A new religion

A couple of days ago, it dawned on me why religion is becoming less relevant in our lives. It isn't. It's just that the god we worship is no longer the abstract skyfairy YHWH or his myriad descendants and variants, but the equally abstract (yet much more apparent) state.

Authoritarian worshippers of the two main factions (the Left and the Right) argue violently about which of them holds the keys to the True Way Forward To Holiness by insisting their grip on the levers of the state will lead to a path of plenty and righteousness.

As with most religious beliefs, the opportunities for apparently sensible, intelligent people to talk utter bullshit in defence of their religious hierarchy and slant on what the state should be are no more illogical and incomprehensible than Catholics refusing contraception in an era of HIV:

Funnily enough, last year one of those sympathetic to Brown had a very different take on a 17-year old tweeter. Graham Linehan noted in the case of “@Rileyy_69”, who was arrested for tweeting abuse (and a lame death threat) to Tom Daley:

As a symbol of free speech, Riley69 is not Lenny Bruce. He’s not even the EDL. He’s a teenager going through that thing a lot of teenagers go through where they seem unable to feel empathy. This kind of temporary sociopath can be very dangerous and using these new tools they can wreak havoc more efficiently than ever before.

He was all for Riley’s arrest - there was no ‘oh teenagers!’ on display here. Yet Riley69 wasn’t a public figure, just someone who had tweeted idiotic comments to a celebrity. If Tom Daley had quickly blocked him, almost no-one would have ever heard of him. Instead Daley alerted his followers and we ended up with people like Linehan defending Riley69’s arrest. The logic, then, that it’s simply awful to bring to light the casual homophobia/racism etc of a newly-pointed police figure but fine and dandy to arrest someone of the same age for their idiotic tweets seems rather…pained. It’s for this reason that I have zero doubt that, had Brown’s tweets not came to light via the Daily Mail but rather (say) through some left-wing blogger who presented them as highlighting her use of ‘faggots’, the response from many would be very different.

People on the Left will grumpily endorse actions from their bishops that would drive them insane if called for by the bishops of the Right and vice versa.

It's also ironic how many left-wing "atheists" will happily venerate the state to irrational heights. In a sense, I'd regard the Left as the devout Catholics of statism, and the Right as milque-toast CoE. The Left seem to have a peculiar belief in the holiness of the state: philanthropy and charity of individuals is shameful, the Holy State should provide for all from its extortion. The Right still go to church, but they've jettisoned some of the more ludicrous aspects of the theology.

Irrational, prone to violent and unreasoning reaction to heretics, filled with internecine squabbles and ridiculous sects, governed by arcane rules interpreted by people of dubious morality using their shamanic powers to hide disgusting deeds: religion has not gone away at all, the world has just adopted a hungrier, more violent god.

Rust In Peace

Well, Margaret Hilda Thatcher has finally succumbed, and from the clamour on both sides, you'd think it was a current serving prime minister who had popped her clogs in office.

I look at the right and I see beatification of someone who ultimately believed that the state had a purpose, even if it was a different purpose than what Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband would expect. From the left, it's like Adolf Hitler had been toppled by people beating him to death with rolled-up copies of the Socialist Worker.

Her policies broke the mould of a nation that was still, 35 years after the event, shaped by the attitudes and experiences of a war that everyone else in the world had left behind.

Today, Britain is still largely defined by what she did. For all the talk that I hear from "the left", the only way Labour came to power was to embrace Thatcherism and evolve it very slightly.

I think Thatcher's real legacy is not her considerable achievements for both good and bad as a politician, her immense climb to power at a time when sexism was still rampant and she was not of the Eton / Bullingdon elite or the strength of the mutual bond that she forged with the US that no subsequent PM matched, or indeed anything else that she did.

Her real legacy was to show the poverty of British politics, where leaders who are not merely mediocre dross, leaders with actual ideas and the will to take them forward come along only once in a lifetime.

Before Thatcher, everyone was still living based on the war, weak, tired and stultified while the rest of the world surged past. Thatcher may have broken the old, comfortable, "clubby" Britain, where your club was either the Bullingdon or the local working man's club, but she also opened Britain up to the rest of the world again.

How depressing that people on the left and the right have got nothing better to offer than evolutions of, or rebuttals to, Thatcherism. It was nearly a quarter of a century ago that she was in power, more than a quarter of the average person's life, and still politicians have nothing more to offer us than what she had.

Ultimately, by dishing up increasingly hair-splitting variations on what Thatcher left behind, British politics is starting a massive race to the bottom.

The empire is over. Britain's first world status is severely at risk and old ways and reversion to some golden era are just not going to happen. Stop dwelling on what's been and start looking to the future, or another 35 years will have gone by and Britain will become an irrelevant museum again, this time the museum of Thatcherism.

In defence of (big) business

My stalker is forever going on about how my lack of detail shows how bad Libertarianism is going to be for the world, because I'm somehow seen as a great policy maker for the LPUK. Well, yesterday, I had a fairly sharp disagreement with the Chairman of the LPUK, so I guess my ability to "dictate policy" is going to be even smaller than it was before.

Patrick made an impassioned post defending protection of British business over globalisation and of British agricultural self-sufficiency over free trade.

The contention by the OP, which is the de facto position of many modern economists, that specialisation and trade is always beneficial is also fallacious. It both presumes perfect access to markets, and that those markets are operating efficiently. This is rarely (ever?) the case

My response is unequivocal: that's just crap. If a trade doesn't benefit you, why do it? That argument goes all the way along the line. If at any step the trade was not to both parties' benefit, the trade would not occur.

I feel that Patrick, like many other people, is confusing the idea of a beneficial trade with the idea of an optimal trade. And it's true that trade will rarely be optimal, but if it's not beneficial, then the party making the trade without benefit or utility is an idiot, and you can't spend your life catering for them.

No system will ever offer optimal trade, but the free market, corporate or no, offers the opportunity for beneficial trade.

I've written previously, for example, about why it might make perfect sense for a nation state to impose protectionist measures on trade. In the idealised neoliberal view of the world, such measures are seen as frustratingly unnecessary and a restraint to trade; for the government of the nation state in question they are perfectly reasonable mechanisms to ensure the growth and long-term health of their economy. This is one of the reasons why this party might not always see eye to eye with certain other proponents of 'free-markets' -- our interests our focused solely upon the well-being of the UK, whilst theirs see the existence of nation states as an inconvenience to the realisation of the global market.

The arguments in favour of protectionism do not convince me, either. One may argue that you are "ensuring the growth and long-term health of your economy", but actually, you're just making your own people pay more for those things you are protecting, now and for ever more. How that helps anyone, I don't know. Well, apart from the people who are in the industries that cannot compete without protection, of course.

I struggle to see the logic of favouring a system which punishes the individual while favouring ineffective, benefit-seeking corporates, in a post attacking ineffective, benefit-seeking corporates and their abuse of the state.

The final point that I want to touch on (in this interconnected, if somewhat wandering post) was brilliantly expressed by Robert Heinlein, in the quote that this post takes it's title from, and which I've used previously:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

To economists, the politicians who seek to plan our lives, and the companies that employ us, we are nowadays 'human capital'. We're a resource to be used in the manufacturing process, whether the 'goods' produced be something tangible like a new kettle or, as is largely the case in the UK, a 'service', or a mere financial transaction.

The deleterious effects of specialisation have long been recognised, including by Adam Smith:

"In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life."

Perhaps modern economists are happy to view themselves, as Heinlein puts it, as 'insects' -- if so, it would probably be fair to suggest the wasp as their arthropod equivalent.

But I'm not happy with being perceived as 'human capital', grist to some greater mill, part of some gigantic corporate clockwork mechanism. I'm an individual human being, with my own wants, needs and desires. My own hopes and fears. This simple fact is something that the classical economists well understood, but which has been tossed away in the last 60 or so years with the neoliberal rush to profits at all costs. And it is another reason why a Libertarian Party, an expression of a political ideology that puts the individual at the very centre of things, will always be in a position of conflict with those who wish to put 'the group' foremost in their considerations; whether those seeking to ride roughshod over the individual human being are socialist politicians, or those pushing the corporatist business agenda.

Heinlein's comment is not invalidated by people specialising in trades or things they're good at. I'm buggered if I'm going to learn how to service my car when I have a perfectly good dealer less than a mile away. I can still change a nappy, write a limerick, program a computer, etc., etc.

The days of people straightening wire to make pins is long gone. Over the course of my career, I have gone from being incredibly generalist to incredibly specialist. I do not find my job in the least bit repetitive, however.

And in a broader sense, it's a bit pointless saying that the UK needs to be self-sufficient in every kind of food we need, there isn't enough agricultural space for us to do it. There are some things we just cannot grow, or cannot possibly grow enough of.

I feel that good Libertarian economics would revolve around the removal of barriers to smaller businesses or individuals, allowing to partake of the market more easily. The massive regulatory burden that we currently have in this country favours large corporates, who can afford to devote manpower to coping with and understanding the regulations imposed. Smaller businesses cannot devote the necessary effort to work with all the regulations and this is really what penalises the individual and benefits the corporate.

I feel that it's important to highlight the fact that government is the guilty party in all this for encouraging business to get co-opted in the government power play. The government wants to grow in power, and it does this, inter alia, by adding more regulation to markets. Big companies like regulations, because coping with regulation is a relatively small part of their cost base, but can potentially ruin a start-up competitor. It also allows them to charge more: "See all this terrible regulation we have to cope with? It requires whole departments we have to pay for!" You pay more and you feel sympathy for them!

Protectionism justifies the government taxing people more and redistributing wealth to the chosen few who have lobbied the hardest for some kickbacks. Businesses of whatever size will naturally and quite rationally indulge in "rent-seeking" if it is offered. (Rent seeking is the business of making money by manipulating the economic and / or legal environment rather than by trade and production of wealth.) Protectionism is classic rent-seeking: "We can't compete with those Chinese, they don't get paid a living wage!" "OK, we'll stick an extra tax on imports from China / give you some extra subsidies of taxpayer money." "Great, now we don't have to worry about containing costs / reducing profits / improving efficiency, and we'll still be cheaper than the Chinese!"

Who in their right mind would turn down the chance of free money? Who in their right mind would not ask the government for free money if the government had a history of giving free money to people who asked nicely? As much as I hate the soulless corporate, they're just playing the game by the rules that the government has set.

Who is paying for this? Only individual taxpayers and voters, who are paying more than they need to or directly subsiding a business that wouldn't survive without the handout. This specific issue is one that I find particularly difficult to reconcile with Libertarianism.

(Read Timmy for genuine sense on matters economic.)

Is Paedogeddon a lie?

This started off as a bit of "ho! ho! light-hearted abuse of statistics", but after I read it, I was a bit taken aback. The ultimate conclusion, for which there is some actual statistical evidence, is that we are less likely to sexualise young girls today than we were in the 50's and 60's.

This young lady was 16 when she was Playboy's Playmate of the Month... in January 1958!

Moving on a little, we look at the average age of Miss America winners, there is an apparent upward trend:



The same is true of Playboy Playmates of the Month.



Porn stars entering the one-handed movie biz show no significant age trend:

Finally, we examine the popularity of beauty pageants specifically for teenage contestants. While I don't have datasets to analyze, such as the annual TV ratings, there is enough information on them to get a rough picture. First, there is Miss Teen USA, the adolescent version of Miss Universe. It was created in 1983, reached its peak for ratings in 1988, and has declined in popularity afterward, to the point where it may not even be televised anymore. And second, there is Miss Teenage America, which was created in 1962 and was last televised in 1977. Judging by its corporate sponsorship and celebrity hosts, it must have been somewhat popular. There are other beauty pageants for teenagers, but they are not even televised, and so do not count as evidence of an obsession with youth. Rather, we see a shift away from throwing young girls into the purely sexual spotlight.

Since there are no huge long-term swings up and down in these data, as opposed to the cases of sluttiness and violence, all generations can say that they've improved over previous generations, or at least done no worse. If any generation is to be accused of sexualizing younger girls in popular culture, though, it is surely the older ones. It is true that the current culture does not value women over 30, but that has never been the case -- just the opposite.

As with sluttiness, part of the declinists' misperception may be due to fashion trends, such as even prepubescent girls wearing adult-inspired clothing. That's hardly evidence of their being sexualized, though -- no guy is actually looking at them as a sex object, and dressing like an adult doesn't make you behave like one sexually. While it may be a bizarre fashion trend -- though more bizarre than when pre-pubescents started wearing two-piece bathing suits? -- it doesn't reflect a sexualization of the young.

I've felt for a long time that media hype about this was seriously misguided, it seems that there is some statistical evidence to support this.