Panchromatica

The pernicious growth of the state

Why a Critique of the Totalitarian Humanist State is Essential to a Genuine Radicalism

As all of this supposed liberation and breakdown of oppressive social structures has occurred, the state has become increasingly ruthless and pernicious in its expression. For instance, the US Constitution allows for the prosecution of only three federal crimes-treason, piracy and counterfeiting. Today, there are over 3,000 federal crimes and forty percent of these have been created since 1970.  Prior to the mid-1980s, drugs were illegal, with drug crimes being treated in a manner comparable to serious property offenses like burglarly or grand larceny. Today, even the most minor players in drug offenses are frequently sentenced to greater periods of incarceration than even some who commit violent crimes. Asset forfeiture laws were originally used to go after the holdings of members of drug trafficking cartels. Today, such laws apply to 140 other types of “crimes”. The US prison population has increased a dozen times over since the 1960s. Paramilitary policing was a new phenomenom in the 1970s, and originally intended as a means of dealing with either civil unrest or particularly difficult matters of law enforcement like hostage situations. Today, paramilitary policing is normal, even for routine police work, like execution of a search warrant. Even at the height of the Nixon era, the idea that a president would claim the right to unilaterally suspend habeus corpus and imprison suspects indefinitely in secret prisons without trial would have been considered absurd.

What was that about the free market again?

U.S. government fights to keep meatpackers from testing all slaughtered cattle for mad cow - International Herald Tribune.

The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.

[via The Art of the Possible]

A strategy for moving towards minimal government

Visit any libertarian web site and you will see lots about what is wrong and a great deal of rhetoric about abolishing welfare and the like, but virtually nothing on the practical question of how to move from a society dominated and to a large degree controlled by the state to one where individual choice is paramount.

If a transition to a much less intrusive state is to happen, we need to consider how that will be achieved – unless of course you are either a revolutionary or a pessimist. In the first case you will think that only revolution can achieve the sort of radical change needed, in the second you will think that only revolution can achieve the sort of radical change needed!

I don’t really think I am a libertarian, although I have had a long standing interest in anarchism and mutualism so I must make it plain that what follows is not meant to be a programme for a libertarian party. In any case, there are probably as many flavours of libertarian as there are ultra-left Trotskyist sects and they are likely to exhibit as much fellow feeling. A libertarian party is almost inevitably doomed to failure for that reason alone. In practice all the main UK political parties have intellectual traditions that could be built on to provide some sort of libertarian or minimal government platform. Nor do I intend to consider the many other ways in which the state intrudes into our daily lives – health and safety legislation, employment law and the like.

These thoughts have been triggered by reading Tim Harford’s book, the Undercover Economist, which describes how China made its transition from a full-blown communist state in the late 1980s to its present position as a major market economy. China’s growth has been in stark contrast to events in the former Soviet Union, where what appears to be emerging after the sort of short sharp shock advocated by the likes of the IMF is a vicious oligarchy of the sort described by Jack London in ‘The Iron Heel’.

Unlike the Soviet Union, China did not abandon the state planning process overnight. Instead it froze the plan. Any production achieved over plan levels remained with the enterprise for sale as they wished. It appears that this simple device was the key factor behind the huge economic advances of the Chinese economy since the early 1990s.

So, how might this help us in the UK to make the transition to a minimal state (setting aside for the moment any discussion of quite what ‘minimal’ means in this context)?

My suggestion is simple. On a given date, Government tax revenue would be frozen – in cash terms without any messing around making ‘allowances for inflation’. We have after all seen what governments can do with such measures when it suits them. At the same time, every private individual or corporate body would also have his or her tax payments frozen – again in cash terms. Tax includes everything paid to government – National Insurance etc for individuals, Corporation Tax etc for business. At this stage I am unsure about Capital Transfer Taxes, Inheritance tax etc – I would like to see them abolished, but I am not sure at what stage in the process.

Should personal or corporate income fall, the tax payable would also fall, paid at the aggregate rate established when the tax collectable was frozen.

Taken alone, this would not be enough to have a significant impact on reducing government spending or increasing personal disposable income. However freezing of tax revenue collected would only be the first stage in the process. Even so, some people would be able to increase their incomes and all of that increase would be tax free and available to spend as they wished. Similarly there would be a strong incentive for business to increase turnover and profits since all increases generated would be free of tax, so allowing them to increase dividends payable and spreading the benefits of their growth further into the economy.

Anyone setting up a new business would immediately be free of tax. This would include businesses created by demergers and spin offs from existing companies. This would have two benefits. Obviously the incentive to start up new businesses would be huge, but by including demergers and independent spin offs, the balance would swing away from the sort of dominance exercised by firms like Tesco in favour of smaller, looser structures such as federations, franchises and cooperatives.

Over a period of 5-10 years, individual personal allowances would increase, so putting further income out of the reach of the taxman. The effect would be to place increasing pressure on government spending in parallel with an increase in personal disposable income and a massive increase in the growth of new businesses aiming to get a share of that money through the provision of goods and services. The objective is to simultaneously increase personal untaxed disposable income to the point where all normal services are affordable by most people, while pressurising service providers to move towards a market oriented approach by reduction and eventual withdrawal of all state funds.

Inevitably some ‘public’ services would need to be cut back or abandoned. The only way in which they could survive would be by attracting people willing to pay directly for the services they provide out of their increased disposable income. Schools and other institutions like them would increasingly have to take a much more market oriented approach if they want to continue to exist.

At some point all these institutions, whether schools or leisure centres would need to become independent of the state. Using schools as the example this would mean that they would be handed over to the staff at a point when staff felt confident that they could generate enough income to keep the school in being. At handover all central funding would cease, although this could perhaps be phased over say three years. At some point however all these bodies would need to either close or be independent, so creating an incentive for early independence in order to get a ‘long run’ up to that final point.

Continued provision would need to be made for those in receipt of some state benefits, for example the chronically sick and disabled. One option might be to set up local or regional charitable foundations funded by a ‘dowry’ from government but afterwards on their own. These could take on the role of providing the ‘safety net’ for those in chronic need. There is no reason why these charities should not compete also – after all the sick and disabled have as much right to a good standard of service as everyone else. Existing charities could perhaps also make a business case for ‘dowry’ funding.

If such a programme as this is to get public support, some guaranteed level of protection for people who are chronically sick or disabled (for example with MS or disabled following accident) would be essential. Initially this might be by requiring ‘dowry’ funded bodies to provide a minimum level of provision.

Another political hot point would be health care. Here GPs could move, like schools, from total state funding through the provision of paid services to complete independence of the state. Major hospitals would probably deal with doctors rather than the public at large, hiring facilities and providing services for consultants and other health care professionals. Smaller cottage hospitals of the sort common in more rural areas could move to a funding model similar to GPs, but could also no doubt hire out facilities and provide local services like X-ray to GPs and others.

Again the essential principle is one of first freezing then squeezing state funding in parallel with increasing the ability of people to pay for their services by reduction in tax levels, starting with the lowest paid. As the state is increasingly under financial pressure, it will need to respond by developing new paying services or moving existing services out of the public sector onto the market in order to survive.

These are really only sketches of a possible process. I don’t intend to set this process out in full detail. That would take a book, not a blog post.

Carnival

I was talking the other day to someone involved in our local carnival and with the promotion of what are now called ‘carnival arts’. If you are like me, I suspect this idea of ‘carnival arts’ runs rather counter to an impression of a few elderly lorries, each bearing their load of slightly embarrassed folk in poorly made and designed costumes, all passing by on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

I’m not entirely sure of the roots of the English carnival in the sense of these processions, although of course carnivals in the sense of fairs like the Nottingham Goose Fair or the Newcastle Hoppings or on a smaller scale the various Mop fairs across the country all have a long tradition. The oldest Carnival in England takes place in Bridgewater, and was established as a celebration of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. It was the precursor of the numerous ‘illuminated’ carnivals that now take place across SW England. Generally however; carnival in the form that we know it in the UK appears, like so many things, to be a Victorian invention. Ryde Carnival for example, on the Isle of White, is the second oldest in the country at a mere 120 years.

Carnival’s real origins are however much less decorous.

In late Medieval European society a feast called the ‘Feast of Fools’ was celebrated in the four days leading up to Lent. In Italy during the sixteenth century carnival developed as a series of masquerade balls encouraging the wearing of masks and costumes. In France Mardi Gras developed from traditional celebrations held on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. (The phrase Mardi Gras means Fat Tuesday in French, from the custom of using all the fat in the home before Lent.) Carnival festivities in the UK originally developed from pagan rituals. Some were later adopted as landmark events in the Christian calendar, and others – like the May Day celebrations – kept their pagan roots.

This older idea links to some other themes I have posted on before, in particular the idea of ‘charivari’ and ‘lords of misrule’. These spread across the Atlantic, for example to Trinidad.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the aristocratic and exclusive character of Carnival dissipated and the festival transformed into an affair for everyone. The emancipated slaves took the celebration to the streets and participated in what was known as the Canboulay or Cannes Brulees – a parody of dramatic events in plantation life, where exslaves adopted the personas of plantation masters by wearing the white masks, while other participants enacted the oppression by wearing padlocked chains…

Most of us have heard too of the Rio Carnival. (Cue gratuitous picture of scantily clad Latin beauties)

Other British traditions such as mummers, morris men, mystery plays and festivities like Up Helly Aa, the Helston Flora Dance and the Padstow ‘Obby Oss’, student Rag Weeks and even pantomime, all seem to have links in some way to this tradition of satire, ridicule and generally boisterous behaviour.

By the 70s however the carnival tradition appears to have been dying and probably would have done were it not for one thing – Notting Hill Carnival. The growth of the Notting Hill Carnival and of similar events in Leeds and elsewhere has it seems begun to reinvigorate the ‘traditional’ English Carnival procession. Notting Hill hasn’t had a smooth ride of course. The huge numbers attending and the disorder associated with it in some years has led to numerous attempts to corral it into a park, where presumably it can be better controlled. Such attempts at control are often couched in terms of public safety and these are of course relevant. However Notting Hill is also a huge demonstration of the existence of a different world, one that isn’t hidden away in suburbia, but out on the streets and making a lot of noise about it. The mindset that wants it penned up in a park is not much different from that which limits demonstrations in the area of the Houses of Parliament.

Being in coercive physical control seems never to be enough, and all rulers fear the voice of the small boy who cries out that the emperor’s clothes are not as substantial as claimed. And satire not only says that the emperor has no clothes, but that it is possible to laugh at the ones that he does have.
There are a range of actions where citizens may express a sceptical distance from those in positions of formal authority: carnival and the various forms of festivals of misrule, in which conventional authority is inverted; satire and the heckling of politicians; derisive or humorous election candidatures such as those of The Monster Raving Loony Party in the United Kingdom. Each of these says to government, in effect, we are keeping an eye on you, and we won’t necessarily accept without question what you tell us, or approve without enquiry what you do or propose to do.

From: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/event.asp?PageId=108&EventId=537

Which sort of brings me back to the idea of ‘carnival arts’. On the one hand I am happy to see the carnival tradition reinvigorated – although not all agree that is in fact happening as for example the local newspaper report bemoaning the lack of ‘floats’, even though there were numerous walking groups in wonderfully elaborate costumes and banging out samba rhythms. On the other I am very uncomfortable with carnival becoming yet another area where the state – in the form of the Arts Council – sticks its nose in and tries to ‘legitimise’ what is going on.

We will tell you what to think...

From the Wiltshire Gazette and Herald.

Defence Secretary Des Browne today asked the High Court to outlaw the use of language strongly critical of the MoD in inquest verdicts on soldiers who have died on active service.

The application came in a test case relating to Territorial Army soldier Pte Jason Smith, who died of heatstroke in Iraq.

Oxfordshire s assistant deputy coroner, Andrew Walker, recorded in a November 2006 inquest verdict that Pte Smith s death was  caused by a serious failure to recognise and take appropriate steps to address the difficulty that he had in adjusting to the climate .
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The 32-year-old fell ill in temperatures of 60C  140F  in August 2003 at the Al Amara stadium, southern Iraq.

The coroner s narrative verdict described how he was taken to the medical centre at Abu Naji Camp, where he died.

The coroner said Pte Smith s difficulty in acclimatising to the heat should have been recognised.

The wording of his verdict came under attack at the High Court in London today before Mr Justice Collins.

Sarah Moore, appearing for the Defence Secretary, said the coroner should not have made reference to a  serious failure  to take appropriate steps.

Why bother having an inquest I wonder? After all the government knows what is good for us better than we do doesn't it?

More coverage

Remixing the London police's anti-photographer terrror posters

fascism, originally uploaded by illegalphotos.

Responding to the London Metropolitan Police's new anti-photographer snitch campaign, wherein posters urge Londoners to turn in people who might be taking pictures of CCTV cameras, many people have taken a crack at redesigning the posters to point out the absurdity of them.

via Brenda and Boingboing

The barrel of a gun

From slacktivist

Participating in civilization -- particularly in a democratic civilization, a civil society -- requires accepting certain rules, regulations, mores, laws, and, yes, taxes in your own best interest and the best interests of others, i.e., for the common good. It also requires that we constantly and vigilantly question every rule, regulation, more, law or tax to evaluate whether it is necessary, fair, wise, efficient, effective, useful, proportionate, etc. But once we accept that as our task -- evaluating each on its merits and demerits in accord with the common good rather than dismissing them all, categorically, as by definition illegitimate -- then we become liberals and not libertarians.

And one of the nice things about being a liberal is that you never need to pretend that you re actually a barbaric hoodlum who only behaves civilly due to fear of punishment from the 101st Airborne.

I don't really think many modern internet 'libertarians' are actually such. If they were, they wouldn't be quite so poisonous about 'liberals' and they wouldn't be so quick to equate 'liberal' with 'socialist'. There are obvious exceptions, but your average internet libertarian is often anti-intellectual and fairly ignorant of the philosophy they claim to support.

Forty years ago, when I gave up Militant on going to university, it was precisely because of the attitudes and behaviour of the sort you see in any Libertarian discussion on the internet. I began to describe myself as a Libertarian Socialist, following Bakunin, but eventually abandoned that self-description and submerged myself in middle of the road Trades Union and Labour Party politics.

With the increasing autocracy of the Labour party however, I am no longer happy to be seen as a supporter and have returned to those anarchist ideas that inspired me in the late 60s. I don't really think I am an anarchist, I just think that we need some conception of a Utopia.

We should be, without hesitation or embarrassment, utopians. At the end of the twentieth century it is the only acceptable political option, morally speaking. I shall not dwell on this. I will merely say that, irrespective of what may have seemed apt hitherto either inside or outside the Marxist tradition, nothing but a utopian goal will now suffice. The realities of our time are morally intolerable. Within the constricted scope of the present piece, I suppose I might try to evoke a little at least of what I am referring to here, with some statistics or an imagery of poverty, destitution and other contemporary calamities- But I do not intend to do even this much. The facts of widespread human privation and those of political oppression and atrocity are available to all who want them. They are unavoidable unless you wilfully shut them out. To those who would suggest that things might be yet worse, one answer is that of course they might be. But another answer is that for too many people they are already quite bad enough; and the sponsors of this type of suggestion are for their part almost always pretty comfortable.

I agree with Norman Geras too that even a Minimum Utopia is a revolutionary objective.

The claim that there could not be, even with all the burgeoning facilities of today’s information technology, anything better than capitalist economic organisation and capitalist markets, I am content to meet with a simple counter-assertion. I don’t believe it.

This I believe is where the internet libertarians fall down. They appear to have no conception of activism except perhaps shouting that the government is holding a gun to their head and no idea of civil society except drawn from the 18th century agricultural economy of the US.

This is something I just don't understand about my libertarian friends here in cyberspace. For them, the menacing threat of armed government tyranny seems to be the only reason they can conceive of for complying with any law, rule, regulation or -- heaven forfend! -- tax.

And that's just, well, odd.

What it boils down to - and call me slow if you want - is the belated realisation that a desire for small government and a concern for individual liberty do not of themselves make you a libertarian. Those are concerns for liberals - and if the pyjamas libertarians are unhappy with that it is their problem, not mine.

A follow up post at Slacktivist here, from the comments on which comes this great one liner:-

I guess libertarians consider corporations as individuals -- overlooking the fact that if corporations were human we'd call them sociopaths.

Passlaws on the way...

from Samizdata.net.

You should see an ID card like a passport in-country. 

Meg Hillier MP, the minister responsible for the scheme, to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, today.

I don't know which is worse - that Labour should see internal passports as a good idea, or that they are so oblivious to their history and implications.

How long before "Papers please" becomes a commonplace on our streets - probably without the please? How long before the people of this country begin to see the Police, not as citizens in uniform but as an occupying army?

It looks like NO2ID needs a US branch

American Liberty Teetering on Edge of Abyss.

“Your papers please” has long been a phrase associated with Hitler’s Gestapo. People without the Third Reich’s stamp of approval were hauled off to Nazi Germany’s version of Halliburton detention centers.

Today Americans are on the verge of being asked for their papers, although probably without the “please.”

Thanks to a government that has turned its back on the US Constitution, Americans now have an unaccountable Department of Homeland Security that is already asserting tyrannical powers over US citizens and state governments. Headed by the neocon fanatic Michael Chertoff, the Orwellian-sounding Department of Homeland Security has mandated a national identity card for Americans, without which Americans may not enter airports or courthouses.

There is no more need for this card than there is for a Department of Homeland Security. Neither are compatible with a free society.

You can have my kidney, when you pry it from my cold dead hand (and other stories to frighten the children)

The announcement from Gordon Brown, that he supports the principle of 'Deemed Consent' to organ donation has brought out the predictable set of responses, ranging from the demented (New Labour New Cannibalism), through the only slightly less barking (although the discussion remains surprisingly thoughtful in the main) to the surprisingly unthinking.

Starting with the mad we have this amazing outburst:

When the law allows organs to be harvested from the bodies of the dead without the explicit prior consent of the dead, or the explicit consent of the next of kin, the State becomes effectively a cannibal.

and:

...presumed consent really is only the beginning. Let this through, and it is only a matter of time before blood donation becomes compulsory. After cannibalism, after all, vampirism is very little.

The trouble with this absurd hyperbole is that no one will listen when you make a serious point and there is a serious point to be made, even from this rather crazy perspective. Do you really trust NHS bureaucrats to get it right? After all one of the reasons for the decline in donors is the Alder Hey and associated scandals, the roots of which go back to 1948.

As Chris Dillow points out, one reason for making the change is the assumption that many people will fail to do so through simple inertia. It is not proposed on the grounds of being more rational but simple expediency.

...the way in which choices are presented to us can affect what we choose - a fact which is awkward for conventional conceptions of rationality.

This outburst from Sean Gabb is totally irrational. It is playing directly and explicitly to the 'yuk' factor and is as nonsensical as the tabloid garbage on which it is modeled.

Moving on to the slightly barking, we have an argument based in part on property rights but also  implicitly on the concept that any action is permissible so long as it causes no harm to others.

...the State's plan to assume default ownership of my mortal remains is wholly and monstrously unacceptable. I reject the claim of the State to own my body just as I reject the legitimacy of its various claims to own my person whilst I am alive.

The second aspect is easier to dismiss.

1. Are you harmed by the State removing your organs after death in order to transplant them into another person? Of course not - you are bloody well dead.
2. Is anyone else harmed by this action? It could be argued that relatives suffer distress but I don't see much sympathy for that from Perry de Havilland and the other denizens of Samizdata if offense or distress is claimed as a reason for legal prohibition of an action.
3. Harm might exist in circumstances where a free trade in bodies or body organs is allowed, since these proposals effectively nationalise your corpse (not for the first time of course).
4. Harm is caused of course but indirectly. If your organs are incinerated or composted rather than being used to keep someone alive, then they will die. There is a strong case that by your inaction you have caused death or at least severe suffering.

Despite 3, I don't think an argument against opt-out based on harm to others can be made.

The issue of ownership is harder to deal with. We accept the disposition of property after death, although of course unless you are an anarchist or minarchist, the state will often set limits on that, for example through taxation. We do not generally accept that people can be owned even by mutual consent, (although there are some who argue otherwise). Can the body therefore be owned after death and on what terms?

It seems to me that this is easier to deal with from the atheist perspective. To an atheist, the body after death is just a collection of bones and tissue and has no intrinsic worth. Even atheists however recognise that to their friends and value their body does have meaning, if nothing else as a symbol of the person they were. This is of itself an important aspect in deciding on the disposition of one's body after death. In the extreme case of leaving one's body to medical research, you have to make specific provision. You apparently cannot simply write it into your will. Even here of course the 'yuk factor' comes into play, both for the owner of the body when making provision and of course for relatives.

For those of a religious bent, there will be other considerations. They are not considerations I accept, or even really understand, but it is your body and your beliefs and neither the state nor anyone else should be able to override those beliefs, even though it appears that the proposals will allow for opt-out.

On that basis, the proposals boil down to the state dictating how you should dispose of your body after death. The third posting I have picked out (cross posted from here) ignores this aspect almost entirely (although it is picked up in the comments) in favour of a rant about the right. It largely ignores the impact of death on the family and those around them - an attitude to a degree retracted in the comments. It simply assumes that there is no acceptable objection to the proposals.

Libby Purves puts it a little more rationally in The Times:

In any legal change, it must be acknowledged and accepted that some of our compatriots have powerfully superstitious beliefs about bodily parts: we are not historically far from the age of relics, and some of the Alder Hey parents held repeated funerals for recovered microscope slides. You may not think that way, I certainly don't; but nobody has the right to gainsay those who do. Not in the “public interest”, not using state authority. Your body is your own.

She also deals with the issue of implied consent:

My main caveat is that with presumed consent the opt-out should be staringly visible. It should be offered in a way nobody could fail to notice, and cost no time, stamps, visits or call centres. Perhaps a tickbox at 16 when you get your national insurance card; then every year a renewable consent box, maybe on your tax form (though given the Revenue & Customs' inability to handle data responsibly, perhaps not). But the opt-out must be unavoidable, universal, not in the small print.

There is no doubt but that people die every week because of the lack of a suitable donor and almost always that lack arises because the person who could have helped didn't get round to it and because no one had the nerve to ask the bereaved. Opinion polls actually show a high level of support for organ transplantation, much higher than for xenotransplants, held out by many as the ultimate solution.

The problem as ever is complex. There is no point in behaving as if there is one answer and ranting about the stupid behaviour of those who don't agree with you. At its centre are multiple moral and philosophical questions to do with our sense of who and what we are and about our place in the universe. Of course it would be nice to have a neat simple solution - but it isn't going to happen. We will have to carry on muddling through, making decisions that please no one.

Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act as if there is some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.

Terry Pratchett Hogfather