- Democracy and double standards Richard Samuelson, Law & Liberty
- “Sovereign Britain” Christopher Bertram, London Review of Books
hypocrisy
Nightcap
- Islamic State has stopped talking about China Elliot Stewart, War on the Rocks
- Can we see past the myth of the Himalaya? Akash Kapur, New Yorker
- Nation-building or state-making? (pdf) Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, Contemporary South Asia
- On national liberation Murray Rothbard, Libertarian Forum
Nightcap
- What do workers want? Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias
- Bird brains Nick Nielsen, Grand Strategy Annex
- Democracy, deepfakes, and disinformation Adam Garfinkle, Inference
- Who is Sheldon Richman? (comments, too) Roderick Long, Policy of Truth
Is Dominic Cummings a hypocrite, or does the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy just suck?
On Saturday, The Observer revealed that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s recently appointed chief of staff received around £235,000 of EU farm subsidies over the course of two decades in relation that his family owns. Dominic Cummings is often portrayed as the mastermind behind the successful referendum campaign to Leave the European Union. So he is currently enemy no.1 among remain-supporters.
I am unconvinced this latest line of attack plays in Remainers’ favor (I was a marginal Remain voter in the referendum and still hold out some hope for an eventual EEA/EFTA arrangement). Instead, this story serves as a reminder of probably the worst feature of the current EU: the Common Agricultural Policy.
The CAP spends more than a third of the total EU budget (for a population of half a billion people) on agricultural policies that support around 22 million people, most of them neither poor nor disadvantaged as Cummings himself illustrates. Food is chiefly a private good and both the interests of consumers, producers and the environment (at least in the long-term, as suggested by the example of New Zealand) are best served through an unsubsidized market. But the CAP, developed on faulty dirigiste economic doctrines, has artificially raised food prices throughout the European Union, led to massive over-production of some food commodities, and denied farmers in the developing world access to European markets (the US, of course, has its equivalent system of agricultural protectionism).
These economic distortions make an appearance in my new paper with Charles Delmotte, ‘Cost and Choice in the Commons: Ostrom and the Case of British Flood Management’. In the final section, we discuss the role that farming subsidies have historically played in encouraging inappropriately aggressive floodplain drainage strategies and uneconomic use of marginal farming land that might well be better left to nature:
British farmers currently receive substantial subsidies through the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy. This means that both land-use decisions and farm incomes are de-coupled from underlying farm productivity. Without the ordinarily presumed interest in maintaining intrinsic profitability, farmers may fail to contribute effectively to flood prevention or other environmental goals that impacts their output unless specifically incentivized by subsidy rules. If the farms were operating unsubsidized, the costs of flooding would figure more plainly in economic calculations when deciding where it is efficient to farm in a floodplain and what contributions to make to common flood defense. Indeed, European governments are currently in the perverse position of subsidizing relatively unproductive agriculture with one policy, while attempting to curb the resulting harm to the natural environment with another. These various schemes of regulation and subsidy plausibly combine to attenuate the capacity of the market process to furnish both private individuals and local communities with the appropriate knowledge and incentives to engage in common flood prevention without state support.
Our overall argument is that it is not just the direct costs of subsidies we should worry about, but the dynamics of intervention. In this case, they have led not only farmers but homeowners and entire towns to become reliant on public flood defenses with significant costs to the natural environment. There is limited scope for the government to withdraw provision (at least in a politically palatable way).
Turning back to The Observer’s gotcha story, it isn’t clear to me that Cummings is a hypocrite. I think the best theoretical work on hypocrisy in one’s personal politics comes from Adam Swift’s How Not To be Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed. In it Swift argues that the scope to complain about supposed hypocritical behavior, especially taking advantage of policies that you personally disagree with, can be narrower than intuitively imagined, mainly because of the nature of collective action problems. Swift’s conclusion is that, in some circumstances, leftwing critics of private schools are entitled to send their own children to private schools so long as others continue to do so and burden of doing otherwise is too strong. Presumably, this also means that strident libertarians are not hypocritical to use public roads so long as a reasonable private alternative is unavailable.
In an environment where every farmer receives an EU subsidy, it might be asking too much of EU-skeptic farmers to deny it to themselves. Instead, it seems legitimate and plausible to take the subsidy while campaigning sincerely to abolish it.
From the Comments: Dual loyalties and American hypocrisy
I am on the road. I’m in Utah, actually, for a wedding. I drove here with my little family. From Texas. It’s a beautiful drive. But long. I’ll have more American pop-sociology soon enough. In the mean time, here’s Irfan on an important topic, and one that’s gone almost cold in libertarian circles:
Thanks for mentioning this post of mine. I hope people will take a look at the comments as well as the post itself. One hears so much loose talk about “anti-Semitism,” and the insult implied by talk of “dual loyalties.” But it’s not a criminal offense in the United States to believe or assert that Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks, or imply that Muslims side with Al Qaeda or ISIS. The President encourages people to believe and say such things, and they do, from the federal executive down to the local level.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/454555-new-jersey-school-board-member-says-his-life-will-be-complete
Meanwhile, the State of New Jersey is seeking to make it a criminal offense to assert that Palestinians have a right of self-defense against attackers who happen to be Jewish: $250 fine, six months in the county lock up. In this universe, either there is no such thing as a Jew who aggresses against a non-Jew, or if it happens, non-Jews are not to resist in such a way as to “harm” their attackers.
As for “dual loyalties,” here is an undeniable, demonstrable fact that no one engaged in the “dual loyalties” debate has managed to address: American Jews have the right to maintain dual citizenship, US and Israeli, to enter the Israeli military, and to serve under Israeli commanders. Those commanders have the authority to order those under their command (including American “Lone Soldiers,” as they’re called) to shoot at anyone deemed a threat under rules of engagement that cannot be questioned by anyone outside of the chain of command. The potential targets include Americans like me (or Rachel Corrie, or Tariq Abu Khdeir). No soldier has the right to refuse such an order. You get the order? You fire at will–to kill.
If an American serving under foreign command faces the prospect of shooting an American in a foreign country, exactly what description are we to give that situation but precisely one of dual loyalties? The soldier holding the weapon has one loyalty to a foreign commander, and one to the United States (or else to the principle of rights), which proscribes shooting a fellow citizen under questionable circumstances. How he resolves the dilemma is up to him, but you’d be out of touch with reality to deny that he’s in one. Is it really “racist” or “anti-Semitic” to identify this blatantly obvious fact? Apparently so.
If the New Jersey bill passes, my merely raising the preceding issue out loud, even as a question–iin the presence of someone who might report me to the police–makes me a criminal suspect, subject to arrest and prosecution. Though I teach at a private university, and the bill seems to apply only to public universities, the wording is extremely vague and ambiguous, and in case, even on the narrow interpretation of its scope, it implies that I lose my rights of free speech if I move to a public university or (perhaps) if I engage in a speech act while being present at a public university.
As someone who’s already been arrested on campus for “saying the wrong thing” (where the offended parties weren’t the usual left-wing snowflakes) this whole censorship thing is starting to get old pretty fast. If the passage of this bill wouldn’t mark a descent into fascism, with a rather large assist from the pro-Israel lobby, what would? If a constituency threatens to imprison you for exercises of free speech and academic freedom in the name of a sectarian state, are you really obliged to pretend that it’s not doing what it practically admits to be doing?
Dr Khawaja blogs at the always-excellent Policy of Truth.
Here is stuff on antisemitism at NOL. And on Palestine. And on free speech.
Nightcap
- The need for class politics Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
- “Do not dig a grave for someone else!”
- Has the Tervuren Central African museum been decolonized? Tyler Cowen, MR
- The nativists have won in Europe Krishnadev Calamur, the Atlantic
Why I turned right
I understand things are not the same everywhere in the World, but until just a few years ago, to call yourself “right-wing” in Brazil was virtually unthinkable. The reasons for that are not totally clear, but the fact is that “right-wing” was a name with a very bad connotation. Brazil went through a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. This dictatorship was set in place to prevent a perceived communist threat in the country, especially after the Cuba Revolution of 1959. Therefore, it was an anticommunist dictatorship.
My understanding is that, because of that, to be “right-wing” in Brazil was understood as “being in favor of dictatorship”, and left-wing to be “for democracy”. Of course, examining things with just a little more care, nothing could be further from the truth. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were no democrats. Actually, the military dictatorship in Cuba lives on. Mao Zedong was a horrendous dictator. So were Stalin and Lenin. There is no reason to believe that Trotsky would have been any less authoritarian.
There is no reason to believe that the socialists/communists in Brazil would have been democratic once in power. But they didn’t come to power, and because of that people could fuel the romantic image of revolutionaries unjustly persecuted by the military. Although I disagree with Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho in many points, I believe he is totally right on this: the military in Brazil was great in fighting the communist guerrilla. Thanks to them, we don’t have something similar to FARC in Brazil today. But when it came to propaganda and cultural war they were just awful. Communists in Brazil (and in other places) were great in selling the image of Che Guevara as a romantic hero fighting against the evil North-American Imperialism.
And this is the paradigm I grew up with. Either you are a freedom fighter, opposing evil capitalists and imperialism, or you are subservient to foreign powers and injustice. Considering this background, of course, nobody would like to be called right-wing. However, things changed.
One of the things that made me turn right was studying the right-wing political ideologies. I discovered that classical liberals and conservatives were not against the poor, just the opposite. The best example I can think of is Adam Smith: his Wealth of Nations is actually a love letter for those who are oppressed by unjust economic exploitation. What Adam Smith was trying to find out is what makes the lives of the simple people better. His answer, in a nutshell, was the free market. Similarly, the Founding Fathers were trying to give the common folk a better living without oppression. And they did. Very different from all the leftist revolutions. In short, free markets and liberal democracy work.
The second thing that made me turn right was the hypocrisy of some leftists. I realized that they want you to have freedom of choice, but only if you choose what they want. If you feel you have homosexual inclinations, they want you to have the freedom to embrace homosexuality. And so do I! But God forbid (or Marx forbid) you decide (for whatever reason) to fight homosexuality and become (or remain) straight. They want women to have the freedom to get jobs. But they don’t want them to have the freedom to stay home to raise the kids. The examples are many, but the summary is this: I realized that many leftists are not ready to defend your right to be different.
I’m really sorry that things come down to what two consenting adults do in a closed room. I really am. But it seems to me that much of the leftist agenda is to have the freedom to choose only if you choose what they want. And this is what made me turn right: to accept other peoples choices as much as I want them to accept mine. Liking it or not.
Words and Actions of Trump the Horrible
I spent yesterday listening in horrified fascination to the mass media creating a crude amalgam of Trump’s sins in the so-called video, yes, that old video.
Nearly all the media, including, I am afraid, the Wall Street Journal, put together or often mix in the same sentence two elements of Trump’s objectionable aspects: words and possible actions. The two deserve completely different treatments. There is no excuse for confusing them except a desire to win at all costs.
Words first: Trump referred to women in obscene terms. This is not in dispute. Calling women “pussies” may tell you something about his present character. (Although that happened fifteen years ago, when he was a registered Democrat.) I don’t see what it tells you that’s new. The man is crude. He is crude in precisely the same way that millions of American men are. I am completely innocent of that particular sin myself (because I was raised overseas) but I have several friends who qualify. It’s interesting that they are, by and large, the same male friends I would describe as “pussy-whipped.” (This is another topic, an interesting one I can’t deal with here: Married American men are exceptionally submissive.) I think the brouhaha about Trump’s obscene words is completely hypocritical and massively promoted by media that lost their intellectual self-respect some time ago. Public discourse also stopped being sensitive a long time ago irrespective of what the current neo-Victorians would have you believe: A young woman I have never met except on-line a couple of days ago, a Clinton supporter, recently invited me on Facebook to “suck my dick!” (She meant her own non-existent appendage.)
Then, there are Trump actions as revealed on the video. Fact is, the video reveals no, zero, objectionable acts. Instead, it reveals Mr Trump bragging about engaging in sexually assaultive behavior. The report is not a fact. Fake confessions are legion, especially within a bragging context. Donald Trump may have never, not once, done the things he says in the video he does, not even the slightest crotch grab. Now, if he is guilty of this kind of boasting, characteristic of teenage boys everywhere, you may decide he is too immature for the job but he is not (NOT) an unpunished criminal.
A stupid braggart and a rapist are different creatures. If you think they are more or less the same, you are full of shit and we need someone like Trump to clean house, because of you, precisely. You are poison while he, Trump, is only moronic.
Let’s focus on various forms of sexual assault. Trump committed some, at least one, or (OR) he did not. There is nothing in between. The function of the amalgam I heard all day yesterday is to spread the credibility of the reports of obscene talk onto the supposition of sexual assault: It’s true that he referred to women in a sexually crude manner, therefore, (THEREFORE), he must have assaulted women sexually. This kind of verbal ploy sometimes actually works. It works with fools and with fanatics.
Now I imagine I might be on a jury regarding Mr Trump’s sexual assault(s) (one or several). I would not have the option to find him a “little bit guilty,” or “sort of guilty,” or “mostly guilty,” or “not actually guilty but he might have done it; look how he refers to women.” The only options available are guilty/not guilty. That’s it. For once, judicial conventions correspond well with logic: He did it (any “it”), or (OR) he did not. There are almost an infinity of offenses a person can be charged with so, there is no reason to come up with unclear verdicts. The prosecutor can charge with attempted sexual battery, sexual battery, aggravated sexual battery, different kinds of rape, etc., exactly so a clean verdict is possible without violating factual evidence. Those who do not know this to be true don’t understand either the US Constitution nor basic fairness. They are temperamentally fascists. (There are other forms of fascism on the Clinton side, following Mr Obama.)
What we see right now is a massive and concerted display of hypocrisy on the part of the bulk of the kind-of-educated class, beginning with the media. It’s so obvious that I think that if Jesus were around today, He would be for Trump. Fact is, there is no record of his speaking up against obscenity while he repeatedly and vehemently attacked hypocrisy.
PS I am wavering in my support of Trump. It’s not because Clinton has become less than a total horror but because he falls too easily into her traps. It bothers me.
Notes On Liberty 