Classical liberalism and illiberal groups

The latest IEA publication, which I have just finished reading is thoroughly to be recommended. Eamonn Butler's Classical Liberalism - A Primer is an excellent summary of that much misunderstood body of ideas with a good many paragraphs that will, no doubt, appear on this blog whenever I am writing about the need to control governments and legislatures, regardless of how its members get there. In other words, a dictatorship by an elected majority has to be controlled as well as the old-fashioned monarchical institutions were.

The historic sections made me laugh - they reminded me of the tail end of the Whig history that I encountered at my schools but there is nothing terribly wrong there. I would have liked a little more about Mediaeval constitutionalism but Dr Butler had to concentrate on the later ideas as these are of greater relevance.

Nevertheless, my first blog about this work is a critical one. I was a little disappointed with his coverage of classical liberal attitudes to illiberalism, always a tricky subject.

On page 92 the author tackles the subject: Dealing with illiberal groups:

An interesting problem for classical liberals, however, is how they should deal with groups and nations that are highly illiberal. The problem has become more urgent. There have always been religious and political fundamentalists who reject any idea of political, social and economic freedom and who would gladly extinguish our own freedoms if they had the reach to do so. But now, with travel so easy and destructive technologies so obtainable, the potential threat has become more dangerous.

The problem is relatively (but only relatively) easy while we are dealing with those threats from outside the country: after all, not every illiberal state is a direct threat to us except maybe by existing but a number of them are prepared to send our agents in to try to destroy us and we need to be prepared for it now as we had to be prepared in the days when our enemy was Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

What of the illiberal groups that are already here and are trying to subvert and overcome our own liberal ideas (in so far as they exist) or create groups and areas that function or intend to function outside our rules and ideas? While we can all be tolerant of people joining Trotskyite groups if they so wish or go to a mosque that preaches intolerant and hate-filled ideas, what of the move to create sharia courts that undermine the basic concept of equal and clearly understood justice for all, without which free societies cannot function?

Dr Butler does not touch on the subject of sharia but he tries to deal with another serious problem:

On the other hand, many classical liberals would think it right to intervene to prevent girls being denied an education, for example, or to prevent female genital mutilation and forced marriages. These are seen as breaches of the rights and freedoms enjoyed by all human beings.

Classical liberals have no prescriptive answer to such questions. But in general they take the view that state action should be kept to a minimum. Some take the view that we live in a pluralist age, and are mature enough to tolerate different manners and customs, so intervention is generally not justified unless there is some overwhelming ‘public’ case for doing so. Others emphasise that persuasion and debate are more effective at changing minds in the long run. A law against female genital mutilation, for example, is probably less effective at ending this practice than women who have undergone it being free to decide not to inflict it on their own children. It is that freedom that the law should be defending.

He then goes on to discussing what we should do if those illiberal groups should find themselves in position of power or authority. I know some people think that illiberal groups have already taken power and to some extent I agree with that, adding the proviso that we are in a position to change that, should we wish to do so.

What, however, is of such problems as female genital mutilation? Why exactly should it be put aside, not dealt with in legal terms (though it is banned in law despite a certain lack of action)? A classical liberal's core belief that the state must exist in order to protect individuals from direct physical harm inflicted by other people. The immense physical harm that is FGM is inflicted on children, often little more than babies who then suffer from the after effects, both physical and mental, for the rest of their lives. By no stretch of the imagination can one say that they are consenting partners.

Yet. apparently, there are classical liberals who do not think this is something for the law to deal with. One assumes that they do think the law should deal with other methods of child or adult torture but not this. Either those people do not exactly know what FGM is, in which case they should read or listen to accounts or they are prepared, in certain cases, to forget about individual rights and the core belief of equal and clearly defined justice and allow certain cultural groups to stay outside that law. More, they are prepared to abandon the basis of classical liberalism which is respect for the individual in favour of (some) group rights. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is not  good enough.

We are getting there

I do not believe I have ever watched or experienced a more boring, stupid and content-less campaign in all the years (since my school days) that I have been interested in politics. As the last day of campaigning wears on I shall write about it some more but now I'd like to concentrate briefly on one subject that is supposed to be the political holy of holies: the NHS.

We all know what a lot of nonsense is spoken about it; we all know how ridiculous is the claim that without the NHS most people would not have access to healthcare because, it would seem, in all other developed countries sick people are simply dying in the streets; and we also know that there is a great deal of nonsense spoken about the NHS being untouchable because everyone adores it and would not have things any other way. People might (but only might as I don't trust the way hacks reinterpret things) say that but the number of British people who have some kind of a health insurance is growing all the time and most employers offer some form of it as part of the employment package.

A good many of my frustrations with people who seem unable to think straight about healthcare were summed up by an interesting briefing paper, recently produced by the Institute of Economic Affairs, entitled What Are We Afraid Of? and subtitled Universal healthcare in market-oriented health systems. It is not a long paper and well worth reading (the link takes you to the pdf version of it).

Kristian Niemietz, the author, says a couple of times that he is not producing solutions to the enormous problems all healthcare systems in the developed world face but he is advocating a more rational discussion that looks at systems that are not single-payer ones, like the NHS and not the US system, which, in his opinion (and I agree) "is singled out because its well-known flaws make it a relatively easy target to attack".

The three countries he does look at have various versions of social health insurance (SHI) systems and are none the worse for it. They are Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland, where the population as a whole has access to high level of medical care but where the funding system is complex and involves a great many private for profit and non profit organizations. Yet, this systems, which would be relatively easy to introduce in the UK and they may well improve the healthcare we have, are never discussed because that might destroy the myth of the NHS's uniqueness.

Two paragraphs from the Summary give a very good idea of the inadequate standard of discussion:

The UK is far from being the only country which has achieved universal access to healthcare. With the notable exception of the US, practically all developed countries (and plenty of developing countries) have managed to do so in one way or another. But Britain is probably the only country where universal healthcare coverage is still celebrated as if it was a very special achievement.

The NHS is often unduly eulogised for minor achievements, because it is being held to unrealistically low standards. The NHS should not be compared with the state of healthcare as it was prior to 1948, or with a hypothetical situation in which all healthcare costs had to be paid out of pocket. Rather, it should be compared with the most realistic alternative: the social health insurance (SHI) systems of Continental Europe, especially the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany.

Curiously enough, soon after I finished reading the paper I came across one of those "you have one day in which to save the NHS" comments on another forum in which UK system was lauded more or less because it managed to save one person's life. Apparently, no other system could do anything of the kind.

Read the whole paper. The subject is not going to go away, not even after tomorrow.

First things first

Those few hours seem to have turned into a couple of days. Also, although I really ought to tackle Ukraine as a blogging issue, the situation seems so fluid that I can never quite decide where to call my own halt. Of course, to nobody's surprise, attention is now on Crimea, a bone of contention between Russia and Ukraine ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Could Putin have had this in mind all along: the detachment of Crimea from its sixty-year old home, Ukraine (then still the Ukraine)? It is, otherwise, hard to explain why he decided to intervene and destabilize (well, help to destabilize) that country for the second time in ten years, with no particular advantage for Russia.

But first, something about British politics. Among the various envelopes that awaited me at home was the latest paper from the IEA, The Sock Doctrine by Christopher Snowdon. This is the third in the "Sock" series of papers about the so-called charities, voluntary organizations and members of the "third sector" that actually receive money from the government in one form and another in order to lobby the same government to introduce legislation that would increase or fail to decrease the role of the government.

This paper deals specifically with organizations whose aim is actual political campaigning that ought not to be financed out of the tax money in any circumstance. Well worth reading if only for the arguments that the defenders of the system put up and for the (incomplete) list of organizations that wage various unpopular campaigns out of our money.

That Brexit Prize

The shortlist has been announced by the IEA and I am delighted to note that the Boss, who has done more work on the subject than anyone else is on it. Go Team EUReferendum though I am not, personally, a great fan of crowd-sourcing: it leads to a great deal of self-satisfaction and mutual back-slapping.

The other name I am very pleased to see on the list is that of James Bennett, who has been described by no less a person than Andrew Roberts as the "godfather of Anglospherism". Jim (another friend), I know, submitted a paper that saw the UK's future in the Anglosphere, an idea I strongly support, as readers of this blog (both of them) might recall.

My submission? Well, it went in at the last minute, having been written in the last couple of hours. So, no, it did not deserve to be shortlisted, whatever the other submissions on that list might be like. There is, however, an advantage to that: I am not constrained by the rules any more and shall be able to post my submission on this blog later on. That is, assuming I can find it in my folders.

In the meantime, one or two curious aspects can be noted and I have already discussed them with the Boss, when I called to congratulate him. There were only 149 submissions and only 100 of them, conveniently, from the UK. Does this mean that there really is so very little interest in the subject in this country? Or that too many people have accepted the ridiculous notion that all we need is a referendum and all our problems will be solved? If so, the work of the various referendum campaigns has been done. Or does the problem lie in the lack of publicity? We, in the echo chamber of euroscepticism knew all about the Brexit Prize but did anybody else pay attention, despite several media outlets mentioning it at the time?

So far as I can make it out the publication of the shortlist has been noted in CityAM and nowhere else, not even in the outlets that had publicized the launch in July.

Another curious fact is that instead of the promised twenty only seventeen were shortlisted. Is it really possible that the panel could not find another three entries of a similar calibre?

An analysis of what Pope Francis said

Philip Booth's blogs at the IEA are always interesting to read. He is a free-marketeer, a devout Catholic and a man who thinks about social and ethical matters as much as economic ones. His analysis of where Pope Francis is going frighteningly wrong in his statements about matters economic is of great interest. He compares this Pope with his two predecessors and the comparison is not to his advantage.

[W]hen John Paul asked whether capitalism should be the model that ought to be proposed to poor countries, he answered: “If by "capitalism" is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a "business economy", "market economy" or simply "free economy".” Of course, the economy should be, argued John Paul, circumscribed by the rule of law.

It is because of the Christian understanding of man as a moral and reasoning person that Pope Benedict argued in Caritas in veritate: “Economy and finance, as instruments, can be used badly when those at the helm are motivated by purely selfish ends. Instruments that are good in themselves can thereby be transformed into harmful ones. But it is man's darkened reason that produces these consequences, not the instrument per se. Therefore it is not the instrument that must be called to account, but individuals, their moral conscience and their personal and social responsibility.” In other words, we are not animals; the economy is not autonomous: it is guided by the decisions of moral human persons. Indeed, the snappy youth version of the Catholic Catechism is very strong on the importance of not circumscribing freedom, even when it is not used appropriately.

Read the whole piece.

Phoney Charities and civil society

Christopher Snowdon:

Euro Puppets –The European Commission’s remaking of civil society

IEA Discussion Paper No. 45

February 2013

It is not precisely news that a large number of organizations that assume the mantle of charities with all the public approval (vague but widespread) that it implies are, in reality, funded by the state that uses taxpayers’ money often to ensure that the organizations in question pursue a political line that is of benefit to it. Nevertheless, this knowledge is carefully hidden, partly by the organizations in question but partly by the public’s own desire not to know the truth, which might result in a completely new way of looking at “settled” notions or supposed right and wrong.

It is, however, useful to have some chapter and verse as we get in this pamphlet and its predecessor, the IEA’s Paper No. 39, also by Christopher Snowdon, published last June and entitled Sock Puppets – How the government lobbies itself and why.

Both papers enumerate organizations that receive money from the government or the EU, which would not exist without that input and which do not, therefore, need to answer to their donors about their activity as charities. Many of them are really lobby groups, coincidentally or not, lobbying for policies that the government or the EU (it is often hard to tell the difference) want to push through and which are not particularly popular with the populace.

With the Euro Puppets there is a further complication: the EU, by and large an unpopular project imposed on the population of various member states by the political elites, has felt for some years that it needs to find some credibility with that population. As it is not about to become accountable or less centralized (au contraire), let alone less devoted to the ideas of regulating every aspect of life it can lay its hands on, it has to think of another solution. One presented itself almost immediately, an adapted version of something instituted in the early Soviet years: the creation of something called civil society. This is an expression that is used more and more and particularly by transnational organizations of which the EU is particularly important as its aim is to become a state (not something it hides or is particularly ashamed of. Such organizations have no accountability and their credibility has to rely on emotionalism rather than political structures, just as the governance they try to impose is managerial (sometimes openly as it happened recently in a few EU member states, sometimes less so, as in normal EU legislation). They, therefore, announce that certain organizations to do with social activity are the real civil society. It just so happens that those organizations are ones either founded or approved of by the governing structures and, as the Euro Puppets demonstrates, funded by them. A closed and rather vicious circle is created: the unaccountable and managerial governance “proves” its credibility by pointing to the support given it by the civil society that consists of organizations it has created and approved that will never display any kind of independence. Needless to say, we are paying for it and for the legislation that those organizations campaign for.

That prize

I ought to have written about it yesterday, as the Boss did, needless to say. He is just much better at this sort of thing and does not find the heat enervating. (Not complaining, mind you, not after the last few months, just stating a fact.)

Anyway, just about everybody knows that the IEA has announced a Brexit (loathsome word but that is the one they are using) Prize for best submissions about what this country will have to do in the two years after an assumed "out" vote in a referendum. We have to assume it or there will be no prize.

Should one enter, given the number of organizations who are likely to do so and given the dubious nature of the judges? (David Starkey? Really?) I am minded to do so, though, unlike the Boss I have no organization to back me. At least, I don't think I do. But if I don't enter, can I really complain about the nature of submissions? Of course, any advice on the subject will be treated in the spirit in which it is offered.