Liberty Alone

One of my pet topics is the increasing uselessness of the left/right divide as a tool for analysing politics. I personally tend to look at things as liberal and authoritarian or big state/small state (I’m in favour of liberal and small state of course).

The Globalisation Institute has just emailed me an interesting article talking about a new way of looking at politics - stasis vs. dynamism:

The stasist does not like change and does not want a world in which order can sponatneously evolve. They are roughly equivalent to the authoritarian and the big state advocates.
The dynamist believes that change can be good, that the world is evolving continuously and that we should be left free to use our ingenuity to solve problems, roughly speaking these are liberals and constrained (if not small) state advocates.

Two types of stasits are identified - the reactionary and the technocratic.
The reactionary is exemplified by people like George Monbiot and the New Economics Foundation who reject growth and progress and look back towards the past as some ideal - suggesting a restrictive localism and abandonment of trade.

The technocratic stasists are those who don’t mind progress if they are in control. They eschew the chaotic bottom up organisation which has brought so much progress and instead seek to control progress from the top. They are exemplified by the old scientific socialists and those who seek to plan trade, industry and development. This government follows a technocratic stasist plan - technology may be used but to manage and it must be controlled. Development of countries should be controlled, aid must be targeted, trade controlled to benefit certain people.

The dynamist in contrast sees the world in its complex glory and understands that no person or group can hope to control outcomes. He recognises the amazing ability of human ingenuity and the possibilities it grants us. He encourages experimentation with different ideas and realises that there is no set route for development and that it could occur in completely unexpected ways. He has a commitment to individual freedom to allow experimentation in all areas of life.
This for me is what liberalism is about - it is not about graciously granting the ability to do something or controlling people’s actions, it is about setting people free to live their own lives.

Needless to say, I’m a firm adherent to the dynamist view of society and progress.

The Globalisation Institute blog has been running a series of posts ‘Quote unquote’ which have had some excellent liberal quotations as well as many on development issues.
Today’s is very perceptive:

This is my long-run forecast in brief: The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today’s Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.

- Julian Simon, in a Wired magazine interview.

This is very true. People all over the world are living in better conditions than ever before (the sole exception is war torn regions of Africa). Freedom is greater than ever, we are living longer, eating better food. We have more productive lives but we also have more free time than ever. In large areas of the world absolute poverty has been all but wiped out. We have huge populations being lifted out of poverty at a greater speed than ever before. Racism, sexism and homophobia are becoming increasingly unacceptable in many areas of the world.

Yet what do we hear? Doom and gloom.
True there are problems, but we are better equipped than ever to face them. We should celebrate the achievements of humanity and face up to the problems with hope not despair.

We should look to a future of wealth not poverty, of a clean environment not pollution, of freedom not slavery, of tolerance not bigotry. We should say to the doom mongers and pessimists that they are wrong, our future is ours to take and we will take it. That we will face up to the problems that are presented to us but rather than despair we shall combat them and celebrate the advances they bring.

To combat our environmental problems we don’t need to flagellate ourselves or try and recover some mythical golden age of harmony with nature and happy subsistence. We can find new ways to deal with the problems that polluting actions solve, we can find the means to improve our lives even more whilst dealing with the problems we cause our environment and eliminating the causes.

Let us celebrate what we’ve achieved and look forward to achieving even more good.

Hugo Chavez is following in Mugabe’s footsteps and seizing land to ‘redistribute’ and install collective farming.

This policy has recently been tried in Zimbabwe and has been a spectacular failure, taking the country from being the breadbasket of Africa to being a country of rampant inflation and massive food shortages.

Of course, Zimbabwe isn’t the only country to have tried this. China tried it during the ‘great leap forward’. What were the results? Famine and death.
It was even tried by some early settlers in the Americas. They tried collective farming and almost starved, it was only when private farming and the ability to trade was introduced that they prospered.

Collectivisation and nationalisation is a recipe for disaster. The disaster may be staved off due to Venezuela’s oil wealth, but that will only serve to prop up a rich, corrupt elite and prevent the liberal reform which would disperse wealth more and provide opportunity for the masses.

I’m sure the left in the west will continue lauding Chavez, even as his errors become manifest, if only because he’s anti-American and claims to be standing up for the poor against the exploitative capitalist.

From The Globalisation Institute I found this.

According to recent surveys, an increasing number of Hungarians oppose the immigration of Pirese to their country. Never heard of them? The Pirese were invented by a research institute to compare the attitude of Hungarians towards existent minorities - Roma, Germans, Slovaks, Serbs - with their feelings towards a fictitious group. Gusztav Megyesi comments with sarcasm: “Surprisingly, the Pirese are most hated by the left and the prosperous inhabitants of western Hungary. They hate the Pirese mainly because they’ve never met one. Personal contact would perhaps help to reduce prejudices… Why hasn’t a politician come up with the idea of making his career by saving our country from the Pirese? ‘I have had all Pirese deported. I am the Hungarian people’s best hope. I want to rule,’ he could proclaim. And his political opponents wouldn’t be able to produce a single Pirese to refute these claims.

An excellent example of the fear of immigrants and the unknown and the way such fear and hostility cuts across the so-called left/right divide.

The Globalisation Institute has something on the latest absurdity of the CAP, and Tom Papworth expands on it.

Will the LibDems call for scrapping it yet?

With the depressing situation in Venezuela (its so predictable, price controls mean that food shortages are arriving, Chavez is continuing his clamp down on opposition and his dictatorial measures), its good to see that Peru is embracing economic freedom and free trade to the benefit of the country and its citizens.

Along with Chile I hope that the sensible economic policies can be combined with social policies which will help the poor not hinder them and increase the wealth and opportunity of all. Hopefully they will then be beacons of liberty and prosperity in long suffering South America.

The Globalisation Institute has finally fixed its rss feed. One of the first articles to appear in my reader was this one.

It echoes my concerns that recycling has become a religion, it is not looked at critically, it is seen as always good, something which is not true.

The article finishes with this nugget of wisdom

To be effective environmentalists, we need to recognise that good intentions are not good enough: we need to pursue policies that really do improve the environment.

This is very true. Just as in social policy good intentions do not make actions right, good intentions in environmental policy does not make the policy right. Just as in social policy the effects of good intentions can easily be harmful.