What I believe in a (slightly spooky) nutshell

Sometimes I struggle to explain why I am a liberal and what it is all about.

That might sound crazy, but the conversation almost always either gets lost in blue-skies philosophical maxims ("the greatest amount of individual freedom possible that does not constrain the freedom of others"), or else becomes bogged down in specifics (school choice; welfare reform). I guess the fact that I'm usually in a pub does not help, but the simple explanation has always failed me.

Thanks to Rob Knight (who takes his lead from The Devil - read into that what you will!) I am remineded that at the heart of liberalism is self-ownership: "I own my life and all that results from it. Therefore nobody may take my life or its product from me, nor impose their will upon me; neither may I do so to others." Tristan Mills mentioned this six months ago, but it seems it takes a cartoon to help me remember.

This 8 minute Flash film sums it up brilliantly. Sadly, it is also slightly spooky: as I commented to Rob,

"I agree with everything they say, but I do feel like a 6 year old in Brave New
World, getting my latest lesson in how to be a constructive citizen. Pass me the
Soma!"

Still, it's a good basic introduction to the premis of liberalism. Having explained the bases, it should be easier to move on to the specifics without assuming I'm mean, selfish or a Tory.

Fascists for freedom

Okay. This is weird.

I was just checking out the Stormfront website (as you do!) and at the bottom I saw a banner advertising Ron Paul for President.

Now, as I understand it, Ron Paul is a Libertarian. As a libertarian, Mr. Paul would undoubtedly uphold the right of bigots, fascists and neo-nazis to shout whatever they want as loudly as they want, to preach hate to their shrivelled hearts' content.

He would also strip away border controls and allow millions of hard working hispanics into America, along with anybody else who could afford the airfare, didn't expect any welfare on arrival and were willing to pay some very low taxes. I've not looked to closely into Mr. Paul's campaign (I'm as far away from Texas as he is from the presidency) but he would probably also slash defence spending, and he would certainly not pass any laws banning inter-racial marriage. Indeed, he would uphold the freedoms of people of all races.

Now, we know fascists are idiots, but advertising their worst nightmare on their own website takes the biscuit!

Not every common-law wife is a nascent victim

I did not even have to open my paper this morning for the heckles to start to rise. The promise of daft legislation was splashed across the front page.

The Times reports that unmarried couples are to get equal rights on separation, “able to make claims against their partners to demand lump-sum payments, a share of property, regular maintenance or a share of the partner’s pension when they separate. They will also be able to claim against their partners for loss of earnings if they gave up a career to look after children.”

Children present a special case, of course. Human children are incapable of looking after themselves for an unusually long period of time – under another promised law, until they are 18 years old. It takes two to tango, as they say, and it is perfectly reasonable that both parents take a financial responsibility for their offspring – even if they later split up.

This is the case already, though the law does not always compensate those (usually mothers) who have put their careers on hold while caring for children. The new law would seek to do that and much more. The Times suggests that an assumption will be made that cohabitation is a partnership, where everything is held in common. No time restriction will apply, as is the case in other countries, where the couple must have lived together for a minimum length of time to have a claim. Neither will it be necessary for a party who was not working to prove that the other party consented to their not contributing. The aim is to provide protection without necessarily conveying rights, and the cohabitee must prove that they will suffer financially, so short relationships are unlikely to yield a return.

This is a typical top-down solution to a perceived problem, establishing a universal rule for what should be multifarious arrangements, tailored by individuals for their own needs. It will create bureaucratic and judicial burdens where private contracts should obtain. Typically of the worst sort of self- (or opponent-) styled “liberal” opinion, it views individuals as victims.

The problem is not that there is no rule to protect cohabiting couples. The problem is that cohabiting couples do not make arrangements to protect themselves. This is partly a cultural issue: love makes us act irrationally; it is considered unromantic to respond to your partner’s omnipresent toothbrush and dedicated sock-draw by producing a contract laying out who will own what in the event of a split. When couples start to buy things together, the last thing they want to do is apply a colour-coded label so that they know which CDs and books are communally owned when it all goes sour.

Yet it is also the case that some couples cohabit without ever intending to or wishing to share their property. I have known plenty of friends who have lived with boyfriends and girlfriends with whom they have never intended to share their whole lives – or their property. Sometimes, relationships are wittingly temporary; other times, there is a deliberate desire to protect one’s property from falling into the hands of another in the event of a split.

In fact, there is already a law that protects the interests of cohabiting couples: it is called The Marriage Act. It creates a legal union between the cohabiting couples that (if memory serves) includes (at least in the version of the contract to which I agreed) the clause “with all my worldly goods I thee endow.” (Which, sadly for Mrs. Polemic, included neither a family estate in Herefordshire nor a yacht).

Marriage is not everybody’s cup of tea of course, but I suspect there are two or three underlying reasons why this is the case. One is its association with a religious ceremony: I have argued before that the French Revolutionaries, having abolished most church institutions, would have done the world a huge favour if they had changed the name when they created a new, civil alternative to marriage. By keeping the nomenclature of the church, they created a headache for future generations.

The second is a “fear of commitment” (which may, of course, not be fear at all, but a rational decision). Many people do not want to conjoin with their partner ‘til death do them part. They want to wing it. That’s fine, but if that is the case, should they be compelled to accept the legal duties of married couples? Surely, if they choose not to commit emotionally, they should be free not to commit materially as well.

Finally, there is the cost. Weddings are not cheap (which is why, by the actual date of the wedding, I’d been obliged to sell the family estate in Herefordshire and the yacht!) and plenty of people are simply not prepared to take on the expense.

The solution to these issues is clear: we need to separate the expensive, emotional and perhaps religious celebration of the union of a man and a woman (or any combination of the above) from the simple, legal and civil protection offered to cohabiting couples that wish to establish the legal basis of their partnership and provide for one another’s security. The means of doing this would mesh perfectly with arrangements to end one of the last remaining bastions of discrimination in British law.

At present, homosexual couples may not marry (for which, blame the Church for a crime of commission and the revolutionaries for a crime of omission). Conversely, heterosexual couples may not enter into civil partnerships. So neither homosexual nor heterosexual couples are able to (forgive me) divorce the legal from the ceremonial.


Why not reform the system entirely. Let civil partnerships be legal arrangements, available to all, whereby (usually cohabiting) couples can make a legal settlement setting out the division of property and the rights and obligations of each partner. The could be quick, easy, cheap and tailored to the needs of the couple concerned (do they wish to share only the house in which they live, or their entire property portfolio?). It would require no ceremony. Indeed, just for (libertarian) fun, this could be conducted by a private notary, rather than allowing the State a monopoly.

Meanwhile, marriage should become solely a celebration of the love that two (or more!) people hold for one another, a declaration of their desire to forsake all others and live together forever, which need have nothing to do with the State, but may be conducted by priests, professionals, officiating friends or the spouses themselves, depending on their preferences.
The two might be combined, of course – many people would kill both birds with one stone. But at least we would be clear who intended to share their property and who did not. And at last we would know exactly what people meant when they said somebody was their spouse, their partner, or was merely living with them.

The Trap: Whatever happened to our dreams of freedom? (Part 3)

Last night saw the third and final episode of Adam Curtis’s television series, The Trap: Whatever happened to our dreams of freedom?.

As I outlined in my reviews of the first and second episodes, this series has argued that the past thirty years has been dominated by a narrow and depressing view of freedom based on an assumption that cold rationality and a distrust of political leadership. Mr. Curtis has sought to undermine this concept. However, in doing so he has demonstrated his own failure to understand both the nature of freedom and the gulf between what has been delivered by political leaders and what individuals cry out for.

In this third post I will outline the programme for those who did not see it. I will address his conclusions in a final post, and there I will argue that he is wrong not only in his analysis but also in his fundamental call for a new type of freedom. In my writing, below, I will limit my comments (in the last and third from last paragraphs) to Curtis’s description of the experiences in Russia and in Iraq. Here Curtis was deliberately disingenuous, attempting to conjure a biased picture and so make it appear that the concept of liberty he opposes is to blame for the problems those countries experienced.

In the final episode, entitled We will force you to be free, Curtis abandoned his focus on psychology and Public Choice Theory, turning instead to the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism in the twentieth century. The leading exponent of liberty was the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. In his essay Two Concepts of Liberty he presented two different images of freedom, which he called “Negative” and “Positive” liberty. Both were born of the French Revolution, but where the former sought freedom from constraint, the latter sought to make the world a better place. Put crudely, these have been described as “freedom to” and “freedom from”: the freedom to act as one sees fit (as long as it does not curtail the freedom of others, as Mill and others stressed), or the freedom from want that came from a progressive society.

Berlin believed that negative liberty was a great prize, freeing us from coercion by others and tyranny by governments. Positive liberty, on the other hand, was a dangerous form of absolutism, for if there was only one ideal future, only one truth, then anything was justified to achieve that goal. “I object to paternalism,” Berlin explained, “to being told what to do.” His great fear was the tyranny of the Communist regimes that were at the time dominating Eastern Europe, but as his example he took the positive liberty preached by the Jacobins of the French Revolution: that the people were too stupid to appreciate freedom, so the state must “force them to be free”, using terror to force the changes necessary to make a better society. Negative liberty would protect us from this progressive tyranny. But Berlin also cautioned that the belief in negative liberty must never itself become an absolute destiny, for if it did it would morph into a form of positive liberty, with anything justified to achieve that end.

Having set out the philosophical battlefield, Curtis began to populate it. Positive liberty was very popular in the middle of the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that freedom was shackled by society, and individuals had to break those shackles to be free. His views influenced Algerian revolutionaries who argued that the West controlled not by force of arms but of ideas, and that catharsis could be achieved by the cleansing fire of violence. Sartre also influenced Steve Biko, Che Guevara and Pol Pot. The views of these men fed back to Sartre, who advocated revolution to free society. This reached its apotheosis in the Khmer Rouge revolution in Cambodia, where revolutionaries sought to sweep aside the shackles that bound society by liquidating the entire middle class, even inviting the Cambodian Diaspora back to help rebuild society, only to butcher them on the runways as they stepped off the planes.

The US reaction to the spread of revolutionary fervour was to promote reactionary forces; the “Realpolitik” of Henry Kissinger. But the support of dictators such as Pinochet and Marcos disgusted others in America – later known as the Neoconservatives – who felt that America should be promoting its values abroad rather than supping with the devil. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, his Secretary of State told congress that there “are things worth fighting for”, and the administration introduced Project Democracy, a plan to promote democracy abroad using four key tools:

• Public support for democratic politics (including dropping the old, discredited allies)
• Promoting democracy abroad – but only in its electoral form, and not what Curtis referred to as the “other aspects of democracy: the redistribution of land and wealth”
• Undermining communist governments abroad (e.g. in Nicaragua)
• The creation of an Office of Public Diplomacy to spread propaganda to the American public.

The result were two scandals: one contemporary and one held over for the future. The contemporary scandal was the Iran-Contra Affair. The scandal for the future was the precedent that was set for spinning intelligence to justify wars for which there was no clear and present danger. The problem, noted Curtis (though he later seemed to conveniently forget it) was that the Neocons had reified Berlin’s fear: they were advocating forms of negative liberty in a positivist way: they would force us to be free.

Nobody noticed, however, because in 1989 Communism collapsed and history ended. Liberal democracy had triumphed. Curtis chose to dwell on the results in Russia, where President Yeltsin followed Jeffrey Sachs advice and adopted a big bang approach to liberalising the economy, destroying elite institutions and freeing the people. To Curtis this was a disaster: prices shot up as soon as price controls were removed; people were issued with vouchers with which to buy stakes in privatising utilities, but they sold them for cash to the future Oligarchs who then snapped up the utilities for a windfall profit; objections in the Duma led Yeltsin to send in troops; finally there was a run on the banks and Russia defaulted on its debt. The results, argued Curtis, was that Russians turned their backs on the anarchy that had ensued and sought sanctuary in order. They willingly gave their freedoms away to President Putin, a reactionary autocrat who promised stability at the expense of liberty.

There is always a point in Curtis’s films where his bias is exposed. In this episode it was the Russian experience. His presentation of the Russian financial crisis crudely exploited time compression, disguising the five years that elapsed between the liberalisation and the financial difficulties. Nor did he mention the low price of commodities (on which Russia was dependent) in the late 1990s, or how much money would later flow into Russia as commodity prices rose. He ignored the knock-on effects from the Asian financial crisis, to which Russia was a sequel. And he said nothing of the Chechen War, surely a more effective tool in Putin’s armoury than the economy. Lastly, Curtis ignored the very different experience in much of Eastern Europe, where liberalisation has led to massive rises in living standards and where greater freedom has been welcomed. This analysis exposes Mr. Curtis as a partial and biased analyst. It does him no credit.

In the final part, Curtis suggested that Tony Blair was quite taken with the principles of negative liberty, but lamented the loss of idealism that positive liberty conveyed. He wrote to Isaiah Berlin and asked whether it might be possible to synthesise the two, though the dying Berlin never replied. Blair went on to argue that it was the destiny of the West to spread liberty. Curtis argues that this was negative liberty as evangelism, but others might argue that it was not negative liberty at all. Blair was also aware that Public Choice Theory had undermined faith in politicians, so the only way to carry the people was – argued Curtis – to lie to them. Evidence for the Iraq war was spun, and Iraq was given a Russian-style dose of liberalising shock-therapy: everything was privatised and the Baath administrators were sacked.

The Iraq experience also encouraged distortion and bias from Curtis. He argued that the de-Baathification resulted from a liberal distrust of public officials. Not a word was said of the intellectual antecedent of this idea, the de-Nazification of Germany, or the fact that the vast majority of the Iraqi people were demanding the removal of their Baath tormentors. Even more unbelievably, Curtis claimed that it was the economic consequences of liberalisation and the lack of positive liberty at the heart of Iraqi democracy that triggered the insurgency, not a combination of Sunni ex-Baath rejectionists and Al Qaeda-inspired fanatics, as every other commentator and expert has agreed. It was fabrication on a grand scale.

He was right in one area, though. The emergence of Islamic terrorism in Western cities has been used – by both Blair and President Bush, among others – to justify massive extensions of state power in an attempt to pre-empt crime and terrorism. This has gone beyond terror, however, to seek pre-emptive powers to control possible criminal and even anti-social behaviour. The result is a return to the arbitrary power of the state and the end of the very civil liberties that the West is claiming to protect. It is a bitter irony.

I have separately reviewed part 2 and part 3. Curtis's conclusion and my analysis of it are discussed in a final post.

Not "social"; not "economic"; just liberal

As so often, Tristan has written a post that has elicited an answer to lengthy not to add to my blog. This time, he is discussing “the difference between what people call Social and Economic Liberalism”.

I have often thought that the divide between economic and social liberals is a false one, whipped up by the media and swallowed by a few too many within our own party.

In my view there is only one form of liberal: one that believes that individuals should be free to do whatever they want as long as it does not impinge on the freedom of others. In that fine libertarian dictum, that means "freedom in the bedroom and in the boardroom".

Those who wish to constrain economic freedom in the pursuit of social aims may be deeply moral people, and may be fired by rational beliefs, but they are not liberals. Conversely, those who champion corporate freedom but take a prurient approach to private behaviour are not liberals, either.

However, I think this issue goes further than how much faith one has in the state. I think it boils down to the faith one has in rationality: in this case, whether one believes that a few right-minded, well-intentioned, rational people, with the moral authority of the majority, is able to create and manage a better society than would occur if decision-making were devolved to the lowest possible level (which is usually the individual).

Sadly, history is littered with the corpses of those who did not conform to their allotted role in the planned society, while wealth beyond imagination has been squandered or foregone as a result of the errors of state planners, both mistaken and venal.

I do not believe that platonic guardians exist, or that anyone is better placed to decide what is in a sane and mature person’s interests than they are themselves. On the contrary, I believe that those who seek to do so are either deluded or self-interested. Others may think that this puts me in the “Economic” wing of my party. I think it just makes me a liberal.

Spot the difference

Have I earned Brian Micklethwait's “particular ire”?

I don't know what I said in response to Brian Micklethwait’s condemnation of the unpredictable and inconsistent Liberal Democrats (though if you want to know what I said you can read it on his site or on mine), but whatever it was it has prompted him to reply:

All parties are coalitions, but some more than others.

I stand by my prejudice about the Lib Dems being more coalition and less coherence than the other two. If all we knew about someone was that he was Labour, or Conservative, or Lib Dem, and nothing else, we all make better guesses about what the Conservative or the Labourite thinks than the Lib Dem, and that includes if a Lib Dem is doing the guessing. Of course we’d often be wrong about the Conservatives and Labourites, and perhaps more wrong in recent years, but Conservative and Labour opinions do have a vague pattern to them. We’d only randomly be right about the Lib Dems.

What do I base this on? Well, a lot of talking and a lot of listening, in the flesh and on the telly and in the newspapers, and now the blogs. Is there any actual survery evidence on this? Maybe. My prejudice, of course, is that it would support me, and not Tom Papworth.

As for those libertarian noises emerging from the Lib Dems, that’s entirely consistent with the above. They echo everyone’s opinions, including mine. That’s why they arouse my “particular ire”, when I’m in the mood to be irate about politicians that is, which is not always.

I just have the strong sense that similar arguments to this one are happening all over the political spectrum, on diametrically opposed blogs and chat rooms to this one, all about how the Lib Dems are the “best bet” for . . . whatever it is, regardless of what it is. Which party is closer to the [fill in the blank] ideal? Always: the Lib Dems, but only in the sense that there’ll always be a Lib Dem making those noises. There’ll be a Lib Dem making any noise you care to imagine.

Nick M’s original Samizdata comment confirms this prejudice, which is why I copied and pasted it. Is he wrong? Was he imagining it? Maybe, but I don’t think so.

Brian Micklethwait on 01/09 at 08:59 PM

Well, he admits it's a prejudice, which is a start!

I maintain that it isn’t so easy to predict who stands where based on party. In mid-2003, were Mr. Micklethwait - unencumbered with prior knowledge – to have met Labour Party MPs Anne Clewyd and George Galloway, he would have found their positions somewhat diverse. Both New Labour and Cameron's Conservatives bear little resemblance to their forebears. One might argue that the Liberal Democrats are neither the party of Gladstone nor of Jenkins, but that only proves that all parties are unpredictable.

I have met Tory libertarians, imperialists and isolationists. US Republicans have neo-cons, paleo-cons and religio-cons. Democrats include hawks, doves, free-traders and isolationists. New Labour is devoid of any recognisable ideology.

Perhaps some real survey evidence would be useful; I'm sure there are research companies capable of carrying out the necessary quantitative and qualitative analysis, if only somebody has the cash with which to finance such a project. I suspect - regrettably - that the desire to be elected would be the strongest force in all politicians.

In the end, just as Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom "to the socialists in all parties", perhaps Mr. Micklethwait should welcome the libertarians in all parties, no matter how much they differ from their colleagues. It is through them that a libertarian consensus will arise.

Are the Lib Dems libertarian enough?

Having scored a miserable 67 points on the libertarian purity test, perhaps I am not the best man to fight the redoubtable Brian Micklethwait over whether the Liberal Democrats have it in them to be a libertarian party or not.

However, Tristan has been highlighting Brian Micklethwait's constant attacks on the Liberal Democrats for some time, and I felt the need to reply to Mr. Micklethwait's most recent criticism; I couldn't resist! My reply is reproduced below (now, with hotlinks!):


In we all pile, fists flailing!

I think your suggestion that the Liberal Democrats are somehow more diverse and less disciplined or harmonious than the other parties is ludicrous, as is the belief (which I infer) that the Tories somehow embody (at least economic) liberalism.

All parties are coalitions - John Major described his Government as "a coalition of one", and Gordon Tullock's theory of logrolling demonstrates that all politics is compromise (he might also have something to say about your suggestion that only Lib Dems are interested primarily in re-election!).

Labour is torn between New Labour and old socialists, the Conservatives between Thatcherites and new-Butskellites, and the Lib Dems have their Social Democratic and their Liberal wings. I cannot believe that you can claim with a straight face that David Cameron's acceptance of Labour's tax-and-spend rate or newfound fondness for the prattlings of Polly Toynbee are consistent with the work of Lord's Tebbit and Howe.

In fact, which party is now closer to a libertarian ideal? Which is the party that believes in open borders for economic migrants? Which would devolve power to local authorities? Which is the most likely to remove the last vestiges of legal discrimination against homosexuals? Which mooted reconsidering prohibition of cannabis for consenting adults? Which has just announced a raft of income tax cuts? Which is closest to land value taxation, beloved of classical economists? I could go on (you might think I already have ;o)

You are right that the Lib Dems need to be more careful to ensure that their message is more consistent. The easiest way of achieving that without a command-and-control style central office (such as the one that sacked Howard Flyte for going off message) is a strong philosophical basis. I hope that that philosophy will be liberalism in its most classic form.

If you want to discuss this further, perhaps we can have a chat over some of John Blundell's free wine.

The strange death of Libertarian Home

Libertarian-minded colleagues will know that a month ago a new blog was launched that sought to be "the leading portal bringing together the libertarian movement."

LibertarianHome.com hopes to be the missing link between the millions of people who have libertarian-leaning views and the libertarian movement. Our aim is nothing short of a revival in libertarian thinking.

It started well. On 24 November an article was published calling for the privatisation of marriage (it's either a legal contract, which can be administered by any lawyer, or a religious union, which is the preserve of priests). Articles appeared defending Acid House parties ("We wanna' be free... to do... what we wanna' do") and attacking Guantanamo Bay. There was a space (Your Platform) where one might submit a short article, and regular round ups of the days news from a libertarian perspective. LibertarianHome received mentions in Tristan Mills's blog among others. Hopes were high.

They have since fallen rather flat. The last time the home page, which provides the libertarian news round-up, was updated was 7 December. The Liberty Log, providing original news and articles, has not been updated since 4 December. And the last time that anyone else had anything published on the Your Space section was 2 December - and not for want of material.

Blogs are, of course, often reliant on one individual, and it may be that Alex Singleton, the apparent editor of LibertarianHome and Director General of the Globalisation Institute, is unable to devote enough time to it. If so, it is a sad false-start. There remains the blog of the Libertarian Alliance (I am unclear as to whether their website is here or here), but the vaunted aim to revive libertarian thinking has yet to be realised.

Slightly less authoritarian than the Dalai Lama

I have been looking at the Political Compass website again. For those of you unaware of this interesting site, it asks the reader 64 politically-oriented questions and then tries to place him/her on a grid where the x-axis is a line between “left” and “right” (by which I expect they mean collectivism verses the market) and the y-axis represents liberty verses authoritarianism.

Jock Coats says in his blog that he feels that “some of the questions are a little awkward.” I think this is if anything an understatement, though having done quite a few of these questionnaires in my time (on occasions when I have been tempted to enter the Government bureaucracy) I recognise that they are always rather poorly phrased, and I suspect that they are difficult to get right.

· The very first statement one must assess is “If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.” There is no option to point out that thriving trans-national corporations are our means of generating the wealth and jobs and transmitting the goods and services necessary to serve humanity.
· My favourite, however, is that “"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a fundamentally good idea.” to which I always reply that I Strongly Agree. It’s a brilliant idea, but totally impractical in the real world. Thus the Compass erroneously pushes me slightly more towards the Marxist camp than I deserve.
· An even more extreme example is “A significant advantage of a one-party state is that it avoids all the arguments that delay progress in a democratic political system.” I strongly agree, but I also strongly believe that the negatives far outweigh the positives. However, I am now pushed towards the Fascist camp. I see myself landing next to Stalin at this rate.
· “Mothers may have careers, but their first duty is to be homemakers.” This is true. It is also true of fathers, but nobody asks about them!
· “Astrology accurately explains many things.” Yep! But not in the way they mean!
· “No one can feel naturally homosexual.” No matter what one thinks of this, it is irrelevant. What matters is whether you think those who feel homosexual (naturally or not) should be treated equally within society.

Nonetheless, I think overall the test works okay. In the end I appear to be a true liberal – as the Libertarians say, people should be free of Government both in the bedroom and the boardroom. Rather than rubbing shoulders with Stalin or Ghandi, I’m nearer Murray Rothbard. Readers may not consider this a good thing!

I think my wife got the best result, though. She turned out to be slightly less authoritarian than the Dalai Lama!

I urge you to give the test a go. It’s fun and enlightening at the same time, and that’s a rare and valuable combination.