Resisting the Ghouls

It is Day 3 of our universal house arrest (and I think that is a more accurate description than “lock down”) here in New Zealand, and I’m well set up to carry on working. I have every videoconferencing application known to mankind on my desktop Mac – Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype, Facetime, Jabber, etc. So far, the internet is working well despite everyone else in my household bingeing on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV+. Yesterday afternoon I was even able to participate in my usual “Friday Fours” – the regular drinks I have with a group of associates – by videoconference. The biggest topic for discussion was how to buy alcoholic spirits in a Puritan lock down. Supermarkets, which are considered essential services and remain open, can sell beer and wine but not spirits. Other liquor outlets have to remain closed, unlike in Australia where “Bottle-Os” (take out liquor stores) are considered an essential service. You have to hand it to the Aussies, they have their priorities right!

I was listening to a podcast yesterday and one of the presenters was discussing Covid-19 with his elderly father, who was a doctor until retirement. The presenter asked how he would’ve coped with the virus in the heyday of his medical career during the 1960s and 1970s. The old man said they wouldn’t even have known it was a distinct virus, not having the DNA analysis we have today, and would’ve regarded it as just a form of influenza.

The story made me realise that some of our worst concerns are subject to what I would call information arrogance – a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. This is the problem with climate science – we know that an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ought to lead to an increase in average temperatures, all things being equal. The problem is, all things are never equal in real life, and we understand very little about the influence of other factors in climate change such as cosmic radiation, the sun’s radiance, the formation of cloud, and the absorption of CO2 and heat in the oceans. The same is true of Covid-19. In most countries, we don’t know the true incidence of the virus because most people haven’t been tested. We don’t know the real mortality because we’re only testing people we think have already got it.

Perhaps the most unsurprising thing to me about the pandemic is that it is being exploited by the usual ideological thugs to push their dystopian agendas. We have already seen numerous claims that “there are no libertarians in a pandemic” and “we’re all socialists now”. The exploitation of these difficult circumstances by those on the left to justify their illiberal political views has been described by Brendan O’Neill of Spiked (an old leftie himself) as the “socialism of ghouls”. He goes on to say:

If your overarching thought upon observing a crisis of this magnitude is to feel ‘vindicated’, almost to welcome the crisis as an opportunity to promote your political worldview, there is something wrong with you. 

Indeed.

There has been much praise of China's response to the pandemic, despite that country’s regime being complicit in the spread of the virus. The idea that only a highly centralised authoritarian state could respond effectively to the virus outbreak doesn’t stand up to the most cursory examination. If China had been a more free and open country, instead of arresting those who sounded the alarm, the virus might have been confined to Wuhan. Other repressive regimes, such as those in Iran and Russia, have also botched the response. You could counter that Western governments haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory in responding to the virus and certainly the New Zealand Government underestimated the risk and responded too slowly, but others such as South Korea and Singapore have managed to bring the pandemic under control comparatively quickly.

We have heard much about how we are all in this together, but ultimately our response to the pandemic is personal and individual. We may be under the confinement orders of our governments, but we each have to take responsibility for how we respond to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. In particular, our ability to recover from this will depend on the decisions of millions of individuals - decisions about whether to invest, start a business, apply for a new job, buy a house, get married and have children, or take early retirement. Governments need to remember this once the pandemic is over. If they lock in the measures they have sold as a temporary necessity, and make all of us dependent on the state for ever after, we may never fully recover economically and socially, and the ultimate cost will be far higher than that of the pandemic itself.

Liberty has been the driver of the huge improvement in the health and prosperity of human beings all over the world for more than two centuries, and we are currently sacrificing that driver to bring this virus under control. The worst effect of the pandemic would be to make that sacrifice permanent.

100 years of failure and there are still naive Marxists

On this day, one hundred years ago, the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Russian provisional government of Alexander Kerensky, thus ushering in the most brutal political system the modern world has known. Many left-wing commentators continue to laud this as the day the Russians overthrew the repressive Czar, but that event actually happened in March 1917. Lenin and his cohorts seized power in a coup and imposed a totalitarian dictatorship that would last for three quarters of a century and that would kill at least 20 million people of its own people.

Leftists of all persuasions defend Communism on the basis that the political philosophy has never been truly implemented. They also claim that Lenin had noble intentions and that he was innocent of the slaughter that followed. Let us deal with the second of these claims first. Lenin was not a good guy. He overthrew a democratically-elected government and quickly imposed the totalitarianism that would characterise the Soviet regime until its demise. He established the Cheka secret police, the Gulags, secret arrest and detention without trial, summary executions and the mass killings of recalcitrant peasants, workers and soldiers. He also began the mass starvations of the Kulaks (the so-called 'rich' peasants) that was to reach its nadir under Stalin, particularly in the Ukraine.

The first line of defence of Communism for today's leftists - that it has never really been tried - is equally false. Every form of Communism, or even staunch socialism - Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Juche, and the latest, Chavism - has caused widespread misery for its subjects. Genocide is not an aberration of Communism, it is a characteristic of it. Communism and socialism are based on the philosophical concepts of idealism and materialism, which support the Marxist belief in determinism - that is, that human beings are not individually responsible for their actions and are merely components of the collective species-being. This justifies the sacrifice of any individual to the collective will (that will, of course, being determined by a small leadership elite). Is it any wonder that people who believe this end up killing anyone who stands in their way?

Today's left-wingers believe that their political system is better than any that went before because they control it, but what makes them think they are better than all the fellow travellers who went before them? It is naive arrogance, that is all. Were they ever to find themselves in a position to make good on their beliefs, they wouldn't last five minutes - because there will always be a Stalin or a Mao standing behind them, only too ready and willing to put a bullet in the backs of their heads as they contemplate their benevolent revolution!

The Mass Customisation of Politics

Business in the social media age is all about mass customisation. Industries such as telecommunications, banking and transportation have figured out that the key to success is to have economies of scale while allowing individuals to have products and services that are tailored to their needs. The commercial behemoths of old that insisted on one-size-fits-all have fallen by the wayside as new businesses exploit flexible manufacturing and service delivery models to accomodate individual consumers' needs.

Politics in the 21st Century is the same. Voters are increasingly unwilling to be boxed into traditional political definitions - left, right, socialist, nationalist. etc. Ironically, this is happening at a time when political labels such as 'extreme', 'Fascist' and 'Nazi' are being bandied about with increasing abandon and usually without justification. 

Many people, myself included, have a political philosophy that does not sit comfortably with most established party manifestos. We are a little bit left, a little bit right, and a whole lot completely outside the spectrum. This is not the same as being purely pragmatic - we have a philosophy that is well thought-out and articulated and are prepared to vote to maximise its realisation. We have little in common with the David Camerons and John Keys of this world who don't believe in anything much and who are willing to do whatever it takes to stitch together a coalition to keep them in power. We may vote for the lesser of evils but it doesn't mean we will accept the bland and uncommitted.

So how do we achieve mass customisation in politics when many countries seem to be locked into a traditional left-of-centre/right-of-centre, two-party paradigm? Partly it is achieved through breaking down the paradigm, and we have seen this with the rise of third parties in many Western countries. The other way it can be achieved is through localisation of politics.

Politics in many countries in recent decades has been characterised by greater centralisation. The European Community is the most obvious example and in the United States we have seen the growth of the federal government at the expense of the state or local government. The problem with this is that it means greater homogenisation and less opportunity for people like me, whose views don't fall into the traditional political buckets, to have our views represented. Localisation of political decisions means we can enjoy, at least at a local level, a more flexible set of policy setttings, and if we are not happy with the decisions of our local government, we can seek out somewhere more compatible with our political views.

It was the intention of America's founding fathers. particularly Jefferson and Hamilton, that the US Republic would be a place where different communities could experiment with different political and social settings, subject only to the universal rights enshrined in the Constitution. America today has become a highly centralised bureaucracy with the Federal Government interfering in every area of Americans lives from health care to what children eat in their school lunches. The complete dominance of US politics by the two major parties means that people who don't fall into the traditional Democrat and Republican camps have no real alternative, except that last year they chose a rebel Republican in Donald Trump to be president. Trump's support came from the disaffected middle and working classes, who rejected the big statism and identity politics of the Democrats and the social conservatism and crony capitalism of the Republicans, and is therefore understandable in terms of the mass customisation paradigm. Brexit was similarly a rejection of the traditional political choices.

Those who insist on seeing today's politics in terms of past dichotomies will continue to be surprised and bewildered by voters' choices. I think that the rejection of tradition political boundaries it is a very positive development but it needs to be accompanied by a decentralisation of political power if voters are to have genuine choices.

When security trumps freedom

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety ~ Benjamin Franklin

Many people find the idea of unfettered capitalism scary. Modern 'liberals', who support a high level of freedom in political, social and religious spheres, baulk at the idea of economic freedom on the basis that it fosters inequality. This is something that perplexes libertarians who believe that there is no such thing as freedom without economic freedom, and that if you are not free to choose how you make your living, what you consume and with whom you trade, you cannot be free in other areas of your life.

There are two reasons people do not want freedom in economic matters. The first is that they want others to take care of them. This is a natural tendency of human beings - after all, we spend the first decade or two of our lives being taken care by our parents and many find it a challenge crossing that threshold where they have to take responsibility for their own welfare. The modern welfare state makes it very easy for people to opt out of adulthood. We provide state-subsidised education to people well into their twenties and it is possible to live adequately on welfare benefits for the whole of one's life.

The second reason why people do not want freedom in economic matters is simple envy. People would rather not be free if it means someone will have more wealth than them. This is the malevolent and misanthropic motivation for socialism and the reason left-wingers tend to support higher taxes even when they are not necessary for fiscal reasons. They would rather everyone is worse off than allow a few to be better off than others. It is consistent with the Marxian worldview that sees human existence as a zero-sum game - that if I have more than you, I must have taken some of your share of the fixed pool of wealth.This is demonstrably a nonsense because if it were so, wealth per capita would never increase (as it has done exponentially for the last couple of centuries).

Whichever of these two motivations apply, the results are the same - a willingness to compromise freedom in the name of economic equality even if makes everyone worse off. This is what we are now seeing in Western societies - freedom is being abrogated in all spheres, including traditional touchstones such as freedom of speech and political association. Governments do not, and cannot, distinguish between the economic and social spheres when it comes to applying their authority, which is why socialism inexorably leads to dictatorship, the most recent example being Venezuela today. The left-wing ideal of political, social and religious freedom combined with high levels of economic control, is a case of wanting one's cake and eating it too.

The 'give back' argument is the opposite of the truth

This post is an enlargement of a comment I made on Lindsay Mitchell's blog today. Lindsay wrote about the response of a 'social entrepreneur' who had contacted 300 local businesses to pay for school lunches for children, and who had had no takers. The 'social entrepreneur' said, 

"I'm not trying to sound harsh but if there are businesses that are making money off our community then I'm sort of garnering towards making them socially responsible to give back to the community that it makes money from."

What I said in my comment was,

"Businesses...'give back' in the taxes, rates and other government charges that they have to pay - often amounting to more than half their profits. But that is just the start of what they 'give back'. They also employ most people who work in their communities, paying their wages, their PAYE, their ACC, their holiday and sick pay, and their on-the-job training. Add to that the fact that many businesses sponsor local sports teams and cultural events, and that many business people are prominent in community service organisations, and you start to see why such claims that business people should 'give back' make me sick."

I have written before about the socialist U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren's "you didn't build that" argument - that businessmen do not create the wealth in their businesses but rather ride on the backs of everyone else in the community. As I pointed out in that earlier post, Elizabeth Warren exactly reverses the true facts. The reality is that everything in the community, every dollar* earned and spent by every worker, and every tax dollar collected and redistributed by the government has been created somewhere, sometime by a business owner or operator or investor.

But, I hear you say, the business owner sells his products and services to the community and therefore isn't he just recycling money that already exists? That would be true if the economy was a closed system and a zero sum game, and, if it was, we would never get wealthier as a society. In fact, we would get poorer because as the population increases and some wealth is destroyed by disasters, war and decay, our wealth per capita would decline. So how do we explain the following graph, showing an exponential increase in global GDP per capita (while the population was also exponentially increasing) over the past two hundred years?

The answer is capital, and by capital I don't just mean money invested. Capital is the sum of human knowledge - it is the equipment and processes, the inventions and patents, the brands and goodwill, and all the other things that go into producing and selling the goods and services we consume. It is the leverage that enables relatively unskilled workers, who would have trouble making a wooden cart wheel on their own, to produce a modern automobile. And because capital is as much about the ability of the human mind as it is about anything physical, it is limitless.

Marxists would have you believe that capital and labour are in conflict - that the more of the final price of the goods and services that go to reward the use of capital, the less that is available to reward labour. This is rubbish. Capital enables labour to be more productive and it is why workers in the Western world today are paid much more for their labour than at any time in history. It is the efficient use of capital that is characteristic of a free market (i.e capitalism) and that enables wealth to increase without limit - and for that increase in wealth to churn through society, thereby improving everyone's standard of living.

So next time someone says that a businesses should 'give back' to the community, just remind them that everything in the community has been derived from businesses in the first place.

[* Note that actually this isn't strictly true for a dollar of fiat currency, but it is true if you think of a dollar as a fixed equivalent amount of gold.]

The Berlin Wall - Lest We Forget

It has been fifty years this month since the German Democratic Republic erected the Berlin Wall.

The Wall was the physical embodiment of the Socialist belief that common good trumps individual good. It was built to preserve the Socialist regime of the GDR by physically imprisoning its population, who up until then were leaving for West Germany in increasing numbers. The Communist form of Socialism that was practised in the Soviet block, and that is still adhered to a greater or lesser extent in China, Cuba and North Korea, is the natural extension of all Socialist regimes. Socialists believe they know what is best for all of us and that individuals should not be trusted to make their own decisions about how they live and work. Ultimately this belief must lead to the use of violence by the state to restrain individuals where their individual choices conflict with those of the rulers of the state.

The only alternative to the building of Berlin Walls is a society based on the paramouncy of individual rights. In such a society the only legitimate role of the state is to prevent the initiation of violence by one individual or group against another. In such a society the state rules only by consent of the individual. In such a society, governments and laws are subservient to the rights of the individual, not the other way around.

Unfortunately, such a society doesn't exist in the world today. In all countries there is an on-going battle between those who adhere to the Socialist philosophy that 'might is right' and those who believe that individuals are best able to make their own decisions about how to live their lives.

The Berlin Wall is a fading reminder that, as Wendell Phillips (not Jefferson, as commonly thought) said, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

On Left and Right

It has been interesting watching the political left-wing around the world, and here in New Zealand, shamelessly exploiting the 76 tragic deaths in Norway to push their political dogma. They are trying to promote the line that Anders Behring Breivik was a Neo-Nazi and right-wing nationalist and therefore anyone with right-wing political beliefs is likely to commit similar heinous acts.

Let us examine the logic behind this. If Breivik was a Nazi, he was a Socialist. After all, the acronym NAZI stands for National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in German) and Hitler professed to be a Socialist. He believed in a strong state, a mixed public-private economy and a single party political system, all hallmarks of other Socialist regimes worldwide. He had much more in common with the many left-wing dictators who survived and followed him such as Stalin, Mao Tsedong and Pol Pot, than with any of the mainstream political leaders in Western nations who would be categorised as "right of centre" today.

The problem with the term "right wing" is that it is used inconsistently to categorise political beliefs as broad as Nazism and Libertarianism. Adherents of the latter, for example, as represented in New Zealand by the members of the Libertarian Party and, to a much lesser extent, the ACT Party, subscribe to a minimalist state and maximum personal freedom (social, political, religious and economic). This could not be further from what Hitler believed than is possible.

Socialists and Nazis are cut from the same cloth - they both believe that the collective should predominate over the individual, that might is right, and that ultimately the initiation of violence is justified in pursuit of their beliefs. All the founders of Socialist philosophy and practice, including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao, had these tenets in common with Hitler.

My heart goes out to the survivors and families of the victims of Anders Behring Breivik and I think if there is one lesson to be learned from this tragedy it is that we should not tolerate any political philosophy that believes it can promote its views through the initiation of force.

Fantasy in Middle Earth

It looks like New Zealand has lost The Hobbit films. Sir Peter Jackson has said that Warner Brothers are coming to New Zealand next week to discuss moving the film production offshore. Sir Peter will remain as director but thousands of New Zealand actors, production staff and support contractors will not have the opportunity that the Lord of the Rings provided them in past years. Why? It is because of the greed and stupidity of the union, Actors Equity, and a few scurrilous troublemakers in the actors fraternity. They have bitten the hand that feeds them and now they are left to wonder why they won't have any work at all.

This is typical of the mentality of many New Zealanders. People in this country live in a political fantasy land. They seem to forget that money and jobs don't grow on trees. They adhere to the utopian, socialist notion that a benevolent government can provide for everyone. They aren't prepared to ask the question, who provides the benefits they expect the government to bestow on them? They aren't prepared to acknowledge the obvious - that it is always an entrepreneur like Peter Jackson (for that is exactly what he is) who ultimately creates all the wealth they consume.

It is not that these people are stupid - we could forgive them if they were. No, they know perfectly well that their beliefs are based on a fantasy that has never worked well anywhere in the world. That makes their views, and their sabotaging politics, all the more reprehensible. They are the same people who demand higher salaries for teachers without being prepared to link pay to performance, or who demand higher taxes to pay for ever more welfare handouts and more money for their pet social engineering projects like preserving the Maori language, without questioning whether such extortion is damaging to enterprise and jobs.

Unfortunately, such dishonesty is the stock in trade of a fair proportion of our elected representatives who give their fellow travellers want they want. Although in the case of some of the politicians, I think lack of intelligence is a valid excuse. That is the effect of a dishonest electoral system that puts half the seats in Parliament in the hands of party apparatchiks who appoint people they can control to party lists.

Unfortunately I don't think The Hobbit debacle will be a wake up call for these mediocre bludgers. They will continue to sell their brand of politics that says all anyone needs is a benevolent government (run by their friends, of course). And New Zealand will continue to get poorer as a result. I just hope they reflect for a moment on the damage they have done in this instance.