Review: Francis Spufford's Red Plenty

The Book

Red Plenty is a fictionalised history, or possibly a work of hard historical science fiction, which covers what it describes as the "fifties' Soviet dream" but which might be better termed the Soviet sixties - the period from Khrushchev's consolidation of power to the first crackdown on the dissidents and the intervention in Czechoslovakia. This is a big book in a Russian way - it's always been a science-fiction prerogative to work with the vastness of space, the depth of history, and the wonder and terror of science and technology, but it's also been fairly common that science-fiction has had a bit of a problem with people. The characters who re-fire the S-IVB main engine for translunar injection, with nothing but a survival pack of big ideas for use on arrival, tend to vanish in the cosmos. At its best, this has given the genre a disturbingly calm new perspective - chuck out your literary chintz, the rocket equation will not be fooled. At worst, well, OH NO JOHN RINGO.

Red Plenty covers a lot of big ideas, some serious hardware and even more serious software, and great swaths of the Soviet Union. But you will also need to be prepared to meet quite a lot of difficult but rewarding people, rather like the geneticist character Zoya Vaynshtayn does at the party Leonid Kantorovich's students throw in Akademgorodok. In that sense, it has a genuinely Russian scale to it. The characters are a mixture of historical figures (as well as Kantorovich, you will spend some time in Nikita Khrushchev's interior monologue), pure fictions, and shadow characters for some historical ones. (Emil Shaidullin roughly represents Gorbachev's adviser Abel Aganbegyan; Vaynshtayn the historical geneticist Raissa Berg.)

So what are they up to?

Rebooting Science

Kantorovich, a central figure of the book, is remembered as the only Soviet citizen to win a Nobel Prize in economics, and the inventor of the mathematical technique of linear programming. As a character, he's a sort of Soviet Richard Feynman - an egghead and expert dancer and ladies' man, a collaborator on the nuclear bomb, and a lecturer so cantankerous his students make a myth of him. Politically, it's never clear if he's being deliberately provocative or completely naive, or perhaps whether the naivety is protective camouflage.

A major theme of the book is the re-creation of real science in the Soviet Union after the Stalinist era; biology has to start up afresh, economics has to do much the same, and everyone is working in a large degree of ignorance about the history of their fields. Some things simply can't be restarted - as Spufford points out, despite all the compulsory Marxism-Leninism, even genetics hadn't been erased as thoroughly as independent Marxist thought, and nobody in charge was willing to even think of opening that particular can of worms. On the other hand, the re-opening of economics as a field of study led to what the biologists would have called an adaptive radiation. Pioneers from engineering, maths, biology and physics began to lay spores in the new territory.

Comrades, let's optimise!

The new ecosystem was known as cybernetics, which was given a wider meaning than the same word was in the West. Kantorovich's significance in this is that his work provided both a theoretical framework and a critical technology - if the problem was to allocate the Soviet Union's economic resources optimally, could it be possible to solve this by considering the economy as a huge system of linear production functions, and then optimising the lot? The idea had been tried before, in the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s, although without the same mathematical tools.

This is one of those events whose significance has changed a great deal over time. The question was whether it was possible for a planned economy to achieve an optimal allocation of resources. The socialists thought so; their critics held that it was impossible, and elaborated a set of criteria for optimal allocation very similar to the ones that are familiar as the standard assumptions in the economic theory of the firm in perfect competition. These days, it's often presented as if this was a knockout argument. From the firm in perfect competition, we hop to Hayek's idea that a market economy is better at making use of dispersed, implicit knowledge. Basta. We won.

The socialists weren't without intellectual originality. In fact, they did actually formulate a mathematical rebuttal to the firm in perfect competition - the Lange model, which demonstrated that optimal allocation was a possibility in theory. The Hayekian critique wasn't considered that great at the time - it was thought a much better point that the barrier to effective planning was a practical one, not a fundamental one. And even then, it was well known that the standard assumptions don't, actually, describe any known economy. It would simply be impossible to process all the data with the technology available. Even with the new tools of linear optimisation, who was going to do all those sums, especially as the process is an iterative rather than a formal one? Stalin and Hitler had their own way of solving these arguments - no man, no problem - and the whole thing ended up moot for some time.

Computers: a technical fix

But if it had been impossible to run the numbers with pen and paper in 1920, or with Hollerith machines and input-output tables in 1940, what about computers in 1960? Computers could blast through millions of iterations for hundreds of thousands of production processes in tens of thousands of supply chains; computers were only likely to get better at it, too. Red Plenty is about the moment when it seemed that the new territory of cybernetics was going to give rise to a synthesis between mathematics, market-socialist thinking, and computing that would replace GOSPLAN and deliver Economics II: True Communism.

After all, by the mid-60s it was known that the enormous system of equations could be broken down into its components, providing that the constraints in each sub-system were consistent with the others. If each production unit had its own computer, and the computers in each region or functional organisation were networked, and then the networks were....were internetworked? In fact, the military was already using big computer networks for its command-and-control systems, borrowing a lot of ideas from the US Air Force's SAGE; by 1964, there were plans for a huge national timesharing computer network, for both military and civilian use, as a horizontal system cutting across all the ministries and organisations. Every town would get a data centre.

The Economics Fairy Strikes Again

But, of course, it didn't happen. There's a good paper on the fate of the Soviet internetworkers here; Spufford has a fascinating document on the end of indigenous general-purpose computer development in the USSR here. Eventually, during the 1970s, it became increasingly obvious that the Soviet economy was not going to catch up with and outstrip anyone, let alone the United States, and the Austrian economists were retroactively crowned as having obviously been right all along, and given their own chance to fail. Spufford frames the story as a Russian fairytale; perhaps we can say that in fact, economics is the fairytale, or rather the fairy. Successive groups of intellectuals have fought their way through the stacks of books, past the ideological monsters, and eventually reached the fairy's grotto, to be granted their greatest wish. And it's always the same one - a chance to fail.

Why did the Soviet economists fail? Red Plenty gives a spectacular sweep through the Soviet economy as it actually was; from the workings of GOSPLAN, to the management of a viscose factory, to the world of semi-criminal side payments that actually handled the problems of day-to-day survival. In the 1990s, the descendants of one half of the socialist calculation debate swept into Russia as advisers paid by the Thatcher Foundation. Arriving on the fairy's magic cloud, they knew little of how the Soviet economy worked in practice, and duly got their opportunity to fail. The GOSPLAN officials of the 60s were reliant on data that was both completely unreliable, being the product of political bargaining more than anything else, and typically slightly less than a year out of date. And the market socialists were just as reliant on the management of Soviet industry for the production cost data they needed to make sure all those budget constraints really were consistent.

That's a technical explanation. But there are others available. Once communism was achieved the state was meant to wither away, and not many of the people in charge of it were at all keen on this as a pension plan. Without the power to intervene in the economy, what was the point of the Party, again? Also, what was that stuff about letting people connect computers to the telephone network and pass messages from factory to factory? Where will it end? The central government, the Politburo, GOSPLAN, STAVKA - they would never accept it.

Another, more radical, is that the eventual promise of Red Plenty was to render not so much the top of the pyramid, but the middle management, redundant. The rapid industrialisation had created a new management class who had every intention of getting rich and staying that way. (This was the Yugoslavs' take on the Soviet Union - the new class had simply taken over from the capitalists.) What would happen to their bonuses, and their prerogative to control the planners by telling them what they wanted to hear?

And yet another is that the whole project was flawed. Even if it was possible to discern the economy's underlying cost-structure, write the software, and optimise the whole thing, how would this system deal with dynamic economics? How would it allocate investment? How would it cope with technological change? It's no help to point out that, in fact, a lot of the questions are nowhere near being solved in any economics.

Soviet History

One view of the USSR's history is a succession of escape attempts. The NEP of the mid-20s, Nikolai Voznesensky's term at GOSPLAN in the 1940s, the Soviet 60s. Each saw a real effort to get away from a political economy which was in many ways a wild caricature of the Industrial Revolution, screwing down the labour share of income in order to boost capital investment and hence industrial output, answering any protest against this with the pistol of the state. As well as trying new economic ideas, they also saw surges of creativity in other fields. They were all crushed.

Arguably, you could say the same thing about perestroika. The people who signed the Alma-Ata protocol to arrange the end of the Soviet Union and the dismissal of Gorbachev were not, in fact, heroic dissidents, but rather career communist bureaucrats, some of whom went on to become their own little Stalins. Spufford says in the endnotes to Red Plenty that part of the book's aim is a prehistory of perestroika - one view of the characters is that many of them are developing into the people who will eventually transform the country in the 1980s. Green politics was an important strand in the great dissident wave, right across the USSR and Central Europe; Zoya Vaynshteyn's genetic research, which turns up some very unpleasant facts, is a case in point. Valentin, the programmer and cadre, is going to retain his self-image as a bohemian hacker into the future. Another Party figure in the book is the man who refuses to get used to violence, which will also turn out to be important in 1989.

Anyway, go read the damn book.

coffee and stupidity

Deeply unprofitable Crooked Timber thread produces an interesting point. Not so much "why do libertarians hate Fairtrade coffee?", but why on earth do they insist on lying? From the link:

By guaranteeing a minimum price, Fairtrade also encourages market oversupply, which depresses global commodity prices. This locks Fairtrade farmers into greater Fairtrade dependency and further impoverishes farmers outside the Fairtrade umbrella. Economist Tyler Cowen describes this as the “parallel exploitation coffee sector”.

Coffee farms must not be more than 12 acres in size and they are not allowed to employ any full-time workers. This means that during harvest season migrant workers must be employed on short-term contracts. These rural poor are therefore expressly excluded from the stability of long-term employment by Fairtrade rules.

The problem here is paragraph two; I've not attempted to estimate the cross-elasticity of demand for Fairtrade and non-Fairtrade coffee, and it's not the kind of thing I'd try unless someone was paying me to do it. But it's perfectly simple to consult the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation International standardisation documents and see if they actually forbid full-time employment or set a maximum limit on the size of farms. Here's the standard on the use of hired labour. Requirement 1.5.1.13:

All regular work is undertaken by permanent workers...The objective is that as often as possible, work is undertaken by permanent workers. Only work that is added to usual work levels during peak seasons may be undertaken by seasonal workers.

So - no. Not even close. 180 degrees out, in fact. The point arises downthread that the great majority of work on a coffee farm is seasonal in nature, so Cowan couldn't possibly have been right even if you let him have his own facts. This is marginally unfair to him; it's not his prose, but rather something he's (very) favourably quoting. The original source is here; note the cites back to Cowan and to people at George Mason University, the Koch Industries school.

For some reason, I still followed a link to his blog after this, to this interesting sociological result. Apparently, if you've been to jail, you're more likely to self-identify as black when you leave jail then when you went in. This is interesting, but then numskull racist twit Steve Sailer showed up in the comments. As far as I can make out from his semi-coherent comments, he's very angry about this, which is odd for someone who believes in biological racism (surely it wouldn't matter? your DNA, after all, doesn't care which census box you tick).

Further, Sailer's freakout reminded me of the old joke about the Wee Free minister who hears that a hippie commune has moved into the next island along. He listens icily as the various novel features are described - the long music, the loud hair, the ruthlessly commercial communists, etc. Eventually they tell him the newcomers believe in free love. "Free love?" he explodes. "That could lead to mixed dancing!" Similarly, it's clear from Sailer's comments that he's opposed to rape in prison because he thinks it might lead to multi-culturalism. And does he think about it. All the time, it seems.

Perhaps his mate Anthony Browne from PolEx could offer him counselling as part of the Big Society?

a reminder that things happen quickly

If you think the Superfreaks had demonstrated the truth of the Dunning-Kruger effect well enough, especially after this further hammering, and their attempt to gain everyone's esteem by having NewsCorp send out copyright nastygrams, think again.

Here's some science, via Lou Grinzo's blog. We've been taking very, very thin samples of the leafmould in the bottom of a rather special Irish lake (peat - not much oxygen, so things *last*), and it's possible to draw some interesting conclusions about the Younger Dryas event, which flipped the planet into an ice age 13,000 years ago after a huge ice barrier in North America collapsed and let vast amounts of fresh water pour into the Atlantic.

The killer detail, literally: the new ice age kicked off within months. We had thought it took decades, but instead it tore in within a year. A year. No time to adjust; not even that much time to flee.

This should surely kill off any daft ideas of fiddling with the atmosphere. Shouldn't it?

that's not noise, that's the sound of freedom - oh, by the way, I voted Libertarian

Libertarianism, by which I mean yer bog standard comments thread North American subtype, is irrational. This struck me in the context of this post of Charlie Whitaker's, which was of course criticised by the local libertarian in the usual terms. First of all, let's define terms; the standard set-up of modern right-libertarian arguments is based on two layered arguments. The first is a weak-form argument, which derives from the Austrian tradition in economics and, therefore, eventually from classical liberalism. It goes a little something like this: As Hayek and von Mises pointed out, we can't possibly know enough to manage the whole economy, and therefore, we should rely on market mechanisms as far as possible.

The notion that GOSPLAN wasn't a triumph is hardly controversial, and for most of the political spectrum, the debate is really about how far we can rely on market mechanisms and what the alternatives to them should be. But the libertarian argument does a hop, a skip, and a little leap of faith here; it extends this argument to claim that any nonmarket organisation will inevitably be less efficient than any market alternative, and that it will be so much less efficient that the costs, whatever they are, will always be worthwhile. We can characterise this as the argument from efficiency.

What's worth pointing out here is the degree to which the volume has been turned up. All the points of doubt in the economic argument have been replaced by conviction. The argument against central planning is built on scepticism, drawing its strength from flexibility like a great bridge or the backbone of a ship; but suddenly, there's a lot of massive but brittle certainty about. What may very well be very small efficiency gains, which may well come at great cost, are being used to legitimate a very strong normative claim indeed.

This is something libertarianism shares with conservatism; the belief that 1) the government will always be incompetent at allocating investment, but 2) it is perfectly competent to de-allocate it. Ministers and their officials cannot under any circumstances be trusted to choose projects to fund, but they have perfect knowledge of what to cut. Now, this isn't actually as stupid as it may sound - as Daniel Davies says, it's much easier to identify stupid proposals than it is to come up with intelligent ones. But economic decisions have a fundamental duality - the decision to buy X involves not buying Y, the decision not to buy Y involves going without Y. Cutting, privatising, deregulating - these are the same activities as spending, nationalising, or legislating.

Clearly, there is a need for a stronger philosophical foundation.

This we find in the doctrine of the illegitimacy of taxation. The ability of the state to collect tax depends on its monopoly of force, and therefore taxation is actually a form of theft. Again, a hop, a skip, and a little leap of faith, and we arrive at the position that as all the activities of the state depend eventually on tax, therefore an NHS blood transfusion is as illegitimate as, say, being shot seven times in the head by a policeman. The immediate counter-argument is to knock the ball forward from Hobbes up to Locke, and to appeal to the social contract. It's entirely possible to enter into a voluntary association to which you pay dues and in which you agree to accept its internal discipline; and here we come up against the rock. You didn't choose to be born into a democratic society - and therefore the contract is invalid.

Of course, at this point most people will lose their temper with the obvious stupidity on display. The horrors - to be born into a democratic society rather than, say, Somalia or the eastern Congo! What an appalling imposition! But then, we parted company with empiricism way back when we decided that Railtrack was necessarily a better idea than any other way of organising the railways.

But there's another, more fundamental point here. The doctrine of the total illegitimacy of the state is a huge, extraordinary claim. It is at least as extraordinary as the claim that a central planning commission with 1920s information technology could manage an advanced economy with better results, both in terms of equality and in terms of economic growth, than any alternative. (And, going back to the DRC for a brief holiday, it has arguably amassed a comparable pile of corpses.) Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, but then, we're dealing with libertarianism here.

Here is the point; if we're being rational about this - and we better be, as it's absolutely indispensable for any libertarian argument to work whatsoever - things should change as soon as we accept this claim. In fact, even deciding that such an extraordinary statement is worth considering, rather than noting that it is at least as crazy as Stalinism and passing it straight to /dev/null, should lead us to change our minds about other extraordinary statements. If we decide it's worth bothering with, we must have changed the criteria we use to assess these things. We need to update our Bayesian priors.

If minarchy makes the cut, why doesn't anarchy, an Islamic caliphate, libertarian Marxism, deep ecology, or the joke from The Onion about the political scientists who discover a new form of government which has features of both anarchy and fascism? Further, libertarianism is very excluding - it denounces everything, all the way across the centre ground and well over into conservatism. If you can find a place for it in your worldview, your priors have to be very odd indeed to exclude social democracy.

And therefore, it is, indeed, irrational; all the strength in it comes from the prior assumptions, and these assumptions have to take a very strange form indeed. Further, accepting a zone of political possibility large enough to hold libertarianism forces a rational person to accept a wide range of views as possible that libertarianism demands that you denounce and attack at every opportunity.

"Prior assumptions", after all, is a polite way of saying "prejudices", and irrational forms of politics inevitably become ways of expressing prejudice.

As a reward for putting up with this drivel:

Loonies 2.0

What is the legacy of the so-called "loony left"? The conventional wisdom is clear; it was all their fault, for panicking the swing voters and preventing a sensible, Newish Labour solution emerging earlier. Well, how did that work out?

And it has always seemed disingenuous for the Labour Party establishment to blame local councillors for a period when the party's central institutions were regularly totally out of contact with the public mood and spectacularly incompetent; it certainly serves the interests of the top officials and MPs to push responsibility onto an amorphous and vague stereotype essentially based on hostile newspapers' take on the 1980s. Arguably, believing hostile newspapers' take on itself has been the fundamental mistake of the Left since about 1987; the entire Decent Left phenomenon, after all, was all about demonising anyone who was right about Iraq in identical terms. Does anyone imagine that the Sun in the Kelvin McFuck era wouldn't have savaged and libelled any non-Tory power holders?

In a comment at Dunc's, Paul "Bickerstaffe Record" says:

I want to kick off a bottom up meets top down economic analysis of how Labour /Left leaning local authorities should now be challenging the Thatcherite orthodoxies of cost control/rate capping in a sort of ‘1980s no cuts militant’ meets 2000s grassroots-dictated economic policy. The institutional/legal framework has of course changed out of recognition since 1984, but heh, that’s a challenge rather than an insurmountable problem

He has a point. Consider the position; it's still conceivable that Labour might luck into a hung parliament next year, cue Liberal and Nationalist (of various types) rejoicing, but any realistic planning has to include a high probability of a fairly rabid Tory government in the near future. Further, the financial position is not great - it's nowhere near as bad as Gideon Osborne makes out, as a look at the gilt rates shows, but it's very far from ideal.

So whoever is in charge will be looking for cuts, and it is a reliable principle of Whitehall politics that one of the best ways to get a policy implemented that you want for your own ideological aims is to attach it to a supposed saving. Only the special relationship and the police-media complex can beat this principle as all-purpose justifiers.

The possibility space includes a Labour government in coalition or under a toleration agreement with the Liberals, which is likely to still be strongly influenced by the Blairite stay-behind agents, a Conservative government heavily influenced by products of 80s Tory culture (the mirror image of the London Labour party in the same period), and some sort of grand-coalition slugthing. It is clear that the balance of risks is towards an effort to legitimise a lot of ugly hard-right baggage through an appeal to cuts.

The Tories are planning to make all spending departments justify their budgets at line item level to none other than William "Annington Homes" Hague; it's certainly a first in British history that the Foreign Secretary will control the public spending settlement, if of course he finds the time to show up.

Therefore, even though there is a need to steer the public finances back towards balance once the recession is clearly looking over, there is a strategic imperative to push back and push back hard against the agendas the cross-party Right will try to smuggle through. After all, the nonsense industry is already cranking up.

Which brings me back to the importance of being loonies, and a bit of politics by walking around. One thing that strikes me about North London is how much stuff in the way of public services here was visibly built in the late 70s and the 1980s; there is a reason why Ken Livingstone hopped right back into the Mayor's office. Despite all their best efforts, the Thatcherites were never quite able to shake the core welfare state; was it, in part, because down on the front line people were still pushing out its frontiers and changing its quality?

A lot of ideas (service-user activism, notably, environmentalism, a renewed concern for architecture and urbanism, and the whole identity-politics package) that were considered highly loony back then are now entirely orthodox and are likely to stay that way, especially given the main parties' obsession with putting taxpayer funds into the "third sector".

I fully expect that anyone who talks a good game about making black schoolboys click their heels in front of teacher - you know the stuff they like - will be able to secure reliable venture capital funding in the million class from a Cameron government, just as they have been able to from Boris Johnson's City Hall, with remarkably little monitoring. William Hague will be snarky. Let him. Nobody cares what the Foreign Secretary has to say.

This creates both opportunities for action - perhaps someone should prepare a Creative Commons or GPL toolkit for citizen-initiated delivery quangos and thinktanks - and also targets for ruthless mockery, when the Tories' preferred third sector entities fuck up. We've already had some very fine examples of this courtesy of Boris Johnson. Clearly, the only rational response to the times is to go mad.

Curiosity is not a crime. Killing cats is.

OK, this is outrageous stupid shit of the sort we expect from our gallant allies. Simply, a graduate student at Nottingham University is writing a thesis on terrorists, and as part of this he gets a copy of an Al-Qa'ida training manual from a US government website. Being a postgrad and therefore by definition permanently broke, he got a friend who worked in the university administration to print off the 1,500 pages rather than paying the shared printer fees.

Now this seems silly - 1,500 pages? Seriously? Wouldn't it have been better to search that lot rather than read it through? Don't they have grep at Nottingham? But that's not the point. The point is that "someone" noticed the document on the administrator's computer and grassed them to the police, who predictably freaked, arrested everyone under the Terrorism Act, kept them locked up for eight days, arrested his family, seized all computers they could lay hands on, etc.

The key detail is that both people have names that might give rise to suspicion of being insufficiently willing to condemn, etc, etc. Now, yer man has been released, however, the administrator is Algerian, and is going to be deported on "unrelated" immigration matters. Yeah, right.

Further, the university:

A spokesman for Nottingham University said it had a duty to inform police of "material of this nature". The spokesman said it was "not legitimate research material", but later amended that view, saying: "If you're an academic or a registered student then you have very good cause to access whatever material your scholarship requires. But there is an expectation that you will act sensibly within current UK law and wouldn't send it on to any Tom, Dick or Harry."

Right, sunshine. There is no such thing as "legitimate" research material, just as there is no such thing as "legitimate" thought. We all have the right to read what we damn well like, and as a fucking university you have a duty to stand up for this. As soon as you accept that reading X, Y, or Z, even though not illegal, is the sort of thing They don't like, you've already lost. Ecrasez l'infame.

The University of Nottingham's vice chancellor is Sir Colin Campbell, who can be reached on +44 (0) 115 951 3001, and by fax on +44 (0) 115 951 3005. More people to shout at are here.

Hat tips: Kings of War, IRG.

Hands across the sea continent

This is hilarious, and depressing: you may find tech-libertarians annoying, but just think yourself lucky we got Paul "Van der" Staines, and not this guy. Dmitri Golubov, for it is he, was nailed in 2005 for running a massive credit-card phishing operation (in that case he was probably behind some percentage of the spamwave I spent part of that year trying to keep out of AFOE's comments); now he's starting the Internet Party of Ukraine.

Well, if he's a spammer he's presumably competent. Here's their platform:

Golubov and the Internet Party are running on a platform of rooting out public corruption and reducing bureaucracy. Other parts of its platform include the "computerization of the entire country,"

Dunno what that means, but it's probably rather like Patricia Hewitt's promise in December, 2003 to deliver "online services" to every household in Britain - this blog existed then, and anyone with a BT landline could at least get dialup. Else something more like the J.G. Ballard character whose "attempts to streamline all the furniture in the dayroom unsettled the other patients". But I doubt a Cybersyn-like real-time planned economy is on the cards.

"free computer courses and foreign languages at the expense of the budget,"

And ponies.

"the creation of offshore zones in certain regions of Ukraine," and the organization of Ukraine as a "tax free paradise with the aim to attract money from all over the world."

Of course...does anyone know if that'll get him an invite to CPAC?

A short break in social democracy

Felix Salmon recalls the impact the appearance of wealth, and Buenos Aires’ status as a quasi-European city, had on Argentina’s finances; part of the reason the banks thought it could pay back the money they lent it was that it looked OK, or rather the steaks were superb, the wine better, the company classy (and white); how could anything go wrong?

It’s worth reading. It’s also interesting, as it’s his response to a debate between carta dell’oro glibertarians Tyler Cowen and Megan McArdle about why those terrible lefties persist in believing that Cuba is richer than northern Mexico. Cowen’s argument is essentially that there is a distinction between perceived wealth and actual wealth; the outsider sees crappy roads but not humming export industries, handsome Spanish buildings but not stinking jails. This is OK as far as it goes, but there is a far more interesting and fundamental point here.

Essentially, what they are talking about is J.K. Galbraith’s paradox of private affluence and public squalor. Naturally, right-libertarianism obliges them to carefully avoid citing him, but this is exactly the point he made in the 1950s; it’s quite possible, indeed common, for prosperity to coexist with ugly and generally ‘orrible visuals, precisely because people will optimise the stuff they control and which affects them individually, like their own homes. Further, there is some sort of indifference curve between private and public goods; people are willing to put up with crappier public spaces if they can compensate with greater private comfort. You can argue endlessly about the slope of the curve, but there is at least some tradeoff.

The international aspect, though, is interesting and I think original; as a foreigner, the visual terms of trade are inverted. You don’t spend time in private space, and you spend much more time than usual in public or semipublic, so private affluence is invisible except in so far as it spills over into the public square (good steakhouses, say, and high culture). Further, a lot of travelling occurs between cultures where different private-public exchange rates apply. It occurs to me that much tourism is motivated by precisely this factor; tourism as a form of commuting from the suburbs of private affluence to the city of public prosperity. In a sense, urban tourists are unconsciously spending a few days in socialism. (Other forms of tourism may provide something similar by creating pseudo-public spaces of great luxury, the poverty of the country being concealed.)

This goes double for questions of egalitarianism - tourists don’t stray into the favela, and a colleague of mine recalls the Ericsson engineer he worked with who was robbed of all his possessions down to and including his underpants on the first day of the project, so private suffering is as invisible as private affluence - and maybe triple for questions of politics.

After all, you’re unlikely to be the object of oppression as a visitor unless you’re actually coming to seek it out; if you don’t speak the language you’re unlikely to miss much through the censorship of the news. Add to this some special factors that apply to visitors who have come to do something rather than just to visit; if business is good, your old friends the fundamental attribution error and the salience heuristic will assure you that things are OK, if you’re as smart as you are. If it’s bad, well, look how dirty the streets are.

Another Brilliant Scheme

I have no idea why "libertarians" would support this idea at all; especially not Jim Henley, who ought to know better. Briefly, "Direct Instruction" suggests that teachers should be given prepared scripts to use in class and instructed to follow them exactly, with classes streamed by ability and repeating courses until passed.

First of all, this is of course wildly managerialist and authoritarian; who precisely gets to decide what goes in the script? What happens to local, democratic accountability? The examples given refer to big school systems (>20 kilostudents), which implies that the sort of parish-meeting board of governors folk like Henley romanticise would maybe have some influence over paperclips.

And, of course, the entire history of brilliant centralising education schemes shows that brilliant centralising education schemes don't work. This is one, so it almost certainly won't. So how the hell did libertarians, subtype North American, come to like it?

My explanation is that it's purely the politics of ressentiment: school teachers and their trade unions are a traditional rightwing enemy image in the US, as in the UK through the 1980s, and this appeals simply because it would piss them off. It's worth remembering that even Henley and Co are actually very right-wing people indeed; in an alternate time line, they'd be on the other side.

Hence the neato anti-trade union ads; from the "Center for Union Facts", indeed. Further reading is here; apparently the Center consists of a bunch of Wal-Mart money and a well-known tobacco industry lobbyist. I think the phrase is "nice mates you got there".

This is one of the reasons I don't have ads on this blog; you either have to filter them, in which case you are in a sense taking responsibility for their content and could be accused of a conflict of interest, or else if you disclaim any control and make it clear that it's entirely up to the BlogAds or Google computers, you run the risk of something really horrible turning up. And then, if you decide to censor it, you've got to answer why you don't censor X, Y, or Z.

Paranoid Critique

Salvador Dali described his work as making use of a paranoid-critical method. Like a paranoiac, he attempted to find meaning in the associations of entirely unrelated images, an analogue to Freudian free association. Tate Modern currently has an exhibition on Dali's influence from and work for the cinema; perhaps as well as the Looney Tunes and Chaplin movies he indulged in, he also picked up the American taste for conspiracy theories.

I didn't know, however, that one of his earliest Surrealist works was entitled Departure: Homage to Fox News.

What could have more contemporary meaning? There's always something weird about rolling news, a form of television that's positively designed to be viewed with the sound off. Sound has a special role in film and television; it's the bridge between the world of images and the world of text. Almost all film post-sound relies on words for plot unity, to avoid becoming a surrealist collection of imagery. Rolling news feels like news, although no doubt there's a reason why Sky News insists on flashing huge red BREAKING NEWS graphics every time they update the latest missing white girl story.

But especially if you can't hear the narration, it's merely an associative volley of random visuals with text labels that may, or may not, be accurate. Now consider this LGM post about CNN's Glenn Beck and his "method"..

Remember that scene [in A Beautiful Mind] where Russell Crowe has pasted up a number of newspaper stories and is making associations and drawing connections between them by running strings from one story to the next, and then that story to another, and so on? You could easily do the same with the stories here. It’s not a great leap to see a certain synchronicity between them..

It's a radical revision to the Foreign Intelligence Supervision Act! It's a flock of hairy telephones! It's...a naked Condoleeza Rice circus-riding two fiery giraffes through the gates of the Natanz enrichment plant!

It is, of course, also true that running strings from one story in the newspaper to the next in the hope of discovering esoteric truths is a pretty good description of blogging. As always, it's a question of filtration; stare at your navel closely enough and eventually it stares back into you.

Which brings me to some substance. Looks like the British government IT monster escaped, heading west to eat some more creamy brain tissue. Like the infovore in Charlie Stross's Atrocity Archive. The NSA apparently wants to do something so astonishingly stupid that its stupidity almost goes around the bend and looks like it might be intelligence. Details; Bruce Schneier points us to this essay by Sun Microsystems security diva Susan Landau on the infrastructure requirements of what the NSA apparently wants. To be quite clear, they want to build in an interception backdoor to every backbone router in the US.

And this after the Great Greek Green Greasy GSM Grokker Gremlin Gripe. Wait; I think I see the pattern. Yes! The hairy telephones...slash open the eye. Their engineers are secretly trying to capsize the whole project of telecoms surveillance...right?

Criticisms of Contraction and Convergence

I don't like the "contraction and convergence" approach to stopping climate change.

Why? Well, I have a number of reasons. C&C states that we should set a global CO2 target lower than present (contraction), and that poor countries should be allowed to expand up to it while rich ones cut down to it (convergence). The argument is that everyone should have an equal CO2 ration.

What's wrong with that? Well, it takes care of equity but does nothing for efficiency. On this classic policy trade-off, it goes 100 per cent for equity. This is a really serious problem; if we are to fix the problem, it's important to think about who can save CO2 fastest and cheapest. This feeds into a second issue: C&C assumes that CO2 emissions are actually good.

Yeah, it's counterintuitive; Mayer Hillman, the plan's inventor, is as dark green as they get. But it assumes that people actually *want* CO2 - that it's something people choose, rather than an unpleasant byproduct. As Amory Lovins says, people don't want energy, they want cold beer. I have no desire to emit CO2. If the choice is available, I'd rather not. But C&C works on the principle that it is only possible to prosper by increasing CO2 emissions - hence the imperative need that they be shared equally.

Anyway, back to efficiency. Imagine you're in a lifeboat that's taking on water. You need to bail the water out faster than it comes in. In the boat with you is a fat bloke who refuses to accept that the water is real, various average normals of differing physiques, and a big strong Indian sailor who, however, thinks it's a better idea to row as fast as possible towards land. The ideal solution is *not* to get everyone baling at the same rate. Rather, you'd want to get the best bailers bailing to the best of their ability. Even if it's not fair that the fat guy takes up so much of the boat's buoyancy, it's not useful either - throwing him overboard would use up far too much energy and risk capsizing the craft. Yeah, bailing at the same speed would be fair, but it wouldn't maximise the rate at which water left the boat. You cannot eat fairness.

Now, the upshot of this is that the sources of emissions growth are highly important. It's easiest to change things where the change is happening. Rather than moralising about how China's economic development is all because of terrible consumers, it's dramatically more useful to think about how factories there might benefit from some of Lovins' design work, aimed at reducing their energy use by a factor of 10, or how best to reward countries like Brazil for not clearing forests. C&C just offers one group (the developed world) blood, sweat, toil, and tears, and another group (the developing world) rather less money. Offering them not-very-much development and the same technology as before is not an attractive proposition.

Neither is trying to persuade the public not to buy their stuff. C&C fans tend to pull into extremely tight defensive circles at this point. Well, y'know, the gains were only achieved by offshoring industry to China. Buying stuff with fewer miles will, ah, bring industry back, and we know that less CO2 is emitted per dollar of GDP here. But the gains only came from offshoring! (Not true, anyway. Germany's emissions fell, and it's a bigger exporter than anyone else, even China.)

Further, the operational suggestions tend to be awful. C&C is based on the idea of an individual CO2 ration, which unavoidably leads to the notion of an individual CO2 ration card, which is essentially a national ID card and tracking system in earth tones. In fact, it might have to be a global system. One of the reasons why I like universal tax and benefit proposals, by the way, is that they minimise the opportunities for mass surveillance.

Carbon tax and redistribute. It's the only way.

Update: have a read of "Elizabeth Economy"'s piece in the Nation.

Who needs remote control?

This DeLong vs Krugman post, and the comment from James Galbraith, raise an interesting issue regarding redistribution of income, free trade, and globalisation. Namely, as trade creates both winners and losers, but with a positive sum, it is both just and politically necessary that the winners compensate the losers. You could consider it a side-payment for the gains, or a necessary social duty. The cynic in me suggests you could consider it either, so long as it happens.

Economists Peter Timin and Frank Hailey at Voxeu.org - a site well worth reading, I suspect - argue that rather than changes in technology, or globalisation, rising inequality in the US since the 1960s is due to changes in institutions. That is to say, US society made a political choice to reduce minimum wages and union power, and cut taxes on the rich. Women with degrees were the only large group whose earnings kept pace with productivity growth, presumably reflecting the simultaneous rise of middle-class feminism and decline of working-class unionism.

As James Galbraith points out, Chinese labour relations is an issue that we have little power to influence, but the minimum wage is entirely ours to control. This raises my point.

Milton Friedman argued in favour of floating exchange rates on the grounds that it was better for one price, the exchange rate, to adjust in order to respond to variations in the relative price levels of economies (and in the animal spirits of speculators) than all the prices except that of foreign currency doing so. In the strong form of a fixed exchange rate, the gold standard, the adjustment process involves changing prices and wages in the entire economy including the nontradable sector.

Similarly, if you try to reduce inequality by protectionism, that involves altering thousands and thousands of investment and management decisions in favour of domestic production generally. And it's pretty obvious that the more decisions you fiddle with, the more you are going to bugger up. The upshot, naturally, is that you should prefer solutions that minimise the number of decision points for any one institution. That implies the best solution is just to, well, tax the rich and redistribute as directly as possible.

What does this say about my views on CO2 emissions control? Well, administrative controls or rationing are clearly right out. Cap-and-trade is a poor second best, especially given all the possibilities for pathology in there - imagine that there are two glassworks, one of which fuels with coal and one which drives an electric arc furnace with hydro power. Glass from A will have a really bad carbon rating, and vice versa. There will be a strong incentive for buyers of Glass A to misrepresent themselves as buying B. If the CO2 charge falls on the end user, rather than Glassworks A, A doesn't have much of an incentive to change rather than cheat.

The best solution? Tax carbon-rich fuels at the point of sale, and redistribute some of the revenue to the poor. There's an existing and highly effective administration to collect such a tax, too. Set a broad goal - perhaps in the form of an average over several years, to keep the dog from chasing its tail - and link it to the tax calculation so an overshoot has automatic consequences and an undershoot has rewards. (See also this post at Kleiman's.)

Kalashnikovs, trousers, squid, pies..

Remember this post on Maglev, managerialists, and creationist technology? Heavily-blogged Myers links to equally heavily-blogged article on the market for Kalashnikov rifles. Apparently, everything he reads only makes sense in the light of evolution. Funny that - think process.

This is also why the Chinese textile industry wants to reopen an old mill in Wigan, 20 years after crushing the original into the dust. It seems that the benefit of a shorter OODA loop - a shorter generation time in evolutionary terms - now outweighs the advantage of paying your workforce dramatically less. After all, if the stuff is coming from China, the turnaround time is going to be at least six weeks or so for shipping on top of however long it takes you to come up with a new model.

In evolutionary terms, again, it was always what could be described as r-selected industries that were going to follow the cheap labour - low overhead, low investment, low margin, fast turnaround. K-selected ones - intensive in physical and human capital, high margins, complex development processes - could only by definition be slower to move. In some ways they have proven stickier than most people thought. It's interesting that the first of the R's are now reaching the end of the race to the bottom.

Is this one of the real challenges? To come up with a politics of evolution? Who knows. But it certainly strikes me that it's an argument for market socialism - after all, elite consensus puts a lot of effort into reducing the risks of firms leaving their employees. What about the other way around? The reallocation of resources involves more than one party.

A practical example?

How could the principles in this post be put into effect? Here's an opportunity. Legendary trade reporter Roger Ford discusses the situation at GNER, where the company's franchise to operate the East Coast Main Line has been withdrawn because the parent company, Sea Containers, is in financial difficulty.

The details of the difficulty can be sketched briefly - unlike all the other rail franchises, GNER is profitable and rather than receiving a subsidy from the state, it actually pays the Department of Transport for the right to operate the service. There's the rub - when the contract with the DfT was last renewed, these payments were considerably increased, Sea Containers believing that it would be possible to operate more trains. However, under open-access requirements, they later had to hand over the train paths required to other operators. Without the extra net income, the payments to the Treasury couldn't be met, causing a cash crisis at the parent company.

The interesting thing is, though, that the DfT rather likes GNER. Wouldn't you? Even if it didn't make as much money as planned, it was after all one part of the rail network that wasn't either haemorraghing cash or becoming a national synonym for incompetence. They want to keep the existing management in place until the franchise is re-awarded, and perhaps even under new owners.

Which begs the question - what on earth would the new franchisees be for? Using GNER occasionally, and at times quite a lot since 1999, I strongly agree with the DfT Railways Directorate that they ought to keep the job. And, even in the event that the franchise changes hands, most of the staff will change hands with it, as will assets like the traction depot in Hornsey Green.

So - if all that a franchise change implies is a swap of top executives, it's arguable that the most likely change in the business this will produce is negative. Why not, then, just give the franchise to the people who work there? It could be structured in several ways, the simplest being the creation of a company owned by the 5,000 staff to take over the management of GNER.

Arguably, if GNER's position as the operator of the ECML doesn't give it any special claim to control access on the route, the very notion of a franchise from the government is absurd. They are just a large buyer of train paths and electricity from Network Rail's London North Eastern Region. What is the state, as opposed from the quasistate entity Network Rail, providing here? Nothing, is the short answer. Therefore it has no claim to any money, except for corporation tax and VAT. This is, of course, unlikely to go over well with DfT Rail or the Treasury. Note, by the way, that I'm highly sceptical of open access on the railway - it works for telecoms/internetworking because there is very loose coupling between services and networks, and the privatisation experience has told us that railways are a lot different. (Look at the pain and difficulty the SNCF and Deutsche Bahn had agreeing terms for their high speed trains to run through on each other's metals.)

If the government must have a piece of the action, I suggest this: it should lend the putative GNER Co-op the cash required to buy out Sea Containers, to be repaid over the life of the franchise at a reasonable interest rate. The risk would be minimal, backed as the loan would be by a stable cash flow and the right to re-award the job if GNER(C) went bust. Obviously, GNER(C) could choose to finance itself privately if it could get better terms, but this version is nice because it satisfies the objection that the Treasury wants its pie. (If it insisted, there could be a state profits participation defined as a percentage above some value, rather than a cash sum.)

At the moment, the new agreement provides that DfT Rail gets to grab all GNER's revenue, and then pay back "incentive payments" if it achieves various targets. I think mine is rather more elegant. The current position also foresees the business's net worth somehow migrating to the Government - mine would see the Government carrying an equivalent sum as an asset, and Sea Containers getting cash on the nail to go away.

To begin with, the scheme could have a fixed term of five years, with the option to continue or re-award - thus it would fulfil my criteria about test-driven development. It would be limited to one rail network, but could be generalised to others if it worked. It would get around the problem of "lemon socialism" - this is a real, successful operation.

Go to school, learn the rules, don't be no faker!

This post from PZ Myers raises a very important point about decentralisation and local accountability. What if the quacks get control? Families and schools are always a problem with regard to liberty - no-one has the right to experiment on the public without their consent, but youth is the one experiment that is performed on everyone.

It may be your right to believe that heliocentrism is an atheistic doctrine that must be suppressed, but it's surely a grave infringement of the liberty of others to enforce it on their kids. Not to mention an infringement of the children's liberty. The glib answer is that you can always send them somewhere else, but this instantly crashes into all the problems of "choice" as a solution for schools (inequality, oversubscribed schools, self-fulfilling signals, lack of real choice in many places), not to mention that it implicitly accepts that the people left behind will just suffer.

Robert Waldmann remarks that there is no evidence that any society has ever put too much money into education. I think he's right. But this is rather what I was getting at in this post. Education is an investment that cannot be readily replaced if it goes wrong - in the example it's much more like the hole in the ground that you can't replace in 50 years than the Ethernet switch, which you can swap out in half an hour. Hence, it's not enough to say that if the creationists (or paedophiles, fascists, jihadis etc) get a school, it will eventually fail. By then the damage is done, it cannot easily be put right, and it bears most heavily on those least able to put it right.

Supporting Iraqi democracy

The war comes to Iraq the Model. A modest proposal, if I may. Comments like this one are not "supporting Iraqi democracy":

Congratulations Mohammed.

You and your neighbors have taken the first step toward democracy and living as free people. It appears you are coming to the realization that being “free” comes with taking the responsibility of government.

By government, I refer to the small group you and the others in your neighborhood have organized for your mutual benefit and protection. Soon, you will join with other neighborhoods and the area that is safe for your families will expand.

In time, most people will figure it out that they, not some nebulous “government”, are responsible for the future of their country. True leaders will rise, criminals will be turned in or be dealt with within the community and the type of society the people want will become reality. Above all, it will be done with a feeling of ownership by the people in the way things run.

Chaos and corruption exist where the people believe the “government” should solve problems for them. Peace and fairness exist where people know that they are the government.
j.west | 11.27.06 - 3:08 pm | #

And a pony. Whoops, the pony got blown up. And another pony. Shit, they cut its head off. And another pony. Looks like KBR just delivered us a squid and charged the government $50 million. Pony attrition seems to be getting dangerously high. Send more ponies!

Seriously, I fear for the mental health of anyone who could write that. But not as much, say, as the physical health of the ITM two, or for that matter anyone else in Iraq. If you want to support Iraqi democracy and you're a US citizen, sponsor someone's green card. Especially in the UK, you might want to try to ensure the government's essentially vicious impulses towards "asylum seekers" do not get too far out of hand. After all, the Home Office was struggling to get existing Iraqi refugees shipped back, into Irbil in Kurdistan because it was the only airfield the charter line would fly into, for fear of their lives. Apparently, even if they came from Fallujah or Baqubah, the legal requirement not to send them into danger was fulfilled if the point of release was itself safe.

In other related news, this article on the potential for peaceful change in Iran is well worth reading. Note: does anyone think strategic bombing will lead to anything but the people involved being strung up as traitors?

Friedman: a man of two halves

Why, asks Chris Dillow, do we consider Milton Friedman a man of the Right? Dillow was thinking of such things as the earned-income tax credit and his opposition to conscription, but the question requires some unpacking. I don't believe, for example, that his concern with liberty is incompatible with the Left. Neither is it impossible to imagine a leftwing critique based on ownership and control, rather than markets versus planning. I certainly agree with him on floating exchange rates, and on the legalisation of drugs.

But all these things - which so many people chose to pick up on when commemorating his death - were sideshows at best to his main achievement, monetarism. Like few other economic doctrines, monetarism was actually tested and met with shattering empirical refutation. The US Federal Reserve lasted three years before kicking the habit. In the UK, the experiment went on until 1986, by which time the government and the Bank had successively failed to control all the main monetary aggregates. Inflation had been forced down, but at the cost of high unemployment - not only is this what the Phillips curve suggested would happen, it arguably happened for the reasons a Keynesian would have predicted it would happen.

The British government applied fiscal and monetary tightening, raised the rate of interest, and permitted sterling to appreciate - and guess what, aggregate demand tanked, unemployment soared and prices eventually fell. Eventually, Alan Walters and Charles Goodhart convinced the government to ditch monetarism. Instead it chose an exchange-rate targeting regime, learnt the hard way just as it had with monetarism, and finally arrived at final-goal symmetrical inflation targeting. We live not in a monetarist world, but a New Keynesian one, where although the preferred policy tools are monetary, the thinking is demand-driven (something that has become much more important with the growth of customer credit).

There is part of your answer, then. In practice, Friedman's doctrine put hordes of workers out of work, and we are still struggling with the social impact. Now the North Sea oil years are behind us, we shall miss the export industries that went to the wall in the combined sterling hike and credit squeeze. But what about the other side? Well, it's very notable that none of the politicians he hawked his ideas to ever wanted to them put into practice, beyond simply squeezing the poor until the pips squeaked. Certainly, he thought it would be better to provide public services as cash or quasicash (vouchers) and let the market sort out how they are organised. But who ever saw any of the money? As with so many self-described libertarians, this was left as an exercise for the creative imagination. Rather than the NHS, let's have fully-funded healthcare vouchers for all...and a pony.

There is, however, a seriously inspiring lesson ex Friedman, now we need new ideas. We urgently need some new ones - how, for example, to shape a politics against managerialism and elite consensus? How to assault inequality without Polly Toynbee-esque control bureaucracy? He was never elected to anything, and never owned much capital himself. He commanded only his pen, but changed the world. Ideas still count.

The politics of beer

More mass biometric surveillance evil. Home Office wants to fingerprint guests at pubs as part of war on anti-social behaviour, torture dolphins parenting binge estates, etc. We've long been documenting the biometric and RFID vendors' war on dancing, but this is a sinister new step. The government wants a monster database of everyone who's gone to a pub. Who voted for this?

There is something almost atavistically horrible about this. It may just be that I drink too much beer, but pubs are traditionally where people go to conspire. The original Ranters convened in taverns in places like Kildwick, according to Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Later, in the 18th century, groups of revolutionary sympathisers, Revolution-Men and followers of John Wilkes, met in pubs to evade the press censorship. One could go on. Crick and Watson burst into the Eagle in Cambridge to celebrate the discovery of DNA. I hear a lonesome whistle blow.

I wonder if the data from this scheme will be hooked into the DHS computer? John Reid is the most dangerous man in Britain. And if this had existed when he was still on the sauce, there wouldn't have been enough hard drives in the world to hold his file.

Recidivist with alert populations

Reid wants to change the law so you can be tortured if he says you're evil enough. Not only that, he wants one of the people who the courts found innocent of preparing ricin in the great no-ricin no-plot tortured, presumably to get out of him why he didn't prepare any ricin. This is an important point about the state without laws - once you open the door to rule by whim, you can't assume that any principles hold, not even the notion that there is a difference between guilt and innocence.

John Reid is the most dangerous man in Britain.

Another data point for this thesis is here. The control bureaucrats are apparently trying to set up real-time interworking between the US Department of Homeland Security's various databases and the Police National Computer. This, a week or so after the Americans legislated to explicitly permit torture and suspend Habeas Corpus. Where is the parliamentary scrutiny? Where is, as they say, the outrage? After all, even in the event that our turd-ridden, vomitous government was to fall tomorrow, who imagines that this will be reversed? It's in the nature of information that once shared, it stays shared.

If you doubt Reid's relevance to this, try out the following quote from one Robert Mocny, director of the USVISIT program at DHS:

"We cannot allow to impediment our progress the privacy rights of known criminals."

The law is what I say it is, and you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists. Perhaps literally with them, in the cells. Joseph Sensibaugh, manager of biometric interoperability for the FBI, meanwhile opines that "It helps the Department of Homeland Security determine who's a good guy and who's a bad guy," targeting "suspected terrorists" and "remaining recidivist with alert populations". Not to mention the president of Bolivia and a dead bluesman, apparently.

Why does it specifically have to be illiterate authoritarianism, by the way? What does that last phrase actually mean, anyone? Anyway. Enquiring minds want to know more. What was this "pilot project"? Whose records were given to the DHS? Will they be told? What are the safeguards? Where are the guarantees?

And what access will DHS have to the National Identity Register? Just think, if you had to present your ID card in Dewsbury...

John Reid: the most dangerous man in Britain

This is the full text of John Reid's speech to the Labour Party Conference. In it, Reid states unequivocally that he does not believe that the State should be subject to law.

And let's be clear. It cannot be right that the rights of an individual suspected terrorist be placed above the rights, life and limb of the British people. It's wrong. Full stop. No ifs. No buts. It's just plain wrong.

This appears to me to mean that, once the executive decides you are a suspected terrorist, you become an unperson and have no recourse against it. Let's be clear in our turn. Far more important than democracy itself is the restriction of power. This is the central insight of all civilised polities. It is a principle that is besieged from every quarter, but specifically among the states that partake of the original.

How could it happen that Britain, the United States, and some Commonwealth countries - the states that share the great constitutional tradition of 1215 - have become the world leaders in returning to government by whim? It's telling that there is no good way to express this particular feature of the last few years in English. German has the fine word Willkür, which connotes both whim but also a sort of contemptuous wielding of power, Willkürherrschaft. And that's what the combination of Blair's aspiration for a "command premiership" that would be "Bonapartist" rather than "feudal" with the war and the aggrandisement of the security bureaucrats has delivered. "Despotic government" was a term used by British imperial civil servants to differentiate those colonies that simply had a governor from those who had "representative government", with an assembly of some sort, or "responsible government" where the government answered to it. But they expected that the governor would obey the law.

In fact, there is a better description for Reid. The word tyranny originally implied the usurpation of legitimate power. By that definition, Reid is a practising tyrant. This graph scares the shit out of me.