… the righteousness fallacy, which Barry Brownstein noted is rampant in modern politics and a key driver of democratic socialism.
The Righteousness Fallacy (also known as the fallacy of good intentions) is described by author Dr. Bo Bennett as the idea that one is correct because their intentions are pure.
It recently occurred to me that California is a perfect example of this fallacy. Consider these three facts about the Golden State:
- California spends about $98.5 billion annually on welfare — the most in the US — but has the highest poverty rate in America.
- California has the highest income tax rate in the US, at 13.3 percent, but the fourth greatest income inequality of the 50 states.
- California has one of the most regulated housing markets in America, yet it has the highest homeless population in American and ranks 49th (per capita) in housing supply.
That politicians would persist with harmful policies should come as little surprise. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once observed the uncanny proclivity of politicians “to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results”.
In his book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman described the danger of such thinking.
[The threat comes] from men of good intentions and good will who wish to reform us. Impatient with the slowness of persuasion and example to achieve the great social changes they envision, they’re anxious to use the power of the state to achieve their ends and confident in their ability to do so. Yet … Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
Jon Miltimore, “Data Show California Is a Living Example of the Good Intentions Fallacy”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2019-01-09.
November 4, 2021
October 29, 2021
Ten years after After America, how are Mark Steyn’s predictions going?
Mark Steyn published his book After America ten years ago:
Speaking of which, we are marking the tenth anniversary of my bestselling book After America. The observances are muted because, from the underpass at Del Rio to the school board meetings of Loudoun County, it has proved too accurate. Nonetheless, I remind you of the book’s opening chapter:
Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you’ll be living the American Nightmare, with large tracts of the country reduced to the favelas of Latin America, the rich fleeing for Bermuda or New Zealand or wherever on the planet they can buy a little time, and the rest trapped in the impoverished, violent, diseased ruins of utopian vanity.
‘After America’? Yes. It will linger awhile in a twilight existence, arthritic and ineffectual, declining into a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past. For a while, there may still be an entity called ‘the United States’, but it will have fewer stars in the flag, there will be nothing to ‘unite’ it, and it will bear no relation to the republic of limited government the first generation of Americans fought for. And life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be conspicuous by their absence.
On the other hand:
The United States is still different. In the wake of the economic meltdown, the decadent youth of France rioted over the most modest of proposals to increase the retirement age. Elderly ‘students’ in Britain attacked the heir to the throne’s car over footling attempts to constrain bloated, wasteful and pointless ‘university’ costs. Everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria angry mobs besieged their parliaments demanding the same thing: Why didn’t you the government do more for me? America was the only nation in the developed world where millions of people took to the streets to tell the state: I can do just fine if you control-freak statists would shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill and your multi-trillion-dollar porkathons, and just stay the hell out of my life, and my pocket.
On the world stage, Joe Biden is the literal embodiment of America’s “twilight existence, arthritic and ineffectual, declining into a kind of societal dementia”. The favelas are here in many American cities, and I see that the citizens of what only a quarter-century ago alleged conservative David Brooks hailed as the future — Burlington, Vermont, the chichi post-political latte town of do-gooder liberalism – is now getting used to routine stabbings on Main Street.
I miss the Tea Party because their grievances were mainly economic. Today’s dissatisfactions are more profound and primal: We are not arguing about socialized health care, but about the agreed meaning of America, and whether it will come to more blood than it’s already coming to.
October 16, 2021
Alberta’s Equalization referendum is “political theatre, and it’s poorly timed political theatre at that”
The province of Alberta is unhappy with the current federal-provincial equalization arrangement. This is not new … it’s been the case off-and-on for most of my life, but this year the province is undertaking a formal referendum on the issue, as Jen Gerson explains in The Line:
Let’s start with all the usual but necessary rigmarole about the Alberta referendum on equalization: a “yes” vote won’t peel equalization from the constitution; even a resounding victory may not actually force the federal government to sit with the province of Alberta to discuss the matter. I mean, it might: this was Ted Morton’s idea, and his argument. That Alberta can force Ottawa and the provinces to engage in some kind of open-hearted exchange by piggybacking on the Quebec Secession Reference is not totally impossible, I guess.
As this Fraser Institute bulletin by Rainer Knopff points out, that reference is specific to questions of, well, secession and probably can’t be re-applied willy nilly to any old provincial grievance. However, Knopff goes on to note that the referendum is necessary to create a provincial legislative resolution on the matter, which would allegedly trigger some kind of duty to negotiate — although certainly no duty to come to an agreement that Alberta would find acceptable.
Most credible individuals begin to handwave furiously when asked to nail the technical legal details about how we’re going to make Ottawa cede a damn thing. Even Morton had to point out that the referendum’s greatest power lies in granting Alberta “moral force” on the question.
In other words, it’s political theatre, and it’s poorly timed political theatre at that.
Equalization is a perennial complaint in Alberta, and not one totally without merit. Although the province doesn’t cut Ottawa some kind of novelty-sized equalization cheque at tax time, we are a comparatively wealthy province, which means the province traditionally sends more money to the federal government through its income and business tax remittances than it receives in rebates and services. There is a sense of injustice, here, which notes that equalization-receiving provinces offer services like cheap daycare, and are now racking up rainy day funds as Alberta falls ever deeper into debt. Meanwhile, we can’t seem to get a pipeline built to transport the very product that provides so much of this national bounty and wealth because other provinces oppose them.
October 14, 2021
QotD: Americans’ perception of foreign economic threats
And when it does Americans will learn nothing from their most recent mistake. If people really understood sound economics, they would not continue to make this same mistake again and again.
Robert Higgs, “China — Americans’ Economic Bugaboo du Jour”, The Beacon, 2018-12-19.
October 12, 2021
Worthless Paper Money – German Hyper-Inflation Starts After WW1 I THE GREAT WAR 1921
The Great War
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The German post-WW1 economy was under pressure: the loss of territory, the war bonds issued during the war and the reparations under the Treaty of Versailles. All this lead to a downward spiral of rising inflation and living costs for German citizens.
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Feldman, Gerald: Vom Weltkrieg zur Weltwirtschaftskrise. Studien zur deutschen Wirtschafts-und Sozialgeschichte 1914-1932. 1984.Fergusson, Adam: Das Ende des Geldes. Hyperinflation und ihre Folgen für die Menschen am Beispiel der Weimarer Republik, 1975.
Grosch, Waldemar: Deutsche und polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung in Oberschlesien 1919-1921. 2002.
Lewek, Peter: Arbeitslosigkeit und Arbeitslosenversicherung in der Weimarer republik 1918-1927. 1989.
Michalczyk, Andrezej: Celebrating the nation: the case of Upper Silesia after the plebiscite in 1921.
Neubach, Helmut: Die Abstimmung in Oberschlesien am 20. März 1921. 2002.
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October 9, 2021
The incredible growth of London after 1550
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers some alternative explanations for London’s spectacular growth beginning in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I:
John Norden’s map of London in 1593. There is only one bridge across the Thames, but parts of Southwark on the south bank of the river have been developed.
Wikimedia Commons.
As regular readers will know, I’ve lately been obsessed with England’s various economic transformations between 1550 and 1650 — the dramatic eightfold growth of London, in particular, and the fall in the proportion of workers engaged in agriculture despite the growth of the overall population.
As I’ve argued before, I think that the original stimulus for many of these changes was the increased trading range of English overseas merchants. Thanks to advances in navigational techniques, they were able to find new markets and higher prices for their exports, particularly in the Mediterranean and then farter afield. And they were able to buy England’s imports much more cheaply, by going directly to their source. Although the total value of imports rose dramatically — by 150% in just 1600-38 — the value of exports seems to have risen by even more, as there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that for most of the period England had a trade surplus. The supply of money increased, even though Britain had no major gold or silver mines of its own.
The growing commerce was the major spur to London’s growth, with English merchants spending their profits in the city, and ever-cheaper and more varied luxury imports enticing the nobility from their country estates. Altogether, the concentration of people and wealth in London must have resulted in all sorts of spill-over effects to further drive its growth. After the initial push from overseas trade, I suspect that by the late seventeenth century the city was large enough that it was running on its own steam.
But on twitter, economic historian Joe Francis offered a slightly different narrative. Although he agrees that a change to overseas trade was the prime mover, he suggests that the trade itself was too small as a proportion of the economy to account for much of London’s growth. I disagree, for various reasons that I won’t go into now, but Joe brought to my attention various changes on the monetary side. Inspired by the work of Nuno Palma, he suspects that it was not the trade per se, but the fact of an export surplus that was doing the heavy lifting, by increasing the country’s money supply.
An increased money supply should have facilitated England’s internal trades, reducing their costs, and allowing for greater regional specialisation. Joe essentially thinks that I’ve got the mechanism slightly back to front: instead of London’s growing demands having reshaped the countryside, he contends that the specialisation of the entire country is what allowed for the better allocation of economic resources and workers to where they were most productive — a process from which a large city like London quite naturally then emerged.
I have some doubts about whether this process could really have been led from the countryside. The regional specialisation that we see in agriculture, for example, only really starts to become obvious from the 1600s onwards, by which stage London’s population had already begun to balloon from a puny 50,000 in 1550, to 200,000 and rising. I also haven’t found much evidence of other internal trade costs falling. Internal transportation — by packhorse, river, or down the coast — doesn’t seem to have become all that more efficient. Roads and waggon services don’t show much sign of improvement until the eighteenth century, and not many rivers were made more navigable before the mid-seventeenth century either. This is not to say that England’s internal trade didn’t increase. It certainly did, as London sucked in food and fuel in ever larger quantities, and from farther and farther afield. But it still looks like this was led by London demand, rather than by falling costs elsewhere.
Besides, the influxes of bullion from abroad would have all been channelled through London first, along with most of the country’s trade. To the extent that monetisation made a difference to the costs of trade then, this would have made a difference first in the city, before emanating out to its main suppliers, and then outwards. I thus see the Palma narrative as potentially complementary to my own.
October 8, 2021
The case for defending Taiwan
Roberto White explains why the west should help protect the Republic of China from the People’s Republic of China:
Taiwan relief map.
Library of Congress Geography & Map Division via Wikimedia Commons.
The past few days have seen Taiwan subjected to another wave of continuous harassment by China. Of course this is nothing new; China has violated Taiwan’s airspace since at least 2014. But, on Monday, a record 34 fighter jets were dispatched to Taiwan. Beijing’s increasingly erratic behaviour towards Taiwan brings to the fore why the West must defend them.
Taiwan is a free-market democracy that, despite its overbearing northern neighbour, has managed to create a vibrant economy that ranks as the sixth freest economy in the world. Crucially, it is a major producer of semiconductors (a device that helps power everything from cars to satellites), accounting for 92 per cent of all production of the world’s most sophisticated and important chips. Thus, from both an ideological and strategic standpoint, defending Taiwan is a mutually beneficial move.
The case for Taiwan’s defence is further strengthened when we look at what could happen in Asia should China take Taiwan by force.
With Taiwan’s ports and air bases, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could extend its maritime militia northwards through the Ryukyu (the chain of islands between Taiwan and Japan) and the Senkaku Islands (disputed by China and Japan). This would give China increased leverage over Japan in a time of crisis by, for example, restricting its maritime commerce.
The CCP could further use Taiwan as a base for tighter control of the South China Sea by blocking the Luzon Strait (between Taiwan and the Philippines) and the Balintang channel, which would cut off the traditional route used by the US Navy to navigate regional waters. In essence, China would immediately become the foremost power in the Indo-Pacific that could eventually kick the US and its allies out of the region. Unfortunately, the threat of a Chinese invasion is not a distant reality. In March of this year Admiral Philip Davidson, the United States’ top military officer in the Asia-Pacific, warned that China could invade Taiwan by 2027.
Given the perilous scenario that would emerge from a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, it is vital that, should an invasion happen, the West comes to Taiwan’s defence. However, until such a time, Western allies should aim to help Taiwan by promoting its participation in international forums. The first step would be to allow diplomats and other officials with Taiwanese passports to enter UN buildings, which they currently cannot do. This would most likely provoke a backlash from China, yet it would also confer Taiwan the dignity and respect that officials from every other state have.
The West should also stand firm against Chinese attempts to exclude Taiwan from international organisations. Between 2008-2016, Taiwan was invited to be an observer at the World Health Organization (WHO) under the name “Chinese Taipei”. In 2016, after Tsai Ing-Wen was elected Taiwan’s President, Beijing rescinded the invitation and Taiwan has not been allowed to participate since.
October 5, 2021
QotD: Entrepreneurship
In fact, one could almost create a new economic law: the amount of abuse raining down on entrepreneurs is directly proportional to the good they do. I haven’t seen much reason to doubt this law yet.
Johnathan Pearce, “Gordon Gekko goes to Germany”, Samizdata.net, 2005-05-05.
September 30, 2021
Petrol shortages in the UK
I’ve seen several reports on the somewhat sudden rash of petrol (gasoline to US/Canadian readers) shortages in Britain, and most of those reports airily pin the blame for the situation on Brexit. To the media, Brexit seems to be an all-purpose explanation for anything that goes wrong (in the same way that previous administrations get the blame for current problems even many years after they left power). Sean Gabb says that despite the frequent glib blaming of Brexit, in this case it is part of the reason:
There is in the United Kingdom a shortage of lorry drivers. This means a dislocation of much economic activity. Because it cannot be delivered, there is no petrol in the filling stations. Because there are not enough drivers, and a shortage of fuel, we may soon have shortages of food in the shops. Christmas this year may not involve its usual material abundance.
These difficulties are wholly an effect of the new political economy that has emerged in England and in many other Western countries since about 1980. An army of managers, of agents, of administrators, of consultants and advisers and trainers, and of other middle class parasites has appropriated a growing share of the national income. This has happened with at least the active connivance of the rich and the powerful. Since, in the short term, the distribution of the national income is a zero-sum game, the necessary result is low and falling real wages for those who actually produce. So long as the productive classes can be kept up by immigration from countries where even lower wages are on offer, the system will remain stable. Because leaving the European Union has reduced the supply of cheap labour, the system is no longer stable in England.
There are two obvious solutions. The first is to rearrange the distribution of income, to make the productive classes more able and more willing to produce. Since this would mean reducing the numbers or incomes or both of the parasite classes, the second is the solution we mostly read about in the newspapers. This is to restore the flow of cheap foreign labour.
In summary, that is my explanation of what is happening. For those who are interested, I will now explain at greater length. According to the mainstream theory of wages, labour is a commodity. Though workers are human beings, the labour they supply to employers is of the same general nature as machine tools and copper wire and cash registers and whatever else is bought and sold in the markets for producer goods. A wage therefore is a price, and we can illustrate the formation of wage rates with the same supply and demand diagrams as we use for illustrating the formation of prices:
The supply curve slopes upwards because most work is a nuisance. Every hour of labour supplied is an hour that cannot be spent doing something more enjoyable. Beyond a certain level, workers can only be persuaded to supply more labour if more money is offered for each additional hour of labour. As with other producer goods, the shape of the demand curve is determined both by the price of what labour can be used to produce and by the law of diminishing returns.
[…]
Our problem in England is that large areas of economic activity have been rigged. There is an immensely large state sector, paid for by taxes on the productive. Most formally private activity is engrossed by large organisations that are able to be so large either because of limited liability laws or by regulations that only large organisations can obey. The result is that wages are often determined less by market forces than by administrative choice. In this kind of rigged market, we cannot explain the distribution of income as a matter of continual choice between marginal increments of competing inputs until the whole has been distributed. It may be better to look at a modified wages fund theory. A large organisation has a pot of money left over from the sale of whatever its product may be, minus payments to outside suppliers, and minus whatever the directors choose to classify as profit. This is then distributed according to the free choice of the directors, or how hard they can be pushed. Or we can keep the mainstream cross-diagrams, but accept that the demand curve is determined less by marginal productivity than by the overall prejudices of those in charge.
Therefore the growth of a large and unproductive middle class, and the screwing down of all other wages to pay for this. This is not inevitable in rigged markets, but is possible. It has come about since the 1980s for three reasons:
First, the otherwise unemployable products of an expanded higher education sector have used all possible means to get nice jobs for themselves and their friends;
Second, the rich and the powerful have accommodated this because higher wages and greater security for the productive might encourage them to become as assertive as they were before the 1980s;
Third, that these rich and powerful see the parasite classes as a useful transmitter of their own political and moral prejudices.
September 29, 2021
The federal Conservatives, post-election
As Erin O’Toole ably demonstrated in the September 20th federal election, when you deliberately exclude the SoCons, the libertarians, the gun-owners, the free speech advocates, and the fiscal conservatives, what you have left is a party that doesn’t have a lot to differentiate itself from the Liberals. Ben Woodfinden offers some thoughts on the Conservative Party’s immediate post-election phases:
I don’t want to spend long on this point because I find this kind of Conservative infighting (the tory syndrome), which is often about a combination of both ideology mixed in with personal feuds and rivalries, extremely frustrating. I think O’Toole deserves a second shot for a few reasons. I thought there was a lot to like in the platform, because O’Toole himself performed fairly well during the campaign for the most part, and the Conservatives are on the path to form government. I also think another leadership election is a bad idea and this habit of dumping leaders after single election results is extremely shortsighted. Changes are needed, but I don’t think replacing O’Toole is one of them.
Before some of you send furious responses about how I’ve “sold out” or how O’Toole sold out and therefore needs to go, I absolutely do think that portions of the base have every right to be angry. As I wrote in the Post column, what has angered many is not simply the campaign O’Toole ran, it was that he won the leadership running as a “true blue” and then pivoted to something else.
The Conservative Party is not a party of one. O’Toole needs to show some humility and work to rebuild some trust with these parts of the base (and caucus) who are upset and angry over this. The Conservative Party is very much a coalition of different groups who disagree on all sorts of things. Keeping these groups together is a delicate and at times challenging task. […]
Anyways, to summarize where I stand on this, and I have no plans of getting dragged into this too much – there needs to be some efforts on behalf of O’Toole to restore some trust with the various factions within the party that are unhappy, but I think overall some of the shifts that are being made are worthwhile ones. It would improve the discourse on conservatism in Canada if we moved beyond the red versus blue tory, liberal lite versus true blue framing that serves us poorly. While we need to wait for a full post-mortem and analysis of the results, there also seem to me to have been some positive signs that this realignment/blue collar shift can work. Matt Gurney interviewed an anonymous senior campaign official after the election for TVO, and something the official said intrigued me:
Gurney: Whoa, hang on. That sounds like something we just shouldn’t blow past! What was the old Conservative coalition, and what happened to it?
Conservative: [Laughs] Okay, obviously it varies by place, but think of it this way: our three legs were big business and corporate, rural and farmers, and a swing component. That third one was tricky. Mulroney brought the Quebec nationalists. Harper, we got them with ethno-community suburban outreach. But I think the Liberals are beating us on big business, and we need to accept that and pivot to small business, working-class, things like that. We just started doing that, and it’s already working. We did shockingly well in Hamilton. And look at northern Ontario. These places are in play for us now. Northern Ontario is going to get very interesting. But if I’m being honest, the question of who the new Canadian Conservative voter isn’t one we’ve fully answered yet. We’re winning the popular vote, but we still need to grow, and I think that needs more time.
I went and did some digging myself and what this anonymous official is saying here appears to check out, and if you combine this with the gains made in Atlantic Canada I think there are real reasons for optimism on this front. This election could be comparable to what happened with the Conservatives in 2017 in the UK, but in a positive way. Hear me out here. In that election Theresa May came close, but just fell short, on breakthroughs across the board that would have fully inaugurated her as the champion of this realignment conservatism. While it didn’t materialize in 2017, it did in 2019. The progress is there, and I really think Conservatives should give this another shot next chance they get, it really could pay off. The party needs to break through in suburban seats, and I think this “thoughtful populism” as John Ibbitson described it can absolutely do that in the next election.
September 27, 2021
Why Were Things So Terrible In the 17th Century – General Crisis Theory
Kings and Generals
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Britain’s electricity grid facing the inevitable result of over-dependence on “renewable” generation
Peter Hitchens on the grim choices ahead for Britain, as the choice to switch to carbon-free electricity generation has left the country with a less reliable and more expensive grid:
These worrying signs came just after we learned that nothing, apart from luck and prayer, stands between us and a shutdown of our power grid. Our gas reserves are almost gone. We have blown up our coal-fired power stations. We have failed to build new gas-powered plants that should have replaced them. Our ancient nuclear power system is fast wearing out.
So we must rest our hopes on wind that does not always blow and on foreign power that may not arrive when we need it.
Can we even begin to imagine what will happen to us if this all goes wrong? We are far more reliant on electricity than ever before. The computers that govern all we do cannot run on anything else, and if they crash cannot be instantly switched on again.
In response, our allegedly conservative Prime Minister praises the green policies that have created this disaster, and pledges to continue them. And he is applauded for doing so.
We may not be facing The Day Of The Triffids, but we face the Day Of The Nitwits, when 30 years of relentless green zealotry send us spinning into the Third World.
There, we’ll be the only Third World country with a submarine-launched nuclear deterrent – Burkina Faso with rockets, as an old joke about the USSR went.
Once again, I saw this coming. Arguing with the Greta Thunberg lot is like arguing with the Spanish Inquisition. The only thing they want to hear from me is a full confession before they burn me at the stake, using carbon-free fuel.
So rather than contesting their faith, I suggested that our best future lies in non-polluting nuclear power. As long ago as 2006, I urged: “Building nuclear power stations, and making ourselves independent in energy, is at least as important as maintaining a nuclear bomb.” I also pointed out, rather before this was fashionable, that “the Russian threat is to our energy”.
Now, I don’t fantasise about being Prime Minister. The job seems to me to be unrewarding, unhealthy, physically exhausting and surprisingly powerless. But on this occasion I have to say that if I could have seen this in 2006, so could the Government and the Civil Service.
And if serious action had been taken then, we could now have a fleet of modern nuclear power stations that would make us secure in energy, and probably turn us into a power exporter.
Instead, leaders of both parties chose the path of vanity, an unusable Cold War superpower weapon, maintained at impossible cost long after the Cold War ended, and even longer after we ceased to be a superpower.
And they chose the pursuit of green policies – the most all-embracing, dimwit wooden-headed dogma since the death of Communism, without enough sense to take any precautions in case it did not work out.
Update: Link was broken.
September 25, 2021
Will Mars become the equivalent to Earth that India and the East Indies once were for Europe?
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes goes a long way in both time and space away from his normal Industrial Revolution beat to consider what might happen as humans attempt to colonize Mars:
The first true-colour image generated using the OSIRIS orange (red), green and blue colour filters. The image was acquired on 24 February 2007 at 19:28 CET from a distance of about 240 000 km; image resolution is about 5 km/pixel.
Photo taken by the ESA Rosetta spacecraft during a planetary flyby.
The other week I attended an unconference, which had a session on the implications of establishing colonies on other planets. Although this was largely meant to be about the likely impact on Earth’s natural environment — what will be the impact of extracting raw materials from asteroids and other planets? — some of the discussion reminded me of the challenges faced by the long-distance explorers, merchants, and colonists of four hundred years ago. There are quite a few parallels I can see between travelling to Mars, say, in a hundred years’ time, and travelling between continents in the age of sail.
For a start, there’s the seasonality and duration of the voyages. European ships headed for the Indian Ocean had to time their voyages around the monsoon season; trips across the Atlantic were limited to just half the year because of hurricanes. Round-trips took years. Similarly, the departure window for a voyage from Earth to Mars only comes around once every 26 months, and even the most optimistic estimates place eventual journey times at about 4-6 months. Supposing that Mars can be permanently settled, any colony there will likely be extremely dependent on the regular arrival of resupply craft. There’s only so long that any group can survive in a hostile environment on their own.
[…]
The Portuguese had once been the only Europeans to trade directly into the Indian Ocean, but the structure of their trade — essentially a state-run monopoly with some licensed private merchants — was unable to compete with the arrival of the Dutch. The initial Dutch forays into the Indian Ocean in the 1590s had originally been financed by lots of different companies, often associated with particular cities — similar to the proliferation of billionaire-led space exploration companies today. But the Dutch soon recognised that such a high-risk trade would only be able to survive if it came with correspondingly high rewards — rewards that could only be guaranteed by eliminating domestic competitors (and if possible, foreign ones too). They therefore amalgamated all of the smaller concerns into a single company with a state-granted monopoly on all of the nation’s trade with the region. In this, they actually copied the English model, but then outdid them in terms of the organisation and financing of that company […].
Are we likely to see a similar move towards state-granted monopoly corporations when it comes to space colonisation? I suspect it depends on the potential rewards, and on the strength of the competition. There is certainly precedent for incentivising risky and innovative ventures in this way, through the granting of patent monopolies. Patents for inventions in the English tradition originally even had their roots in patents for exploration. I would not be surprised if such policies end up being used again by countries that are late-comers to the space race, perhaps by granting domestic monopolies over the extraction of resources from particular planets or moons. Although direct state funding can help in being first, like they did for Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, state-granted monopolies for private actors may again end up being the ideal catch-up tool for laggards, as they were for the English and the Dutch.
How the monopolies are managed will also matter. The English East India Company, for example, was initially more focused on rewarding its shareholders than it was on investing in the full infrastructure with which to dominate a trade route. The Dutch company, by contrast, from the get-go was part of a more coordinated imperial strategy — one that sought to systematically rob the Portuguese of their factories and forts, to project force with the aid of the state. Indeed, if there’s one big lesson for the geopolitics of space, it’s that far-flung empires can be extremely fragile, with plenty of opportunities for late-arriving interlopers to take them over.
Although it’s difficult to imagine space colonies being able to become self-sufficient any time soon, it seems likely that those controlled by particular companies or countries may occasionally be persuaded — by bribes or by force — to defect. What’s to stop them when they’re hundreds of millions of kilometres away from any punishment or help? Ill-provisioned factors, forts, or colonies happily switched sides to whoever might provision them better. As I mentioned last week, such problems curtailed the ambitions of other would-be colonial powers, like the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia. When the Dutch turned up in the Indian Ocean, many of the Portuguese forts they threatened simply surrendered.
I bow to Anton’s far greater historical knowledge in most things, but state monopolies in the 16th to 19th centuries were very different creatures than their potential modern equivalents, and the much more comprehensive degree of state control of the economy now would probably mean that a state monopoly over extraterrestrial activities would be a worst-possible outcome. The greater the powers in the hands of the state, in almost every case, the worse all state-controlled activities have become. The incentives of civil servants are vastly different than those of individuals or businesses and are farcically incompatible with the risk-taking necessary on a dangerous frontier.
September 22, 2021
QotD: Urban bohemians
Powers fails to recognize that her bohemia is predicated upon a market liberalism that throws off so much wealth that you can live like a Pharaoh just by scavenging what other people throw out — as she and her slacker buddies did in San Francisco in the ’80s and early ’90s. Her bohemian lifestyle is part of the same system that underwrites free markets, consumerism, and tolerance for all sorts of offensive speech and alternative lifestyles. In other words, the liberty to be bohemian is a glorious result of the very capitalist reality that Powers says a real bohemian must be against.
Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason Online, 2000-10.
Update: Broken link fixed, thanks to “somercet1” for the heads-up.
September 15, 2021
Hansa – Northern Silk Road – Economic History
Kings and Generals
Pubished 14 Sep 2021Use our code
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