I’d made some effort to ignore the latest inter-blog political stoush, but when I saw Helen on the Cast Iron Balcony who (unlike many people on all sides of politics in Australia) actually has something between her ears defending Robert Manne (quite possibly the rankest intellectual bully in Australia), I knew something was up.
In short, The Australian has been attempting to define ‘the Left’ in Australia by getting a bunch of different people broadly identified with ‘the left’ to write on issues they consider central to leftism. The first was fellow Oxfordian Tim Soutphommasane, followed by various others, including Julia Gillard and Robert Manne. The whole series is here. You’ll need to trawl through a great deal of dross to find the relevant piece; David McKnight was another contributor. Tim’s piece is far and away the pick of the bunch, the others degenerating rapidly into the sort of low-rent sentiment one associates with Mills & Boon ripoffs of Jane Austen (no dear, that isn’t Mr Darcy, despite what you might think).
I am especially perplexed by Gillard’s piece. She recounts how her father won an 11+ scholarship to the local grammar but was ‘unable to take up his place.’ This is simply inconceivable, unless her family had the sort of entrenched prejudice against education common in many working-class British families of that period. You see, my father also aced the 11+ and went to the local grammar (from Kilburn, London, not rural Wales, but I am not going to engage in competitive/Pythonesque ‘I was born in a shoebox’ games with Ms Gillard). The grammar scholarships were extraordinarily generous, constructed such that anyone who did well on the 11+ could go on to better things. They were a way to punch through disadvantage for many working-class British children. The only reason for a person not to take up his grammar place was the sort of familial attitudes so memorably assayed in Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave, filmed by Ken Loach as Kes. Billy may not want to ‘go down the pit’, but his family’s disrespect for anything that might rescue him from that fate is the touchstone of the film and book, not any failure of the British education system.
My dad was constantly told that he was ‘getting out of his class’ by being at the grammar, even though he did well. His parents — my grandparents — took the scholarship money with gratitude, but offered him no support. I wonder greatly whether Julia Gillard’s family was similar. Eventually, Dad joined the Royal Navy as a boy seaman: ‘I joined the Navy to see the world, but what did I see? I saw the sea’ he often told us, a wry smile on his face.
Gillard aside, of course the other stoushers around Ozblogistan have got into the act. Quadrant, (disclosure: a magazine for which I have occasionally written) has produced its own series on ‘the left’, memorably summarized thus by Andrew Norton:
From the classical liberal side there is Jason Soon on social justice and me re-working my left sensibility material from last week.
Angela Shanahan and Bill Muehlenberg represent family-values conservatism.
John Dawson argues with Dennis Glover about equality.
And Mervyn Bendle provides the Quadrant grumpy old man perspective: ‘the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia is a shallow, condescending narcissist.. a labored, cliché-ridden, self-serving piece of propaganda, without even a hint of an interesting idea or original vision … the Left is about are simplistic ideas and slogans, jealousy, resentment, opportunism, and a lust for power and personal advancement.’
This has produced appropriately stoushy responses from both Larvatus Prodeo and Catallaxy. It is all very prolix and rather unedifying. Why am I commenting, then? The weirdness of Gillard’s piece is one reason (there must be other descendants of £10 Poms whose parents went to grammars who found her piece odd, surely?), the stubborn refusal on all sides to even attempt to understand what one’s opponents are saying, and then — from someone who really should know better — an attempt by Dave at Balneus to define those politically opposed to him as suffering from mental illness. Shades of the Soviet insane asylums for dissidents, anyone? Now maybe that piece was tongue in cheek (I sincerely hope so). Andrew Norton — while lunching Dave’s central assertion — managed to let the whole business pass, which is a credit to Andrew. I am afraid I am not willing to be so charitable.
Apart from Andrew, I suspect I am Ozblogistan’s favourite libertarian, in part because I am ‘nice’ and do not seem particularly doctrinaire. It is true that I distrust doctrinaire politics in all its forms, but that does not make my classical liberal values any less profound. I loathe groupthink in all its forms and see it in about equal proportions among both loopier conservatives and the social democratic left. Read the various Quadrant pieces (guided by Andrew’s comments) for good examples of the former; read the comments at LP or Dave’s piece for signal examples of the latter. I think (in order to make a proper job of flinging away my ‘nice’ libertarian appellation) I need to make it clear that if the price of a more equal society is the hammering down of individual difference and eccentricity (such that I experienced from the likes of Robert Manne and his on-the-taxpayer’s-tit literary acolytes) then I want no part of it. If that means the poor and the weak go to the wall, then too bad.
Thing is, the poor and the weak won’t go to the wall in a more liberal state, despite all the dire predictions engaged in by the commenters over at LP. They may have to take a little more personal responsibility, but no-one will go to the wall. At the heart of the social justice ‘category mistake’ (the phrase is Hayek’s and I suspect Quadrant did not give Catallaxy’s Jason Soon enough space to explain it) both conservatives and social democrats engage in is a complete failure to understand the limits of law and what law may reasonably achieve. Law does an excellent job of process (what justice is). It does a remarkably shitty job of outcomes (what justice is not). It is wise to remember this fact.
Legislation has two limits. One is practical (call it a ‘means-end’ limit). The other is principled (call it a ‘normative’ limit). Most philosophers spend all their time arguing over the latter: John Stuart Mill’s ‘harm principle‘ represents an attempt to get at what a principled limit on the powers of moral and redistributive legislation may look like. This is philosophically interesting and forms a major part of my DPhil thesis here at Oxford. In the case of conservatives and social democrats, however, both groups engage in major legal wish-fulfillment: they think they can ignore ‘means-end’ limits. That is, they seem to think that passing a law will make it so. If wishes were horses, people, beggars would ride. They think they will, for example, be able to make abortion illegal (or greatly restrict access to it) with no social or economic comeback, or impose salary caps on business executives without hemorrhaging talent overseas or to other industries.
This is utter hokum.
Law has limits. Legal officials at various times and in various places have objectives and they need to find the best way of achieving them. Some might seek to end casual street violence, so impose stiff legal penalties on anyone caught engaging in such conduct. Some might seek to end demonstrable harms caused by alcohol or drugs through prohibiting their sale and consumption. Others might seek to meet housing needs by imposing minimum standards for accommodation on those who rent out their properties. Though they seek the best means of reaching their goals, they might fail and the failure could be dramatic.
In all the examples mentioned above the aims sought may not materialize. The stiff legal penalties imposed by those seeking to curtail street violence may lead only to an increase in violence as perpetrators reason they may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. The prohibition of alcohol consumption may merely drive consumption underground, failing in its purpose and succeeding only in adding to the stock of societal harms as further criminality incident on the prohibition grows. Property owners, rather than forking out for legally mandated improvements to their rental property, may simply take their properties off the market, resulting in fewer affordable properties available for rental and fewer needs met. In each case the law has overreached itself. Having observed the results of their efforts, the legal officials may conclude that it would have been better to have used other means or maybe even to have done nothing, to have tolerated the former level of harm, since their means of putting it to an end did not solve the problem aimed at, but exacerbated it. In pursuing the best result as they see it, they have achieved only the third-best and now the problem might be the embarrassing one of getting back to second-best.
These are familiar stories in skeletal form and illustrate the commonplace that the methods the law might use can simply misfire. There are limits to what the law can achieve because some of its tools are blunt. Some tools do not work, others are counter-productive; some exacerbate the problem they were supposed to resolve. Knowing what works and what does not and what will be counterproductive is important knowledge indeed. Again, enforcement of a desired policy may be prohibitively expensive and divert resources away from still more important goals a state may wish to pursue. A state may also need to consider in some contexts the psychology of its citizens. Perhaps there is something in the Freudian notion of pale criminality: ‘the condition of one who commits a crime because of, rather than in spite of, its forbidden status’. There may also be a ‘mixture problem.’ I have in mind John Stuart Mill’s point that truth and error may be found combined in one package deal, so that there is no way of suppressing the error without suppressing truth as well. But the point can be made more generally: there may be no way for a state to suppress a greatly undesired activity without also disturbing a greatly desired activity. The law in short is limited by the tools it has at its disposal and the effects that these tools will have. Law can coerce, it can make rules, it can adjudicate, but one can only go so far with these tools. Law must seek to do the best possible with the tools available.
The ‘tool’ that limits law most severely in a practical/means-end sense is its access to knowledge. This is at the heart of Hayek’s arguments about information asymmetry and spontaneous order. Because choosing on behalf of citizens involves knowing more about what those citizens want than the citizens do themselves, it is doomed to fail (unless, of course, the legislator is omniscient), or will at the very least involve intolerable invasions of citizen privacy and restrictions on citizen liberty.
I am not a political theorist, or if I am, I am only insofar as it assists my legal work and my jurisprudential scholarship. I am, however, a lawyer. And if people want to make a more equal society or protect the unborn or enhance family values or tax the rich or enact a cap and trade scheme, then they have to use my tools, and my tools are legal and legislative. And I have enough experience and knowledge to know when those tools tend to work and when they tend to fail.
And that, friends and neighbours, is why I am a libertarian. I am modest enough to admit that the law is a broadsword and not a scalpel, and that attempting to do complex and subtle things with it are likely to fail. Hell, the law doesn’t always protect us from force, theft and fraud, which is what everyone — on all sides of politics — thinks it should do.
Whenever someone wants to enact a law because it will be ‘good for us’, I think it is appropriate for me to reach for my revolver, and that you ought to as well. Well-meaning legislators of both conservative and progressive hues are like vampires. Invite them into your house at your peril, because once they’re inside, the bastards will never leave.
136 Comments
The Gillard thing is odd. I sense a whiff of the Kes factor too. More detail needed.
The thing is that certain parts of the Left believe that you shouldn’t get above yourself (just like certain parts of the Right). If you educate yourself and get out of that position you’re a class traitor, a snob, all of that stuff.
Both Left and Right have really unattractive elements who believe that they are better than other people – born to rule, or more moral, or just better able to see what the masses need. The problem is that terrible wrongs can be done when people think they are doing the right thing.
As I said over at Dave’s place, I’m a pragmatist not an idealist. What I care about with social policy and law is – DOES IT WORK? Does it actually achieve the aim it sets out to achieve? If it doesn’t…well I don’t care whether it’s left wing or right wing, it should be scrapped.
Well yes, the groupthink and naivety about the efficacy of law, among other things, displayed on supposedly social democratic blogs is the reason I now prefer to call myself a centrist rather than a social democrat in the blogosphere..
A recent case in point is is minimum wage law- Mr Bahnisch over at LP thinks (correctly I believe) that it would be a good thing for the working poor to have more disposable income. So how does he think we should achieve it? Why of course, all one has to do is wave the legislative wand and increase the minimum wage! Anyone who thinks this is a silly idea as it will harm the poor by making the employment of capital more attractive than the employment of labour is obviously a shill of a narrow and corrupt economic orthodoxy, or even worse a Hayekian! See here: http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/07/07/fair-pay-commission-still-a-misnomer/
I’ll have a dig at libertarians in a later comment, for now the sun is shining and I must go outside and plant some eremophilas
What are these? If you link to an image, I’ll display it in your comment.
Because choosing on behalf of citizens involves knowing more about what those citizens want than the citizens do themselves, it is doomed to fail…
I’ve never understood this assumption that people working together to determine what they want (democratic socialism) better than individuals can alone, particularly when much of what people want only makes sense in the context of wider society. Individuals have their own limits of knowledge and with the exception of their inner most desires, the nature of what they actually ‘want’ will depend on a much broader knowledge than most individuals will have. This means that a collection of people can know more about what an individual wants than the individual themselves.
Additionally people frequently act against their own interest and it can be trivial to manipulate someone’s desires. These human elements distort the process and outcomes of decentralised systems such as free market capitalism, sometimes leading to worse outcomes that those resulting from more centralised ones despite their own inherent flaws. Human nature means that outcomes of any system will be more complex than a simple idealogical theory can predict, and we shouldn’t rule out systems on a simple idealogical basis.
Emu bush. Some species are considered weeds in your home state of Queensland but they behave themselves in colder, wetter climes. http://www.malleenativeplants.com.au/eremophila-subteretifolia/
Now I must go chase the neighbour’s sheep out of my bottom paddock before they eat any of the poison peas (gastrolobiums) I planted!
Dr Bahnisch these days!
One of the main problems with those who celebrate their so called left credentials, is that most or nearly all must rely on the private sector for support, survival and regrettably continue to adversely over-regulate the hand that feeds them while delivering very few popularly useful products themselves outside the mass conformist models. Housing regulated and produced by the lefts self serving bureaucracy is a good example of the failure to innovate and produce something of endearing value to the dwelling plebs.
#6, except of course in your own name to the post. Doh!
Congrats, but arn’t you getting above yourself?
LE – I’m with you, but the “does it work” meme can be a bit more grey when you come to define success.
eg stimulus – worked in short term, but may be a long term albatross on the economy.
So, did it work?
Pete, I take your point. I suppose I was thinking of instances where things are clear policy FAILS but people keep them in place for ideological reasons, and close their eyes to the fact that the policy is a failure.
But sometimes it’s hard to know if something is a failure or not. Or to know what the right thing to do is. The stimulus packages are a good example. I don’t think there was very sound policy behind them – I tend to think that we may be in trouble in the future as a result. But of course the powers that be are arguing that the stimulus package is how we’ve avoided recession.
On the other hand, legislation serves more purposes than “means to an end”. Quite frequently it’s purely a signalling device.
Horrible Crime X occurs, which is already on the books. No matter, the government tinkers with the criminal code (rewrites a clause to say the same thing, for instance, or adds a clause which gives a second name to the same offence) to be Tough On Horrible Crimes of Type X.
I think there’s some deeper human bias at work here, because the same problem occurs in my line of work. That gap between the goal or policy and the outcome seems like a short, deterministic step. Just pass a law. Just write the software. Easy!
If the name isn’t already taken, I propose to call this the fallacy of optimistic determinism.
Second try. re “I was born in a shoebox’ games”, years ago there was a nice cartoon depicting a debate during a Presidential election. The caption – “My great grandfather grew up in a smaller log cabin than your great grandfather”.
Julia Gillard’s father would have been from a Great Depression era family which may not have had the money to feed and clothe him adequately even with a scholarship for the local grammar school.
In Wales the social and economic effects of the Great Depression would have lasted up to WWII, particularly in the south where the family appears to have come from.
I know of one Australian male who did not take up a scholarship in that era because his inner-city family couldn’t afford to kit him out for sports with a simple pair of tennis shoes and the school would not tolerate sports being played in ordinary school shoes.
Well I said I’d come back and have a dig at libertarianism so here I am. As with social democrats of the Dr Bahnisch variety, there is much to criticise about common themes in libertarian thought , so I’ll confine myself to one subject, that being excessive techno-optimism. Libertarians overemphasize the efficacy of high tech troubleshooting. A case in point is Mr Soon over at Club Catallaxy, who criticised the Brit Tory leader David Cameron for donating money to a charity that gives poor small acreage Indian farmers low tech peddle pumps so they no longer have to bucket water. Soony and his cabal of libertarian harpies labelled this evil (Soony’s actual words) because the Indians should have been given motorised pumps instead. I pointed out that this would make farmers dependent on spare parts and maintenance backup, the lack of which often brings development projects undone in the third world. I also pointed out that farmers would also become dependent on the supply of cheap and readily available diesel, which could never be guaranteed. Further, the FAO and World Banks had endorsed peddle pumps as they are proven to increase farm incomes roughly sixfold.
The Catallaxy harpies became more and more hysterical and I had no choice but to go back into exile.
And sure enough, prices of petroleum products exploded from about the time Soony wrote his post (September 2007) until the start of the GFC a year later. If Chairman Soon’s Great Leap Forward had been enacted by private and government aid agencies during that time, hundreds of thousands if not millions of poor people would’ve starved to death.
See here: http://www.catallaxyfiles.com/blog/?p=3126
I fear I have accidentally deleted someone’s comment, and because there is brilliant sunshine pouring in through the window over here (yes, it does happen sometimes), I didn’t even see whose it was. Please comment again whoever you are and I will ensure your comment stays where it ought.
If Chairman Soon’s Great Leap Forward had been enacted by private and government aid agencies during that time, hundreds of thousands if not millions of poor people would’ve starved to death.
Or gone back to bucketing water by hand. But point about techno-optimism taken.
Mel:
Couple of things wrong with your recollections and follow-up.
1. The intent of the peddle pump donations racket was seen as maliciousness on the westerner’s part. It’s okay for Londoner’s etc. to have running water and electrification but handing an inexpensive electric pump to an Indian village was bad as the emissions from a tiny pump would cause the earth the explode as a result of Co2 emissions. Am I getting the train of thinking on the green zealots right here?
2. Electric motors and a small generator these days would be about as expensive as a pedal pump as those things are massed produced, so the intent on the westerners part was pretty bloody obvious which was save the earth by sticking a brown man on a peddle pump.
3. Oh please no one would have starved to death because the price of oil went up. Stop over egging things Mel, so try to think harder. If the villagers didn’t have anything prior the donation and weren’t dying of mass starvation prior to getting an electric pump there would hardly be millions dead a few months later because the price of oil went up. I guess you’re going to peddle the idea that the green zealots would have known the oil price was going up. Lol
4. You didn’t go into self-exile. You were banned for making abusive, racially charged comments whenever you lost an argument. Big difference.
Clarencegirl, this too is true – it could have been that there was some kind of ridiculous requirement like having sports shoes which provided a practical barrier to students who were less well off. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Incidentally, spam filter is going psycho again and holding back people’s comments – it’s not that we don’t love you, it’s just that Akismet is insane.
This isn’t borne out by the evidence, Desipis. Attempts by larger groups to pilot choices by an individual are at the heart of all command economies, all of which have failed. There is an emergent movement among behavioural economists suggesting that it is possible to ‘nudge’ people’s choices in an appropriate direction, but the nudgers’ aims are far more modest and do not involve any coercion (on the grounds that the state is often wrong).
clarencegirl, I take your point but I still have my doubts. My father’s family were also depression era, and really were down on their uppers. London also had great pockets of poverty in that period.
This describes very well all the mountains of legislation designed to ‘make murder even more criminal than it already is’ during the War on Terror.
I’ll just ask you JC not to reanimate old stoushes if you don’t mind.
Sigh. Let’s deal with some of the JC falsehoods. FAO and World Bank economists endorsed peddle pumps well before anyone gave a crap about climate change. The climate change angle is immaterial.
The people you call brown people can be seen cheerfully using peddle pumps here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH2I2ZKD_98&feature=player_embedded#t=119
Note how one woman says she is happy she no longer has to pay for a diesel pump.
This video is about a local Indian charity that clearly sees peddle pumps as the superior option: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1d32uVHZtc
Youtube has hundreds of videos in which third world farmers tell the same happy story.
On the Cat you induced MichaelF to commit suicide and denounced Indians as savages, among other things. You’ve been banned from numerous sites for abuse and trolling include Tim Lambert’s and Harry Clarke’s. I doubt SL or anyone else here is interested in this crap so why not take it back to the Punch and Judy Channel.
SL
There is heaps hear to riff off, but for now, I’ll confine myself to you being ‘Ozblogistan’s favourite libertarian’. I’d say the reason is less that you are “nice” – that does not mean you are NOT nice, but I think LE gets bragging rights for ‘niceness’
.
No, you are just more professional in your blogmeistering. I suspect, this has much to do with a sincere – and most legitimate – conviction that you are extremely smart and extremely well educated, and have the prizes to back up your convictions.
That is, you are not so intellectually intimidated that you must micro-manage the flow of posts, deleting those that threaten your rep. As we all know, most other blogs are not run by people so intellectually comfortable. They justify their micro-management and skittish “Delete” function in the name of what they call “not feeding the trolls”.
Apart from that, adding The Oz series, the Luvvie. P, Guy Rundle, Cast Iron Helen and Her Sistahs, and what we get is a picture of the Australian Left as nothing more than the mouldy rump of Socialists/Communists Trots/Stalinists/Maoists/Western Marxists/New Left/Blah from the 1960s/70s still hanging on to the few remaining life-rafts of S.S. Leftist.
The Rump Left is white, bourgeois, mainly in the 50s and 60s, works in the public service, including the casualised fag-end of the Dawkins University Culture War departments, with nary a clue of what is “Left” among them.
What the “Left” does hang on to is basically incoherent.
Social justice is just another vapid stocking filler for The Luvvies, as are “neoliberalism”, “social democracy”, “social inclusion”, “equity” and such. They are more accusations of the alleged moral want of their adversaries than any meaningful base upon which to base a polity.
Social justice is their 5-star general. But whenever they say/type social justice they basically mean “equality of outcomes” = “Socialism/Communism”, which as we all now know = “poverty + police state” = road to serfdom.
That is why they spend so much time still hating Howard and inventing non-existent religions – such as “neoliberalism”, which even then they dissemble into “economic/market-liberalism/neoconservative/economic rationalist/The Right, and on, and on.
The reason they create these ideological neologisms – despite those to whom they supposedly apply never using them to describe themselves – is to function as The Left’s very own ‘Other, thus providing the leftists with some mirage of coherence in their own self-identification as “left-wing”.
Trying reading books/chapters/articles by McKnight, Quiggin, Manne, Rundle, LP, etc. and time how long before you get a headache trying to follow the ideological vivisection and Frankensteinian attempts at nominalist cohesion.
I increasingly strongly believe they simply choose a large number of adjectives, quadrupling their number simply by adding neo or post to each; cribbing tomes on political theory – thus extracting words like liberal, socialist, fascist, Communist, and so on – bunching them all together as one does when playing Pick Up Stix. They then throw these words into the air. Wherever they land and in whatever order, they combine with the nearest adjective and its temporal state – neo, post etc. – and voila.
While sadly lacking the natural attractions and thus combinations of covalent bonding we find in organic chemistry, Ideological Pick-Up-Stix, has now at least something to define itself against.
It is ironic that The Left’s politically-correct agreement on what it calls “climate change” has not harvested more from organic chemistry’s existence being rooted in the chemical element, carbon. Even if The Left wished to stick with its more inorganic ideological bondings, such as libertararian Socialism, it would do well to hire some inorganic chemists to point out which inorganic compounds are highly soluble, and thus avoided. We might say that “social liberalism” is the NaCl of the ideological covalent bonding of Leftist neologisms, whereas market liberalism is perhaps the carbon of Leftist ‘Othering’.
While this ideological nominalism might help rescuing The Left from its intellectual and ideological schizophrenia, it is tragically – at least in its 2009 garb – nowhere near sufficient for attaining a state of coherence, when they safely might be permitted to roam about the world.
Mel I’ll also ask you not to reanimate old stoushes, and also point out that the spammer is now going really crazy. I’m having to fish for comments in amongst the porn and viagra ads (not edifying).
Yes, LE wins the overall ‘nice’ prize JG… but then, she isn’t a libertarian!
SL
Touche!!
Excellent post.
My dad was constantly told that he was ‘getting out of his class’ by being at the grammar, even though he did well
One of the reasons the Beatles broke up was over management issues. Paul McCartney wanted his soon-to-be father-in-law to manage the funds. The others wanted a shyster. And they went with him cause they thought Linda McCartney’s dad was a snob. But if that was true why did he let his baby girl marry a working class skouse?
Needless to say Lennon, Harrison and Starr learned the hard way and McCartney is worth 100 000 000 +.
This isn’t borne out by the evidence, Desipis.
SL, I’m not saying that it’s “always” the case (which is what command economies are about), but rather that it’s “sometimes” the case (as opposed to the “never” position of libertarians). The art of good legislation/regulation is knowing when this is the case. Or more specifically when individuals acting in their own perceived self interest isn’t in the interest of wider society.
All the major developed economies have significant amounts of regulation, so if anything, the evidence points to some level of intervention being successful and even necessary.
Just a minor addition to my point about The Left creating its ‘Other, is to trot out the tu quoque fallacy by banging on about “the Right”. Does anybody on this blog identify as “right” wing? I don’t. It is a mistake to bundle up liberals, conservatives, libertarians, Tories, mercantilists, national socialists, as “The Right”.
Again, it is another example of self -projection. Left-wing people proudly so identify – in their blog banners, in their writings, in the party memberships, etc. And those people thus invariably are described or even pigeon-holed as “The Left”. (note the spelling
)
But just because Leftists need a solid political identity, replete with foundation narratives, structuralism, and eschatologies varying somewhat from fatalistic to utopian, does not mean the rest of the world does?
For example, a strongly religious person HAS a socio-political identity joined at the hip with their Roman Catholicism, Twelver Shia Islam, and so on that transcends any temporal secular notion of Left/Right. Who gives a hoot about Marx, when you’ve got Jesus Christ (may peace be with him) and Muhammad (may peace with him)!?
The formation of the modern Liberal Party of Australia was not based on mass readings of Locke and Mill, but a grass-roots, sleeves rolled up fervent opposition/fear of the incipient Socialism/Communism that was blooming in Australia.
Now, merely hating Communism in 1944 could provide enough canvas for an awafully huge tent, whose source of comfort, security, and political strength ebbs and flows with the reality of Communism/Socialism taking over in Australia.
Perhaps Leftists really do think if you are not a card-carrying self-identifying Leftist then you are part of “The Right”. Such Manicheanism does have some logic, if you are revolutionary or a passionate social engineer. Otherwise, it does not really progrees debate, but handicaps it.
No, all non-Leftists are NOT all Righties now!
I suspect we may be in furious agreement here.
Of course, however, this requires modesty about what the law can and cannot do. It is the essence of Hayek’s argument that markets and society both need to be thickly forested with laws, but that those laws should have certain characteristics. He describes these as ‘end-independent, general, applicable to a very large set of future circumstances where the facts (but not the parties) are on all fours’.
Very few libertarians are anti-regulation in the way their opponents commonly describe. There may be a few of that type on the outer limits of anarcho-capitalism, but certainly not me, Jason Soon or Andrew Norton.
It is a mistake to bundle up liberals, conservatives, libertarians, Tories, mercantilists, national socialists, as “The Right”.
You could say the same for the Left.
I think the way it works is that most people don’t have much by way of political consciousness. They don’t care. Most aren’t particularly interested in the nuclear arms race or the degradation of the natural environment or whatever else.
Those that do drift to left wing politics of some kind of another because they actually talk about that kind of stuff. And then you recieve the doctrine and that’s how you explain things. It does become Manichean with everyone who doesn’t subscribe to the ALP, the Greens, radical feminism, Eco-War or whatever being thought of as ‘evil’. And this escalates for the same reason that passions run wild whenever angry people gather.
I was attracted by left-wing politics when I was at Uni pretty much surfeit of the Cold War insanity, the treatment of girls in my high school, the authoritarian nature of Joh’s Qld and the rest. After a while I learned that the Left do the same shit only ineffectively. I see the spectacle of so-called feminists telling other women what to do and how to dress and what they like and what is and is not ‘women’s business’. I see so called anarchists behaving with unbelieavble authoritarian meglomania. The best one was the greenie activist who wanted to burn down a state forest. Or perhaps the Marxist who thought Milan Kundera’s novels were ‘Soviet bashing’!
A lot of people on the Right are also concerned with social issues but tend not to get too involved because they don’t want to be associated with the Left.
I think a lot of energy is wasted in this mutual dehumanizing regard and the political party loyalty that it generates is absurd. Logically the best thing to be is a swinging voter.
There are different points of view and mindsets. There will always be conservatives and progressives and live and let live people and people who want to subject the entire globe to the Plan.
My view is that you simply don’t have to choose to be ‘left wing’ or ‘right wing’. You can decide for yourself how you stand on various issues and standing on one issue the ‘left wing’ way doesn’t prevent from standing on another the ‘right wing’ way. You really don’t have to buy into the block booking system of ideology. All political ideologies are models and none of them are perfect. Moreover we would never’ve got this far if everyone had exactly the same view of things.
It might be better
Adrien, you could say that about The Left, except my point about their own self-identification as “Left”. Big diff. don’t you think?
Adrien, I could not agree more. Personally I don’t think I fit well into a left or a right wing stereotype and I’m happy with that.
“Law does an excellent job of process (what justice is). It does a remarkably shitty job of outcomes (what justice is not). It is wise to remember this fact.”
Actually there is plenty of evidence of nanny state law and other nanny state actions being an effective tool for delivering outcomes, for example reducing mortality and morbidity. These include the massive drop in traffic accident and smoking related death and injury since government intervened in these matters. On consequentialist grounds these things are clear winners. I doubt many people would object to the ends achieved although some may not like the means.
Also the nanny stater (and I am a proud nanny stater) has more than just law in her/his toolkit. Education is another tool and so is marketing.
The problem is that too many nanny staters are absurdly naive and not in the least pragmatic. The example of Dr Bahnisch thinking that if benevolent legislators don a pink tutu and wave a magic fairy wand the laws of economics will part like the red sea and the oppressed masses will benefit once again comes to mind.
It might be best if the nanny stater devises and implements small experiments in improving the common good. Call these conjectures if you will. In the event a conjecture is refuted then it shouldn’t be too much trouble to learn from it and advance a new conjecture.
Not necessarily, John. In the UK there’s a particular interest in the idea of social mobility as a measure of “Social Justice”. Some families move down the social ladder, whilst others move up. I can’t think of anyone who genuinely thinks that poverty can be wished or public-policied out of existence as the problem is too complex, what governments CAN do is tweak the incentives to ensure that there is a healthy level of “churn” ie. exposing more people to equality of opportunity. Unfortunately the current system here is structured in such a way that it encourages stagnation – poor families stay that way but the wobblier sections of the middle class have their status protected. Britain’s social mobility has been declining since 1945 (and here I will restrain myself from commenting about the tendency of the baby-boomers now in power to “pull the ladder up after them”) due mainly to education reform. It worsened particularly in the 1970s with Labour’s war against “elitism” in the form of the Grammar school, and the coup de grace came with the end of full student grants for university study under the Conservatives in the 80s.
Some context for DEM’s remarks about the Grammar School system (and why I found Gillard’s story so flummoxing) is available here. I am not normally a fan of wiki but this has some good information and lots of links.
DEM
OK, I’m going to have to ask a couple of questions sequentially. The next depends on your answer to the first. Oh, and I am reasonably up on the UK class system. I lived there for 18 months late 80s/90s working in IB in the City and for four years in the mid-late 1990s.
OK, so what is this “social justice” concerned with? Relative circumstances or absolute circumstances, or something else?
Lubricating the ladder of social opportunity? For example, lower middle-class Margaret Thatcher becomes Tory PM, and like lower-middle-class Susan Greenfield, a Baroness. If so, how does “social justice” deal with said ladder really amounting to a zero-sum game, whereby one person’s climb is equally matched by someone else’s decline?
The reason I became interested was because as most times your comments are silly and exhibit lax thinking. I didn’t bring up the issue, Mel. you did, presented in a childish way to somehow moralize about libertarians. And like most times your wrong.
Here’s what spiked said about your peddle pumps.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3788/
In a feature about carbon offsetting in The Times (London), it was revealed that the leader of the UK Conservative Party, David Cameron, offsets his carbon emissions by effectively keeping brown people in a state of bondage. Whenever he takes a flight to some foreign destination, Cameron donates to a carbon-offsetting company that encourages people in the developing world to ditch modern methods of farming in favour of using their more eco-friendly manpower to plough the land. So Cameron can fly around the world with a guilt-free conscience on the basis that, thousands of miles away, Indian villagers, bent over double, are working by hand rather than using machines that emit carbon.
Climate Care celebrates the fact that it encourages the Indian poor to use their own bodies rather than machines to irrigate the land. Its website declares: ‘Sometimes the best source of renewable energy is the human body itself. With some lateral thinking, and some simple materials, energy solutions can often be found which replace fossil fuels with muscle-power.’ (2) To show that muscle power is preferable to machine power, the Climate Care website features a cartoon illustration of smiling naked villagers pedalling on a treadle pump next to a small house that has an energy-efficient light bulb and a stove made from ‘local materials at minimal cost’. Climate Care points out that even children can use treadle pumps: ‘One person – man, woman or even child – can operate the pump by manipulating his/her body weight on two treadles and by holding a bamboo or wooden frame for support.’
Your tube links are laughable pomo sets for the organization promoting renewable energy with a difference. Humans peddling like rats to extract water from the ground.
Note how one woman says she is happy she no longer has to pay for a diesel pump.
Has the thought even crossed your mind that the racket could have donated the cost of the diesel?
Youtube has hundreds of videos in which third world farmers tell the same happy story.
So why don’t you try it and tell us how it goes for a month or two. Let’s see if you too can become a happy little camper foot-peddling water out of the ground.
I really don’t think we should be comparing your reprehensible conduct at that site and the things you’ve said.
My comment related to your failure to recollect why you have been banned from that site so many times and the comment you to that simply was inaccurate. I was trying to was setting the record straight.
Yes, SL, I was CERTAINLY being tongue in cheek (with both of yesterday’s posts, actually), ignoring the differences between the libertarian/authoritarian right like many of the “rightie” writers ignored the differences between libertarian/authoritarian left.
I would have thought that the mention of the DSM would have been the icing on the giveaway cake – that bastion of conservatism took HOW long to declassify same-sex orientation as a mental illness, something that could even be “cured”? So what chance classifying most in US politics as defective?
Andrew Norton, of course, was spot on about the sensibility thing. (And the “left has sensibility X so right have no sensibilities” is another giveaway about buccal overstretching). However, I’d also think that most with a social libertarian streak arguing for rights they’d never exercise (e.g. pro-same-sex-orientation rights even if not having any SSO folk in their families or circle of friends) would have many of the same sensibilities.
As for any “treatment” I’d recommend – certainly not a re-education camp, but maybe a few simple things commonly done in allied health courses, and best done in schools – make each student wear a sling or leg splint and crutches for two days and you’ve pretty much opened the eyes of everyone but the most egocentric.
As to the ironing out of individual variation, differences, etc, that’s got little to do with left/right and more of the divide between the libertarian/authoritarian. Procrustes’ bed serves no-one but inflexible clothing manufacturers.
Enough with the peddle pumps, people. Enough, already… please. It’s not even tangential to the thread, FFS.
I don’t think the social ladder IS a zero-sum game JG, it is constrained by the economy of course (as many over-extended middle class people are presently finding out) but improving people’s outcomes can improve the wider economy and society. The idea of churn just acknowledges that even with the best of opportunities, not all parts of every family will be able to capitalise on them, whether from personal weakness (addictions) or plain bad luck.
As for what constitutes “social justice”, the definition will vary depending on who you ask. I merely brought up social mobility as a quantifiable component of the larger lefty “social justice” agenda you referred to.
Sorry, SL. I just wanted to set the record straight about Mel’s emotionally laden hatred of libertarians, which I might add doesn’t seem to be even his worse side. It’s always wrong anyway spliced with links that almost always disagree with what he says
I don’t think social improvement is zero-sum either, otherwise all the effort that’s gone into growing the pie since the days of the Industrial Revolution will be for naught. Of course there’s more to go around these days.
JC: last meta comment. Back on topic now, wearing your Troppo tux
DEM
OK, correct me if I’m wrong, but you are applauding moves/government policy that allows people as much freedom – defined largely as opportunity – to change social positions (or even less quantitatively, to be able to make decisions about their lives, that are not denied basically in utero).
To the extent, I am not misrepresenting you, hell I am 100% with you sistah! Having been born and raised in Mt. Druitt – a hideous huge Sydney public housing sink – and having lived in Holland Park and Belsize Park, where because of my job (derivates in the City) and social networks in the gay world, I know quite a bit about social stasis, the sometimes impervious integument of class – particularly in Britian, etc.
But I don’t get how any of this is social justice. To me it is firstly about indibiduals “rights/opportunities” to excercise mobility options if they choose, but secondly, I am not seeing where the “justice” idea becomes relevant.
My understanding (and as I’m not a leftie, I could be completely wrong) is that opportunity IS the justice. Injustice is being in the same position all your life and denied the opportunity to change that if you so wish. Structural constraints (like education) are easier to tinker with, but social constraints (discrimination) can do as much damage. They’re just a hell of a lot more difficult to address and quantify and may not actually be possible to change regardless of well-meaning legislation.
Just as a point of interest JG, would you regard the goal of establishing a minimum quality of life (as defined say by a citizen’s income/negative income tax) as an attempt to produce equality of outcome?
SL
OK, cool. That’s why I asked DEM if she was concerned with absolute or relative mobility. Look I have a HUGE aversion to anybody in Australia being poor.
For example, at school, as a teenager, since the age of 14 I had Thursday night/Saturday morning jobs at Woolworths, Grace Bros, and MacDonalds. Now, we all know how shittily teenagers are paid at these sorts of places. I often ruminated on the justice of being paid $2 an hour or whatever it was, and even discussed with my Dad. Now, my Dad did horrifically foul work at an abattoir, where he was also the Meatworker’s Union rep. Ultimately, we both agreed, I was not being exploited and it was a good thing they hired us.
Why? I lived at home, with everything provided. I still got the average pocket-money going in my part of the world – about $10 from memory – for chores around the house. Dad still paid for all school equipment, including lunches, excursions, etc.
Basically, the money I earnt from my part-time jobs was play money – go to underage discos in nice new threads, buy booze, buy records, go to Choooiiineez restaurants, etc.
Without that 2*4 hour shifts per week (more in school holidays), there is no way my Dad could have afforded to buy those things.
Further, the value-added of the work we did for those corporations was pretty low. Carrying bags of groceries out to customers cars, mopping up smashed bottles of shampoo, running a price check on “Moddess – Ladies sanitary items” I kid you not, that did happen once!
BUT as an adult, I think it incredibly WRONG that a 40 year old bread-winner – man or woman – lives on the proceeds of such work, being paid – in real terms – what an adult was paid when I did that work.
So, I have a split notion of justice there. It was OK for me to be paid $2 per hour for 8 hours work per week, but not OK for an adult to be paid $3 per hour for 40 hours per week.
DEM
I wrote my last post before reading yours. Does it satisfy your question about “minimum quality of life”?
Now 43 is a very interesting comment, JG. My analogous employment was first at Woollies and then Myer (Qld’s Grace Bros), and I remember coming to the same conclusion as you. My pay was better, but I suspect that was only the effect of inflation.
SL
Now, that’s an even spookier simpatico that electing Tech Drawing as elective in Years 9 and 10!
I don’t have the philosophical or jurisprudential training to explain our shared ethics on this particular issue, do you think you could have a stab?
JG@43, it sounds a bit like your notion of fairness might be something along the lines of “to each according to his need”. You might need something about “his ability” in there and then you’ll be on to something
“the stubborn refusal on all sides to even attempt to understand what one’s opponents are saying, and then — from someone who really should know better — an attempt by Dave at Balneus to define those politically opposed to him as suffering from mental illness. ”
Even Jason Soon has accepted the validity of various polls that show Libertarians are less likely than the followers of the other major political ideologies to donate their time and money to charitable efforts.
On libertarian sites whenever something like a muted increase in the pension is discussed the consensus is always the same: the oldies can go fuck themselves. In this very post you’ve used the “fuck the poor” line as a rhetorical device.
We can go to your local church and see Christian conservatives helping the poor.
We can go along to a Conservation Volunteers event and see lefties and greenies planting trees.
But where do we go if we want to see Libertarians doing anything for anyone but themselves?
Mel let’s agree to debate in a civil fashion and knock the abuse if you think that’s possible.
Even Jason Soon has accepted the validity of various polls that show Libertarians are less likely than the followers of the other major political ideologies to donate their time and money to charitable efforts.
Could you provide some evidence for that?
On libertarian sites whenever something like a muted increase in the pension is discussed the consensus is always the same: the oldies can go fuck themselves.
Again can you offer up any evidence? Disagreeing with the concept of an age pension for almost everyone wouldn’t qualify as libertarians are against these things in principal as private alternatives would offer better results. The churn alone would see people end up with a larger nest egg.
We can go to your local church and see Christian conservatives helping the poor.
I would tend to guess that libertarians are not church going by and large as the guiding principal is anti-authority and churches tend to be authoritarian.
We can go along to a Conservation Volunteers event and see lefties and greenies planting trees.
And this is supposed to be indicative of what exactly?
But where do we go if we want to see Libertarians doing anything for anyone but themselves?
Umm John Humphreys starting up a scholarship program where people donate money to a fund that helps Cambodian kids get through local university.
For instance I give away 5% of my gross earnings every year to charities I consider worthwhile: sometimes obscure organizations that really help people liking buying electric wheelchairs etc. I’ve been doing that since the early 90s Mel. Two Wall Street firms I worked for “kindly requested” employees donated 5% of the gross each year.
Referring to polls like your recent surveys show that the stingiest people in the US are American liberals compared to their conservative friends.
melaleuca,
Don’t you see, by employing people for slave wages and selling them overpriced crap through emotionally manipulative marketing they are helping others by giving them options* with which they can exercise their freedom!
* – gross or theoretical options only. The fact that they reduce the net practical options available is irrelevant or something.
Speaking as the resident generally leftish person, I’d say that social justice is about providing substantive equality as opposed to just equality of opportunity. It’s all very well to say everyone has equal opportunity to go to university but this ignores the fact that poor people don’t have the resources to get there in the first place (adequate schooling, scholarships, recognition of other disadvantages – including racism, sexism, discrimination of other kinds). It is about recognising that the playing field is not level, and trying to level it out to some extent.
The question is how the playing field can be levelled out effectively. Personally, for example, I don’t think something like affirmative action works in the long run. It doesn’t deal with the basic problem in the first place, and breeds resentment. I believe that there are always going to be inequalities in society (c/f Marxism, which seeks to iron out those inequalities altogether, without much success in practice, I should add).
The important thing from my point of view is offering as many people as possible the choice or the opportunity to get themselves out of a disadvantageous situation.
“Speaking as the resident generally leftish person, I’d say that social justice is about providing substantive equality as opposed to just equality of opportunity.”
True. But it is more than that. Most conceptions of social justice note that we are not born equal; some of us are just plain dumb, others have psychiatric problems and physical ailments. The afflicted persons are not to blame for their plight and shouldn’t be condemned to a life of poverty and social exclusion due to the fickleness of fate.
On top of that , the more sophisticated free marketeers recognise that the free market is not a perfect meritocracy. Lady luck can easily condemn someone of great merit to the gutter while propelling someone without merit to the stratosphere ( think Kyle and Jackie O).
In spite of SL’s rhetoric, societies with social democratic tendencies, such as Sweden and Norway, have done exceedingly well at ensuring outcomes for the disadvantaged aren’t so bad.
On the other hand, in those right-leaning western societies where to the poor and disadvantaged are supposed to rely on little more than what SL calls ‘personal responsibility”, such as America, the life chances of the less fortunate are rather bleak.
ps. I also recognise the importance of an ideology of personal responsibility but I’m equally aware of its practical limitations.
societies with social democratic tendencies, such as Sweden and Norway, have done exceedingly well at ensuring outcomes for the disadvantaged aren’t so bad.
On the other hand, in those right-leaning western societies where to the poor and disadvantaged are supposed to rely on little more than what SL calls ‘personal responsibility”, such as America, the life chances of the less fortunate are rather bleak.
Oh please, you’re comparing large oranges and small oranges implying one is an orange and the other is a pear.
Western systems are all basically interventionist in their own peculiar way. Suggesting that the UK, France, Italy, Australia, Sweden and Norway and the US are not variations of the same basic social democratic model is taking the ostrich approach to reality.
LE
I honestly had no idea you dressed to the Left!
Unfortunately, your prescriptions commit what I have increasingly identified as not only hidebound to The Left, but its cardinal sin; the passive voice.
d say that social justice is about providing substantive equality as opposed to just equality of opportunity.
Er, exactly whom is to have the honour of so ‘providing’?
LE
I also passionately oppose this modern fad of shoveling ever-increasing proportions of young adults into university; especially as much of the government’s motivation is to keep youth unemployment numbers down.
Universities should exist purely to pass on highly intellectual.academic/cognitive KNOWLEDGE. If a discipline does not lend itself to tortuous examinations at the end of the degree to check if the student has mastered that knowledge, then that discipline does not belong in the university.
Once stydents master this disciplinary knowledge, the university should train those who show promise as contributors to the progressive research agenda and/or teach.
I would also include the academic nuts and bolts of those professions that demand mastery of high level intellection to be able to practice.
There is so much social energy basically being buried in the western university system. There is probably no justification for any more than about 10% of our population to gain university degrees
JG,
“Er, exactly whom is to have the honour of so ‘providing’?”
Well that would be the State, sweetheart.
And before you ask with whose money, it is the State that prints the money and sets the laws that determine its distribution, including the “thicket of laws” that make a free market possible.
I hope this helps.
JG, yeah, I’m not a “typical Lefty” if you know what I mean. I don’t adhere to the Lefty canon of belief. But I do have a strong “social justice” streak.
As to how to provide substantive equality? Well that’s the 20-million-dollar question. The reason I’m not a libertarian is because I don’t mind government intervention in some circumstances, and I also believe in government funding of some services. So our taxes pay the government to do stuff for us. But I think the government also totally ruins certain things when it gets involved (eg, childcare), so you have to be careful about what you let it do.
I also favour laws against discrimination but do not favour a Human Rights Act or Bill of Rights (as you well know).
That being said, I recognise that there are limits to how far legislation can fix a problem (SL and I are probably in agreement on this one – we’ve seen too many laws to think legislating is a panacea).
JG @ 55 – yes – if you open something up too widely, it becomes devalued. Also university education is not for everyone. And you know what – that’s okay! See, I might be left-ish, but I’m also a meritocrat, so I certainly don’t think everyone has equal ability. Inequality is inevitable in society. But I’d prefer that people have options for social mobility, and that there be a safety net for the most disadvantaged in society.
(Incidentally, I am stewing on the MOTHER of all posts on maternity leave and etc which certainly will not take a conventional left wing approach. Bubble, bubble)
Also I do think practical education in a field is really important. I’m glad that I practiced in various fields before I went back to academia, and that I didn’t just do one or two years at a big firm and then flit back to the hallowed halls. There’s more than one way to learn, and sometimes practical knowledge can be superior to university learned knowledge. By the same token, the reverse can sometimes be true too.
“But I think the government also totally ruins certain things when it gets involved (eg, childcare), so you have to be careful about what you let it do.”
The free market stuffed up childcare when ABC Learning went bust. If the nanny state hadn’t intervened we would now be in a fine pickle.
LE
Let’s be honest, there is NOTHING elite about a Media Studies degree from the former Oxford Poly in England or Latrobe University in Australia!
LE
Oh we are completely at one on it “being OK” not to go to uni. My brothers all left school at 15, and are nowadays, mechanics, electricians,and such. Far better to to own your own plumbing business, be able to support your three kids comfortably, have a happy marriage, than be a Dawkins University graduate, as useless as pockets in underpants to society, and so bitterly and suicidally toils away in the call-centre orbit.
Ah, Mel, but if it hadn’t been for childcare subsidies there’s no way ABC would have ballooned like it did. It grew out of the government underwriting of certain kinds of private childcare.
John G – Adrien, you could say that about The Left, except my point about their own self-identification as “Left”. Big diff. don’t you think?
.
Point.
.
LE – Adrien, I could not agree more. Personally I don’t think I fit well into a left or a right wing stereotype and I’m happy with that.
.
Vaclev Havel said it best. It’s absurd to classify your opinions topographically. There is like mindedness but no-one really agrees with anyone else 100% of the time. And why should we?
.
Because of caucus discipline. The last time I saw this in action was when I was a scrutineer at my local ballot station. In the room an elder of the ALP was explaining to a youngster why each and every member of the Liberal party is inhuman.
.
It’s funny ’cause on that day the nicest person was the Lib candidate. And the second nastiest one was the ALP elder.
.
Next to Barry fucking Jones.
Vaclev Havel was an idiotic drunk.
You’ve got to be careful of shovelling Sweden in particular into the conventional ‘social democratic’ basket, too. That country has a voucherized school system and fully privatised social security — neither of which the US has. Both of those are central libertarian policy proposals, and both have worked well. Indeed, if there is one libertarian policy I’d want to implement immediately if not sooner, it would be school vouchers.
Also: apologies for not being around while this thread was unfolding, I have got quite a bit on over here at present.
LE@57 said (and thinking SL would be in agreement) "there are limits to how far legislation can fix a problem"
I suppose it depends if the aim of the legislation is clear, the legislators skillful, and the interpreters on the bench are wise – all in competition of course with the skill of those searching for loopholes.
One could draw parallels in health interventions – sometimes the side effects are worse than the original affliction, and require a second intervention, then a third, …
SL says:
“You’ve got to be careful of shovelling Sweden in particular into the conventional ’social democratic’ basket, too. That country has a voucherized school system and …”
The Swedish voucher is nothing like that proposed by libertarians. Under the Swedish system private schools are not allowed to charge a fee above the voucher rate nor are they entitled to pick and choose who they teach.
The Swedish system offers genuine choice to all irrespective of family income while ensuring there is no rich school/poor school divide.
On the other hand the libertarian conception of vouchers lets private schools charge parents top up fees as well as letting them weed out or not enroll “undesirable students”. For example, a Christian school can refuse to enroll homosexual students.
The Swedish voucher system faithfully adheres to bread and better social democratic values of social inclusiveness and equality of opportunity. On the other hand the libertarian conception provides for social exclusion and the co-existence of rich and poor schools.
I’m surprised and disappointed to see you deliberately misrepresent the Swedish Voucher System.
But Desipis, these days few people actually agree with “to each according to his need” preferring “to only those who deserve it” and a return to the worthy/unworthy poor dichotomy that welfare entitlement (having paid your national insurance/taxes/insert australian equivalent) was meant to eliminate.
Good god. If the passive fulfillers of “need” were to dole out each of my “needs”, the rest of y’all would be having cold showers and eating drippin ‘n bread for the rest of your lives!
Desipis
I don’t really know what the full implications of my examples of justice, unfairnes, etc. are. But I do know I viscerally take to the streets when I hear whispers of that in Australia in 2009, grown men/women feeding his/her/their families on the 2009 values of $2/4 per hour I earnt at Woolworths, Grace Bros., and McDonalds during my teenage years.
Under the Swedish system private schools are not allowed to charge a fee above the voucher rate nor are they entitled to pick and choose who they teach.
Umm so the Swedes have nationalized the private schools through legislative edict then?
jc, regulation != nationalisation.
DeusEx, I guess “deserve” does seem to be a middle point between the communist “need” and the capitalist “earn”.
JG, does it make any difference to your perception of fairness given the welfare that such a family would receive if their breadwinner was only earning minimum wage?
Adrien
What do you mean by ‘point’?
Desipis:
Yep, in this instance it sure does. They’ve nationalized the private schools through government edict that’s all. It’s the most dishonest form of nationalization , as there’s no compensation for the heist.
jc,
No it’s not. The schools still have private owners and those private owners can still make a profit from the school. The school can operate as it pleases within the confines of the regulation, which is a far cry from a school directly controlled by the state.
Desipis:
The schools can’t charge above the voucher and aren’t allowed to choose their students as a result of government force.
Can you explain to anyone here what makes it private?
The school can operate as it pleases within the confines of the regulation, which is a far cry from a school directly controlled by the state.
hahahahaha. You’re kidding right?
Can you then explain what they are allowed to do different to public schools?
Joe C will never be the first cab off the rank but he has got closer to the truth here than poor old Helen D.
Under a pure form libertarian voucher model it would be perfectly OK for a Christian school to replace Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” with the Old Testament’s book of “Genesis” in the science classroom. Such a school would still receive voucher money from the Government.
Conversely such a school would not receive a single shiny Krona from the Swedish Government.
But it’s entirely arbitrary and imposes highly subjective moral assessment onto persons. Historical example: young women applying to receive parish relief in the Welsh valleys pre-WW2 (and welfare state) were subject to a virginity test. I can only assume that failing meant they were considered capable of earning their own living…
Given the announcement by Gordon Brown this week that Labour is planning to put teenage mothers into “baby borstals” rather than give them access to social housing, I’m wondering how long it’ll be before someone tries that tack to deny them income support as well.
Mel
Under pure libertarianism there wouldn’t be any vouchers, so you got that wrong from the start.
Sl’s point was that it broadly promoted competition in the schools market. At first blush she appears right.
Although the defacto nationalization of private schools seems to me to be a con so that the state won’t have to worry much about outside competition as the basically closed it down under pretense. There’s a huge rat there and it smells to high heaven.
Uhh, voucherisation wouldn’t necessarily end the application of national curriculums Mel. The whole system is based on preparing students for common national qualifications (junior/senior certificates, GCSEs/A-levels etc) so a school couldn’t put Genesis in the science course unless the common qualification syllabus said so. Their pupils simply wouldn’t pass or would have their results discounted by universities and employers outside that narrow demographic.
DEM says:
“Uhh, voucherisation wouldn’t necessarily end the application of national curriculums Mel. ”
Sigh.
I very clearly said “pure form libertarian voucher model.” The words before voucher are known as qualifiers.
Qualifier
2. modifier: a content word that qualifies the meaning of a noun or verb
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=qualifier
Sigh.
I very clearly said “pure form libertarian voucher model.” The words before voucher are known as qualifiers.
Mel, do you understand that in “pure libertarian” model vouchers wouldn’t exist.
Do you get that or not? I really don’t know how else it could be explained so you would understand.
Desipis
OK, let’s explore two scenarios here for the same family. Let’s call them the True-Blues
Scenario 1 (a). The main breadwinner – Torana True-Blue – is married to Tina, with two children, Tiphany and Tiger – works at the Mt.Druitt Woolworths, as I once did. Torana T-B works his 40 hours on full-time award wages – which is, as it was in my day, higher than juniors, both casuals and full-time. But he also gets his fair share of overtime, little of which nowadays attracts penalty rates. According the current award, Torana True Blue is paid a weekly wage of $570 per week or $30,000 pa,
Or pre-tax, a piddling $16,500 p.a which is about $14 per hour, or about $315 per week!!!.
Scenario 1 (b). Same as 1, except Tina Torana works at the same Woollies at the same level on identical wage pa – except at the moment the deal is Tony takes all the overtime opportunities, so Tina can be at home to cook dinner for the kids; last year the relationship was the reverse. Thus, this bring the Torana’s family income to roughly $33,000 per annum (plus Torana/Tina’s over time, usually about an extra $3,000 pa.a post tax) , or $630 per week sans overtime; while nudging $700 avec overtime…
But like John Greenfield and his abattoir-toiling Dad in the 1980s, 15 year old Tiger and 13 year old Tiffany True-Blue are able to contribute.
15 year Tiger True-Blue, like John Greenfield circa 1980s, also got a casual job at Woolworths earlier this year, paying the 2009 award wage for casuals of $17 per hour. Thus, the $30 per week pocket money is augmented (pre-tax) by 8*17 = $136, which over 52 weeks amounts to $7,070 or $4,266 after tax = $82 per week, which I guess given inflation gives high school kids a similar lifestyle I enjoyed in High School.. While Tiffany True Blue is only 13, she is able to buy sexier frocks than otherwise through her tax-free babysitting connections around the neighbourhood.
Soooo, ‘social justice’ and the True-Blue Family
OK, I must confess straight up, my knowledge of welfare economics is non-existent. That it is why I deliberately linked justice and fairness to subjective, not necessarily informed rational principles; to whit, I emphasise my visceral reaction.
Now, as to your question about
my perception of fairness given the welfare that such a family would receive if their breadwinner was only earning minimum wage?
OK, first of all, I want to put the word “welfare” on the table. I regard Newstart/DSP payments etc. as “welfare”, but not government schools funding, nor universal health insurance, for example. If you mean ‘welfare’ more in the way Bob Hawke used it when he was selling The Accord’s acceptance of lower real wages in exchange for an increase in a phrase almost too wolly even for the Leftists; “social wage”: welfare transfers to the True Blue family from general revenue in the form of Medicare, Health Care card, cheap meds, compulsory super payments by employers, NewsStart, DSP, free access to JobStart, NO, it does NOT – necessarily – alter my perceptions about adult breadwinners working for shit money at Woollies.
Primarily because the employer-paid wage is less opaque, more publicly known, and a more tangible and – metaphorically – tactile source of cash for burpers and farters to buy holdiday cruises, plasma TV, etc. OTOH, as history so clearly revealed, governments have the upper-hand in nibbling away and even occasionally devouring in a ravenous rage this so-class “social wage”.
But don’t get me wrong, it makes me very proud, and thankful that – like the True-Blues – I am Australian, and therefore Torana and Tina True-Blue never have to worry about losing their house over little Tiffany’s netball accident, or the increasingly lairy Tiger’s carryings on. My – JG’s – support for Medicare is unshakeable; but that does not mean, I am closed to discussions about ‘reform’. Like any policy idea, that would require huge amounts of government borrowed deficit spending, I am reflexively sceptical, but that does not mean cynical .
I merely say, OK, I am a bit suss at the oft-asserted wisdom – by the likes of JQ – of governments spending borrowed cash being less threatened by the alleged contradictions and malfeasance that attend private investment dominating. I have seen too fairy-floss gifted to pollies’ favourite marginal electorates. OTOH I have also seen some/much good in government-appropriated taxpayer-funded investment and general redistribution. So on this particular case, I promise to give your advocacy the most considered respect, as, in the past, you have suggested much that is sensible thus you have in the past persuaded me of the government taking control in one or two specific instances. So give us your best pitch!
One example, is Medicare and the PBS. My main reason for being so take-no-prisoners on the health system debate is that I believe healthcare truly is unique among all other human demands of goods and services. The decision to forego a Ferrari or pair of Calvin Klein Jeans is nothing like the decision to have heart by-pass surgery. The research of I have done on systems in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Australia, including having lived and worked in Oz, US, and UK, has lead me to conclude that any Australian lobby group that wants to try and chip away at our system has got a REAL fight on their hands. One of my best mates is a Wall Street Healthcare M&A Managing Director, and over the past few years, I have finally convinced that America’s sucks and Australia’s rocks.
It is for these reasons that – despite my being born here – I am big supporter of the social capital that these instritutions and transfer payments strengthen Now, not only am I no welfare economist, nor am I a libertarian jurist!
. Thus, I fully expect – and would welcome – identifications of my mewling for the True Blue family as ignorant examples of woolly-thinking. 
The titbits I have picked up on welfare economics, the minimum wage and targeted government transfers during the Howard years – and of course now, Rudd – have only been peripheral, gathered willy-nilly while reading/learning about other issues.
I was never a fan of Howard’s politically-brazen electorally-targeted transfers from the ongoing surpluses. Apart from stockpiling – in either a Future Fund or an insurance policy to be used as per the first GFC stimulus package (I’ll leave discussion of the 2nd and 3rd for now) – why didn’t the Howard government just reduce tax rates to such a level, that no surplus would be result OR give the money back to ALL taxpayers, not just those who found themselves knocked up during a serendipitous time-frame. Talk about the Fiscal Rhythm Method!
Scenario 3
Unemployment strikes the True-Blue Houselhold
On current government largesse, which at least rhetorically, makes claims about “equity”, “social Justice” “social democracy”, “inclusion”, blah, blah, blah, appearently we are in the worst pickle imaginable. However, I have been quite vocal in expressing a contrary view about “the GFC biggest economic/financial disaster, and the greatest economic challenge mankind has every faced” garbage
Why, and this HOW DOES come back to your question?
Because I focus on the material well-being (let’s talk brass tacks here, how much lolly rattles around the True-Blue family’s petty-cash tin) of the True-Blues as among my top three bellwethers of a socio-political economy’s health. That is, I dismiss unemployment rates and trend, as being of only limited use. .
To me, if unemployment in, say, Australia co-existed with huge surpluses that could be used to tied over the True – Blue family – as either straight ‘no strings attached’ transfers from the surpluses, OR as HECS-style arrangement – at exactly the same standard of living they enjoyed before Mr. and/or Mrs. True-Blue became unemployed, thus requiring no deficits, no foreign borrowing, and no money printing, then I would find it hard to characterise Australia as being in recession, no matter what all the other parameters – G/NDP, capital investment, etc. – say.
Now, you would be partly, maybe even mostly, right to most vigorously trivialise my under-rating of those other figures. But the truth is, I do not really trivialise them. If the True-Blues can still take their annual holiday tp the Gold Coast, each kid kitted out with new seasonal clothing, the missus still able to buy a new pair of shoes – absolutely NO Jimmy Choo or Manolo Blahnik, mind! I makes an enormous.
Now, from the disarticulated data points I have about Australia, I do not think Australia is terribly “unfair”. And I think some of the ‘Welfare” transfers to otherwise fully-employed bread winners, in an IR system that still has a relatively high floor, are justified. I just have a narrower range of transfers I would classify as “welfare, compared maybe to what you might.
Welfare economics is not my thing, I only absorb it peripherally. Ironically, my concerns for the minimum-wage family breadwinner toiling away the cash register was somewhat leavened during the Howard years due to – what appeared to me – not insignificant redistribution of the substantial rises in commonwealth taxes from the general boom, the China story, and of course, the GST. However, whether I think the government using surpluses extracted from Australian’s nationwide is quite another issue altogether!!
I should have explained why I thought the Swedish voucher model was relevant and useful, but I had other things to do yesterday LIKE HAND IN THE FIRST HALF OF MY DPHIL. Sorry for shouting.
The reason the Swedish system is such an important voucher model is as follows:
1. The US (due to its Constitution — Ist Amendment) cannot fund religious schools. Any voucher system it develops is subject to this very important constraint. Now I realise that Australia also has an anti-establishment clause, but it has always been interpreted more loosely than the US version. Private religious schools in the US are few and far between and would remain so under any voucher system, hence the interest of US libertarians in what the Swedes have done.
2. The main reason to introduce a voucher system of any sort is to increase COMPETITION. This is precisely what the Swedish system has done. People can attend any school they like: the voucher is fungible. The Swedish government (and other smaller pilot voucher schemes) thus forces schools to provide relevant information to parents, not the usual sort of amorphous waffle schools commonly try to get away with. Instead of piffle about ‘educating the whole child’ or ‘schools all have their strengths and weaknesses’ and so on, schools are forced to provide information about pass/fail rates, university entrance rates, value-add (how well the school assists a disadvantaged intake) and so on.
3. Study after study (in Sweden and elsewhere) has shown that when poor people get access to relevant information about schools and have the freedom to choose, they choose much better schools for their children, and — in those studies that have followed disadvantaged students through the system — the children do much better across every metric (literacy, numeracy, university entrance, trade qualifications and so on).
4. Schools in Sweden are free to raise extra funds from private sponsors, and many do so.
5. Bad schools close. This is the clincher, and remains as true of the Swedish voucher system as of any other proposed voucher system, and remains the principle reason why vouchers are treated with horror by teachers’ unions and the like. The Swedes have ended the pretense that all schools and teachers are equal, and by voucherising their system, have completely eliminated the phenomenon known in Britain as ‘the sink school’. Disadvantaged pupils finish up mixed in with student populations that are far more ‘normal’ in their ability range, with all the academic and social benefits that entails.
6. Although DEM has mentioned it, I’ll just reinforce the point that voucher systems still have national curriculums/local curriculums etc. Even the earliest voucher system (the Scottish ‘penny school’ system) imposed curriculum requirements. If these curriculum requirements are not met, then the school cannot receive vouchers. In Sweden, for example, they are rather insistent about the science curriculum being taught properly, despite demands from Muslim parents in some school districts for creationism to be taught.
7. Milton Friedman first proposed vouchers in Capitalism and Freedom. If you take the time to read his proposal, you will see it’s very similar to that currently in place in Sweden, in part because Friedman knew he would be operating within the constraints imposed by the First Amendment.
For a good bunch of studies on school choice, I recommend Ch 13 of Sunstein & Thaler’s Nudge and references therein.
SL
I am not well read in either Mises or Hayek, but I do recall coming across an argument that EVEN given distribution of the world’s resources right at this very minute, an instant change to libertarian principles would STILL improve the lot of those at the bottom, compared to the status quo
a) Am I quoting the right people?
b) What are your thoughts?
It depends what you mean by ‘libertarian principles’, JG. As you’ve no doubt noticed, getting libertarians to agree on a set of core principles (as JC has mentioned re: schools) is (at risk of repeating myself) like herding cats.
The heart of libertarian ideals, however, are:
1. Smaller government (coupled with lower taxes)
2. Strong institutions
3. More choice
Beyond that, getting further agreement is a trifle tricky!
jc: Can you then explain what they are allowed to do different to public schools?.
SL seems to have provided an adequate explanation.
DeusEx, I certainly agree that current perceptions of “deserve” is arbitrary and irrational. I guess that’s why we need to look at a more systematic way of balancing the encouragement of people to earn (be efficient and innovate) with meeting the needs of those who are unable to earn for themselves.
Don’t be a patronising dick, Mel. Since when has the “pure form libertarian” model of education advocated the absence of all external assessment and/or standardised qualifications?
SL@85 said “I had other things to do yesterday LIKE HAND IN THE FIRST HALF OF MY DPHIL. Sorry for shouting.”
HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY (Not sorry for shouting)
Hope you, and the supervisor, are pleased with it.
(And re 87: Maybe those trying to get libertarians to agree to a set of core principles should ask the Saints for help…. they managed to herd Cats last weekend for 3 out of 4 quarters)
Unfortunately, Mel is indulging in what I warned about above:
Just a minor addition to my point about The Left creating its ‘Other, is to trot out the tu quoque fallacy by banging on about “the Right”. Does anybody on this blog identify as “right” wing? I don’t. It is a mistake to bundle up liberals, conservatives, libertarians, Tories, mercantilists, national socialists, as “The Right”.
One HUGE difference between Religious blogs, Leftist blogs and non-Leftist blogs is the hypervigilance for “heresy” among Leftists.
The Leftists waste so much time, saying “As a pre-op FTM transsexual Sioux Native American, it is highly offensive that certian members should dare to speak for the ‘Other’.
All voices must be heard, and all truths/espistemologies must be accepted as equal.
Our promised land of decentring Europe, so that the subaltern might finally be able to speak on his/own without the ventriloquism of ‘native informers’ is surely nigh, if only we can maintain collectivity.
Oh, and usual aty these meetimngs, we must acknowledge the Oogaw BOOga people – the trasitional owners of this sitte and Article 4,987,675,987 (cxxix) (b) of the last meeting that deligitimsed ALL indigenous historiography tjhat was npt unedretaken by indigenous p[eople who claimed to be at least 234,765th indigneous.
“Milton Friedman first proposed vouchers in Capitalism and Freedom. If you take the time to read his proposal, you will see it’s very similar to that currently in place in Sweden, in part because Friedman knew he would be operating within the constraints imposed by the First Amendment.”
That is a falsehood for the reasons I’ve already explained.
Milton Friedman’s proposal allows elite schools to pick and choose students and it allows them to charge fees that ensure only the kids from Toorak but never Thomastown turn up on opening day.
Ultimately the poor and difficult to teach students would end up in Five Star Bulk Billing clinic style private or public schools, complete with white piano and dusty chandelier. Crikey, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dr Geoffrey Edelsten personally greets all the new arrivals.
SL also skips over the fact that Friedman NEVER supported a national curriculum. All he was willing to say was that a small government office would ensure schools met the barest minimum requirements, which I take to mean seats, a blackboard and a couple of handy fire extinguishers.
The Friedman system would further entrench and reinforce the existing system of privilege whereas the Swedish system is in perfect alignment with the social democratic paradigm.
SL also skips over the fact that Friedman NEVER supported a national curriculum
Umm yes that’s true, perhaps because at the time of writing (and possibly even now) it is still state determined. Shocking surprise there, Mel. I’m gob smacked in this latest revelation of yours.
Milton Friedman’s proposal allows elite schools to pick and choose students and it allows them to charge fees that ensure only the kids from Toorak but never Thomastown turn up on opening day.
Is it? How would you then explain that parents continue to send kids to private schools in Australia at a fast rate of knots even without vouchers and paying the full price? It seems you have a pretty antiquated, almost quaint view of the world. These days all one needs to is front up with the fees and you can pretty well send your kid to any school in the country. In fact Mel, a kid from Thomastown would be accepted to all elite schools with the promise to pay. I know of one limitation at two elite schools in Melbourne- Scotch and Melb. Grammar- where the kid has to pass an aptitude test and reasoning test (which is something you often have difficulties with)
Ultimately the poor and difficult to teach students would end up in Five Star Bulk Billing clinic style private or public schools, complete with white piano and dusty chandelier.
Not if you applied the evidence from Sweden, Mel, the furry little social democrat country you brought up. They say they have had very good results with voucherization as the threat of closure does tend to focus the mind a little.
Crikey, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dr Geoffrey Edelsten personally greets all the new arrivals.
Or his wife.
All he was willing to say was that a small government office would ensure schools met the barest minimum requirements, which I take to mean seats, a blackboard and a couple of handy fire extinguishers.
Perhaps, but if that’s a problem you may also want to explain the across the board success of private schools and by definition most aren’t elite.
The Friedman system would further entrench and reinforce the existing system of privilege whereas the Swedish system is in perfect alignment with the social democratic paradigm.
Umm how exactly? Would the sudden nationalization of private schools make the bad schools better? You really need to run that through the reasoning meter again.
Education is a state responsibility in the US (as in Australia). In the UK it is an odd mixture of local (LEA) and National (the ‘Key Stages’). Systems vary across Europe. No USAnian of any political persuasion (of which I’m aware) has advocated a national curriculum. They are all mindful of the effect of the 1st Amendment, however, as is Friedman.
Schools exercising control over intake is a separate issue from voucherising, but as we’ve seen, voucherising eliminates much of the problem by distributing ‘difficult’ children more evenly through the system. That isn’t to say that some people won’t finish up on the outer; some kids are genuinely unteachable, if only because they’re an incredible danger both to other students and to teaching staff as well.
Dave: heard about the Footy Final… Saints had their last flag in, when was it, 1966 or something? I know Shane Warne is a Saints fan, which may (or may not) explain many things…
jc,
They say they have had very good results with voucherization as the threat of closure does tend to focus the mind a little.
You need to work on your reading comprehension. They have good results with poor and difficult children because schools cannot turn away such children, not just because they have a voucher system. Friedman’s system would not have the same constraints and thus wouldn’t achieve the same good results.
jc: Umm how exactly?
By providing poor children the means (vouchers) and the opportunity (must be accepted on first come first serve basis) to access the same education as the rich. You make a point about kids being accepted to any school as long as their parents can pony up the cash. That’s a pretty big barrier which means that many kids will lack the means to access the same levels of education as the upper class.
The point is that it increases social mobility which helps to get the best and the brightest into key positions in society rather than the children with the richest parents. This leads to a society that is more meritocratic and hence better run (and ‘fairer’ too).
Desipis:
The reason why we engaged in an argument is that you were unable to comprehend what essentially a defacto nationalization is.
You now seem to think that the nationalization of the private schools in Sweden was the action that is causing better results if indeed that is that case.
So it wasn’t voucherization and the consequarnces of failure that has achieved this in your mind. It was the defacto nationalization of private schools that did it. Interesting.
I sometimes get impatient with logic like that simply because it’s a waste of time disentangling such a mess.
Friedman’s system would not have the same constraints and thus wouldn’t achieve the same good results.
Apart from the fact that the Swedish government’s action is essentially fascist in reducing freedom of association etc. how exactly do you know that this would result in a better outcome? Do you have any evidence?
That’s a pretty big barrier which means that many kids will lack the means to access the same levels of education as the upper class.
And your point is what exactly? Fuck up the freedom to associate for one group of people because you don’t like the idea they should, as say restricting the freedoms of a top school would somehow makes things better?
The point is that it increases social mobility which helps to get the best and the brightest into key positions in society rather than the children with the richest parents.
So restricting the right of Sydney Grammar or Melbourne Grammar to determine their student intake would raise social mobility? Why don’t go one step further and do what Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Potty Mouth did, which is instead of killing off a racial group do it by supposed class. People respect you more as it promotes equality ?
This leads to a society that is more meritocratic and hence better run (and ‘fairer’ too).
You don’t understand what the term meritocratic means and if you did, you’d be running a million miles away. A meritocracy means that just as people are allowed to rise to the top unencumbered, they should also be allowed to fail and hit skid row. Skid row would also apply to families where the parents hit on hard times, conversely it would also apply to those that hit the jackpot in life and that would also mean there would be consequences as a result. Do you really support a meritocracy? Really?
moderation?
No, sorry jc, it’s our insane spam filter – I’ve let your comments out now.
I thought that anyway, LE. No problem just alerting you. thanks
jc:
What exactly is it about the Swedish school system, when compared to other regulated industries in other countries pushes it across the line into “nationalisation”. The schools are still privately owned with the profits going to those owners which seems to me to be pretty explicitly not nationalised.
As far as nationalisation goes, I’m pretty sure Australian schools have to be not-for-profits.
So it wasn’t voucherization and the consequarnces of failure that has achieved this in your mind.
In my mind the consequences of failure would provide a significant improvement over a system that lack such an element. However a system where all the poor kids ended up in the low-cost poor kids school because they couldn’t afford any other school would remove the consequences for such school as the kids couldn’t go anywhere else. Thus the restrictions are necessary to ensure the benefits of competition apply across all students.
Skid row would also apply to families
Meritocratic outcomes apply to individuals, not families. A system that promotes people based on family connections is called nepotism.
Fuck up the freedom to associate for one group of people…
I guess its a matter of balancing that freedom with other important values in society such as equality, quality education, etc. Should we allow hospitals this freedom too, so they can turn away someone they don’t like and just watch them bleed out in the street? Should we abolish trespassing laws because its restricts freedom of movement? Should we allow people to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater because to do otherwise would restrict freedom of speech?
Legal freedoms don’t mean much when people’s freedoms are restricted by other means.
Why don’t go one step further and do what Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Potty Mouth did, which is instead of killing off a racial group do it by supposed class.
You really need to work on understanding the concept of grey. It’s that wide place between black and white, that although may not fit well into theory, is the place where reality exists.
What exactly is it about the Swedish school system, when compared to other regulated industries in other countries pushes it across the line into “nationalisation”.
You yourself have made mention of the restrictions imposed. Read what you’ve said. What they’ve done is a Defacto nationalization where the schools can’t choose their students and they can’t charge any more than the voucher. They’ve basically made them answerable to the state in the most important ways. The only thing they haven’t done is bought the building and the interiors, which is even worse as it’s stolen away every other right.
The schools are still privately owned with the profits going to those owners which seems to me to be pretty explicitly not nationalised.
How can you say the schools are privately owned when the most basic rights of private ownership have been removed? Are you kidding? You really don’t see the difference?
In my mind the consequences of failure would provide a significant improvement over a system that lack such an element. However a system where all the poor kids ended up in the low-cost poor kids school because they couldn’t afford any other school would remove the consequences for such school as the kids couldn’t go anywhere else. Thus the restrictions are necessary to ensure the benefits of competition apply across all students.
Face facts. That is the real hard reality of things. All schools can’t be turned into a Sydney or Melbourne Grammar. That just is never ever going to happen.
Meritocratic outcomes apply to individuals, not families. A system that promotes people based on family connections is called nepotism.
The point is that you really don’t support meritocracy as a meritocracy expects the slippery pole leading to the basement to be well greased too. This has consequences for families as the kids aren’t the breadwinners.
I guess its a matter of balancing that freedom with other important values in society such as equality, quality education, etc.
Define your values and what they mean to you. It seems your values supersede some very important freedoms. Also tell me what you would do to people that don’t wish to live under those restrictions. Would you jail them or re-educate them?
Should we allow hospitals this freedom too, so they can turn away someone they don’t like and just watch them bleed out in the street?
Please explain with evidence why you’re now suggesting that hospitals would turn away people when their emergency rooms are set up to cater for emergencies. You’re really not making any sense here. It’s like you’re suggesting MacDonald’s would turn away people wanting to buy a burger for no possible rational reason.
Should we abolish trespassing laws because its restricts freedom of movement?
No, of course not as trespassing presupposes private property ownership and the owner has a right to decide who and when people enter his/her property.
Should we allow people to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater because to do otherwise would restrict freedom of speech?
That’s silly. There has been plenty written that demolishes that cheap shot.
Legal freedoms don’t mean much when people’s freedoms are restricted by other means.
Umm okay. So please expand a little. But please don’t list things that really amount to nothing more than a bunch of privileges or demands lefties dress up as rights.
jc,
… a meritocracy expects the slippery pole leading to the basement to be well greased too.
I don’t disagree.
This has consequences for families as the kids aren’t the breadwinners.
This function of society is not meritocratic. It might be normal, driven by biology and common, but it’s not meritocratic. A meritocratic system would reward the kid on the kid’s performance, not on their parents.
Anyway, I’m going to give up trying to argue about the definitions of nationalisation and meritocracy. You seem to have a different understanding of the words to me and as far as I can tell most other educated people.
It seems your values supersede some very important freedoms.
Important to you. In a democracy the importance of issues and the outcomes of any trade offs would occur through the democratic process.
As for me I place the wellbeing of everyone as the overall goal of government, and freedom is an important (but not the only) part of that. The more subjective a particular element of wellbeing is, the more important freedom is. Elements that can be assessed in a more objective way can be handled in a more deterministic fashion.
what you would do to people that don’t wish to live under those restrictions.
I’d give them a vote, and the opportunity to run for political office. If the majority vote to remove a right, those that want it need to convince the majority that they are better off having such a right.
So please expand a little.
What use is the freedom of speech, if someone else has the freedom to follow you around and just talk over the top of you. So we limit the freedom of speech of some people (those who are motivated to talk over/silence others) a little bit (through harassment laws, etc) to ensure everyone can practically exercise their right. It’s important to understand the purpose of the rights (enabling free communication between individuals) and not just dogmatically insist their absoluteness. Just as its important to understand economic mechanisms such as markets and why they work (competition, transfer of power to the successful, freedom to innovate – which are all still present in the Swedish school system), when they don’t work (natural monopolies, tragedy of the commons, etc) and not to dogmatically insist they are the only way.
I’d give them a vote, and the opportunity to run for political office. If the majority vote to remove a right, those that want it need to convince the majority that they are better off having such a right.
Huh… Hitler ended winning the elections. Hamas has won a majority and their rules demand that women have to wear head dress, can’t go out unaccompanied by family and their voice is worth far less than a male in a court of law. The majority voted for that, so I take it you wouldn’t have a problem … seeing the majority voted.
I think you’re ideas a terribly confused.
Anyway SL, thanks for a most thought provoking post and discussion. Hope the DPHIL goes swimmingly. Also hope you wack the finished product up on the web as I’d love to see it.
Desipis,
It is a waste of time discussing matters with JC. I suggest you ignore him as most people do.
Mel:
I think you have me confused with you.
What use is the freedom of speech, if someone else has the freedom to follow you around and just talk over the top of you.
I really don’t think you even understand the principle of freedom of speech.
For the most past freedom of speech is about the right to political dissent and the right to express opinions whether in art, books or film etc. There are of course some limitations to that, some are quite reasonable like it’s illegal to display pics of minors in sexual positions etc.
The lawyers here would be far more able to provide better definition.
Walking behind someone, shouting and harassing them is form of assault.
You really don’t understand it do do?
Mel,
Oh I realise that, but I was at work and this was suitably distracting.
jc,
There are of course some limitations to that, some are quite reasonable
Which is my point. I think that restrictions on freedom of association for the good of the education system are reasonble.
Particularly given that its endemic poverty and poor education that enables charismatic megalomaniacs to gain popularity and control.
I’ve missed much of the ongoing discussion due to being busy with other stuff, but one last point: what I’ve quoted from Desipis can be achieved with other educational methods, and was achieved in Britain when the country had an intact grammar school system (see DEM’s earlier comments and links).
What we are arguing about now is how to make systems that were/are already pretty good even better. It may be — as Labour discovered when they lunched the grammars — that this isn’t possible, and that we have to appreciate that there is an upper bound to reasonable educational outcomes. That may mean accepting a certain failure rate. This is not something human beings have been good at during ‘high’ points of civilisation throughout history.
Particularly given that its endemic poverty and poor education that enables charismatic megalomaniacs to gain popularity and control.
Sorry, but if a person is of sound mind and body there is absolutely no reason to be dirt poor in Australia.
I just wish Australia would get it’s frock enough and adopt a Sweden-like vouchers system. But like Sweden, schools who enrol a kid with a voucher cannot receive once extra cent in school fees; though I am fine with this or that school becoming richer through lamington-drives and Chippendales nights for the fathers.
Recall, the thrust of the pro-voucher Friedman, and other libertarian schools was that with local financial schools at the local level and other local options, that very soon, what works, and what doesn’t would be become obvious.
My otherwise wholehearted embrace of Sweden-like vouchers, private schools like Ascham, Scotch, Kings, and Geelong get 3/5 of fifth all from the voucher lolly. And yet Geelong Grammar’s VCE Results will continue to compete with Mt.Druitt School circa 1998
The point being that many people are NOT of sound mind and body, jc.
Deus:
Something like 30% of the population receive some sort of government aid. Somehow I don’t quite see 30% as being handicapped.
Perhaps 3% are?
I’m not even suggesting taking anything away from the legitimately unemployed either and in fact they should be compensated even more by those that choose to work in regulated labor market sectors.
SL, indeed it may be that way. I think the ‘progressive’ move away from a meritocratic education system is problematic. The reason I think a voucher would be a good thing is that the freedom afforded schools could help to limit these damaging top down policies.
I would be wary of a simplistic return to an older system. The scope of education, particularly primary and secondary has changed dramatically in just the last couple of decades.
Deus, actually I was arguing that many people of sound mind and body are being kept in (relative) poverty in spite of their best efforts.
People find themselves in impoverished circumstances for all kinds of reasons irrespective of whether they have a “sound mind and body”. At the macro level here are two causes of poverty:
-Capitalism is the best economic system available, however it is inherently prone to booms and busts- the GFC being the latest bust. During the busts people go to the wall through no fault of their own. This is a readily observable fact.
-Dysfunctional subcultures. As an example, a child born into a remote Aboriginal community has very limited life chances. Quite literally, a short, nasty and brutish life is highly likely even if the child is born healthy and smart. No child chooses to be born into such circumstances, and once again, it is observably obvious that shrugging off the damage such a background does to one’s psyche and climbing up the social ladder is close to impossible.
Capitalism is the best economic system available
I’m curious how you come to that determination.
…however it is inherently prone to booms and busts…
There are many, many more ways in which capitalism traps people into an informal lower class.
Research in Scotland recently by the charity Capability Scotland puts the number of households in Scotland with one or more members effected by disability (ie. not based on receipt of benefits and regardless of severity) at one in four. You might be surprised.
They won’t represent the full 30% of course, people can also be impoverished by debt, bad luck, non-disease deficiency of literacy and/or education and crime but 3% may be a considerable underestimate. British figures for the overall spend on sickness benefits are vastly higher than the overall spend on unemployment despite the income benefit being less than £20 a week more.
Ah, because it’s the only one that works. It’s a bit like democracy; it’s the worst system in the world except for all the others that have been tried. Even the most social democratic nations in Scandinavia are capitalist; they’ve just made different decisions about tax and transfer policies.
Research in Scotland recently by the charity Capability Scotland puts the number of households in Scotland with one or more members effected by disability (ie. not based on receipt of benefits and regardless of severity) at one in four.
When I see numbers like those, Deux, my bullshit meter immediately goes off. I’m sorry but I find it a little hard to believe that 25% of the population is incapable of working because they have a disability that makes them unable to sit say in an office and work.
Desipis says:
I’m curious how you come to that determination.
Perhaps through reasonable evidence.
You seem really hung up about this class thing and making it your prime focus. There’s a great deal of agility in our class structure and your hang ups about it seem so 18th century.
-Capitalism is the best economic system available, however it is inherently prone to booms and busts- the GFC being the latest bust. During the busts people go to the wall through no fault of their own. This is a readily observable fact.
That not necessarily so all the time. There was the slowdown in 1998 here for instance and the tech crash in he US where masses of people weren’t effected one way or another.
By and large we went through a 17 year expansion here with a very large rise in living standards across the board.
JC says:
“By and large we went through a 17 year expansion here with a very large rise in living standards across the board.”
During those 17 years of expansion the Australian rate of unemployment was AT ALL TIMES double, triple, quadruple or quintuple the rate of unemployment we had in the growth era post WW2.
Capitalism is the best economic system available, however it is inherently prone to booms and busts
and jc@121 says it ain’t necessarily so.
And what did that organ of hard-line socialist propaganda, The Economist, have to say back in 2007-04-01, when discussing the various instruments that would lead to the global financial crisis (yes, The Economist saw it coming for many years)
(Mel.. can’t get to your blog, damn! Desipis, do you have one?)
Mel:
When people put up a reasonable explanation you always seem to disbelieve it (and not refute), so it simply becomes impossible discussing something with you. I’ll give this a try though.
The period just after the war to the mid 60’s was a period marked by central wage fixing when the clearing rate, that is the wage adjudicated by the arbitration commission was set below the clearing rate. The result was the labor was able to clear and we had full employment.
That went out the window during Whitlam’s government and we ended up with a wages break out and recession. From then on wage determination was very much set well above the clearing rate and not surprisingly we ended up with a chronic unemployment problem even when the economy was growing. Recall the ling wage rackets?
We went close to finally making quite possibly the most positive reform since federation with work choices, which would have pretty much allowed the market to determine wages and broaden employment prospects. That’s now history and we have gone back to the awards system of the 70’s. Don’t go blaming the market for high levels unemployment over the coming years or rather higher than necessary unemployment as a result of heavy-handed interventionism. Go stare at Gillard’s pic if you wish to find fault.
Dave:
The Economist has been crying chicken little since 2000.
They never called the crisis accurately. In fact their charts always showed Australia as the most expensive real estate market or most certainly up there. The chart was always used to support evidence that those named were going to experience a crash.
Australia has not experienced a crash so they’re wrong.
There’s no point in saying that over the next 10 years country x is going to experience a recession. That’s a bullishit prediction. That’s more or less what The Economist was doing along with all those other so-called recession forecasters.
The only people that can really lay claim to the forecast was a few people like John Paulson, a hedge fund manager that made around 10-15 billion in accurately predicting the sub prime crash and actually putting money on it.
Robert Schiller is also a bullshit predictor too when you really get down to it.
Schiller’s big time, golly gee forecasting methods is mean reversion. Wow! How extraordinary.
Every 1/2 decent trader fully understands mean reversion. That’s not forecasting.
Truth is no one… no one can accurately forecast continually as the world is far too complex.
I guess I should have clarified that I was after a definition of “capitalism” and a definition of “best”, and not specifically challenging the idea. That is form a “why” of capitalism, and use that context to assess the impact of various regulations (such as those imposed on Sweden’s school system), instead of just resorting to dogmatic neo-liberalism.
jc:
The ability to do productive work is no means a ticket out of poverty. If you look at more liberal labour markets (such as the US) you will find numerous examples of people who work long hours, are good at their job, and yet still get paid bugger all. (And I’m ignoring the fact that you misread what DeusEx wrote)
But it is in the nature of capitalism to test new ideas to destruction and to use new instruments as the basis of speculative excess.
The Economist has a very nasty case of Keynesianism these days and someone sometime ought to get in there and beat it out of the bastards.
They were a far better newspaper in the 90′s and these days it’s almost unreadable,
Look the one thing they seem to be missing is that despite what most lay people think bankers aren’t gods who are able to predict their own demise.
Lehman did not go out of it’s way to create paper which they held as a a risky an experiment. They honestly thought that the paper was “safe”. Hell the ownership culture was very strong at Lehman with 35% of the stock owned by the staff.
90% of the the problems caused by excess can be directly traced tot the central bank whose job it is to remove the punch bowl at the right time. 3 years of interest rates at 1% in the earlier part of the decade caused the excesses and there is no getting around it.
For the Economist to say what they said in reference to your quote basically suggests they have no idea of the impact of monetary policy on our daily lives… they think money is neutral. If you questioned them on this they would of course go into hysterical denial ………that of course they don’t regard money as neutral. In reality they do that by what they say or omit saying.
The ability to do productive work is no means a ticket out of poverty. If you look at more liberal labour markets (such as the US) you will find numerous examples of people who work long hours, are good at their job, and yet still get paid bugger all.
You have the evidence to support your claim in the US is basically Malawi and Switzerland all mixed into one.
I’m sorry, but, you’re totally out of your depth. The ticket out of poverty is working work, not sitting around
waiting for the next social security cheque. You’re simply wrong.
Read again JC, I said NOT based on receipt of benefits or severity. My point being that disability is far more common than most people think so numbers of those where the severity is high enough to interfere with working is also likely to be somewhat higher than expectation.
You’re right in that social security is NOT a route out of poverty (or at least what our ‘relative’ definition of that term – real poverty with starvation, disease and homelessness has by and large been solved thanks to the Welfare State and good civil governance). The rules are drawn up to make sure that can’t happen (and where not, often achieve the same thing despite being meant to address other issues), but while working provides the opportunity to succeed, a successful outcome is not guaranteed which I think is what Des is getting at. We’ve been analysing the phenomenon of the working poor for over a century now, pretty much since the lady fabians did their research in London published as the excellent “Round About A Pound A Week”.
jc@127: The inevitability of a crash given the lack of responsibility (risk) that comes with risk and returns, a sad characteristic of what I’d call financialism, rather than the traditional risks and rewards of investment in equity, was what The Economist was railing about. The timing is unpredictable. Just as with a cancer, you cannot give a time-to-live, only a probability of dying within a given timeframe. Incidentally, The Economist has been worried from about the same time as I was working on a trinomial (rather than binomial) algorithm for options pricing, and realized that the guaranteed influence and returns using derivatives was not reflected by the traditional risks of loss.
Modern finance seems to me as faithful to the ideas of the fathers of the free market as the Borgia Popes did to the ideals of their nominal prophet, or indeed, most communist states to Marx.
As for Australia, we are still awaiting the consequences of years of significant current account deficits, just as our key exports (carbon) are about to become more expensive. We remain highly vulnerable. How do you see the national debt being repaid, without a massive change to production of things the world will pay a premium for, or such a tightening of our belts that the blood no longer reaches our legs and we lose the ability to stand unaided? Default? An international safety net?
Thus I wonder how the past (and likely future) methods of the IMF and World Bank differ from the methods of a nanny state… but a very harsh nanny at that.
The differences between the two forms of the “nanny knowing what is good for you” are perhaps only in the proximal intent ( whether to prevent harm to individuals, or to guarantee at least some return to international creditors) and whether the imposed constraints are on the lifestyles of individuals or entire populations.
Thanks Deux… Good points.
Dave:
Jc@127: The inevitability of a crash given the lack of responsibility (risk) that comes with risk and returns, a sad characteristic of what I’d call financialism, rather than the traditional risks and rewards of investment in equity, was what The Economist was railing about.
I think you really need to explain this a little more, Dave as I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. It’s not accurate to say that risks don’t match rewards in the strict sense as the management that failed all lost their jobs. Perhaps the shareholders should have suffered a little more, however the group I see getting the special hand out at the banks were the bondholders, as they should have come down to the equity level first before the government stepped in. If there was excessive speculation blame the Fed for setting rates too low and blame the SEC for raising the leverage allowed to be taken on I-bank’s balance sheets at the start of the decade allowing them Ito go to 35:1. I also have a good reason why that happened if you want me to explain it.
The timing is unpredictable. Just as with a cancer, you cannot give a time-to-live, only a probability of dying within a given timeframe. Incidentally, The Economist has been worried from about the same time as I was working on a trinomial (rather than binomial) algorithm for options pricing, and realized that the guaranteed influence and returns using derivatives was not reflected by the traditional risks of loss.
You don’t think vol is properly measured by black scholes? Note I only really use the applications and don’t know the math behind it.
Modern finance seems to me as faithful to the ideas of the fathers of the free market as the Borgia Popes did to the ideals of their nominal prophet, or indeed, most communist states to Marx.
Well yes that’s true. In fact most Wall Street types are democrats …. They belong to the (Dem)olition Party.
As for Australia, we are still awaiting the consequences of years of significant current account deficits, just as our key exports (carbon) are about to become more expensive.
Dave, we have an absolute advantage in this stuff. I wouldn’t worry too much as our exports will do okay and if they don’t we can adjust through the exchange rate like we did this year.
We remain highly vulnerable.
Which is why out floating exchange rate serves us well.
How do you see the national debt being repaid, without a massive change to production of things the world will pay a premium for, or such a tightening of our belts that the blood no longer reaches our legs and we lose the ability to stand unaided?
If our growth rate is high then it will fall as a percent of GDP so it may be okay. In any event until now nearly all the debt was private so I don’t owe anything for what the RIO board has cooked up and neither do you.
Default? An international safety net?
We can only really only default on what Rudd and Swandive are cooking up.
Thus I wonder how the past (and likely future) methods of the IMF and World Bank differ from the methods of a nanny state… but a very harsh nanny at that.
Dunno. What do you mean by that?
The differences between the two forms of the “nanny knowing what is good for you” are perhaps only in the proximal intent ( whether to prevent harm to individuals, or to guarantee at least some return to international creditors) and whether the imposed constraints are on the lifestyles of individuals or entire populations.
Perhaps. However don’t be too concerned as there is a lot of private equity investment coming in.
I’m not saying that welfare is the desired way, I’m saying we need a system that rewards those who work hard, innovate and produce the wealth, instead of one where the rewards go to those in the positions to exploit others.
Not to defend the low interest rates, but I think you’re greatly overstating the influence of the central banks over the problem(s), and understating the over-reliance of the banks on “the market” to assess risk for them. At the end of the day the market was wrong, and the banks were caught short.
(Dave, nope no blog. Never had the discipline to keep things going.)
jc@131 on options pricing: Black-Scholes is based on probability on a given day that the price will go up v down (binomial). I was working for a prof at RMIT that included a probability of it staying the same as well as the other two (thus trinomial), a refinement of the BS (sic). The maths on paper is elegant, but implementing it accurately enough for academia (approximations verboten) to show the differences between the two models on a day-by-day basis, with long (not!) floats on the 16-bit computers of the day, was ugly, while non-lossy integers blew up with the factorials in the Taylor series. Oh for a modern 128 bit mainframe with 256 bit longs!
JC
Comoared to Sydney Grammar, Melbourne Grammar is like Summer Height’s High. Sydney Grammar’[s more natural competirtors are Eton, Winchester, Westminster. I don’t think there is even one school in Victoria I’d send my cleaning lady. And has QLD always been so baxckward edfucationally.
Comoared to Sydney Grammar, Melbourne Grammar is like Summer Height’s High.
Really? LOL Dunno much about Sydney schools.
I too have no political agenda or preference and tend to have a degree of cynicism based on life experience. However I would like to tell this story.
My son married an English girl and her father was a staunch unionist, yet, when it came to voting he voted Liberal.
The reason? He said only the aristocrats could handle the countries money as they were born to it. workers are not.
What a mind set. Some of the world’s greatest rogues have come from the “aristocracy or the rich.
However, we have to accept that was how he was reared and conditioned.
He was a very nice man, pleasant and a hard worker but not one you could say was a thinker.
Just thought this little tale demonstrates how people think politically and choose their politics and what influences them into making their decisions. Decisions may be based on ambition, greed, power, etc., and the people who want to work for the people and so on.
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