'Six of the best' -- more posts from the archives [update: links fixed]

Six more posts from the early days of NOT PC.  Six classics from the archives here that you've probably never seen before, or wish you hadn't.

Six more things to contemplate over summer

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April, 2005 

The Ministers of Contaminated Blood

Q: What do Simon Upton and Helen Clark have in common?
A: As Ministers of Health they both presided over the Contaminated Blood scandal of the early nineties, and both have since sought to suppress sensitive information about the scandal.
    In the early nineties, Clark and Upton decided that technology allowing screening of blood for Hepatitis C would not be used in the New Zealand health system; 250 haemophiliacs were infected and up to 20 people may have died as a result of this decision. Like the Berrymans, the people infected have found it impossible ever since to get justice. And as with the Berryman case, both Labour and National Governments are implicated in the commission and the cover-up.
    A story in today's Press reports, "Haemophiliacs who contracted hepatitis C in the bad blood saga have won a chance at compensation, with health officials agreeing to consider a paper outlining a proposed settlement." But there are no guarantees, and as this story reminds us even getting to this stage has not been easy: "Haemophiliacs investigating the "bad blood scandal" of the 1990s have been stymied by a 30-year embargo placed on sensitive documents from Prime Minister Helen Clark's time as health minister."
    It seems that the lesson from Watergate has still not been learned here in NZ, i.e., that it was the cover-up that ruined the President, not the break-in. Or maybe they're confident we don't have a Woodward or a Bernstein here to chase the story down. Or a Deep Throat.
    Both Clark and Upton have been in denial of their role in the scandal ever since. Clark still suppresses documents about the scandal - why? - what does she have to hide, one wonders? - and when Upton left Parliament for his cushy sinecure with the OECD, he was asked whether he regretted anything in his career as a Minister. "No," he told Radio Pacific News, "nothing gnaws at my soul."
    Perhaps he doesn't have one.

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April, 2005

Rothbard and the 7.5 million

    In 1975 Saigon fell to the Vietcong, and murder ensued. Much murder. As a recent article notes:

"April 30th, 2005 marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Three decades in which the Vietnamese communist government and proxies killed 7.5 million people."

   When the South Vietnamese government collapsed, anti-government anarchist Murray Rothbard cheered. He celebrated. He wrote Hosannahs to "the death of a state," oblivious to the butchers who steeped into the vacuum he cheered on. And he cheered American deaths then just as today his followers (such as the antiwar.com crowd) celebrate American deaths in Iraq, and dissemble over Rothbard's calumny.
    Such is the response when the reasoned love of liberty is replaced instead by blind hatred of the state. 
    To be anti-government is not to be pro-liberty. Tom Palmer explains the point, and I argue it again here and here. Rothbard and his followers are anti-government.  They are not pro-liberty.
    7.5 million deaths at the hands of a brutal government underscores a crucial point that all lovers of peace and freedom need to grasp: that hatred of the state evinces no love of liberty; that hatred of oppression guarantees no help for those oppressed; that peace without freedom is injustice to the innocent.
    That it's not enough just to hate the state.  It's much more important to love liberty.

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April, 2005

Elephant dung with your art, sir?

    If you've given up visiting art galleries because they're full of elephant dung, animals pickled in formaldehyde and Colin McCahon wannabes, and none of these are your thing, then you might have wondered how they could ever have become anyone's thing?
    Stephen Hicks explains here how today's 'post-modern art' came to be so ugly. (And if you like what he's got here, keep your eye out for his next book - after slaying the Postmodernist dragon, for his next job he'll be be moving in on postmodernist art.)
    Hicks concludes: "The world of postmodern art is a run-down hall of mirrors reflecting tiredly some innovations introduced a century ago. It is time to move on."
    Sure is.

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Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Con-art in Kaipara

    It's his money to waste, but if you want to see what Alan Gibbs has wasted his money on you can watch thirteen-and-a-half minutes of streaming TVNZ video showing much of what he calls 'art.' For a supposedly hard-nosed man, it's somewhat surprising to see what craftless tat some con artists have erected to persuade him to part with his cash.
    Pictured at right by way of example is a chunk of rusting steel, an enormous wall of which by the same 'sculptor' has been erected at great expense in one of Gibbs's Kaipara paddocks.
    "It's some of the very best art in the world," Gibbs says of it all. I think not. It's neither good nor art. "Capitalism is the greatest natural gift to mankind," Gibbs also says. Now there's more hard sense.
LINKS: Sunday: Alan Gibbs - TVNZ (13:25)

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Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Collapsed: Jared Diamond's arguments

    Jared Diamond’s much praised book Guns, Germs and Steel contains erudition by the plenty, but for me it fell down because his thesis had no place for the greatest boon in mankind’s history, the Industrial Revolution, and no understanding of what that Revolution demonstrated so thoroughly: the role of the mind in transforming existence for human ends.
    No, as far as Diamond's book was concerned it might have happened but he couldn’t explain it, it didn't fit his thesis, and so he just left it out.
    Bad Jared. 
    That's just one reason among many I prefer David E. Landes’ similar but superior work The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why some are so rich and some so poor to Diamonds’ book.
    Landes argues that in the end culture is a greater determinant for wealth than are geography or history alone. Cultures, as Thomas Sowell reminds us, are not museum pieces but the working machinery of everyday life – and by that standard some cultural machinery is more likely to make you wealthy than others. Cultures that value property and contract rights and personal liberty are in the end going to be more successful than those that don’t. Read a comparison of the two books here.
    And Diamond is ignoring the field of property rights again in his new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. As Joel Schwartz points out here on Tech Central Station Diamond’s central thesis is once again worthless because he simply fails to address this point -- and this "oversight" means Diamond misses the fundamental explanation for the collapse of some societies, and the flourishing of others.
    So Diamond doesn’t appreciate the rolse of the mind really understand markets, he doesn’t understand resource-pricing, and he doesn’t understand how property rights fixed the Tragedy of the Commons problems he cites for the societal collapses in his book.
    In short, he doesn’t fully understand his subject. Sad really, because he writes so damn well.

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Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Learning from Easter Island: something for Russel Norman and his Greens to think about

Russel Norman's acceptance speech for the leadership of the Greens shows the intellectual horsepower that got him the Greens' co-leaders job--or the lack thereof. It has all the scope of a TVNZ Special Report and all the depth and resilience of moist tissue paper. (And Liberty Scott has another critique of it this morning). I want to examine Russel's view in that speech of our alleged "impending environmental collapse," which is his supposed political raison d'être, and his solution for averting it:

"I wanted to start [he says in his acceptance speech] by talking a little about the history of Easter Island... The story of Easter Island is the story of one potential future of the planet writ small..."

Okay, stop laughing there at the back. Let the man continue:

"A hierarchical society was built around the construction and worship of ... giant statues. The largest and heaviest statues were carved and raised just before the civilisation collapsed. And the civilisation collapsed because they had cut down every substantial tree on the island ...
"After the last tree was felled they could no longer build ocean going canoes to catch fish, they ran out of timber to build houses and keep themselves warm, the soil eroded into the sea, there was no wild fruit to eat, and all species of land birds became extinct. Their civilisation collapsed due to civil war over resources and famine, resulting in the loss of 90 percent of the population."

According to Russel, our own culture of industrialism, worldwide trade, contract and property law, and shackled capitalism is the same as the Easter Islanders, only larger:

"Now, our society has its own cult of the ever-bigger statue, and it's called the cult of never ending growth in material consumption and GDP. Each year we must build an ever-bigger statue consuming yet more resources taken from the forests and quarries and factories of the four corners of the earth. Every year we must consume more of resources available from the planet in order to expand our material consumption."

I'll let you work out for yourself for a moment just some of the many things Russel has to overlook to make his comparison between the dirt-poor Easter Islanders and free-wheeling, ever-productive modern man. But what's Russel's solution to the impending collapse he predicts for us?

"If we are to avoid the fate of the Easter Islanders then we need international environmental treaties that empower governments to discriminate on the basis of how products are made - that is whether they were made in an environmentally harmful way or not."

      This is the sort of "thinking" that got Russel the co-leaders' job. Like author Jared Diamond, who he gives as one source of his 'arguments,' he lacks understanding both of the Easter Islanders' collapse, and what allows the modern semi-capitalist world to work so damn well, and to produce so damn much. And he lacks an awful lot of perspective. What he wants as a solution to the problem he thinks he's identified is to shackle the production that makes human life possible, and to return to the primitivism that killed the Easter Islanders.
    Here's something to consider: The Easter Islanders are not us. Their way of life, fortunately, is not ours. Crucially, their culture is not ours. As David Landes argues in his book Poverty and the Wealth of Nations, it is culture that matters above all.

"Culture is a greater determinant for wealth than are geography or history alone... Cultures that value property and contract rights and personal liberty are in the end going to be more successful than those that don’t."

      That is the crucial thing. As is found so often, what the 'have-not' cultures had not and have not is freedom, and what makes freedom possible. As Landes says, it's these three things that have underpinned the rise of the western world since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and they were of course spectacularly absent both in the culture of Easter Island, and the Green Party policy manifesto. Property rights. Contract rights. Personal liberty. To ignore these three boons is to ignore human history since about the middle of the sixteenth-century, and to fail to understand human productivity and wealth production.
    Perhaps Russel and the Greens could take that lesson from the Easter Islanders: the importance of property rights and contract rights and personal liberty, and what happens in their absence? Sadly, it is these answers to the problem he poses that Russel and his party are set firmly against. As Gene Callahan says of Diamond's analysis,

   "he has not realized that ... there is a ... discipline called history that concerns itself with discovering the particular antecedents of some unique going-on that explain its occurrence, based on critically analyzing artifacts from the past that have survived into the historian's present.
    "... Diamond's mistake is not merely of concern to scholars. The view that 'vast, impersonal forces' largely determine the course of history, whether those forces are taken to be 'the material conditions of production,' as in Marxism, or geographical circumstances, as in Diamond, naturally suggests that individuals can do little to affect their own future.
    "As a logical consequence, in order to improve the lives of those who have been dealt a poor hand by those forces, it seems necessary to counteract them with another vast, impersonal force, namely, the State. Huge international programs intended to redress the arbitrary outcomes brought about by historical forces are recommended. The cases of countries with few geographic advantages but relatively free economies, such as Japan, prospering, and those of nations blessed with natural resources but ruled by highly interventionist governments, for example, Brazil or Nigeria, lagging behind, are easily dismissed as anomalies by those who are convinced that human action plays an insignificant part in history."

John Bratland makes a related point, against both Diamond and Russel Norman:

    "For Diamond [and Norman] societies are entities that act independent of the actions of individuals. He sees societal ascent or collapse as being contingent upon the extent to which societies embrace a centralized structure and management. But in so doing, he ignores institutions critical to peaceful, prosperous social interaction and the formation of society: (1) private property rights and (2) human action leading to division of labor and emergence of cooperative monetary exchange. With these institutions, individuals are able to avoid conflict and rationally reckon both scarcity and capital. Without these institutions, societies such as the Soviet Union and Easter Island are seen to have a common fate in that scarcity implies conflict, chaos, ‘waste’ and eventual collapse."

    The fate of a culture is not fixed in the stars; it is set by the extent to which "institutions critical to peaceful, prosperous social interaction" are valued, and to which human genius is free to create.   Curiously, it is this model for human life that Norman rejects, and it is the centralised Soviet model that he seems to favour as a model for society.
    Perhaps if he was serious about his own critique, he might reconsider his position.

LINKS: Russel Norman's links Easter Island and the WTO and comes up with ? - Liberty Scott
Collapsed: Jared Diamond's arguments - Not PC
The Diamond fallacy - Gene Callahan, Mises Institute
On societal ascendance and collapse: An Austrian challenge to Jared Diamond's explications - John Brätland (US Dept. of the Interior), Mises Institute

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Check back tomorrow for more classics from the archives. In the meantime, here's the GoBetweens:

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