Dumping the Far Right with the tea

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Many readers will be familiar with the worthlessness of political labels. Oh, Libertarian are you? So that’s the same as liberal? No? What’s that? A "classical liberal"? OK, so it’s conservative, but you’re not a huge fan of Cameron? But what, not Bush either? You get the picture.

But even among such confusion, there’s one thing everyone can agree on – they all hate the "Far Right". Naturally this political group is no less incomprehensible than any other – amorphous enough for conservative Americans to pin on Obama, and for him to return in kind. Makes you feel lucky to be in Europe where Jörg Haider, Nick Griffin and company simplify things by sticking to the "classical Far Right" model, no?

In the past, the privilege of branding opponents as "far right" in the US was the preserve of Democrats against Republicans. Therefore, as if by habit, Democrats last night lamented the triumph of Far Right politics as Scott Brown shook the political status quo by turning Massachusetts Red. But the easy marriage of this historically successful association is shrinking.

I wrote a while back that so-called "Far Right" social conservatism was giving way to libertarianism as the GOP’s most powerful weapon, led by the phenomenon of the Tea Party movement. Brown’s victory is yet another triumph for this perception. This new Republicanism is tough to discredit, as it’s peppered with that very American, and oh-so-un-Far-Right idea, "freedom".

Of course, the Left still tries. MSNBC’s in-house "firebrand" commentator Keith Olbermann provides a nice taster of current Democrat sentiment here, where the key outtake would be describing the Tea Party movement as:

…perhaps the saddest collection of people who don’t want to admit why they hate since the racists of the South in the 60s insisted they were really just concerned about States' rights.

Well Keith, isn’t it impressive what this mob of hick racists has achieved? Thanks to them, even as the numbers of self-proclaimed conservatives dwindle, it’s becoming harder and harder for left-wing Democrats to woo independents, leading to a tremendously entertaining political tussle.

Americans "left and right" seemingly still believe they have something to fight for, yet here in Britain we can barely summon an ounce of enthusiasm for an imminent general election that could turf out one of the most disastrously incompetent governments in history. And that’s a shame, because freedom isn’t just about practical measurements, it’s about the psyche a society fosters in its people.

The meaning of Massachusetts

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Regular readers will know that I have no love for the US Republican Party, especially in its big government, Bush-era guise. Given the incompetent, spendthrift way Bush and his colleagues in Congress governed, they deserved to lose in 2008. But still, I couldn’t be more delighted that Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat has fallen to the Republicans: it is precisely the one-year anniversary present that Barack Obama deserves. He ran as a pragmatic centrist but since taking office his true colours have shone through: he wants to end American exceptionalism and turn the United States into a European-style social democracy. And that, quite emphatically, is not what most Americans want.

The main practical effect of this election result is to land Obama’s efforts to reform US healthcare in extreme difficulty. This too is a very welcome development. It’s not that the US healthcare system doesn’t need reform – it does – but rather that the Democrats’ plan takes entirely the wrong approach. The ambition of reform should not be to use government coercion to expand coverage, but to reduce costs by allowing greater competition and consumer choice – that is, by having stronger market forces, not weaker ones. Simply by permitting US citizens to purchase health insurance across state lines, for instance, it has been estimated that 12 million more people would be able to afford insurance.

But also I think this debate has an added significance: as Peter Wehner and Paul Ryan wrote in the Wall Street Journal a while back, socialized healthcare is a big government “tipping point". Once the government provides healthcare to a large enough number of people, any attempt to cut taxes, reduce spending, or roll back the state will be met with accusations from the Left that people will lose their healthcare – a tactic which, judging by British experience – is as effective as it is cynical.

The founding fathers viewed America’s role in world affairs very simply: it was to act as a beacon of liberty, to inspire the rest of the world with its freedoms and constitutional government. Perhaps Scott Brown’s election and the defeat of Obama’s healthcare plan is one small step towards America resuming this role. 

Happiness

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According to Geoff Mulgan, writing in yesterday’s Independent:

This year's election could be the first when party policies are interrogated not just for their effects on economic growth or the NHS but also for their effects on happiness.

Well, I can think of one thing that would make me happier: having less of my earnings forcibly confiscated and then wasted by self-serving bureaucrats. Oddly enough, the Lib Dems are the only party that would do anything for me in that regard – their plan being to raise the tax free personal allowance to £10,000 – although people with higher incomes (or mansions) would be penalized to make up for it. Otherwise, I don’t hold out much hope of paying less tax. Nor do I imagine that any political party will simply ‘leave me alone’. The Tories, once thought of as the party of limited government and personal responsibility, are now every bit as enthusiastically nannying as the rest of them. Apparently it’s called ‘compassionate conservatism’.

Of course, I don’t think my suggestions are quite what Geoff Mulgan had in mind when he wrote his article. On the contrary, the school of ‘happiness economics’ to which he appears to subscribe never seems to have much time for individual freedom, presuming instead that state enforced ‘equality’ is the best way to improve our general sense of well-being.

But I’ve got to say I side with US conservative Charles Murray on this one. Far from making us happier, I’d say big government drains satisfaction from our lives. I’m not talking about money or taxes here, but rather the fact that when government ‘provides’ it takes away our independence and undermines our self-reliance. It erodes families, and communities, and civic institutions. Far from encouraging solidarity and brotherly love, big government tends to atomise and dehumanize society, replacing a web of meaningful voluntary associations with distant, top-down authority.

Ultimately, America’s founding fathers had it right. Government’s job is not to implement policies that will maximize some aggregate measure of happiness, but to protect our rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". If we are to judge political parties as Geoff Mulgan suggests, then that is the criterion we should be using.

The new paternalism

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We've all heard about this new paternalism, haven't we? You know, Cass Sunstein and "Nudge" seems to have got David Cameron all excited, there are even those calling the whole idea libertarian paternalism. We. the populace, are such confused little baa lambs that we need the wise and the good to tell us what to do. But instead of actually insisting we do something we'll just get a few nudges from taxation or regulation to get us through the right five bar gate. You know the sort of thing, maybe the collie dog will bark at us, perhaps even nip our heels, but we won't be forcibly beaten into our pens.

Glen Whitman has been looking at the holes in this argument and this particular one looks to me like a corker. One of the major thoughts about why we do make bad decisions is that we're subject to hyperbolic discounting. We're OK weighing up the pros and cons of something that's going to happen soonish but we're bad at working out the cons of things which might happen in the far future. Smoking is pleasurable now but we don't put enough weight on dying painfully of lung cancer in 40 years' time. Doughnuts are yummy but we underestimate the cost of a new wardrobe in 3 years' time. Being warm this winter is wondrous but we underestimate the costs of drowning Bangladesh in 2,500 AD. Similarly, a pension fund is nice but we underestimate the benefits of a decent pension in 40 years' time and put too little into it now.

So we should be shepherded to the right decisions by those wise enough to know what the correct, non-hyperbolic, discount rates are. That's basically the libertarian paternalism for you right there. And as Whitman points out, that's just great but who are the people who will be taking these decisions about what is the correct discount rate?

Yup, politicians. And do politicians take decisions based upon the correct discount rates or are they also subject to this hyperbolic discounting? Was that howls of laughter I could hear? Splutters of indignation perhaps? For yes, of course, when we look at how politicians actually run any of the long term schemes which they currently have power over we see that they're vastly worse at this than we little sheep are. Look at civil service pensions, roaring out of control as far as the eye can see into the future because years ago it was easier to buy political support or buy off industrial unrest by promising what could never be afforded. The untold off-balance sheet promises that have been made that will impoverish our grandchildren just to get one politico or another through a difficult election. The hocking of the future in that every few year electoral scramble to get the right bums on the right benches at Westminster.

For the failure of this libertarian paternalism, the hole in this argument about hyperbolic discounting, is that we as individual humans may well be imperfect: but those who would rule us are worse by this measure. I know of no adult who lives their life with a final horizon of only the next election and I know of no politican with a horizon of longer than that next election.

In short, we're better than the politicians but then we all knew that anyway, didn't we?

The CRC should be scrapped

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I got one of those phone calls from a PR agency, asking a series of questions on how I (as a 'stakeholder', whatever that is) view their client. Often these calls aim partly to give us 'stakeholders' a subliminal message ('how aware are you that XYZ Corp helps old folk/ loves cats/befriends orphans/sponsors charities/improves nutrition...sort of thing). But for the most part, they are just trying to find out what 'opinion leaders' actually think of them.

Well, in this case the client was the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC), and my answer to that question was 'not much'. I was appalled when I got this quango's first report – a real door-stopper of a publication, complete with its own DVD, and hand delivered no doubt to all of the Westminster think-tanks as well as MPs, journos and who knows who else. It must have cost a fortune. And last year they produced another 49 separate publications, a few of them on the same sort of scale.

Mind you, the rural affairs department DEFRA gives them £6.7m of our money, so they're not pinching pennies, and with a staff of 80 they have plenty of people. Their motto is 'tackling rural disadvantage', and they see themselves (so their PR person said) as a 'voice for rural people and buisnesses', an 'expert adviser to government and others' and yet, paradoxically, 'an independent watchdog'.

Independent my bahookie. This is a quango set up by Blair & Co in 2005 after they had been shocked by the scale of the Countryside Alliance marchea on London in response to the proposed foxhunting ban, particularly the enormous 2002 rally. The 407,791 protestors – the largest civil-rights march in UK history – argued that Blair's effete metropolitan government didn't have the faintest understanding of countryside issues. The CRC was the government's attempt to show its concern – at our expense. Naturally, like all quangos, it has grown in budget, personnel, and remit. Unelected, it pushes its own agenda on rural communities, while claiming to understand and empathise with them.

The CRC should be closed down. Saturday 10 July would be a good day to send out the redundancy notices, the anniversary of the first (120,000- strong) Countryside Alliance march in 1997. It wouldn't just be taxpayers who rejoiced.

See Dr Butler's new Alternative Manifesto here.

Old ways

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I’m currently reading a biography of Gladstone, the 19th Century Liberal prime minister, by Philip Magnus. It was first published in 1954 and is currently out of print. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating read, and is fairly easy to pick up second hand on the internet.

One tidbit I picked up on this morning is that when Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer, it was the practice to make every tax contained in the budget the subject of a separate bill in Parliament, to be debated and voted on by both houses, rather than just approved in one go by the ruling party.

Such a system certainly has advantages: it would ensure a far greater degree of budget scrutiny, and would also place a roadblock in the way of unpopular tax rises. Forcing MPs to vote on each particular tax would also make it very clear to their constituents where they stood on fiscal issues, and increase accountability.

So perhaps it would be a good idea to return to such a system. On the other hand, I can easily imagine some downsides: such a budgetary process would probably be seized upon by special interest groups, who would distort it to their own ends. Political horse-trading and pork-barrel politics might increase as government whips struggled to secure support for individual measures, and principled reform of the tax system might be made that much harder.

What do readers think? Are the old ways the best?

P.S. A few pages on, and I discover that it was actually Gladstone who introduced the consolidated finance bill, in order to get the repeal of the paper duty through the Lords in 1861... 

#KerryOut

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Far be it for Junksmith to intrude into party politics, but I derive some wry pleasure from the #KerryOut campaign. Labour's 'Twitter Tsar' Kerry McCarthy (MP for Bristol East) has made enemies of a good portion of the blogosphere for various reasons, including making defamatory online remarks about Tory Bear (Harry Cole) and Iain Dale, and then blocking their replies.

Kerry (as she is now universally known among the blogerati, was completely undistinguished as an MP, following the whip on every occasion. Ironically, her only taste of fame – her fatuous 'Twitter Tsar' appointment – could well be her undoing. Iain Dale has put her top of his list of 'Labour MPs I'd like to see kicked out of Parliament', and Tory Bear and others are sinking the snowboots in too.

As a result of the #KerryOut campaign, which Kerry has brought on herself, the Tory candidate for Bristol East, Adeela Shafi, has raised over £1,600 in donations in just a few days. I am sure her £2,000 target will be exceeded soon. It should all remind politicians – particularly pompous politicians who proclaim that they know how to handle the new media – that the blogosphere is not to be messed with.

The happiest people?

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Nicholas D. Krist of the New York Times claims that Costa Rica is one of the happiest places in the world because it has abolished its army and spends that money instead on education. He might be right, but first there would have to be some indication that it is indeed one of the best places to live and that its education system is in fact good (not just expensive). That doesn't look like happening any time soon:

• Legatum Prosperity Index: 32/104
• Average Life Satisfaction Ranking: 19/104
• Per Capita GDP Ranking: 53/104
• WEF Global Competitiveness Index: 55/133
• UN Human Development Index: 50/179
• Heritage/WSJ Economic Freedom Index: 46/178
• TI Corruption Perceptions Index: 47/180
• Vision of Humanity Global Peace Index: 29/144

The tea party

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People across the United States are switching on and tuning in to the spirit of their founding fathers. Tired of government ineptitude, many are looking to overturn the status quo. Enter stage right: the tea party movement.

The movement is a modern political phenomenon and will likely not be easily swept away until its message has been heard, no matter the actions of the donkeys and elephants. As David Brooks writes in the New York Times:

According to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 41 percent of Americans have a positive view of the tea party movement. Only 35 percent of Americans have a positive view of the Democrats and only 28 percent have a positive view of the Republican Party.

And perhaps even more pertinently:

The movement is especially popular among independents. The Rasmussen organization asked independent voters whom they would support in a generic election between a Democrat, a Republican and a tea party candidate. The tea party candidate won, with 33 percent of independents. Undecided came in second with 30 percent. The Democrats came in third with 25 percent and the Republicans fourth with 12 percent.

For David Brooks though, the desire for a reduction in government is connected to a general ‘sour mood’ across the country. For Brooks, this is a widespread negative reaction to the beliefs of the ‘educated class’ (think global warming, gun control etc.). As well as being a rather patronizing thesis, I think Mr Brooks really misses the point and spirit of the movement. These people are not only reacting against 'elite' culture and control, but are also inspired by the alternative: the restoration of their liberty, the principles of their Constitution.

To claim, as Mr Brooks does, that the tea party movement is ‘defined by what they are against’ is unfair. Firstly, It should be taken as a given that any man, woman or child with an ounce of freedom running through their veins is against a whole lot that the government is doing in the United States. But more importantly, they are clearly best defined by what they are for, not against, namely life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Read Andrew Ian Dodge here to find out more.

The 'party of opportunity' and the 'age of aspiration'

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It is election year and the battle has begun in earnest. Against the Tory message of Austerity, Mr Brown has drawn a clear dividing line; his party of ‘opportunity’ will usher in an Age of Aspiration after ‘only’ 12 years in office. If by aspirational, he refers to the aspirations of socialists to centralise, control, distort, burden, and hinder, then perhaps he has credibility.

Austerity and opportunity are not mutually exclusive. The principles of strict economy are sound, which although forgotten or unknown in Number 10, drive growth and create opportunity. Saving is fundamental to economic growth. The process of investment in capital requires prior saving. By relinquishing immediate consumption below its potential level one may engage in capital formation.

Brown’s disregard for strict economy is made evident by the horrendous state of the public finances due to terribly excessive spending in times of growth. There is nothing complicated about living within ones means, about balancing the budget. However, when Labour entered in 1997 the budget was in balance, but by the Treasury’s own forecast by 2011 we will be over £1 trillion in debt, and this doesn’t include our obligations off the balance sheet.

With business stifled, interest rates rising, our credit rating at risk, and huge amounts of debt that you and future generations will have to pay, Brown’s record for burdening the future is perhaps without comparison. Our growth statistics show that you cannot spend your way out of recession, and we cannot borrow our way out of debt. Brown’s economic illiteracy is simply depressing - No sustained recovery can be achieved without focusing on debt reduction.

The aspirational people who achieve overall success and generate the most wealth will be penalised with at least half of their income taken by the government in taxes. Regulation costs under conservative (small c) estimates work out to over £100 billion. For those still in education, who aspire to success, rather than having an education based on their own choices and needs, it is centralised and focused on government targets.

As Smith put it, “there is a lot of ruin in a nation". We need a competent and genuine strategy in Number 10 which tackles debt and returns power to the people.