, it just required work. Trouble is that a lot of rules are needed to make life easy, so the nanny state prospers.
Biota
9 Sep 12 at 10:10 am
An interesting take from a USA non tax paying worker.
NoFixedAddress
9 Sep 12 at 10:11 am
Religious worship or Bolt worship: which is more popular on a Sunday morning with you lot? I guess there’s a lot of, shall we say, crossover.
m0nty
9 Sep 12 at 10:11 am
I went to a church once, and walked out with a wife.
Not doing that again, they’ll probably give me another one.
Winston Smith
9 Sep 12 at 10:20 am
Winston, it took me considerably more goes til I walked out with a wife! That’s something the Nanny state should fix – matchmaking. Maybe the siren song of the Left would lose its appeal if the government forced well off Lefties to marry poor bogans.
John Comnenus
9 Sep 12 at 11:01 am
Hmm, I like the idea of Australian journalists as fish heads.
Mother Hubbard's Dog
9 Sep 12 at 11:54 am
Clicking through those links, I was expecting to find the writings, not images.
Still, it was a nice surprise clicking on Hayek.
Eddystone
9 Sep 12 at 12:02 pm
@Cato the Elder
Heinlein popularised the phrase with his use of it in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but it appeared many times before that. For example, even as the title of a 1949 book, TANSTAAFL: a plan for a new economic world order, by Pierre dos Utt.
Mother Hubbard's Dog
9 Sep 12 at 12:02 pm
Not to mention JS Mill
Eddystone
9 Sep 12 at 12:03 pm
Offer an LCC government model to taxpayers – clearly define what the government will and won’t do and point out that taxes will be exactly halved.
Of course when there are sufficient numbers of people working for government departments this will no longer appeal, we may have already reached that point.
Ah, forget it Rafe, just let the whole system crash so people can vote in the Beast.
Chris M
9 Sep 12 at 12:16 pm
Thanks MHD, I hadn’t bothered to Google it.
I have always been taken with the truism ever since I read Heinlein’s book in my early teens. Strange how it eludes the wishful thinkers on the left.
Someone always pays.
Cato the Elder
9 Sep 12 at 12:18 pm
Rafe, I don’t think you can blame ancient philosophers. Socrates in particular understood limits of his knowledge (unlike present day intellectuals).
However even if they preached some of the things inconsistent with liberalism, the question is why these ideas have become dominant in the market of ideas. I don’t think we have an answer.
Maybe it is as simple as envy and laziness. Envy is a powerful incentive to work harder and smarter to outdo your neighbour, but stealing is a much easier path. It took millenia to recognise that, actually, in the world where it is the norm to steal from each other (e.g. through enslavement or war etc), at the end everyone becomes poor.
Boris
9 Sep 12 at 1:54 pm
Amen.
We are now living in a Kallipolis, at least according to failed Greens candidate and self-confessed public intellectual and supporter of internet censorship Clive ‘suspension of democratic processes’ Hamilton,
“… the Australian Greens are the party of Plato …” and
“… if after this election the Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate, Plato’s spirit will come alive in our upper house …” (The Australian August 18, 2010).
manalive
9 Sep 12 at 2:00 pm
Actually the hedge issue is really about not caring what affect your actions have on your neighbours – and doesn’t offend free market principles at all. When the number of sunny summer days can be counted on one hand and your neighbour plants a dozen cypress leylandii that can grow to 15m blocking sun to your backyard, conventional common laws of tort or nuisance aren’t effective legal protection. This principle does not extend to the prescriptive laws that prevent cutting down trees – even noxious weedy trees that some councils have enacted.
As population densities increase, good planning potentially requires a more involved role for regulatory agencies to ensure suitable access to light, set backs and the like. Having lived in an apartment (the cheapest place to heat/cool with the lowest water consumption) the value of a few hours sunshine on a veranda can be substantial.
H B Bear
9 Sep 12 at 2:09 pm
H B my point was the difference between the obsessive and anal regulation of strutures versus the capacity of toxic neighbours to plant trees with impunity that can wreck the amenity of people next door. Maybe the law has changed to correct that situation, it is a pity that commonsense can’t prevail because regulation is the second best solution.
Poor Old Rafe
9 Sep 12 at 2:37 pm
No idea what aggressive hedging is but please do a post about aggressive hedgehogs, Rafe.
TimT
9 Sep 12 at 3:57 pm
poor old rafe, ideologies are over–rated as an influence in public life.
Stigler argued that if Richard Cobden had spoken only Yiddish, and with a stammer, and Robert Peel had been a narrow, stupid man, England would have repealed the corn laws to allow free trade as its agricultural classes declined and its manufacturing and commercial classes grew in the 1840s and onwards,
As Stigler noted, the ideas behind any reform had been around for a long time. To affect public policy, ideas must find a market among those influencing change.
When their day comes, economists seem to be the leaders of public opinion. But when the views of economists are not so congenial to the current requirements of interest groups, these economists are left to be the writers of letters to the editor in provincial newspapers. These days they run an angry blog.
The role of ideology in environmental politics is overrated too. In DEMAND FOR ENVIRONMENTAL GOODS: EVIDENCE FROM VOTING PATTERNS ON CALIFORNIA INITIATIVES, Journal of Law and Economics, April 1997, MATTHEW E. KAHN and JOHN G. MATSUSAKA studied voting behaviour on 16 environmental ballot propositions in California to characterize the demand for environmental goods:
• The environment was found was to be a normal good for people with mean incomes, but some environmental goods are inferior for people with high incomes, at least when supplied collectively.
• An important price of environmental goods is reduced income in the construction, farming, forestry, and manufacturing industries.
• In most cases, income and price can explain most of the variation in voting; it is not essential to introduce concepts such as ideology and politics.
Green voters are manifestations of 19th century British Tory Radicals mouthed the same prejudices of Trollope’s 19th century Tory squires: attacking any further expansion of industry and commerce as impossibly vulgar, because it was ‘ecologically unfair to their pheasants and wild ducks’.
The 19th century Tory radical disdain for the habits of their inferiors remains undiminished among their moern heirs and successors. They gravitate to a global, big-brother government to keep the middle classes in line and to a back-to-the-earth, peasant-like localism imposed on others but presenting no threat to this new elites’ comfortable lives.
Jim Rose
9 Sep 12 at 4:06 pm
Thanks Rafe. An excellent and thoughtful post.
Ken N
9 Sep 12 at 4:26 pm
The google images for aggressive hedgehogs don’t look very aggressive. Fighting hedgehogs is no better, although this channel your inner hedgehog is quite fun.
Poor Old Rafe
9 Sep 12 at 4:34 pm
Bad-ass Honey Badger would make a meal out of Aggressive Hedgehog any old time.
Gab
9 Sep 12 at 4:55 pm
Quiz: are you a fox or a hedgehog?
Mother Hubbard's Dog
9 Sep 12 at 5:30 pm
Follow up post here
Mother Hubbard's Dog
9 Sep 12 at 5:36 pm
The ship’s cook and hedgehog…
Rabz
9 Sep 12 at 5:50 pm
Mother Hubbard’s Dog (MHD) I am a fox with a score of 34, but I am not sure what this means. I can predict the future to some level of accuracy? Does not sit well with my belief and experience that the future is always totally different not only from likely outcomes, but also from what we can possibly imagine.
oil shrill of Brisbane
9 Sep 12 at 5:51 pm
osoB, I think it means you can predict better than random, unlike a hedgehog. But note that even the best predictions of foxes only managed to account for 20% of the variance in outcomes.
Mother Hubbard's Dog
9 Sep 12 at 6:03 pm
PS it also means, as far as I am concerned, that you are probably more likeable. I am not overly keen on dogmatic individuals.
Mother Hubbard's Dog
9 Sep 12 at 6:04 pm
Good question, Rafe. To answer it, look no further than who sets the daily news stories, who writes the scripts for movies and TV, who writes the novels and plays, who teaches at schools and universities.
blogstrop
9 Sep 12 at 6:07 pm
Jim,
The Kahn and Matsusaka study is a bit dated. Environmentalism is rather more powerful than you suggest and has usurped the regulatory measures that Stiglerr was concerned about.
Moreover as we can see from electorates like those of Turnbull’s and Pelosis the green left vote is particularly strong in The toffiest places, places that were not long ago solid Tory.
Alan Moran
9 Sep 12 at 6:14 pm
Confirming that green ideology is a luxury only the rich can afford.
Mother Hubbard's Dog
9 Sep 12 at 6:55 pm
As a poor bogan, I couldn’t think of anything worse.
lol
nilk
9 Sep 12 at 7:56 pm
It might help to initially wonder how one thinks in the first place.
Peter Ryan, in his Quadrant column, wrote about this years ago but I forgot when and which.
Thinking is essentially manipulating the sequence of memories one accummulated during life, and hence what one interprets the past to have been.
This is contrast to what one feels, in a biological sense, rather than intellectual.
Louis Hissink
9 Sep 12 at 8:09 pm
Im against nanny statism but Im not against the bloody government building roads (because the ppp experiment has stuffed up).
Unfortunatelky all my worst fear have come true. The current government, shrunken by the head hunters, cant build roads because it lost its expertise and trained staff years ago in waves of sackings and now only specialises in writing new nanny statist legislation to annoy the hell out of ordinary people.
Alice
9 Sep 12 at 8:50 pm
Give my regards to Daisy Duke…
The Liberal Democrat Party in local council elections which were held yesterday, ran on a platform which included the notion that people outranked trees, and property owners should be able to cut down any tree they wanted to cut down. They almost got my vote…
ar
9 Sep 12 at 10:09 pm
thanks Alan, Kahn in a 2010 paper found that in California, an increase in a county’s unemployment rate wass associated with a significant decrease in residents choosing the environment as the most important policy issue
In January 2010, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to rank the importance of twenty-one issues. Climate change came in last.
in 2008, even McCain called for a successor to the Kyoto Treaty and cap-and-trade. two years later, McCain was against a climate change bill. Previously he was one of the most outspoken members of Congress on climate change.
on tory radicals, for a discussion of how people lose their youthful radicalism see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7887888/Champagne-socialists-not-as-left-wing-as-they-think-they-are.html
The paper is based on the 136,000 people in the World Values Survey between 1981 and 2008:
• Participants were asked to choose whether they saw themselves as leftwing or rightwing;
• The results were then compared with their responses to more detailed questions about their views, to determine how closely the participants own perception matched their real position on the ideological spectrum.
Well-educated individuals are more likely to wrongly characterise their political position, thinking that they are more leftwing than they actually are.
One reason those on the left do not realise that they have shed their youthful liberalism is that they socialise with people going through the same ideological shift. Detached from the broader electorate, they fail to notice that their views have become more conservative.
Jim Rose
9 Sep 12 at 11:11 pm
We just had an election, and in the Toffiest area of Sydney, Woollahra, the greens lost huge amounts of votes.
Rococo Liberal
10 Sep 12 at 9:42 am
Most excellent
Cato the Elder
10 Sep 12 at 12:02 pm
In this Leftist incarnation, it starts as early as pre revolutionary Europe, with writers such as Rousseau to Marx dreaming up formulae for a perfect world, for the perceived majority anyway.
But I think the mode of infiltration of all institutions took some inspiration from Gramsci. He knew that if the Left could infiltrate and dominate the infrastructure of Education, they could more easily capture the bureaucracy of government, the media and the judicial apparatus. I have heard it referred to as the Long March of The Left in the West. They succeeded, they have taken over the Establishment, and we are now disorganised voices from the margins of power and influence.
It is because they are now the Establishment that they have become intelectually lazy, and habitually resort to authority and ad hom attacks to win an argument. The well may have been poisoned, but its the Left who is drinking the kool aid. Their whole economic and philosophical edifice will collapse under the weight of their own poisoned Marxian internal contradictions, but its going to take a lot of innocent bystanders down with it.
Jannie
10 Sep 12 at 2:00 pm
No, disagree. The rot starts in the middle management.
Who does the interviewing for the next job vacancy in the public service? Or in the media organisations. Its not the boss.
Once you get enough of one political persuasion in an organisation in positions where recruitment is carried out you will eventually get a situation where all the people are of that philosophy (unless they’re good actors).
All it takes is a will to recruit on a tribal basis rather than competency. Which side of politics works that way?
In the public service there are no rationalisations of middle management whereas in the private sector you usually get a cleanout every 5 years or so, when a recession comes along. That means the public sector becomes a closed shop but private enterprise much less so.
We saw this when Newman was ABC Chairman. He failed to make a dent in the culture as the substrata locked together against him. After a while he gave up.
Bruce
10 Sep 12 at 2:36 pm
Socialism is simply a manifestation of tribalism, so it would be a ‘fall-back’ position. This is also how democracies work- by the numbers! I would have been surprised if versions of tribalism DIDN’T recur- it is part of history and our genetic heritage, after all.
Nuke Gray
11 Sep 12 at 11:13 am