Blogoir: September

Is deftly hosted by Natalie Bennett.

Various points of interest, including a list of feminist bloggers missing from the 'blokeosphere' lists of leading bloggers exemplified by the Total Politics surveys. Hey, women bloggers, there's nothing stopping your blogs being put forward into these surveys and asking readers to vote for them. As eg Jennie Rigg did, climbing nicely up the charts this year.

Another frequently disgusted woman takes unerring aim at the idea that women and the way they dress or behave somehow makes anything bad that happens to them at the hands of men their fault:

Matthew Wright was very close to the crux of the issue when he made the point that blaming women for verbal sexual abuse makes as much sense as 'covering them all up with burkas', but sadly failed to go further and explain why. Burka or mini-skirt, hijab or high heels, the very fact we focus constantly on what WOMEN are wearing, shows that we still see women as being the 'gatekeepers' of sexual activity, and men as the aggressors.

No one would ever seriously make the argument that a man wearing tight jeans is 'asking for' a woman or a gay man to grab his backside, because what men wear, where men go, how men act, is never up for analysis.

This, of course, is right at the heart of the Burqa ban debate and the way Islam currently operates in many societies, as I myself have pointed out. Lawks, am I a feminist?

Part of the problem with some Islamic (and other?) communities in the UK is 'cousin mariage' and consequent 'inbreeding'. Genetic testing to help test the higher risks (if any) of illness/disease?

Finally, Brian Barder is still banging on against Tony Blair, this time over the 1999 Kosovo bombing. Well, Brian's a classic Oldish Labour-type thinker. Did he vote for Labour when TB won all those elections, or at least want Labour to win? I didn't.

Don't forget nominations (britblog AT gmail DOT com) for Matt Wardman next week.

One of the key rules followed as closely as possible by the British Royal family is to be photographed as rarely as possible eating or drinking (especially eating).

Why?

Because it's next to impossible to look dignified when eating.

The more so when knives and forks are unavailable - or seen as 'too posh'.

A powerful essay by Angelo Codevilla looking closely at the dominant ruling class in the USA:

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them?.

What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government...

And it seems to work, at least for them (my emphasis):

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain.

A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court.

Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded.

Is this situation starting to change as millions of Americans grope towards deciding to withdraw their consent to be pushed around by this sprawling elite?

It all comes down to the Sanction of the Victim:

I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent.

I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it.

The word was “No.”

Plenty of resonance from that idea over here too - look at the way the main political parties across Europe fuse together with the European-level bureaucracy to tell us all what to do, in the hope we won't notice what is happening...

According to the Total Politics list I have shot up from a scrawny 196th place (2009) in the UK Top 300 Political Blogs to a not-so-scrawny 93rd place (2010). Yay.

To add to my frabjous joy, I have overtaken Craig Murray whose appeal has definitely  waned - down from 95th last year to 98th place now haha.

Let's nonetheless be right.

Many blogs won't care less about Iain Dale's rating lists and so don't encourage their readers to vote. Craig has a far bigger readership than I do, even if (as one wag once put it to me) many of them seem to be people for whom Craig's comments box performs a valuable public service - if they weren't raving away there against Bushitler/Blairnazi, they'd be wandering around Sainsbury's muttering to themselves.

Here by contrast the readship is refined and highly intelligent.

Still, the loneliness of the long-distance blogger is real enough, and these lists at least show that people are reading the product of all the bloggers listed - and appreciate the effort involved.

Several people at the Speechwriters Guild conference yesterday said that I should write a book about my life and times in the FCO. I told them that I write this instead - and it's even better than a book, as it's free to readers and has a much-reduced carbon foorprint.

To all those who took the trouble to vote for me this year - many thanks. 

The 2010 UK Speechwriters' Guild conference took place yesterday in beamish Bournemouth. To fine effect.

Tobias Ellwood MP purposefully kicked off, closely followed by my own attempt to share some of the operational problems Leaders and their speechwriters face in working out how best to respond to Bad News (examples aplenty, including how (not) to respond to natural disasters).

Max Atkinson is the great UK if not world expert on the speech-making art, which he examines down to fascinating micro-detail. He explained to us with various terse video-clip examples how effective an unexpected visual prop can be in helping a speaker convey a message. Which, of course, does not necessarily mean that the message itself is any good.

Edward Mortimer recounted his sudden move to become Kofi Annan's speechwriter at the UN and the complexities of speechwriting in that esoteric environment.

Phillip Kahn-Panni showed us what can be done with a superb voice and an easy, confident style.

John Shosky recalled his abrupt rise to senior US speechwriting glory in the Reagan years. He made an eloquent case for speechwriters to see themselves as the very guardians of words, in an age where some popular role-models for public speaking can hardly speak at all, let alone say anything worthwhile. 

The participants included some escapees from speechwriting jobs in the Brussels EUrocracy, and Simon Lund-Jensen and Peter Palshøj from a terrific Danish group delivering public speaking services, Rhetor. They showed us how an object (Rufus the Horse) could be used to help waffling/boring speakers get back to simple straightforward messages.

And plenty more.

Conclusions?

The event showed once again the gulf between US speech-makers (and speech-writers) and the rest.

Americans expect a show, preferably one with a positive 'hopeful' message. Hence their good speakers are superb story-tellers, taking real-life examples and building on them to convey ideas of wider significance.

Here in the UK we snootily dismiss that sort of thing as falsely folksy or just plain sentimental. We are culturally ill-at-ease (or at least we think we are) with anything which has too much obvious commitment or passion. Speeches here typically are lower-key, more about conveying information and ideas cogently, with an emphasis on self-deprecation - not quite the same as American gracious courtesy.

Meanwhile over in mainland Europe the quality of speechmaking is anywhere between awful and calamitous. Hard exactly to explain why, but it must be part of an inherited cultural tradition that Europeans perforce must listen to their biggers and betters, who therefore have no real need to try hard to explain themselves. This goes to dizzy heights of paternalistic self-parody in the EU.

Americans really do think that their leaders are working for them, not that they are working for their leaders. The atmosphere is substantively democratic. Hence part of the explanation for the Tea Party tsunami - millions of Americans think (rightly) that the Washington establishment have lost the plot and become a decadent complacent part of the problem. Speakers (and speechwriters) in this turbulent context need to exhibit considerable energy to survive.

One other point. Many speakers spelled out the central idea that a good speech tells a story. Audiences visibly perk up when someone starts to say something 'real' or obviously not the usual blah-blah of corporate and political discourse. Something to think about if you have to get up and 'say a few words'.

All in all, Brian Jenner has done a terrific job in launching the UK Speechwriters' Guild and helping get public speaking skills a greater focus here. Total Politics helped sponsor the gathering - a good move by them.

The event can only grow and grow, moving in due course to a Europe-wide level where we all can pull together to help hundreds of millions of Europeans escape Audience Agony.

Is any cause more deserving?

Over at Business and Politics is my nob unsuccessful attempt to bring trendy retail chain Joe Browns to explain why they think it is OK to sell clothes with communist images.

They do try to wriggle out of a tight corner, and seem to accept that Che committed atrocities:

The image of El Che has, however, come to represent something other than oppressive communist rule; Che’s image symbolises free living, independence and unity… Furthermore you will find that Che’s image is commonplace amongst the retail industry and is a global insigne within popular culture despite the misunderstandings of many surrounding Che’s beliefs and atrocities.

Atrocities! For sure. Yet now his image symbolises "free living, independence and unity"?

Not so for those he murdered? Why not make some tee-shirts depicting the victims of communist regimes' strong commitment to upholding independence and unity?

Anyone wishing to contact Joe Browns to remonstrate with them about this dismal failure of moral imagination - all for the sake of a bit of money - just has to click here.

Maybe they should just update their product line a bit. Now that would show freedom, independence - and 'attitude'.

The insults fly thick and fast as ever:

Michelle Muscat: a thick layer of foundation not matched to her skin tone is what every girl needs if she's in Manchester or Malta

Why is this voluntary initiative being organised through a political party, with parents stupid enough to send their children along to Brainwashing Central just as long as they can get something for free?

I should get back there on another low-profile visit and delve into these mysteries in more detail. The weather must be excellent at this time of year.

Off I go soon to address tomorrow this year's Speechwriters Guild conference in Bournemouth, the theme being all about how leaders deliver good news and bad.

Haha, some leaders ARE the bad news, as Gordon Brown found out to his cost. See also the results of the latest elections in the USA.

The UK Speechwriters’ Guild has selected a group of wise, entertaining and controversial speakers to offer expert insights, stimulate thought and share experience on the subject of how to improve the clarity of communication in public life

I wonder whether I am marked down as wise, entertaining or controversial. I'll try to be all three.

While I am away, look at Walter Russell Mead's resounding advice to students going to college, and in particular this point (my emphasis):

... learn to write well.  This paradoxically is going to be more important than ever for the next generation. 

I can’t tell you how many editors at how many famous magazines have told me over the years that most professors and academics simply cannot write, and bemoan the immense amount of time they must devote to impose some kind of intellectual structure and comprehensible prose on the crabbed drafts they get from, often, fairly well known people.

This will not last.  Publications are not going to be able to continue paying editors to spin straw into gold; if you want to have a public voice in the next generation you are going to have to learn to write well. 

This is a hard skill to acquire, but it can be taught.  Most schools don’t do this well; it is expensive and academics generally don’t value clear and attractive prose writing as much as they should.  This is important enough that I would recommend you use it as a factor in choosing a college, but for those of you already enrolled, make a point of seeing what your school offers in this area.

Couldn't agree more.

You either carry with you through life the full set of the strong precision tools which a firm grasp of language and meaning (and therefore thought itself) afford you, or you don't.

A point relevant to speechwriters.

Great piece here about the way the Tea Party in the USA is now a formidable voting tendency, based on mass decentralised networked commitment:

Radically decentralized networks -- everything from illicit music-sharing systems to Wikipedia -- can direct resources and adapt ("mutate") far faster than corporations can. "The absence of structure, leadership, and formal organization, once considered a weakness, has become a major asset," the authors write. "Seemingly chaotic groups have challenged and defeated established institutions. The rules of the game have changed."

Moreover, hierarchies are at a loss to defeat networks. Open systems have no leader or headquarters; their units are self-funding, and their members often work for free (think Wikipedia). Even in principle, you can't count or compartmentalize the participants, because they come and go as they please -- but counting them is unnecessary, because they can communicate directly with each other. Knowledge and power are distributed throughout the system.

As a result, the network is impervious to decapitation. "If you thump it on the head, it survives." No foolish or self-serving boss can wreck it, because it has no boss.

Fragmentation, the bane of traditional organizations, actually makes the network stronger. It is like a starfish: Cut off an arm, and it grows (in some species) into a new starfish. Result: two starfish, where before there was just one.

Shucks.

This sort of thing was fun when it helped elect President Obama. Now it's nasty right-wing extremism.

But, tea partiers say, if you think moving votes and passing bills are what they are really all about, you have not taken the full measure of their ambition. No, the real point is to change the country's political culture, bending it back toward the self-reliant, liberty-guarding instincts of the Founders' era...

Many years? How many? "We have a 40-year plan," Meckler says. "We don't want to raise another generation of sheeple."

Let's have some of that here too, please.

While the boring Koran non-burning story was running, over on Radio 5 Live someone used the metaphor that "you're not allowed to shout 'Fire' in a theatre" as the basis for circumscribing free speech.

And here is a grander person, namely US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, saying the same thing:

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told me on GMA that he's not prepared to conclude that -- in the internet age -- the First Amendment condones Koran burning.

“Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout 'fire' in a crowded theater,” Breyer told me. “Well, what is it?  Why?  Because people will be trampled to death.  And what is the crowded theater today?  What is the being trampled to death?”

This vacuous idea keeps coming up, despite my own sterling efforts to demolish it:

The point of these examples is that they make us consider finely-grained nuances of Responsibility and Causation at the heart of our jurisprudence and therefore our civilisation.

It is a basic precept of Western law and morality that if X is to be held responsible for damage to Y, Y has to prove that he has suffered some damage and that X's actions caused it, if maybe only as one contributing cause along with others.

See this classic and this gallop through the arguments.

Because such questions are so far-reaching and important - and subtle - they need careful handling in the courts, lest precedents set in one context have a ruinous wider effect.

David French at NRO has another attempt to explain what is happening here:

Twitter (for those not yet in on it) is a simple and therefore powerful way for people individually and collectively to share their thoughts, all with 140 characters.

You can Follow the thoughts of people you like or find interesting and, of course, have people who Follow your thoughts, such as they are.

This is how a lot of journalism works these days - the media sit there waiting for Tweets to pour in with good leads and links.

Sometimes a few of people start thinking about the same thing, their Followers themselves opine on it, and an avalanche of Tweets (called a Trend) ensues.

Thus one current Trend: #howtopisswhitepeopleoff - a sprawling stream of collective consciousness and jokes ranging from funny to bawdy to vile, almost all necessarily 'racist' or racially charged, mainly from 'people of color':

#howtopisswhitepeopleoff OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA!...

#howtopisswhitepeopleoff get ona crowded elevator and keep sayin nigga nigga nigga

#howtopisswhitepeopleoff increase their taxes because reparation payment laws have been passed

#howtopisswhitepeopleoff tell 'em that it ain't rapping if you ain't black

#HowToPissWhitePeopleOff offer them grape drink insted of grape juice

You (perhaps) can see how this sort of thing can get quite absorbing very fast, as hundreds of these things pop up every minute at the height of a Trend.

A magnificent current Trend is #rockretractions - people giving second thoughts on the lyrics of famous pop songs:

Mr. Springsteen has decided that tramps like us were actually born to stroll at a leisurely pace. #rockretractions

We had to build this city on rock n roll because the paperwork for solid foundations with integrated sewer was horrendous. #rockretractions

Ok, so it might not be a "whole lotta" - but woman, I have love of at least moderate size coming your way. #rockretractions

"This is Major Tom to Ground Control: The mission was a complete success and I'll be landing soon!" #RockRetractions

I know I called it "Your Song," but that doesn't mean you can have any of the royalties. #rockretractions

Good Vibrations, you think? Actually no. This is California - I think you'll find it's an earthquake. #rockretractions

In all honesty we probably will, at some point, get fooled again. #rockretractions

You can in fact have your pudding even if you don't eat all your meat. #rockretractions

You really thought a deaf, dumb, blind kid could play a mean pinball? Ha! #rockretractions  

Gazillions more where these came from. Having a sleepless night I have added some of my own:

There were only 2268 holes, primarily in Witney and the Home Counties, far too few to fill any main London concert venue #rockretractions

Welcome Back my Friends to the Show that Ends at 1045pm due to Health and Safety requirements #rockretractions

I'm not too sexy for my shirt, On the contrary, my shirt is far too sexy for me #rockretractions 

Matter of fact, none of it is dark #rockretractions

Is this how the world ends? Not with a bang, but a lingering Trend of forlorn Tweets?

I have surged from a measly 76th place in 2009 to a glorious 40th place this year in the Total Politics 2010 list of the Top 100 right-wing blogs.

As a treat I offer you this review by Leon Wolf of the book Dirty, Sexy Politics by Meghan McCain. It is an account of her father's doomed Presidential campaign as seen from the inside.

It is fair to say that Mr Wolf does not rate this book highly. Marvel as he warms to his task - and tears it limb from limb:

... it is physically impossible for Meghan McCain to describe a given scene or occurrence without describing in detail what everyone in the room was wearing (and how their hair was done), most especially including herself. I stopped counting the number of times she informed me that she was wearing UGG boots on a given occasion at five.

Dirty, Sexy Politics is 194 pages long; if you removed the descriptions of outfits and hairstyles so-and-so wore when such-and-such was going on, I doubt it would have scraped 120 pages. 

I wish I could say the preceding sentence was gross hyperbole, but if you have made it this far in this review, you deserve the truth: it isn’t.

Lots more where that comes from.

Phew.

Awesome Guardian piece on the Cuban regime's bold plan to stop paying people nothing to do nothing:

Authorities announced yesterday they will lay off more than 1 million state employees in the island's biggest economic shake-up since the 1960s.

Cuts begin immediately, with 500,000 jobs due to go by March. Loosened controls on private enterprise will, it is hoped, jumpstart the private sector and turn former public workers into entrepreneurs...

Unemployment last year was officially 1.7%, but with average monthly salaries of only $20, supplemented by a ration book and free health care and education, many Cubans make minimal efforts, prompting an old joke: "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work." Che Guevara's dream of creating a "socialist man" motivated by moral rather than material incentives has long been abandoned...

 "People knew this was coming, but now it's here, it's real, and they're worried. Bosses will get rid of the least productive employees, the ones who don't work or show up for work."

Why should there be any social explosion in Cuba if people who don't work no longer have 'jobs'?

Hurrah.

As has been noted here many times, you can evade reality, but you can't avoid the consequences of evading reality.

In this noteworthy case it's taken 50 years for the consequences to pile up nicely, to the point where even the doddery communists running Cuba have spotted them.

Jonathan Freedland keeps popping up in the Guardian on the subject of the dishonesty and falsehood of equating Soviet and Nazi crimes.

Here he was in October last year.

And now again today:

For one thing, the equation of Nazi and communist crimes rarely entails an honest account of the former.

Odd that here Nazi gets a Capital N whereas communist gets only a modest c. Plus, of course, in the Guardian that equation rarely entails an honest account of the latter.

This latest Freedland piece takes some odious examples of history-rewriting in Lithuania to try to establish this phoney syllogism:

• some Lithuanians dishonestly play down Lithuanians' role in historical atrocities and assert that Nazi and Communist crimes were equivalent
• all Lithuanian dishonesty invites us to question the motives of people who equate Nazi and Communist crimes
• therefore it is false and dishonest for anyone to equate Nazi and Communist crimes

The embarrassingly impoverished moral logic here is really striking.

I repeat what I said in August last year, as I think it nails this issue once and for ever:

It all boils down to a simple question.

Nazism's collectivist death cult was, if you like, essentially irrational if not mad, but with manic method in the madness. All that raving about blood and Jews and maggots, combined with Germanic efficiency in rounding up so many Jews and Romas and Poles and others and then destroying them.

Stalinism's collectivist death cult by contrast was ultra rational. It was based on the idea that the end (Scientific Socialism) justified any means and in any case was inevitable as the communist Wheel of History rotated. Bourgeois and other opponents simply 'had' to be eliminated.

Surely an intelligent deliberate murderer is more morally guilty than a crazy one?

Put it this way.

Imagine that Hitler and Stalin had been captured at the end of WW2 and put on trial for their crimes.

Hitler's lawyers might have been able to mount some sort of defence argument based on Insanity - that he was so crazed by that in any sense that mattered he should not be regarded as legally responsible for his actions.

Stalin surely could not claim that. The record of his iniquity and his countless justifications of it and the documentation describing it would all show that he knew exactly what he was doing and meant to to do it.

So, yes, any normal person has to 'equate' Nazism and Communism and find nothing of any true significance to distinguish them.

If anything the very nihilistic 'rationality' of Communism makes it even worse.

A conclusion terrifying to today's Marxists-Lite such as Slavoj Zizek, who makes his position clear:

• Fascism has to be proclaimed to be fundamentally worse than Communism
• since the alternative is to see Fascism as a natural reaction to the Communist threat and therefore somehow a lesser evil.
• Which is bad since it weakens a "postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity"  

Indeed. A postwar Europe based on the biggest of all Stalinist Big Lies.

Truth will out.

My only 'live' encounter' with Pope Benedict XVI came in May 2006 when His Holiness visited Poland.

The venerable Catholic Church hierarchy this time did not need any miracles to turn water into wine - amidst the drought of an alcohol ban for Poles, through a miracle there came Plenty!

I was struck by many aspects of the Pope's address at Auschwitz - see the full text here.

As you would expect, many eloquent phrases and subtle ideas:

In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can only be a dread silence - a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent?  How could you tolerate all this? 

In silence, then, we bow our heads before the endless line of those who suffered and were put to death here; yet our silence becomes in turn a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation, a plea to the living God never to let this happen again...

No - when all is said and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself!  Do not forget mankind, your creature! 

And our cry to God must also be a cry that pierces our very heart, a cry that awakens within us God’s hidden presence - so that his power, the power he has planted in our hearts, will not be buried or choked within us by the mire of selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism... 

There is also the inscription in Russian, which commemorates the tremendous loss of life endured by the Russian soldiers who combated the Nazi reign of terror; but this inscription also reminds us that their mission had a tragic twofold effect: they set the peoples free from one dictatorship, but the same peoples were thereby subjected to a new one, that of Stalin and the Communist system.

Yet on the one key issue, namely responsibility for the whole disaster Auschwitz represented, the Pope seemed to me to fall short:

... a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people - a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honour, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power. 

This contrives to portray the German people as bamboozled victims, rather than people who in their many millions voted for Hitler and otherwise supported him. Not everyone, for sure. But Germans en masse were not only used and abused. In good part they brought their suffering on themselves, and set in motion untold suffering for countless millions of others.

Pope Benedict might have dealt with this by saying a word about his own connection with the Hitler Youth and the power of temptation, or otherwise addressing each individual's accountability for mass wickedness committed in his/her name. But one way or the other, the formula used here did not, for me, do the trick.

Maybe even the Pope is unable to confess fully and frankly? And perhaps that's the point?

Here is the Archbishop explaining why the Pope should be warmly welcomed to the UK and what in the bigger scheme of things he represents for our civilisation.

I creep towards modernity.

Postings on this site are now likely to be Tweeted on Twitter, where I have a happy but select group of (as of right now) 200 Followers.

If anyone on Twitter has not yet followed Lileks, do so. He is the master of this demanding genre.

An interesting piece by James Kwak about how his economics students tackled a problem supposedly about fairness in business practice:

Today in class, the professor posed the first question from the paper:

“A hardware store has been selling snow shovels for $15. The morning after a large snowstorm, the store raises the price to $20.”

In 1986, 82 percent of respondents thought this was unfair. In class, it was about 50-50...

More fundamentally, the 1986 paper shows that Econ 101 is diametrically opposed to human beings’ intuitive sense of fairness. Yet public policy largely follows the dictates of Econ 101. Is that a good thing?

The argument that this is unfair relies on the notion that by bumping up the price the salesman gets a gain at the 'cost' of poorer people who either have their meagre money eroded much more quickly or stay snowed in because they can't afford a new shovel.

Isn't this a trivial proposition?

Fairness for whom and when and how?

First, some businesses make their money over the year by running seasonal price adjustments, so that in some periods prices have to be lower as demand is low, whereas in other periods prices are higher because people really want that product then. If the business did not make a good profit when it had the chance to do so (and thereby compensate itself for leaner months), it might go bust and workers would lose jobs. Not much fairness there.

Plus this example misses dynamic effects. People will see this trader trying to cash in at their expense. Even if they have to pay up now, they may make a point of not buying from him/her again later if they have a chance. So fairness smooths itself out over time.

Or someone out there fuming over the high cost of shovels may sit down and invent a new, cheaper way of getting rid of snow. Huge fairness and utility gains for everyone are possible in due course.

In other words, a banal 'intuitive sense of fairness' based on a static situation and ignoring dynamic effects is really misleading when it comes to looking at such things.

Which is why any centralised attempt to dump standardised lumpen fairness on people usually backfires, on a massive scale.

As Cuba at last is realising, by laying off hundreds of thousands of state 'workers'.

Hurrah.

My analysis of this phenomenon, ably brought to our attention by eclectic Lefty Keith Ruffles in a comment on my latest BBRU, is over at Business and Politics:

But where does ‘real influence’ come from?

Only from the systemic discipline which comes from people having the chance to vote both with their feet (ie to leave an oppressive system if they want) and with their property (ie to stop the collective from stealing or ruining the fruits of their efforts).

In a word, from ownership:

I created those things, with my brain and hard work. You have no right to take or control them, just as you have no right to take or control my mind.

I will be happy to share my production with you, but only on the basis of free trade between free people.

If you fail to deliver your side of the bargain, off I go – taking my fair share of my production with me.

Horrible.

Just horrible.

One of the main jobs top civil servants have - arguably the only main job - is to tell politicians that their policies are reckless if that is the way a sober look at things adds up.

If the politicians then ignore the advice, civil servants have all sorts of guileful ways at their disposal to cause trouble to persuade them to change course. Or they can resign. Either is fine.

But, alas, our top civil servants had a better plan. To sit their giggling nervously:

When asked directly what prevented civil servants from telling politicians that borrowing was too high, he said: “The politics was that we had put an end to boom and bust.”

Turnbull added: “We had a sense of overconfidence; it happened all around the world, but it was a rather extreme form of it in the UK.”

... Turnbull said that that excessive borrowing started to be a problem from 2005. “It kind of crept up on us in 2005, 2006, 2007, and we were still expanding public spending at 4.5 percent a year,” he said, arguing that the Treasury should have been putting more money aside.

“You might have thought that we should have been giving priority to getting borrowing under better control, putting money aside in the good years – and it didn’t happen,” he commented.

This being the modern British civil service, they can't write about this without an illiterate eggcorn:

Speaking last month, the retired civil service chief said it was too difficult for civil servants to call for public spending to be reigned in until after the financial crisis hit.

Since it's now official that these top people failed to do their most basic job properly, presumably it's OK to murder their pensions as a punishment pour encourager les autres?

The Independent today runs the story of deaf diplomat Jane Cordell's claim that the FCO unlawfully discriminated against her in refusing to post her to Astana (Kazakhstan) as the cost of the 'reasonable adjustments' needed to allow her to work there would not (said the FCO) have been reasonable. 

And here is a short comment from me also in the Indy on the case:

This case opens a painful question: are some disabilities just too expensive to be supported at the workplace?

People with disabilities are necessarily super-realistic about fairness and what works and what doesn't. Any organisation grappling with these tough issues should bring in the disabled colleagues concerned to help sort policies and procedures – and the way decisions are communicated.

Talk about irony: if the FCO does lose this case, it may well be because it did not listen.