[The British army] occupies a curious place in both the emotional heart of the nation and the head of policy makers. The public if asked are usually aware of an organisation steeped in regimental tradition, know of units like the SAS, Guards and Parachute Regiment and may know a little bit about the equipment such as tanks (noting that all APCs are tanks to the layman’s eye…). They recognise it from state ceremonial, where it is an integral part of the national fabric and identity, and are proud of the perception of “our boys” serving overseas in warzones. There is often a deeper rooted, but baseless suspicion of the senior echelons, dating back to the tired cliché of “lions led by donkeys” and fed by a generation of misguided historians trying to rewrite WW1 as not the greatest victory in the history of the British army, but instead four years of class war and turgid poetry.
To policy makers the army is an institution which is central to the survival of the nation, and which carries out many vital roles to meet defence and security policy objectives, but which is also extremely good at champing at the bit to get involved in operations overseas, even when it is not necessarily in the national interest to do so.
A cursory examination of history suggests that the British army is not by itself a war winning organisation. It does not go to war alone with peer rivals and expect to win – UK policy instead for centuries has been to maintain a small (but professional) army able to either conduct colonial policing, or work as part of a larger coalition force to achieve victory. This is not to do down the efforts of the army, but to accept the reality that as an island nation, the UK has relied on the navy as the ultimate guarantor of its security.
Sir Humphrey, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Deployable Division?”, Thin Pinstriped Line, 2017-08-06.
December 6, 2019
QotD: The British army
December 5, 2019
QotD: [Literal] Health Nazis
Smith adds: “Clearly there were considerable links between the promotion of particular lifestyles and the racial hygiene movement. Tobacco and alcohol were seen as ‘genetic poisons,’ leading to degeneration of the German people.”
The point, I hasten to add, is not that today’s “public health” paternalists are Nazis. I am not suggesting that everyone who hates smoking is just like Hitler. But there is an unmistakable totalitarian logic to the notion that the government has a responsibility to promote “public health” by preventing us from engaging in activities that might lead to disease or injury. The implication is that we all have a duty to the collective to be as healthy as we can be, an idea the Nazis embraced but one that Americans ought to find troubling.
Jacob Sullum, “So What If Hitler Was an Anti-Smoker?”, Reason Hit and Run, 2004-12-17.
December 4, 2019
QotD: French anti-Americanism
Guy Sorman, “French Anti-Americanism, Rebooted”, City Journal, 2017-11-27.
December 3, 2019
QotD: Defending freedom of speech
H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H.L. Mencken.
December 2, 2019
QotD: Evidence of markets in classical civilizations
If we turn, however, to the ancient world, the evidence must almost always be indecisive. Very few ancient writings have survived. Obviously, two thousand years are a long time; and ancient civilisation did collapse. Add to this that far fewer documents relating to economic matters were produced or could be preserved than has been the case with us. There was no printing: everything had to be copied by hand. The best writing material was papyrus, which was both expensive and fragile. The normal writing materials for accounts and administrative documents were waxed tablets, which were scraped and reused, and thin wooden sheets, which were thrown away once they had served their purpose.
The literary remains of Greece and Rome which have come down to us through generations of copying and recopying are the products of a rather snobbish culture, and contain little direct information about economic behaviour. The great writers, as Finley observes, do seem to have lacked the conceptual framework for intelligent discussion of finance and commerce. Even otherwise, these were matters they regarded as beneath the notice of history. Thucydides, for example, gives full discussion to the political causes of the Peloponnesian War, but says nothing of what we know from the archaeological evidence was the complete Athenian displacement of Corinth in the pottery markets of the Western Mediterranean world.
During the past century or so, the rubbish dumps of Egypt have revealed a mass of the everyday documentation we have for no other area of the ancient world. There are tax records, and commercial correspondence, and administrative commands, among much else. The problem here is that Egypt was always an exception. From its earliest history, its geography opened it to capture and exploitation by rent-seeking élites. The Pharaohs were worshipped as gods and given whatever they demanded. The Ptolemies organised the country into one gigantic state enterprise and used the proceeds for making a big noise in the Hellenistic world. The Roman Emperors kept up the monopolies and requisitions, treating Egypt as their personal property, and so far as possible isolating it from the rest of the Empire. The documentary evidence, therefore, we have from Egypt may not be representative of the ancient world as a whole.
But this, plus the material archaeology, is all we have. And if we want to know anything for economic motivations and behaviour, we must press the evidence we have as hard as we can. The history of the ancient world is, in many important respects like a mosaic that has been broken up with many of its tiles thrown away. The whole must be reconstructed from the parts remaining. It is a difficult enterprise, but it can be attempted.
If there is little direct, there is much indirect evidence. This is scattered through the surviving body of ancient literature. It consists of casual remarks, illustrations to arguments, even comments that are in themselves foolish. It is a question of looking for this evidence, and of knowing how to use it.
An interesting example of how evidence can be extracted and used comes not from our own ancient world, but from pre-Columbian South America. Deirdre McCloskey has looked at the geographical distribution of Mayan obsidian tools. She notes that, the farther from the sources of their obsidian, the smaller was the ratio of blade weight to cutting length. She comments:
By taking more care with more costly obsidian the blade makers were earning better profits; as they did by taking less care with less costly obsidian.
What we have here, then, is evidence that illiterate, stone age toolmakers were at least as conscious of opportunity cost as any Victorian mill owner, and rather more so than the average socialist planner of the next century. So long, of course, as this is evidence — this is, so long as the tools are distributed as claimed — we have empirical reason for doubting the Polanyi claim that,
previously to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets…. Gain and profit made on exchange never [before the nineteenth century] played an important part in human economy.
Sean Gabb, “Market Behaviour in the Ancient World: An Overview of the Debate”, 2008-05.
December 1, 2019
QotD: Religious belief
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2004-10-18.
November 30, 2019
QotD: Comparative advantage
Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality, 2016.
November 29, 2019
QotD: The progressive belief in the mind-controlling power of the press (and Facebook)
Media-bashing has resurfaced with a vengeance over the past couple of weeks. It isn’t hard to see why. The polls don’t look good for Labour. Some are predicting a wipeout, especially in Labour’s traditional working-class strongholds. And as has been the case for a good 30 years now, when political events don’t go the left’s way – or rather, when the dim public lets the left down – the knives come out for the media.
Corbynista commentators are railing against the “billionaire media”. “Billionaires control the media, and it’s undermining democracy”, say the middle-class left-wingers of Novara Media. How? Because these billionaires are “tell[ing] you what to think”. You, the gullible, ill-educated throng, that is; not us, the well-educated, PhD-owning media leftists at Novara who can see through the lies peddled by evil billionaires.
Brendan O’Neill, “The woke elitism behind the left’s media-bashing”, Spiked, 2019-11-25.
November 28, 2019
QotD: The native view of the Pilgrims
Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2006.
November 27, 2019
QotD: The evolution of markets
We believe that there is a natural inclination to promote our own welfare and that of our loved ones. We further believe that, given reasonable security of life and property, this inclination will lead to the emergence of a system of voluntary exchange. That is, we will seek to trade the things we have or can create for other things that we regard as of greater value to ourselves.
In doing so, ratios of exchange that we call prices will be revealed. These prices, in turn, will provide general information about what should be produced, in what ways and in what quantities. Furthermore, changes in price will provide information about changes in preferences or in abilities to produce. Custom will set aside one or more goods to serve as money. Institutions will emerge that channel savings into productive investment, that spread risk, and that moderate expected fluctuations in price. Laws will develop to police the transfer of property and performance of contracts.
We believe that market economies emerge spontaneously and are self-regulating and self-sustaining. This is not to say that all market societies will be the same. Their exact shape will depend on the intellectual and moral qualities of the individuals who comprise them. They will reflect pre-existing patterns of trust and honesty and the general cultural and religious values of a people. They will also be more or less distorted by government intervention. But we do say that market behaviour is natural — that, in the absence of extreme government coercion, or extreme disorder, buying and selling to increase our own welfare is what we naturally do.
Sean Gabb, “Market Behaviour in the Ancient World: An Overview of the Debate”, 2008-05.
November 26, 2019
QotD: The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688
Brian Micklethwait, “Navigating individuals”, Samizdata, 2004-10-04.
November 25, 2019
QotD: The origins of the state
L. Neil Smith, “What Would Real Tax Reform Look Like?”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2017-10-29.
November 24, 2019
QotD: The persistence of culture
Societies don’t work that way. Culture doesn’t work that way. In fact culture is so persistent, so stubborn, it leads people to think it’s genetic. (It’s not. A baby taken at birth to another culture will not behave as his culture of origin.) It changes, sure, through invasions and take overs, but so slowly that bits of older cultures and ideas stay embedded in the new culture. It has been noted that the communist rulers of Russia partook a good bit of the Tsarist regime, because the culture of the people was the same and that came through. (They just dialed up the atrocities and lowered the functionality because their ideology was dysfunctional. They blame their failure on Russia itself, but considering how communism does around the world, I’ll say to the extent countries survive it’s because of the underlying culture.)
Sarah Hoyt, “A Generation With No Past”, According to Hoyt, 2017-10-19.
November 23, 2019
QotD: Populism and democracy
I was not so precocious: it took me twenty more years to sort out what I might mean by the word “Tory.” But the view itself began in Hobbesian fear, that day, with my discovery that “the people” stink. They are mindless animals, and put some wrath in them, they will lose their bashfulness. And of course, not only in West Pakistan; for gradually one makes the further discovery that “the people are the people are the people” everywhere. They need to be tamed, cautioned, repressed, sometimes caged. My response to misty-eyed rhetoric for “democracy” is unfavourable. “Populism” is, in my sight, unambiguously evil — even when its cause be, for the moment, just. Given more time, and the inevitable failure to achieve immediate goals, the cause itself will turn rancid.
David Warren, “Crowds & powers”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-11-08.
November 22, 2019
QotD: Politicians, like scorpions, cannot change their nature
Don Boudreaux, “Dogs Bark!”, Café Hayek, 2017-11-02.
