Areopagitica

The Big Jigsaw Puzzle

2007-07-24T18:25:00.000Z

This is about a jigsaw puzzle. A big jigsaw puzzle. THE big jigsaw puzzle.

You know the deal when you bring a jigsaw puzzle home from the shop. It comes in a box, with a picture on the lid. You of course assume that the picture on the lid is what you get when you put all of the pieces together correctly. You assume that the factory put the right pieces in the right box. And if it says: "6000 piece puzzle" on the lid, you expect that there will be 6000 pieces in the box. No more, no less. One of each. No duplicates.

But this is about a more interesting puzzle than that. Much more interesting. This is about a puzzle with no box and only a very old lid that is alleged was just painted by some ignorant old Uncle called Moses a long time ago and that the puzzle never originally belong with it. The puzzle has missing pieces (though huge numbers of pieces have recently been found) and duplicate pieces. There are lots of tricky pieces that look like one part of a picture and turn out later to be a completely different part of the picture. And you have to scour the earth for the pieces, like some kind of strange treasure hunt. The pieces are all over the place. Some are in particularly difficult to find places, like deep underground, or even out in space. The good thing is that everyone in the family knew the rules for what constitutes a puzzle piece, and the rules for how to find the pieces. Puzzle-building really took off after Uncle Francis (from the Bacon branch of the family) wrote those rules down in the 1600s. If someone doesn't accept these rules, then they aren't allowed to contribute pieces or join in the puzzle-making efforts. One great thing about the commonly-agreed rules is that far-flung relatives can collect pieces from all over the world, bring them to the shared box and join in with working on the puzzle, even if they speak other languages.

Everyone in the family also agreed that, in the end, the pieces can only make one picture. But while the puzzle is being assembled, they need not all necessarily agree on exactly what the picture is or what each part of it looks like precisely. They might have different ideas of suggestions about which pieces fit where, and how they fit together, and what each part of the picture looks like. Still, some people think it helps to have common agreement on what the big picture looks like, although the details of any given part may be disputed.

Part of the challenge is that a lot of the pieces can be fitted together in more than one way, but only one of those ways is correct. So, when trying to fit the pieces together, it might be possible to assemble a part of the picture incorrectly. But, as more new pieces are found, an incorrect part tends to become more and more infeasible. It starts colliding with other parts that seem to have been correctly assembled. If the problem part isn't changed, the part that is wrong will clog up the whole picture-solving enterprise. If parts that are right are changed to accommodate parts that are wrong, the problem just gets worse. That's what happened to Uncle Plato and Uncel Aristotle's part of the picture with the earth in the centre of things. Uncle Ptolemy and lots of other Greek uncles all thought that part of the picture was right and got their way for a long time. Of course, they kept fiddling with it as people brought new puzzle pieces in. But that section of the picture had to be pulled apart and rebuilt in 1543 when our Polish Uncle Nicolaus (Copernicus) brought in some new puzzle pieces that showed that our really old Greek Uncle Pythagoras had the right idea way back.

So, once an error is recognised, the puzzle-builders need to agree to pull apart the problem area of the picture and to try to rebuild it in another way, so that it fits with the other parts that seem to be right. There more of this pulling apart and rebuilding than you might think, but the pulling apart seems to happen only in short bursts very occasionally, with lots of steady piece-collecting and puzzle building going on in between.

This is a really big puzzle. It's so big that the family has been working on it for hundreds of years, passing it down from generation generation. Every so often a cranky old uncle comes in, or sometimes a clever young cousin, possibly with a bag full of new pieces, or maybe just a few pieces and a head full of ideas, and tries to tell everyone that they've got the picture completely wrong. Like when old Uncle Comte (from the de Buffon branch of the family) came along in 1774 and told us "No, no, no. This isn't a 6000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It's a 75,000-piece jigsaw puzzle!"

Uncle Charles (of the Lyell branch) came along in in 1830 and tried to tell us that it was an infinite-piece puzzle. What was he thinking? Of course, we didn't believe him. Later, some clever cousins did some mysterious mathematics using the pieces we had on the table and reckoned this was somewhere between a 100 million-piece puzzle and a several billion piece puzzle.

Then another Uncle Charles (Darwin) came back from a big sailing trip to some islands off South America with another bag of puzzle pieces and lots of great stories. In 1859 he told us that his new-found puzzle pieces proved that the old puzzle box-lid picture of the Bible creation story and the Noah's Flood story was all wrong. This multi-million (or multi-billion!) piece puzzle was of a completely different picture altogether.

Most of the family was still rather skeptical of all this, but in the end enough family members who decided that they had authority were convinced, and so all the pieces of the picture got pulled apart and spread really far apart. Of course, this meant lot of sketching in the gaps between pieces, and lots of hand-waving and fascinating story-telling. the big spreading also meant the puzzle wouldn't fit on the family dining table anymore. It got moved to a big warehouse with specialist equipment, which was locked and guarded by serious-looking people who called it a 'laboratory'. Some were in white coats and some in black gowns. Family members who still suspected it still might be a 6000-piece puzzle after all became less and less welcome at the lab.

Big puzzles are obviously more important than small puzzles, so money forcibly collected from family members started being given to the big puzzle-building project, whether the contributing family members liked it or not. Then these self-appointed guardians of the big puzzle started quietly changing the rules. For example, they stopped taking notice of the old rules for what constitutes a puzzle piece and started treating sections between pieces or even way outside pieces, which they had drawn-in by hand, as if they were puzzle pieces. Then, if anyone collected some puzzle pieces that made the drawn-in bits look wrong, or threatened to require a change in a major part of the picture, they were just throw those troublesome pieces to one side, as if they didn't belong to the picture at all!

More recently, they also started making up spurious new rules. For example, they said no-one is allowed to look at the picture on the old box lid when working on the puzzle, because they said it might not be the right picture. (They also said rude things about old Uncle Moses, or that his painting was actually a more recent work by a team of clever forgers). Then they went even further and said that it is against the puzzle-making rules to look at the box-lid picture, which they said proves that the box-lid picture is not the right picture. They also said that, since in the end the puzzle pieces can only make one correct picture, therefore the multi-billion piece picture of a magic self-generating system that they were working on must be the right picture, so everyone must agree to it.

Of course, a few brave family members pointed out that Uncle Francis would have laughed at these spurious new rulesm which are each an obvious non-sequitur. But the guardians said "Boo-hoo to old Latin logic that's out of date" and became very bossy. They said they had enough numbers to keep out anyone who disagreed with them or their new puzzle-building rules, so get with it or get another job, pal. Sadly, some family members were intimidated by this and fell into line, but not all did.

These days you're not allowed in to the lab and you're certainly not allowed to talk to the kids unless you've been peered at by the right people from inside to make sure you believe that this really is a multi-billion piece puzzle picture of a magic self-generating system that we have here. If anyone gets in who doesn't believe that, or if they change their mind after they have been inside for a while and looked at the pieces closely, then they are peered at again intrusively before being rudely and unceremoniously kicked out.

Well, this jigsaw puzzle has become such an enormous family squabble in recent decades! Actually, the people inside the lab don't like the idea that we are all part of one family. Silly monkeys! They get dreadfully upset if anyone mentions super-great grandpa Noah, or ultra-great grandpa Adam. They get especially upset if anyone mentions the family resemblance and suggests that they themselves are really just like old ultra-great grandpa Adam or ultra-great Grandma Eve after all. Actually, they get so upset trying to disown their ancestors, that they start behaving just like they really are descended from them, getting all tricky and evasive. It's hard to hide the old family likeness!

Of course, any mention of ultra-great grandpa Adam really gets up the noses of the special people in the lab (and the guides who run the children's tours). You see, it reminds them of Adam's Father. And they definitely don't want to have anything to do with Him! They consider Him to be a rotten old spoil sport. As far as they are concerned, He doesn't exist. They even go so far as to say, that it is impossible to build jigsaw puzzles if you think He exists! (Another spurious new rule). Come to think of it, the whole point of the magic multi-billion piece jigsaw of the self-generating picture seems to be a frenzied attempt to prove to themselves He doesn't exist. It doesn't matter how roughly they force together pieces that obviously don't fit together, or how many free-hand sketches or hand-waving stories they need to make up to fill in the vast gaps between the pieces, as long as the picture keeps convincing them that He is not their Father, they are happy to keep beavering away.

Any family members who recognise their First Father are regarded with extreme suspicion. The guardians will let them in, as long as they agree to pretend that He is not their Father while they are inside working on the puzzle. Some agree to this treacherous double life, because, after all, working on the big puzzle does pay reasonably well.

Despite all this, there are still a few hardy advocates around of the old 6,000-piece puzzle. More than you might think, actually. A few decades ago some of them even started collecting their own puzzle pieces (trying their best to stick to Uncle Francis' good old rules), looking at copies of other puzzle pieces that have been taken inside the lab, dusting off the old discarded box-lid picture and trying to put together the 6000-piece jigsaw. There are several various projects of this type. The picture may vary between them, but the basic elements are the same.

The folks in the lab working on the magic multi-billion piece picture of the self-generating system (and their bewigged friends outside) are doing everything they can to stop anyone telling the young children that there are serious people working on 6000-piece puzzles. We wouldn't want any impressionable young family members getting involved in that dangerous game! The thought of letting the children choose which puzzle they think presents a more persuasive picture is just too much. They just might find it a convincing picture!

Libertarianism and Islamofascism

2007-03-22T00:14:00.000Z

Libertarianism -- not to be confused with genuine classical liberalism -- will be destroyed by Fascist Islamism one way or the other. Either the majority of voters in the West will see it for what it is and reject it or Islamists will use it for what it's worth, (using the camouflage of Multiculturalism) and then seek to conquer those societies once they are in a position of strength.

By the 1980s, most Americans understood that libertarianism (embodied in the social democratic humanist parties of the West) was a dead end. Australians 'got it' in the 1990s. The British are just now showing signs of getting it. Continental Europe shows few signs of getting it, at least not Old Europe. She will probably be crying out for America to save her at some point. Again.

Libertarians seem blithely unaware that, while the Islamists might rant against the infidel Jews and 'Crusaders' in the internet video preambles to their murders and massacres, they have nothing but utter contempt for the moral philosophy of libertarianism, which inclines strongly to atheism. The libertarians' naivete in this regard seems to be a product of their own generally hostile disposition towards Christianity and the State of Israel, if not towards Christians and Jews personally. This hostility has apparently blinded them to the fascist nature of Islamism.

The fascination of the Left for power figures of the Fascist right is a thing to behold. There is a strange revulsion-attraction to Nationalsozialism: International Socialism's bastard progeny. The news footage of Tony Benn perched on the edge of his chair like an adoring schoolboy in rapt attention on a visit to Saddam Hussein in his last months of power as the Americans planned his removal remains etched on my memory. (Baathism is a secular Arab manifestation of fascist ideology).

Expect no thanks from the Libertarians to the true defenders of freedom when they are saved from this new Islamofascist enemy.

Prohibition

2007-03-08T13:37:00.000Z

Every thing which is moral evil, and is detrimental to the interests of society, is not, therefore, properly punishable by society (e. g., prodigality, indolence, gluttony, drunkenness).
...
It is not the business of society to keep a man from injuring himself, but from injuring others. As to his personal interests he is his own master.

- R. L. Dabney, Systematic Theology, Chapter 48, Religious Liberty and Church and State.

These quotes are part of Dabney's argument that force (exercised by the State) is no remedy to the crime of heresy. But the principle itself applies more broadly.

One of the clearest examples today of disregard for the principle of the proper role of the State is the prohibition of mind-altering substances or narcotics. This disastrous policy and the enforcement of it, is led by America (who after her experience of 1920-33 she should know better), but is practically universal around the world.

Thus has the State usurped the role of the family.

The object of the family as to children is to promote their whole welfare. The object of civil government is simply the protection of temporal rights against aggression, foreign or domestic.

- R. L. Dabney, ibid.

In usurping the role of the family, the State practically becomes the family, thereby visiting upon us a measure of the evils of Communism. The State-as-family has become increasingly evident in Mr Blair's New Labour Britain.

Immediately following the above quote, Dabney continues:

But this is just the view which all claimants for high powers in governments deny. Like Mr. Gladstone, they claim that the proper view of government is, that it is an association intended to take in hand all the interests and welfare of human beings, of every kind; everything in which man is interested, and in which combination can aid in success, is the proper end of human government. It is to Pan: The total human association. Now, the plain answers to this are three: the Bible says the contrary. Rom.13:4. It is utterly impracticable; for, by the necessary imperfection of human nature, an agency which is best adapted to one function must be worst adapted to others; and an association which should do every thing, would be sure to do all in the worst possible manner. But last, and chiefly; if this is true; then there cannot be any other association of human beings, except as it is a part and creature of the State. There is no Church. The State is the Church, and ecclesiastical persons and assemblies are but magistrates engaged in one part of their functions. There is no such thing as the family, an independent, original institution of divine appointment. The parent is but the delegate of the government, and when he applies the birch to the child, it is in fact, by State authority! All combinations, to trade, to do banking business, to teach, to preach, to navigate, to buy pictures, to nurse the sick, to mine, etc., etc., are parts and creatures of the State! Or if it be said that the State, though it has the right to do every thing, is not bound to do every thing, unless she finds it convenient and advantageous, then the ethical argument is relinquished; and the ground of expediency assumed ...

Again, the argument here is against Establishmentarianism. However, the parallels are clear. In assuming parental responsibility for all individuals, children and adults and getting into the business of trying to stop a man from injuring himself, the State has become the family.

Tragically, the outcome has been disastrous. Prohibition has caused an increase in the use and abuse of the very substances it has sought to eliminate (because addiction to substances made artifically expensive by prohibition creates an incentive to 'push' and deal). Prohibition has caused a significant increase in prostitution (to finance personal addiction to substances made artifically expensive by prohibition) and in recent times thereby fuelled the transmission of AIDS and other serious infectious diseases. Prohibition has caused a significant increase in acquisitive crime, much of it violent, which all responsible members of society are forced to finance, through their property insurance policies. Prohibition has indirectly fuelled military conflict in some of the poorest countries of the world (profits, artificially inflated by prohibition, from the illegal trade in narcotics have become probably the most convenient means to finance trade in illegal arms).

In short, the policy of narcotics prohibition has not only been a far greater failure than the earlier policy of alcohol prohibition in the United States, but, far from reducing the sum of human misery, it has greatly increased it.

The general availability of narcotics is a perhaps a dreadful thing. But the effects of their prohibition is far, far worse. America's prohibition experiment in the 1920s failed miserably. The world's late 20th century narcotics prohibition experiment has failed even more miserably and on an even more spectacular scale. To expect different effects from the same set of causes and initial conditions is known as madness.

The State makes a dreadful parent.

Dispassion

2007-03-02T09:30:00.000Z

"Reason is the slow and tortuous method by which those who do not know the truth discover it. The heart has its own reason which reason does not know." - Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670)

It was once considered a virtue to be dispassionate, particularly if one was, say, a scientist or an economist or a civil servant, or even, perhaps, a politician.

Today, people boast about how 'passionate' they are about some cause or other. Lots of people are 'passionate' about 'climate change.' Even the robotic Al Gore.

Pascal also wrote that "When the passions become masters, they are vices." - Pensées (1670)

He's still right about that.

Sovereign debt relief, or merely write-downs?

2007-02-14T23:33:00.001Z

BBC Newsnight (Wed 14 February) just ran a piece by Greg Palast, produced by Meirion Jones on vulture fund companies taking third world countries to court to recover debts.

Greg Palast's piece on vulture funds and debt relief -- replete with gumshoe-style mock drama on the streets of Washington DC -- was very weak. Disappointingly, Jeremy Paxman's follow-up studio interview failed to redeem the situation.

It seems that the voters in creditor countries have been sold a lie. Our elected leaders, pandering to self-righteous rock stars and their legions of 'concerned' fans, have made grandiose statements about relief and cancellation of poor countries' debts. We the taxpayers have taken the financial hit via write-downs, naively thinking we are party to an act of generous national charity.

Then, creditor governments have simply turned around and quietly SOLD the debt to vulture funds at a written down price (the lure of cash today proving more attractive to Treasuries than the prospect of recovering even the written-down value at some uncertain future date, as would be required for genuine debt relief).

Here, the naivete of producer Meirion Jones in the web article accompanying the Newsnight piece is astonishing:
"Vulture funds - as defined by the International Monetary Fund and Gordon Brown amongst others - are companies which buy up the debt of poor nations cheaply when it is about to be written off and then sue for the full value of the debt plus interest - which might be ten times what they paid for it." (Emphasis added).

This makes it sound as if the creditor nations had no choice in selling the debt, rather than simply forgiving it, which is what they have told their electors they are doing! ('Vulture fund threat to third world').

Unfortunately, all this means that the debtor countries have been left holding the original liability, even as politicians in the West bask in the electoral glory of debt relief. The buyer of the debt now owns the repayment stream, such as it may be. (Presumably, what has been sold is the original loan instrument, against which the buyer of the debt sues. Otherwise, what is the vulture funds' legal claim?)

Naturally, vulture funds are not constrained by the political sensibilities of not suing the government of a poor country. And the original creditor governments can wash their hands and say: "Nothin' to do with me." It's like something straight out of 'Yes, Minister.'

None of this was properly explored by Newsnight. There will always be a market for buying and selling debt. Nothing wrong with that in principle. But elected governments should surely be held to account for their hypocrisy.

Then there was the studio interviwee's bemoaning of the money "taken out of" poor countries for debt repayment: as if no money had been put in (ie: loaned) originally. And there was no hint of a question from Paxman about where the loaned capital actually went! Why is it not generating a return sufficient to repay the debt?

Arguably, developed nations should not be lending to very poor countries at all. We should be making grants, and tying them to performance so the money benefits the poor instead of disappearing into financial black holes and benefiting such people as the corrupt elite of Africa, the "Wabenzi" passing by the poor in their convoys of bullet-proof Mercedes.

Apparently, it doesn't occur to anyone at the BBC, not even to Jeremy Paxman, that there might be some merit in corrupt third world leaders being pursued by some hard-nosed debt speculators for some nice assets quietly tucked away, which might just have been paid for by funds siphoned off from sovereign loans ...

But, of course, we can't suggest performance-linked grants instead of loans, can we? After all, that was the idea of some guy with the initials G.W.B.

Come on Mr Paxman, sharpen up a bit!

Forgiveness

2007-01-31T15:28:00.000Z

Meditations from brief travels in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

He who forgives is greater than he who is forgiven.

The Serbs have not forgotten their treatement at the hands of the Nazi-allied Croatian Ustashi in WW2. This is understandable, given the nature and scale of the attrocities committed. The time since is but a brief moment compared with the time elapsed since the Battle of Kosovo between Serbian lords and the Ottomans on 15 June 1389: another event that has not been forgotten.

The former Yugoslavia is where Rome and Byzantium and Islam collide: the Pope, the Patriarch and 'the Prophet.' It's interesting to reflect on the 'accidents' of history. The dissolution of the Habsburg Empire and the unification of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs; the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Axis invasion, and then (falling out of Britain's less-than-ideal alliance of convenience with Communist Russia and the subsequent defeat of Nazi Germany and her allies), the 'Second Yugoslavia', the socialist republic of Tito's Partisans. A Federation, but with Belgrade standing astride, very much in the centre, for geographic and historical reasons.

With the breakup of the old communist-socialist order, Serbia had an opportunity to be magnanimous, to be bigger than her old ethno-religious enemies, to forgive and to move on. To let go. Instead she chose to hang on. To deny freedoms. To fight seccession. And, in what can only be considered a terrible irony after the experiences that followed the Axis invasian of 6 April 1941, she got a National Socialist leader. Nationalsozialist. Nazi to you and me.

There followed 'ethnic cleansing,' mass murder and attrocities. Ancient score settling is surely the road to misery.

"The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God." James 1:20

In eschewing forgiveness Serbia has reduced herself. It is now she who needs forgiveness. In seeking domination, and a 'Greater Serbia,' she has forfeited her dreams of greatness and now finds herself greatly reduced. An uneasy peace has settled. Slobodan Milosevic has passed on to give his account to the highest court. Will Serbia's neighbours now rise to the opportunity and be big enough to forgive her?

May refreshing showers of forgiveness descend gently on the souls of the people of the mountains and plains of the Western Balkans.

Tolerance and the homosexual lobby

2007-01-31T10:33:00.000Z

Tolerance is the gracious middle ground between complete acceptance and complete rejection.

That middle ground is where Western society used to stand in relation to homosexuality. Society expressed its disapproval of the practice through the law. Ministers of religion were at liberty to speak against it, at the times and in the places of their choosing. And yet, despite the general disapproval of society, people were at liberty to choose a homosexual lifestyle, on the understanding that they were publicly discrete and did not give offence. The conscious policy was not to enforce the law within the private domain.

The traditional gracious tolerance of Western society is a reflection of God's grace, of the kind that one would hope to see in a society with historic Christian roots. (It stands in stark contrast to, for example, Nazi Germany's violent persecution and execution of homosexuals). God did not respond to the Fall of Adam and Eve — their direct rebellion against Him — by passing the death sentence immediately upon them (which He would have been completely justified in doing). Instead, he graciously suspended the sentence, provided clear warnings against sin and of the need of salvation, and provided the opportunity of redemption and eternal life after the temporal sentence of death.

Today, the homosexual lobby, acting in league with the wider licentious Left have contemptuously rejected the gracious tolerance traditionally extended to homosexuals. 'You are either with us, or against us' is apparently their policy. It is completely unacceptable to them that anyone should be at liberty to speak against homosexuality. Everyone must move to a complete acceptance of their view, their anti-morals. Public funds must be used to promote it. The media must advocate it and celebrate it. Public funds must be removed from anyone who refuses to promote it.

* * *

In Britain, Roman Catholic adoption agencies find themselves faced with the prospect of closing their doors unless they submit to the diktat that they open up the placement of adoptive children to homosexual couples. Their response has been hopelessly timid: merely asking for 'exemption' and saying nothing against the evil law itself or against the legislature which 'frameth mischief by a law.' ('Regulation must not trump conscience' by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor in today's Torygraph).

Piece by piece, the framework is being assembled for persecuting Christians with the full force of the State. The inherent, latent Authoritarian streak of the Libertarians is being gradually revealed.

Adoption is a precious thing, providing an analogy for our reconciliation with God. Similarly, marriage between a man and a woman is a precious thing, not only because it was ordained by God at Creation, but because He dignified it as the principal analogy for the relationship between Christ (the heavenly Bridegroom) and His church. The beauty in even these two pale, earthly reflections of pure divine love is the subject of intense, blind hatred by Libertarians and the licentious Left. Its challenge to even their hardened consciences is too much for them to bear and so they must desecrate it, trample it underfoot and decry anyone who would champion it and uphold it.

Conducting potentially harmful experiments on children is usually condemned. Not in this case. Let the experiment run then, that its designers may condemn themselves with its results.

Pity the poor, innocent children.

Minting headless coins

2007-01-15T15:31:00.000Z

The school leaving age in Britain is to be raised for the first time since since 1972, from 16 to 18. We are told this will reduce welfare payments. One wonders whether it will increase education payments by more or less than the welfare savings. At the margin, does it cost the Exchequer less, the same or more to pay teenagers to do nothing to wander the streets or to do nothing in a classroom?

What will an increase in the number of students who don't want to be there do to the classroom environment and life-prospects for the others in their final two years of school who do want to be there?

The report on this in the Times Online (by Anthony Browne and Philip Webster) had some real policy gems. There would be exemptions for under-18s who are caring for parents or relatives (so much for the Labour social safety net), and (the real gem) for young teenage mothers. This government of unintended consequences seems oblivious to the potential effects of passing legislation forcing teenage girls to stay in school while giving them the option of pregnancy as a "get out of school free" card. But hey, why miss an opportunity to create two new problems instead of one, especially when it can be done with just a few extra lines of legislation?

And another classic: Education Secretary Alan Johnson (who apparently sees no irony in the fact that he left school at 15 and rose to cabinet level) wants to launch guaranteed apprenticeships, so that any youngster who reaches a certain skill level will have the 'right' to follow a suitable apprenticeship.

And so another 'right' is minted at the great Rights Mint in Westminster Palace. This government seems not to realise that creating a right also creates an obligation or a liability. But who is holding the obligation, the liability of all these guaranteed apprenticeships? Who is the guarantor? Is the government planning to (re-)nationalise great swathes of British industry?

It's as if they are minting coins stamped with a value on one side, but blank on the other. Or printing bank notes with no mention of the Bank of England. Or writing cheques with no drawer.

If Labour ministers understand this, maybe they figure that counterfeit rights don't cost much, and may fool enough of the people enough of the time. Such is the cynicism of the counterfeiter. Or perhaps, far from understanding liberty, they understand almost nothing. Take your pick. Either way, these are the leaders and the legislators we have elected. A greater indictment of the Conservatives than the electoral success of this government could hardly be imagined. For a decade they have failed to hit such a large target, lumbering about blindly, causing havoc. But then again, each nation gets the Government (and the Opposition) that it deserves.

Diplomatic offensive

2006-12-20T13:48:00.001Z

Diplomacy has been defined as equal parts protocol, alcohol and vitriol.

Chales Moore wrote in the Daily Telegraph on Saturday that 'The Iraq Study Group speaks longingly of a "new diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region".'

Has anyone else wondered how something can be both diplomatic and offensive?

Perhaps it falls under the third part of the definition, although it's not entirely clear how a Western diplomat would ever build up to the vitriol part in the Middle East, where the protocol is no alcohol.

Prohibiting drugs is not conservative

2006-12-14T23:48:00.000Z

‘Prohibition undermined respect for the law, corrupted the minions of the law, created a decadent moral climate - but did not stop the consumption of alcohol. Despite this tragic object lesson, we seem bent on repeating precisely the same mistake in the handling of drugs.’

- Milton Friedman, Prohibition and Drugs, NEWSWEEK, May 1, 1972.

‘Economist Milton Friedman predicted in Newsweek nearly 34 years ago that Richard Nixon's ambitious “global war against drugs” would be a failure. Much evidence today suggests that he was right. But the war rages on with little mainstream challenge of its basic weapon, prohibition.’

‘The more the U.S. spends on interdiction, the more incentive it creates for taking the risk of running drugs.’

- George Melloan, Musings about the War on Drugs, Global View opinion column, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, February 21, 2006.

* * *

Last night (Wed 13 Dec 2006), Newsnight covered the current string of murders of prostitutes in Ipswich, followed by an interview. Jeremy Paxman had in the studio Dawn Annadale, a former escort; Fiona MacTaggart, Home Office Minister from 2003-2006; and Tom Lloyd, Chief Constable, Cambridgeshire Police, 2001-05. After some talk about getting prostitutes off the streets, the discussion turned briefly to drug addiction. Most, if not all of the five young women killed in Ipswich were drug-addicts.

Paxman asked Tom Lloyd: “What’s the solution to the drug-addicted woman, who sells herself to feed her habit?” To which he replied: “Well in simple terms: prescribe heroin to reduce crime.” He went on:

“There’s a real problem with the drugs debate: there isn’t one. If people like me say, why don’t we prescribe heroin, because it’s a rational approach that I can argue for, people will say ‘well you’re going soft on drugs.’ I’m not. I’m actually going hard on drugs, because at the moment the drug dealers have a free rein. I’ve been a police officer for over 30 years, and in that time, all of the efforts of police to try to combat illegal drugs were either ineffective or actually counter-productive, and resulted, as we know, in a huge increase in the availability of drugs to everybody. So, what I’m saying, if nothing else, is if the government regulated the supply of drugs you would eliminate the harms caused to the users. People are still dying in our public lavatories because of an overdose; there is 60 to 70 percent of acquisitive crime committed by people desperate for a fix; prostitutes on the streets desperate for a fix. We have got a huge burden on the whole country: up to 12 billion pounds. This is what I was told recently by a Home Office official. It’s a massive problem. It’s being going for 30 to 40 years, and it really is time we started debating it openly and thinking about it imaginatively.” [Emphasis added].

* * *

The more that is spent on interdiction, the more effort is put into seizing drugs, catching dealers, trying to restrict supply, the more incentive it creates for taking the risk of running drugs. Of course, defying such basic economic principles of risk and return is about as sensible as trying, with great moral earnestness, to defy gravity by walking off a cliff.

But the incentive effect goes well beyond the major criminal gangs, right down to the small-time user-dealers on the street. As Tom Lloyd said: ‘I’ve been a police officer for over 30 years, and in that time, all of the efforts of police to try to combat illegal drugs were either ineffective or actually counter-productive, and resulted, as we know, in a huge increase in the availability of drugs to everybody.’ So banning drugs has quite probably contributed to an increase in the use of these substances, relative to what it would otherwise have been.

Stepping onto the bottom rung on the distribution chain is one of the three common methods of financing an illicit drug habit. So the law is, in effect, underwriting the greatest pyramid selling scheme yet devised, with addicted users motivated to create new customers to finance their habit. Wonderful!

And how do users who aren’t dealing finance their habit? Unless they are celebrities or other types with high income occupations (espeically those without demanding schedules requiring regular attendance at the office) they steal or turn to prostitution. Even better! We all pay for the former through our insurance policies and the latter brings the usual social ills. We are usually able to turn away and ignore the prostitution problem. The thin veil has been violently torn away in Ipswich this past fortnight. And, as if driving up the supply of prostitutes wasn’t enough, illegality has made injected drugs a perfect vector for the transmission of infectious diseases, particularly AIDS, but by no means not limited to it. Combine that effect with prostitution and you have the perfect cocktail for multiplication of misery and practical evils.

The evidence is overwhelming. Surely, the burden of proof is on the prohibitionists to justify the continuation of their disastrous policy in the face of an enormous and growing mountain of evidence. It’s a conservative principle to be observant, thoughtful, not to let emotions trump right reason, and to respect and yield to evidence when they contradict one’s views, beliefs and opinions, however long- and dearly-held. It’s another conservative principle that the task of government is not to try to create heaven on earth (which is not only impossible, but has always led to an increase of misery), but to minimise practical evil. This involves being sufficiently discriminating to discern which is the lesser of alternative evils. So what happens to these principles with self-professed conservatives when it comes to the drugs issue?

Conservatives, as a rule, are people who understand that something that appears comforting and generous on the surface (eg: socialism) can actually be simplistic, oppressive, and full of falsehood and evils, both practical and moral. They also understand that what at first seems challenging and harsh, (eg: conservative principles) may actually be inherently compassionate, preferrable and desirable. So it's tragic that so many otherwise sensible and intelligent conservatives, who are usually able to discriminate correctly between liberty and tyranny, between giving people credit and patronising them, seem to have a massive blind spot on drugs.

Only with such a blind spot can such an otherwise sensible conservative write:

‘Few spectacles in politics have distressed me more in recent years than the ridicule heaped on Ann Widdecombe, when she was still Conservative home affairs spokesman, for saying that the laws against the use of drugs needed to be enforced. She was absolutely right. Since drugs crime is the cause not just of most prostitution, but of between 70 and 80 per cent of all crime in this country, she was making a unanswerable point.’

- Simon Heffer, Drugs are the curse of our land and turn women into prostitutes, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, Wednesday February 13, 2006.

At least the headline to Mr Heffer’s article is a true statement. Unfortunately, what Mr Heffer thinks is ‘blindingly obvious’ is a simplistic falsehood blinding him to the more subtle truth that the present ‘solution’ (prohibition) is actually making the problem worse:

‘Punishing drugs users would also be likely to give the police more information about their suppliers. The prisons cannot be too full for such people, who are the most destructive in society. Can we not see this blindingly obvious truth? Of course, even if drugs use were eliminated, there would still be tarts, and there would still be people who kill tarts. There would probably, though, be gratifyingly fewer of both.’

- Simon Heffer, ibid.

But this is not only a practical issue. The prohibition of narcotics is not only unjustified on the practical evidence, but it is utterly inconsistent with conservative principles. It denies people personal responsibility. I don't need the law to tell me not to use these substances. This law treats us all like children or presumes we are imbeciles. It invades and violates the domain of the family.

Experts may debate the degree of medical harmfulness of various drugs. But it is not the primary responsibility of the state to restrain people from self-harming behaviour. That is the natural responsibility of the individual and their family. Imposing criminal penalties for self-harming behaviour is completely absurd. (We send people to prison, and, in complete mockery of the prohibitionist policy, even the prison authories can’t keep drugs out of these small and supposedly secure and highly controlled environments.) If the behaviour is self-harming, then leave the harm as the natural punishment!

The current situation is far worse than 1920s American alcohol prohibition. The substances are far more potent, more compact and convenient to distribute, as well as being more dangerous to self-administer in unhygienic conditions. Richard Nixon’s “global war against drugs”, America’s failed prohibition experiment is being repeated on an enormous scale and has been imposed on the entire world.

Repealing the prohibition on drugs is not a crazy libertarian policy, but is grounded in classical liberal principles. Even if David Cameron understands this, which appears somewhat unlikely at present, don't expect him to say so. Only a true, unashamed conservative with unquestionable classical liberal credentials would be able to carry it off.

SJW