In Politics Luck is Everything

Lucky David Cameron led the British Conservative Party to a smashing win this week in the British local elections. It was the best result for the Conservatives since 1992.

The New Labour Party of Tony Blair obligingly self-destructed in the week before the election. First the health minister was booed by union nurses. Then the Home Secretary was caught letting foreign criminals out of jail without deporting them. There was a cockup on the coordination front. Finally the portly Deputy Prime Minister was featured in the tabloids having an affair with a subordinate civil servant.

So the New Labour Party that boasted of “joined-up” government has proved to be incompetent at managing the day-to-day work of government. It has thrown money at the public services without reforming them to get better value for money. And the less said about the sexual liaison with a junior co-worker the better. The law doesn’t seem to apply to left-wing politicians.

Just as Bill Clinton got every lucky break imaginable in 1992, and Tony Blair in his campaign to become Prime Minister, it looks like David Cameron is another one favored by the gods. How do they do it?

Beyond the luck, it appears that Cameron is succeeding in moving the party leftwards. Wrote Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph

A tieless Tory called Adam, with a ponytail, won in Crawley by drawing lots with the Labour man after they'd got exactly 500 votes each. He looked rather sweet. The crowd of party workers celebrating the capture of Ealing were youngish, a little bit ethnic and even verging on the cool.

This is exactly what Cameron wants to read after his campaign to “Vote Blue, Go Green.” (Blue is the party color of the Conservatives.)

Tieless Adam with the ponytail is a far cry, as the Brits would say, from the traditional Tory “blue-rinse” grandmother.

The Importance of Associational Government

What is the best way to create a prosperous and free country? Is it through the careful work of an enlightened elite, the imposition of a higher form of government from the top down? Or is it through the peaceful interaction of ordinary people, the slow work of trust-building from the bottom up?

It’s an important issue at a time when the United States is trying to bring democracy to Iraq and wondering what to do about the eruption of left-wing thugs in South America.

In a thoughtful article in TCSDaily Arnold Kling looks at this critical matter, and introduces the work of Meir Kohn. Kohn opposes the concept of “associational government” against “predatory government.” As Kohn writes:

The economic basis of associational government is joint action. A group engaged in any common activity -- whether production, trade, or predation -- will organize itself for joint action whenever it is advantageous to do so. Unlike predatory government, associational government is government from below, it is voluntary, and it derives its authority from the will of the group.

Or to put it in Kling’s words:

Kohn's theory is that the associational state -- meaning limited government that is held accountable to the governed -- is built from the bottom up by smaller forms of associations. Government as we know it is not created by constitutions or democratic vote. Those institutions can help to maintain associational government once it is established, but associational government is possible in the first place only if people have a strong tradition of religious, commercial, and lesser governmental institutions.

The success of self-government in the Dutch Republic, in Britain, and in the United States built upon a solid foundation of voluntary institutions. But the big states like France and Spain had a strong king and weak institutions. It is not therefore an accident that “the commercial and industrial revolutions took off earliest in the associational states” like Britain.

The problem is that this model does not encourage optimism on Iraq. Writes Wretchard at the Belmont Club:

There is total lack of trust among the families, the tribes, and the sectarian factions created by the 35 years of despotism and isolation of the criminal Saddam regime.

Without a foundation of cooperation and trust how can the groups of Iraq get together and govern?

And when we look at the peasant cultures in Venezuela and on the altiplano of Peru and Bolivia we can understand why it is that left-wing thung dictators can battle to power.

The bottom line is, of course, that if you want the prosperity of capitalism you have to build the associational culture of cooperation and trust throughout society. In Marxian terms you would say that the superstructure of freedom depends of the productive forces released by the bourgeois culture of serving the consumer.

Watch South America Go Down the Tubes

While many conservatives are fearful of the resurgence of left-wing dictators in Latin America, there is another response. Sadness.

At the start of the twenty-first century we know what happens when a left-wing dictator takes power and centralizes control of all resources into the political sector. It is poverty.

In 1917 left-wing thugs took power in Russia. Eighty years later, after dreadful famines and wars, it collapsed into frank poverty and failure.

In 1949 a left-wing thug took power in China. Thirty years later, after about 60 million deaths, it started to spin away from the dead hand of state capitalism and immediately the energy of the Han people set China on the road to prosperity.

And let us not forget the pathetic left-wing thug Fidel Castro who has wrecked the island of Cuba in his 45 years of misrule.

Now Evo Morales, the elected president of Bolivia has nationalized the Bolivian natural gas industry. And the left-wing Presidents of Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina have got together to say that all is well.

But with South America turning to left-wing thugs like Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, we know what to expect. Poverty, thuggery, and misery. Powered by the fuel of nationalized energy industries they will strut and fret for a season. And then energy prices will go down and the people will suffer.

And the nationalized energy industry, run by incompetent political hacks, will go down the tubes.

Do we have anything to fear from the South American energy thugs? Probably not. Energy is energy. There’s a world market, and oil is fungible.

But if there is one thing that the twentieth century has taught us. Democratic capitalism works, every time it is tried. And it brings immediate and consistent prosperity to the people. Dictators don’t.

Buckley and Will on Galbraith

Why does the death of J.K. Galbraith this week matter? And why are we beating it like a dead horse here at Road to the Middle Class? Because he defined what it meant to be a liberal in the middle of the twentieth century. Understand Galbraith and his writings, and you understand liberals.

In William F. Buckley, Jr’s obit we can observe a gentle reminder of Galbraith’s wrong-headedness.

It is fortunate for Professor Galbraith that he was born with singular gifts as a writer. It is a pity he hasn't used these skills in other ways than to try year after year to bail out his sinking ships.

And George Will nails it, describing Galbraith as the culmination of a culture of intellectual conformity that got its start in the 1950s.

Intellectuals, that herd of independent minds, were, as usual, in lock step as they deplored "conformity." Fear of that had begun when the decade did, with David Riesman's "The Lonely Crowd" (1950), which was followed by C. Wright Mills's "White Collar" (1951), Sloan Wilson's novel "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" (1955), William Whyte's "The Organization Man" (1956) and Vance Packard's "The Hidden Persuaders" (1957).



Galbraith brought to the anti-conformity chorus a special verve in depicting Americans as pathetic, passive lumps, as manipulable as clay. Americans were what modern liberalism relishes — victims , to be treated as wards of a government run by liberals. It never seemed to occur to Galbraith and like-minded liberals that ordinary Americans might resent that depiction and might express their resentment with their votes.

It still hasn’t occurred to liberals that people might resent their condescension. Or that they ought to.

Gen. McCaffrey Reports on Iraq

Rumsfeld critic retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey recently visited Iraq and filed a surprisingly optimistic report. Excerpted by Wretchard at the Belmont Club it describes an Iraq where things really are looking up.

McCaffrey reports that the Iraqi Army is “real, growing, and willing to fight,” the Iraqi Police is a problem, but improving, and that he is optimistic about a successful government.

[I]n my view, the Iraqis are likely to successfully create a governing entity. The intelligence picture strongly portrays a population that wants a federal Iraq, wants a national Army, rejects the AIF as a political future for the nation, and is optimistic that their life can be better in the coming years.

His especial praise is reserved for the US armed forces in Iraq.

The morale, fighting effectiveness, and confidence of U.S. combat forces continue to be simply awe-inspiring.

But two institutions get a failing grade: the State Department and the media. The State Department cycles people in and out of Iraq too fast, and the media doesn’t get out enough.

Read the whole thing.

French and Germans Publish Yank-bashing History Text

For some time the French and the Germans have felt that they needed to get together to smooth over the differences they have had over the years. What better way than to write a high-school textbook together?

And what better way to cement Franco-German friendship than to fill the book with anti-American bile?

The textbook, published today, “was ordered in 2003 by President Chirac of France and Gerhard Schröder,” then Chancellor in Germany, according to Adam Sage in the London Times. Starting in 1945, the history soon gets to work on

the Cold War, where the US and the USSR are presented as broadly equivalent in moral terms.



Both were engaged in an arms race described as “the balance of terror” and both sought to “impose themselves by an omnipresent propaganda” that involved “gross exaggerations and simplifications”.

Actually the Germans, bless their hearts, didn’t really like all this Yank-bashing. They tried to tone things down a bit.

German historians had insisted upon softening the message with sentences such as: “Some people, notably in Germany, consider the US to be a power which defends democracy in a world where the UN is not always able or willing to do it.”

But not those those blood-curdling Gaulish warriors! They wouldn’t write a mamby-pamby sentence like that.

Still there’s a bright side to all the America-bashing. The next volume in the book deals with the 18th century up to 1945, during which the French spent a lot of time marching their armies through Germany—French-occupied Germany, as they call it in The Brothers Grimm. And they can end Volume II with the lovely spectacle of the French settling down contentedly to Nazi occupation after the shameful defeat of quarante.

Hey, it could have happened to anyone.

Let's Eliminate The "Dictator Dividend"

Washington State’s Senator Maria Cantwell has been in the forefront of demands to “make price gouging illegal.”

But private-sector oil companies, the evil spawn of John D. Rockefeller, own a mere 6 percent of crude oil production. The rest is owned by government-owned national oil companies. As Max Schulz in TCS Daily writes:

Red Caveney of the American Petroleum Institute noted, "Nearly 80 percent of the world's reserves are owned by these national oil companies and a mere 6 percent are controlled by investor-owned companies."

So how does Senator Cantwell propose to make the evil price gougers of OPEC illegal?

The problem goes beyond “price gouging” to what Max Boot calls a “dictator dividend.” Only one major oil-exporting country is a well-established democracy. The rest are mostly dictatorships. And the run-up in oil prices has delivered a $500 billion per year dividend to these fine global citizens.

This windfall helps to squelch liberal forces and entrench noxious dictators in such oil producers as Russia (which stands to make $115 billion more this year than in 2003) and Venezuela ($36 billion).

The problem with oil-exporting countries, as we have said here before, is that in resouce-rich nations the people are a cost. Only in advanced developed countries are the people a resource, where it pays the ruling elite to develop and enhance their skills and welfare so that they will generate more tax revenue for the elite to spend. In a country like Saudi Arabia, the people are just a cost. They reduce the amount of money available for the House of Saud to spend at the gaming tables of Europe and on prosletizing their Wahabism worldwide.

How can we reduce the dictator dividend? Everybody wants to raise taxes, but the better solution would be to drill, drill, and drill again. Let’s get all the oil out of the ground and then go onto the next energy resource. Could it be nuclear, or solar panels in space? Who cares? We are humans and we will figure it out.

But first of all, let’s scotch the dictator dividend.