Time for Malcolm Fraser to repent

"And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety,"

-George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London 

From a certain progressive standpoint, Zimbabwe, it seems, has at last gone to the dogs.

The Rhodesians would have told you that the dogs arrived years ago, and the rest of the changes were merely being more open about the kennel-like aspects of state.

Of course, this doesn't mean that things can't get worse. When it comes to forecasting the fortunes of countries, as in stockmarkets, picking exactly when the bottom has been reached is a very perilous business. It is always dangerous with basket-case countries to assume that things can't get any worse, because truly awful leaders seem to be uncannily persistent in finding a way. If Zimbabwe is remembered for anything, perhaps it will be for that.

So let's focus on a more stripped-down prediction - that installing Robert Mugabe was a mistake that everyone involved ought to feel intensely ashamed about.

Surely that's been pretty obvious for at least 25 years, right?

Ha! Sometimes it takes a while for things to get so bad that they break through the cognitive dissonance of those that helped create the disaster.

Just ask former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Fraser.

In one of the more disgraceful episodes of a mostly worthless (at best) Prime Ministership, Fraser was heavily involved in getting Robert Mugabe installed. As Hal G.P. Colebatch recounts:

Fraser's 1987 biographer Philip Ayres wrote: "The centrality of Fraser's part in the process leading to Zimbabwe's independence is indisputable. All the major African figures involved affirm it."

Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere said he considered Fraser's role "crucial in many parts", and Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda (whose own achievements included making his country a one-party state) called it "vital".

Mugabe is quoted by Ayres: "I got enchanted by (Fraser), we became friends, personal friends ... He's really motivated by a liberal philosophy."

Fraser's role also attracted tributes from Australian diplomats. Duncan Campbell, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, has claimed that Fraser was a "principal architect" of the agreement that installed Mugabe and that "he was largely responsible for pressing Margaret Thatcher to accept it".

Former Australian diplomat and Commonwealth specialist Tony Kevin has also claimed that Fraser "challenged Margaret Thatcher's efforts to stage-manage a moderate political solution".

In an interview in 2000, Fraser showed that he appeared to have learned absolutely nothing from the process. This was just after Mugabe had passed a law allowing white farming assets to be taken without compensation.

JOHN HIGHFIELD: Mr Fraser, what do you make of these goings on in Zimbabwe? After all it was in the late 1970s that you and your friend, Kenneth Kowunda [phonetic], persuaded Mrs Thatcher to come across to your view and give Zimbabwe independence.

MALCOLM FRASER: I find it very hard to understand the disintegration that has, in fact, occurred because I really did believe, and I think many people who knew what was happening in the country believed, that President Mugabe started very well. I can remember speaking with Dennis Norman who was a white farmer in Mugabe's first government, and he spoke very highly of him and spoke very highly of his policies at that time.

...
I'm - you know, what has gone wrong in the last several years I find it very difficult to pin-point, except that economic policies have not worked. He's tried to defy, I think, the international moves of the marketplace which would have reduced investment in Zimbabwe and therefore reduced employment opportunities for Zimbabweans.

By 2000, it had been clear for quite a while that Zimbabawe had been disgracefully managed on a purely economic basis for a long time. When Mugabe was installed, Zimbabwe's GDP per capita of $916 (in current US dollars). By 2000,  its GDP had declined by over 40%, to $535. Have a look at the graph below of the subsequent growth of some nearby countries that were poorer than Zimbabwe in 1980 and see what you think of Fraser's claim that Mugabe 'started very well'. Try putting in Botswana as well (slightly richer in 1980) and the comparison becomes even more dismal, as it towers over Zimbabwe. The most optimistic description is that things hadn't yet gone to hell as late as 1982. Heckuva job, Malcolm and Robbie!

But in some sense, this isn't really the striking point about the Fraser response.

The first bizarre part is Fraser's contemptible obfuscation of referring to a policy of forced, uncompensated confiscation of white farm assets as merely 'economic policy'. Nothing racial here, no siree! See no race, hear no race. Why is that? Why the absurd euphemisms?

The second bizarre part is that, 20 years later, Fraser still finds the events mysterious. Do you think this might be related to the first point, you worthless old fool?

Fraser has to skate around the racism of the Mugabe regime, because given the economic catastrophe that befell the country, this is the only advantage that the initial Mugabe boosters can claim over Smith. Sure, we replaced a system that was lifting Zimbabwe out of poverty with a brutal and corrupt regime that terrorises its citizens. But hey, at least it's not racist, like Smith!

Of course, Smith's racism was mostly of a disparate impact variety. Rhodesia was not South Africa, and the practical restrictions on blacks were far less than under Apartheid. The 1961 constitution had property and education requirements for voting rights, but made no explicit racial prohibitions (although later voting systems did). The outcome was heavily skewed towards whites, obviously, and this was almost certainly the intended effect. But if you think that having a property requirement for voting means that a system is not meaningfully democratic, then Britain in World War I was just another undemocratic oligarchy fighting against other equally undemocratic oligarchies. You also wouldn't want to praise the US founding fathers too highly.

When Hal Colebatch caned Fraser in 2008 for his shameful role in getting Mugabe installed, Fraser's response was pathetic. You will scour in vain for any description by Fraser of racism in anything Mugabe did. You will also scour in vain for any coherent explanation of what exactly was wrong with the Smith regime, except that Smith personally was a real meanie who didn't let Mugabe, who was already fighting a civil war to overthrow the government, visit his young son when he was sick, and when he ultimately died. By all means, let's then give the country to a man who at the time was already famous for running an organisation that cut the noses and lips off blacks who opposed him. Have a look, Malcolm! Have a look, if you can stomach it, and tell me again what a terrible man Ian Smith was.

In the mean time, Fraser clings to a cock-and-bull story that the real issue with Mugabe was when his wife died, and that's when it all went to hell. Great theory! Completely untestable in terms of its main aspects of course. But what about the implication - that nobody could have seen this coming, as the start was so excellent. Seems plausible, no? Except that Smith pretty accurately did predict what was going to happen. Malcolm Fraser continues to express his surprise. Smith expressed no surprise at all. Sadness, yes, but not surprise.

How about, just for a change, you consider the possibility that you got completely suckered by Mugabe, that his moderate image was all a con for your benefit, and that millions of people suffered enormously because of your gullibility. You got played, you silly old fool. You are the muppet in this story, the mark, the rube. 35 years later you still can't see that. Gee, I picked the cup that I'm super sure had the pea under it! And somehow I still lost money, it just doesn't make sense!

So now, let us return to the story I linked at the start. Exactly where have things gotten to recently?

In the harshest official policy on race and land reform in a country that has been close to bankruptcy, the 90-year old autocrat said Wednesday that whites may no longer own any land in Zimbabwe. 

Let us pause and reflect on Malcolm Fraser's shame. We have known for almost 30 years that Fraser bequeathed to Zimbabwe economic and social catastrophe. We have already known of the thousands brutally killed and tortured in Mugabe's prison of a country. We have already known of the increasing hostility towards the dwindling number of remaining whites, even when it was entirely self-defeating from an economic point of view. We have known that Mugabe has long since stopped holding any semblance of free and fair democratic elections, another frequent criticism of Smith.

But finally, we have reached the nadir, from the progressive point of view - at long last, we now have a regime that is actually more racist than Ian Smith's. Smith never imposed any restrictions this draconian on blacks. The fig leaf, absurd though it was all along, is finally stripped away. There is nothing left, absolutely nothing, to recommend this regime over the one it replaced.

Malcolm Fraser never had to face the consequences of his actions. He will live out his days in comfort and peace in a stable and prosperous first world country. The same cannot be said of the citizens of Zimbabwe, both white and black, who had to live with the regime Fraser helped install.

The one phrase you probably haven't heard being thrown about much in the debate on whether to intervene in Syria.

"Libya".

So, we want to topple a nasty secular dictator we know, who is locked in a struggle with Al Qaeda-linked terrorist 'rebels', confident that we'll manage to turn the place into Switzerland.

How'd that work out last time? Not so hot, as I wrote about at the time.

How's it going now? You've stopped hearing about it, but that's just because the west has a short attention span.

From a randomly-chosen item in the first couple of hits when I type 'news Libya' into google:

"We all thought Libya had moved on – it has, but into lawlessness and ruin"

Libya has plunged unnoticed into its worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Gaddafi

A little under two years ago, Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, urged British businessmen to begin “packing their suitcases” and to fly to Libya to share in the reconstruction of the country and exploit an anticipated boom in natural resources.

Yet now Libya has almost entirely stopped producing oil as the government loses control of much of the country to militia fighters.

Well that's just grand.

No, really, things will work out much better this time. Trust us! From the producers who brought you 'The Arab Spring'.

Fortunately, common sense seems to be slowly breaking out this time around.

It started in Britain:

British Prime Minister David Cameron loses parliamentary vote on Syrian military strike

 But now it's catching on everywhere:

TONY Abbott: We’ve got a civil war going on in that benighted country between two pretty unsavoury sides. It’s not goodies versus baddies, it’s baddies versus baddies. And that is why it is very important that we don’t make a very difficult situation worse.

Look, the phrase 'baddies versus baddies' is definitely infelicitous, but the sentiment is certainly correct. (You could probably paste the same quote into most internal conflicts in the Middle East, if not most conflicts in the Middle East more generally). I personally prefer the Kissinger restatement of the same view about the Iran/Iraq war - 'It's a shame they can't both lose'.

Still, better crudely phrased realism than naive dross about dreams of freedom that winds up with thousands more in body bags.

When I said it's catching on everywhere, you can always rely on some people to refute the 'everywhere' part:

Sweden on Tuesday became the first European Union country to announce it will give asylum to all Syrian refugees who apply.

“All Syrian asylum seekers who apply for asylum in Sweden will get it,” Annie Hoernblad, the spokesperson for Sweden’s migration agency, told AFP.

Ha ha ha! "All"?

I don't think you've thought this through.

Some PR advice for the PRC

If you look across the countries of the world, it is a reliable trend that any country featuring the word ‘Democratic’ in its name is both
a) A hellhole, and
b) Not at all democratic.
Think ‘The Democratic Republic of the Congo’ or ‘The German Democratic Republic’.

In many ways, this is isn’t surprising – the countries with the worst governance records and the least scruples want to cloak themselves with the veneer of respectability by claiming to be what they think polite society demands they be. This doesn’t fool anybody except the rubes, of course. But at least it indicates a clear estimate of where they think the positive brand equity lies, and it seems to be in ideas like ‘Democratic’.

Which makes China all the more puzzling.

The Chinese Communist Party has been becoming less communist ever since at least when Deng Xiaoping took over. These days, it is not meaningfully Communist at all.

In fact, if it were to rename itself ‘The Chinese Capitalist Party’, the description would probably actually be more accurate (although clearly imperfect).

But instead, they still want to keep clinging to the title ‘Communist’. This is odd to me. Maybe it just reveals my biases, but at least by my estimate of the ‘polite society’ metric, Communism has some pretty toxic brand capital – the forced labour camps, the gulags, the man-made famines, the hundred-odd million corpses piled up over the course of the 20th century. It’s not as toxic as the ‘Fasicm’ or ‘Nazi’ brands, of course (in public perception at a least, regardless of whether you think the relative ranking is deserved).  But if you just wanted to convey a sense of ‘caring about the workers and the poor’, what about ‘Socialist’ or ‘Social’? Surely that would be an improvement.It’s almost as if the Republican Party wanted to use its current policies but refer to itself as the Nazi Party.

My guess is that this is mainly due to wanting to maintain the legitimacy of the current regime by implying a historical continuity in the lineage of power (to disguise the almost 180 degree turn in some of the policies). How else do you explain the cultish devotion to images of Mao, notwithstanding that Mao would probably have a fit if he saw the current policies being implemented by the current ‘Communist’ party?

The best description to me of the current Chinese government, at least domestically, is ‘like Singapore in a number of its attitudes towards policy, but more corrupt and with a more puzzling internal party mechanism’.
But ironically, unlike the Democratic Republic of Congo, I think this current labeling does fool more people than just the rubes. I imagine it colors a fair bit of the instinctive hostility to the Chinese government in the west,  at least to extent that they continue to pay obeisance idolize a bankrupt and depraved ideology, even as they disavow it through their actions.

In other words, their actions have actually justified jettisoning what seems to me to be a disastrous linkage, but they cling to it tightly.

I guess they just don’t think that Communism is such a loathsome thing to be associated with. I’d like to think they’re totally wrong, but depressingly I’m not so sure.

Mourning the Loyalist Cause

As a tribute to the dying hours of the National Holiday over here, everyone who hasn't yet read it should read the great Thomas Hutchinson's 'Strictures Upon the Declaration of Independence'. It is long, but I promise you it is worth it. You may be surprised to find that the best description ever written of the Declaration of Independence is from someone who was deeply skeptical of the entire affair.

Strictures Upon the Declaration of Independence is also a wonderful secret handshake of sorts, because my strong guess is that nearly everyone who has read it is no more than one degree removed from a Mencius Moldbug fan.

Egypt and the Endless Wellspring of Western Optimism

So the Military in Egypt decided they'd had enough of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government and removed them in a coup.

Firstly, can you blame them?

This Business Insider article from May details quite well exactly how screwed the country has gotten since the Muslim Brotherhood took over in the glorious Arab Spring. Some highlights:

Homicide rates have tripled since 2011

The number of armed robberies rose from 233 in 2010 to 2,807 in 2012.

Brotherhood president Morsi declared no court is authorized to overturn the president's decisions.

And on, and on, and on...

Should these events have come as a surprise?

The average westerner, to the extent that they think about the matter at all, is convinced that democracy is both an inherent moral good and an effective intrumental good. It is morally just to put matters to a vote, and doing so produces outcomes that will be judged as good even aside from the manner of decision.

The reactionary viewpoint tends to view democracy as inherently a moral neutral - what does it matter if things are voted on? Is it better than just having a wise king decide on what he thinks is the best outcome? And in terms of the practical angle, it tends to produce permanent social conflict - the Cold Civil War, in John Derbyshire's description.

Still, a Cold Civil War is a hell of a lot better than a hot civil war. The current state of the west, however decayed, is still rather pleasant. And the governance, while sclerotic and disfunctional, works way better better than most non-democratic places in the world.

But even a passing familiarity of places that have tried to implement democratic systems will reveal plenty of places that actually got significantly worse once people started voting (Zimbabwe, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq), and way more that certainly didn't improve (see: all of Africa, nearly all of the Middle East).

So what to make of it?

A skeptic's middle ground might be to simply note that democracy is a tool whose outcomes depend entirely on the quality of the people voting and what they're minded to vote for. If you have civilised people voting for their best estimate of what will be in the overall national interest, then it will probably turn out pretty well. Then again, if you have a population of civilised people who are looking out for the national interest, your country will probably turn out pretty well even if they're not voting (see: Singapore).

But if you have people minded to vote for tribalism, or for tyrannical religious rule, or to attack and drive out minorities, or to eat the rich, or to start endless wars with their next-door-neighbours... well, then that's what you'll get.

Sometimes, you can shrug this off as a national comeuppance - if people want stupidity, they deserve to get it.

But what about when a majority votes to oppress the minority (e.g. the Copts)? Do the Copts 'deserve' their fate for simply not being numerically superior? Someone has to be a minority group, after all.

The real question is whether it is predictable that certain national populations are likely to view voting as an excuse to impose a tribal or religious totalitarianism.

Of course, to even begin to answer that question, you'd need to be willing to contemplate the possibility of such a thing as 'national character'.

And since nobody is willing to do that, when democracy seems to lead to disaster, it must be posited that there was some flaw in the voting or political process that prevented righteousness prevailing. This is No True Scotsman meets Whig History on steroids - the good are always more numerous than the evil, and so elections will always produce good outcomes, unless they're thwarted by some evil group. The protesters in Tahrir square must all be freedom-loving democrats, notwithstanding that they seem to keep raping female reporters that stray too close.

In other words, the answer to disastrous outcomes following elections is always more elections:

As acting leader, Mr Mansour will be assisted by an interim council and a technocratic government until new presidential and parliamentary elections are held. No details were given as to when the new polls would take place.

Second verse, same as the first.

Ex ante, I wouldn't have thought that Egypt was a particularly bad candidate for democratic elections, at least as far as third world countries go (certainly more so than Afghanistan). But it keeps not working out that way. At some point, it must be considered whether in Egypt, Liberty and Democracy are at inherent odds with each other.

This is Egypt under liberty but not democracy.

This is Egypt under democracy but not liberty.

The Evolution of Shylock Holmes on Democracy, Part 2

(...continued from Part 1)

The aftermath of the financial crisis saw the election of Obama, and the resulting stimulus bill was basically just the laundry list of every wasteful pork barrel project that was waiting for a crisis to ram it through. Predictably, this resulted in an increase in the size of government that was (as always) promised to be temporary, but which ended up being (as always) permanent. Obamacare saw the takeover of the US healthcare system with ever more regulation and deceptive hiding of costs (every ‘child’ insured until 26! ‘Free’ coverage of pre-existing conditions), resulting in something that was likely to be worse even than a fully socialised model. The ever-expanding bureaucracy of federal, state and local governments in the west was choking and relentless, showing no sign of stopping. The contraction of the private sector in the recession only served to highlight how the only expanding sector was government paper pushers, passing laws to burden private business.

Not only that, but the longer things went on, even the legislative achievements of Republicans became harder to see the benefit of. George Bush’s most impactful domestic policies were increasing seen to be another permanent expansion of the bloated entitlement state with Medicare Part D prescription drugs for seniors, the creation of the repulsive and loathsome TSA, and No Child Left Behind. The latter actually seemed like a good idea under standard conservative thought that the problem with bad schools was the teachers unions. The more you read, it seemed like the problem was really just bad students, and the whole idea was that standardized testing would make all students above average. Which, of course, didn’t happen. The 2012 Republican candidate had passed the same damn healthcare policy that conservatives were now complaining about. If this was the practical difference between the two parties, what was the point?

This was mostly just grumbling and disillusionment about domestic policy, but the view that Republicans probably wouldn't do much to reverse things was dispiriting  The election of Obama probably had a larger effect on the perception of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which was perhaps more central to the question. Once the administration of the wars was no longer being carried out by “our guys” (as increasingly tenuous as that label was becoming), conservatives, myself included, were able to view the whole affair without nearly as much instinctive partisan support of the decisions made up to now. You started to hear well-reasoned paleo-conservative  voices on the right making sound and persuasive arguments about the folly of trying to turn these places into Switzerland – what the hell were we still doing there, almost a decade on? Sure, it was important to attack Al Qaeda and maybe even send a message to third world dictators to deter them from acquiring weapons of mass destruction (though opinions on the last one varied). But why did that involve trying to run the places in a really half-assed way for years on end, resulting only in the deaths of the most honorable and courageous soldiers the US was producing? If we wanted to kill terrorists, why not just blow up the place and leave?

The Arab spring managed to destroy the last of my faith that democracy might have even neutral effects on third world countries, let alone that it was going to foster economic development and liberty. The cathartic satisfaction of seeing the architect of the Lockerbie bombings getting his just desserts made way for social chaos and the attack on the Benghazi embassy. Meanwhile, Mubarak, who was not nearly as bad as Gaddafi, got the boot and it was quickly apparent that he wasn’t going to be replaced being a western-leaning liberal like the Sandmonkey, but instead by the Muslim brotherhood. That may be the last time I let my optimism about getting rid of the devil you know cloud my better judgment.

And then came along Moldbug, to put a lot of this stuff in a new perspective. With a longer time frame, reactionaries were seen to have been losing slowly but inevitably for the last several hundred years. Not only that, but it was only when one was willing to remove the sentimental attachment to the idea of suffrage did it seem obvious that the rise of democracy and the rise of socialism were unlikely to be a coincidence. Rather, they were viewed as one of the likely (if not the only) stable Nash equilibria of the voting game: 51% will always get together to expropriate the remaining 49%. I’d always known that this was a possibility. These days, I tend to think that it’s probably an near-inevitable result of democratic systems – sometimes you get there slower, sometimes you get there faster, but socialism is where it ends up. At last, you had a very parsimonious explanation of both why conservatives kept losing and why they kept being surprised about this fact – they were wedded to a romance about universal suffrage that blinded them to the fact that this was the likely cause of the ruin of the things they valued. To say that the 49% deserve to be eaten because they’re not the 51% tends to undermine the ‘getting the government you deserve’ argument.

To the extent that democracy is thus the means by which you empower the many to expropriate the few, it is no longer a moral neutral, it is in fact a moral bad. In this setup, the west works despite democracy. It doesn’t work without regard to democracy, and it certainly doesn’t work because of it. Even democratic boosters must occasionally look at the story of Greece in recent years and wonder about the ability of western democracies to correct course, particularly if there isn’t some superior not-really-democratic body like the EU to force their hand.

All this raised the larger question : what if the same thing was true in the West that you’d previously identified in the Arab spring and the third world? That in the long run you could either be free to vote, or free in the other aspects of your life, but not both?

I’m not certain of this conclusion. An awful lot hinges upon what you think about the relationship between democracy and the widespread technological improvement and associated economic growth of the 20^th century. If you think that this was tied to democratic systems of government, you’d very likely stick with it. But the evidence on this is hard to interpret. There’s a big time-series trend, for sure, and the US was probably the most innovative country of the 20^th century. But the Soviets had a space program too, and the Nazis weren’t short on good physicists either. It’s hard to know what to think on this one.

The small-c conservative in me, however, is still skeptical of grand schemes for change. This is not based so much on the idea of needing to preserve the world as it is, but rather on the imperfectability of human knowledge. Most elaborate theories of government, including appealing ideas like neocameralism, may suffer from the same problem as No Child Left Behind – they sound great in theory, but the seductiveness of a given theory as being intellectually consistent nonetheless fails for reasons that you hadn’t thought about in advance. In other words, part of the problem of the communists was that they had an unrealistic view of human nature. The other part, however, was that they had excessive hubris about their ability to remake the world into some alternative utopia. To somewhat correct the first but retain the second may lead to disaster almost as surely, if your understanding of human nature turns out to be better but still incomplete.

So Shylock of 2013 is skeptical about our current governing arrangements, but unclear of what to replace them with. At a minimum, I’m much less certain that government in the west is carried out in anything like an optimal fashion. It’s striking how little experimentation there actually is in different methods of government. This makes me suspicious of claims that we’re at some kind of global maximum. Frankly, I’m not even sure we’re at a local maximum. You may think there’s a lot unresolved questions about something like a sovereign corporation. But honestly, what makes you so confident that it would work worse than the State of California? How about just less suffrage? If voting isn’t a moral right, would government work better if voting were limited to net taxpayers or property owners?

Moldbug once wrote that to not believe in democracy in the 21^st century is a little like not believing in God in the 17^th century. In this regard, I guess I’m a democratic agnostic, leaning skeptical. I find myself uncertain where most people are sure.

We’ll see what I think in 5 years time. Not many who lose their faith tend to regain it, however.

The Evolution of Shylock Holmes on Democracy, Part 1

Shylock circa 2003 was mainly a neo-conservative. By this, I mean that I tended to view democracy as both a moral good and an instrumental good. In the moral category, I tended to think that democracy was important as the only legitimate measure of the consent of the governed, and hence replacing authoritarian regimes like Saddam with some expression of the average Iraqi’s opinion was inherently an important increase in their freedom.

In terms of the importance of the invasion though, I was perhaps more sold by the idea of democracy as an instrumental good –that democracy tended to have a civilizing effect that would cause Iraqis to be less interested in starting wars with their neighbours and trying to develop weapons of mass destruction. At a minimum, it seemed like a better bet for the Middle East than the apparent previous policy of mostly non-engagement, which had brought September 11.

The longer the Iraq war went on, of course, the more it became apparent that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan was turning into a functioning government at any rapid rate. The new states were incredibly weak and riddled with violence. At the same time, democratic elections in the Palestinian territories produced government by Hamas, which seemed, if any anything, slightly worse than the terminally corrupt Palestinian Authority. It all started to call into question the idea of democracy as an instrumental good, as it wasn’t producing anything like decent governance in all these places.

More reading about the history of government in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Chile cast the previously observed correlation between prosperity and democracy in a new light. These places tended to start out with authoritarian capitalism, and once this created prosperity, they were then able to transition to democracy. From this point of view, democracy was better understood as the symptom of a functioning society, rather than the cause. It seemed more that once a society had a culture that respected property rights and generally allowed individual freedom (at least in non-political matters), they were more likely to transition to democratic suffrage.

In this view, democracy is like a luxury good – it may have some positive treatment effects in a society that’s already peaceful and rich, but if it’s tried in a society that’s tribalist and doesn’t respect private property, the result is likely to be something like the disaster in Zimbabwe. At best, it’s a practical neutral overall, being maybe welfare-improving in some cases and harmful in others.

In moral terms, democracy was still a weak moral good, but the argument was more tied to the idea that you got the government you deserved. If you as a society voted for Hamas, you deserved to be governed by Hamas, for better or worse (in this case, worse). But it was at least a just outcome – as long as the vote was respected, the only way you got Hamas was if the median person supported it. This was the overall perspective of Shylock circa 2007/8.

(...to be continued)

Oscar Pistorius shoots gun, girlfriend and progressive delusions hardest hit

Quote of the day, from AL, referencing the case of Oscar Pistorius, the South African paralympian accused of shooting his girlfriend:

I'll bet South Africans love that celebrity gun violence has joined non-celebrity sex violence, non-celebrity gun violence and apartheid as the things for which that country is famous.

Ha! Quite.

The story is sad, no matter what happened that night, certainly for the family of Reeva Steenkamp, the victim.

It's also, however, a useful lens with which to examine how a certain mindset continues to view problems in South Africa. If you want to enjoy some schadenfreude, Hector Lopez points us to this breathless more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger ABC 7:30 report story on the subject

GINNY STEIN: Amidst the heartbreak, another round of soul searching has begun in a nation that despite its violent nature still believes in the miracle of Nelson Mandela.

LULU XINGWANA: We still have to deal with the consequences of the war of Apartheid and the brutality of Apartheid that has actually affected the psyche of our society.

Some possibly roided-up athlete, who apparently wasn't a saint simply because he lacked legs, killed his girlfriend, maybe intentionally, maybe because he thought she was an intruder, and the problem is ... wait for it ... Apartheid!

To paraphrase Menachem Begin: white guy kills white girl and they blame a long-dead racist government.

Amidst the heartbreak of deploying every threadbare cliche on the subject, yet another clueless progressive reporter fails to revise any of her hypotheses no matter what the evidence says.

We're coming up to, what, 20-odd years since the end of Apartheid? So how's the great universal suffrage experiment working?

Just swell!

Perplexingly, the effects of Apartheid just seem to get larger and larger the greater the time elapsed since the event. Odd, huh?

If you look at the overall trends, the good news is that they've apparently managed to reverse some of the large increase in crime that occurred in the first 8 years since the end of Apartheid:

The bad news?:

The good, but largely inexplicable news is the decrease in so‐called social fabric crimes; crimes that the police have little ability to affect. Murder, the most reliable of all police statistics, has reduced by 7.2% in the last year and by 15% over the past six years; attempted murder, common robbery and common assault have also reduced fairly dramatically since 2003/4. While this may represent a positive social change, it could also just reflect under‐recording of at least common robbery, assault and attempted murder.  

David Bruce of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation argued in a SA Crime Quarterly article in March this year that the discrepancy between the rate of change in these social fabric crimes strongly suggests that the police are under‐recording the less serious interpersonal violent crimes as a way to improve the performance ratings of stations to meet the target to reduce violent contact crimes by between seven and ten percent per annum.

The idea that police may be underreporting crime in order to improve statistics isn't a big surprise. The more grimly ironic part is that crimes like 'common robbery, assault and attempted murder' are just part of the "social fabric", which police have little ability to affect. Come on! You want the police to try to prevent all sorts of nickel and dime stuff like attempted murder? Don't make me laugh.

On the other hand, some murders are more notable than others. Let's ask the impeccably left-wing Genocide Watch about the situation in South Africa:

On 15 September 2011, Genocide Watch placed South Africa at level 6, Preparation, saying "we have evidence of organized incitement to violence against White people".... Genocide Watch stated that by 2001 "2.2 percent of ethno-European (White) farmers had already been murdered and more than... 12 percent of these farmers had been attacked on their farms". As of December 2011 approximately 3,158 - 3,811 White farmers have been murdered in these attacks.

What's that, you say? There's a genocide going on in South Africa? Quick, send in the Marines!

Oh, you mean it's blacks killing white South African farmers? Never mind then, nothing to see here. I bet they had it coming, those racists! 

Surely this is just three-thousand-odd isolated incidents that have received widespread condemnation by the government?:

On 8 January 2012, after giving a speech at the ANC Centennial 2012 celebrations in Bloemfontein, South Africa, president Jacob Zuma sang the same "shoot the Boer" that had been the subject of Julius Malema's hate speech conviction.

So take your pick - either the South African government is implicitly supporting a genocide against white farmers, or it's simply unable to prevent the widespread murder of white farmers as part of a general murder epidemic! Either way, it's a win-win for South Africa.

Apartheid is the gift that just keeps on giving for progressive do-gooders trying to explain why the 'miracle of Nelson Mandela' has entirely failed to reduce the penury and misery in South Africa.

Apartheid, like most of the other undemocratic systems that were opposed by Western democracies, is so dead that its revival is not only inconceivable, but even the fact that the system existed in living memory seems hard to fathom. So be it - it's hard to think of any political viewpoint (mine included), no matter how outlandish, that would view apartheid as anybody's ideal system of anything. This holds no matter how much scorn you may have for the current governing arrangements. Lord Cromer didn't need apartheid in Egypt, and I doubt he would have needed it in South Africa either.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that the impeccably un-racist (against blacks at least) universal suffrage democracy that replaced it has been such a disaster. How can that be? The system it followed was such a corrupt and racist disgrace. Surely virtually anything else should be a clear improvement, no? And if you replace it with the democratic consent of the governed, in the best form of government that the world has ever known, surely prosperity and stability should follow.

And yet ... they don't.

Not in Libya, not in Egypt, not in South Africa, not in Zimbabwe, not in Iraq.

At some point, surely one must perhaps consider the possibility that democracy and universal suffrage in Africa are not in fact solving any of the problems that they were meant to cure, and may in fact be making them worse?

Let me pose the same question I ask of colonialism opponents when it's cited as the catch-all explanation for Africa's social ills - assuming things continue to stay wretched, at what point will you be willing to acknowledge that the fault is no longer that of Apartheid?

It's a joke question, of course - liberal opinion will never, ever stop blaming colonialism and apartheid for African problems. Not in 20 years, not ever. If in a thousand years humanity has colonised the stars and South Africa is still a hellhole, you can bet that liberal opinion will still be blaming apartheid.

The genuinely good news is that universal suffrage is taking somewhat longer to completely wreck South Africa than it took in Zimbabwe.

This means that you've got a bit more time to get out, should you have the misfortune to still be there.

How the Sausage is Actually Made

One of things that Mencius Moldbug likes to emphasise is that most Western countries increasingly aren't democracies in a meaningful sense. Sure, we vote for politicians every couple of years. But the vast majority of the important decisions about what becomes law are made by civil servants - professional government officials who decide what's going to happen. Congress has decided that the job of governing is so vast that it will just palm it off to the secretary of the relevant department to figure out what to do. They in turn will palm it off to a bunch of junior guys, who may palm it off to some corporation or lobby group or NGO.

Don't believe me? Check out the 'Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act', a.k.a. 'Obamacare'. Do you know how many times the phrase 'The Secretary Shall' [promulgate regulations, develop standards, award grants, carry out a program, establish a formula...] appears in the act? Quick, see if you can guess.

It appears 883 times.

It's not even like the politicians are even going to any great lengths to hide how little involvement they have in lawmaking. Nancy Pelosi famously declared about the Obamacare Bill, in public, that '[W]e have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it'. Not only did she not know herself, she wasn't even afraid of admitting it. So why did she pass the Bill? Someone told her to pass the Bill, and she trusts them enough to just go along with the recommendation. Who wrote it? Who knows! Some combination of lobby groups, civil servants, NGOs, and God knows who else.

So far, the Secretary has issued over 12,000 pages of regulations elaborating on the law. And in case it wasn't clear, I'm pretty certain that the Secretary herself hasn't read and understood the intended (let alone actual) effects of all 12,000 pages of regulations. Again, who actually wrote them? Great question. Care to wager on the chance that you'll be able to get a straight answer to that question if you asked the Secretary, or Nancy Pelosi?

This isn't just a Democrat thing. Moldbug has a great example about some ridiculous Executive Order on 'Protection of Striped Bass and Red Drum Fish Populations'. Does anyone imagine Bush knew virtually anything about this subject before passing the order? The mere suggestion is laughable.

The idea that most of the important legislative choices are being made by a bunch of nobody government officials is so rarely discussed in the popular discourse that you suspect most people don't really believe it. Come on, how much power can some random bureaucrat in an obscure bit of the government have to affect my life?

As if to remind you, here comes the latest dreary outrage in government overreach in the name of corporate cronyism - as of last Saturday, it's now illegal to unlock your mobile phone in the USA so that you can use it on another carrier.

As a policy, this is yet one more example of restricting consumer freedom in the name of protecting big business. WHEC helpfully informs us that:

Officials say carriers rarely went after customers that unlocked their phones...

and that's a guarantee you can take to the bank!

...but instead targeted businesses that bought throw away phones, unlocked them and shipped them overseas.

 Which is a clear problem because... um... you see...

But that's not what's shocking here. The real kicker is the following:

In October 2012, the Librarian of Congress, who determines exemptions to a strict anti-hacking law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), decided that unlocking cellphones would no longer be allowed. But the librarian provided a 90-day window during which people could still buy a phone and unlock it. That window closes on Jan. 26.

 F***ing who? The Librarian of Congress? Who on earth is that? And why are they determining whether I can unlock my cellphone?

If there are any Shylock Holmes readers that can prove that they knew before last week that decisions on copyright were made by the Librarian of Congress, I will personally send them a cheque for $1000.

Who wrote this awful regulation? Who decided that we needed to make criminals out of people who want to use a local SIM card while travelling in Europe before their contract is up?

Beats me. Some flunkie in the US Copyright Office of the Librarian of Congress. And how did the person get the idea to do this? Presumably the phone companies donated to somebody important, and got this disgraceful back room deal.

If you still believe the fiction that laws are made by elected representatives, you may be wondering whom you complain to to get the Librarian of Congress replaced. Oh, the halcyon days of youthful naivete! Do you think the Cathedral cares one whit about your opinion?

Every now and then the public service will step sufficiently far out of line that politicians will occasionally overrule the decision. The public assumes that this means that the rest of the regulation has been given careful oversight and assented to. Care to wager over how many of those 12,000 pages have been scrutinised by any elected official ever, given Congress couldn't be bothered writing them in the first place?

And for the remaining 99.9% of regulations, some group of guys whose titles and positions will be meaningless to you are busily deciding how the power of the state will be administered.

At least in the EU the elites have essentially given up on the farce of pretending that any meaningful decisions will be decided by the popular will.

Here in the US, the charade continues a while longer.

None of this would have been a surprise to the great Robert Heinlein, who described it very memorably way back in 1961 in his book 'Stranger in a Strange Land':

IN THE VOLANT LAND OF LAPUTA, according to the journal of Lemuel Gulliver recounting his Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, no person of importance ever listened or spoke without the help of a servant, known as a "climenole" in Laputian-or "flapper" in rough English translation, as such a Servant's only duty was to flap the mouth and ears of his master with a dried bladder whenever, in the opinion of the servant, it was desirable for his master to speak or listen. Without the consent of his flapper it was impossible to gain the attention of any Laputian of the master class.

Gulliver's journal is usually regarded by Terrans as a pack of lies composed by a sour churchman. As may be, there can be no doubt that, at this time, the "flapper" system was widely used on the planet Earth and had been extended, refined, and multiplied until a Laputian would not have recognized it other than in spirit.

In an earlier, simpler day one prime duty of any Terran sovereign was to make himself publicly available on frequent occasions so that even the lowliest might come before him without any intermediary of any sort and demand judgment. Traces of this aspect of primitive sovereignty persisted on Earth long after kings became scarce and impotent. It continued to be the right of an Englishman to "Cry Harold!" although few knew it and none did it. Successful city political bosses held open court all through the twentieth century, leaving wide their office doors and listening to any gandy dancer or bindlestiff who came in.

The principle itself was never abolished, being embalmed in Articles I & IX of the Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America-and therefore nominal law for many humans-even though the basic document had been almost superseded in actual practice by the Articles of World Federation.

But at the time the Federation Ship Champion returned to Terra from Mars, the "flapper system" had been expanding for more than a century and had reached a stage of great intricacy, with many persons employed solely in carrying out its rituals. The importance of a public personage could be estimated by the number of layers of flappers cutting him off from ready congress with the plebian mob. They were not called "flappers," but were known as executive assistants, private secretaries, secretaries to private secretaries, press secretaries, receptionists, appointment clerks, et cetera. In fact the titles could be anything-or (with some of the most puissant) no title at all, but they could all be identified as "flappers" by function: each one held arbitrary and concatenative veto over any attempted communication from the outside world to the Great Man who was the nominal superior of the flapper.

This web of intermediary officials surrounding every V.I.P. naturally caused to grow up a class of unofficials whose function it was to flap the ear of the Great Man without permission from the official flappers, doing so (usually) on social or pseudo-social occasions or (with the most successful) via back-door privileged access or unlisted telephone number. These unofficials usually had no formal titles but were called a variety of names: "golfing companion," "kitchen cabinet," "lobbyist," "elder statesman," "five-percenter," and so forth. They existed in benign Symbiosis with the official barricade of flappers, since it was recognized almost universally that the tighter the system the more need for a safety valve.

The most successful of the unofficials often grew webs of flappers of their own, until they were almost as hard to reach as the Great Man whose unofficial contacts they were . . . in which case secondary unofficials sprang up to circumvent the flappers of the primary unofficial. With a personage of foremost importance, such as the Secretary General of the World Federation of Free States, the maze of by-passes through unofficials would be as formidable as were the official phalanges of flappers surrounding a person merely very important.

So it was, so it is, so it will continue to be.

On Voting

Mencius Moldbug once opined that for a westerner to not believe in democracy in the 21st century is somewhat akin to not believing in God in the 18th century - not so much in terms of the persecution, but in terms of how much it makes you an outlier relative to respectable opinion.

Most people who get all misty-eyed when election day rolls around tend to rarely enunciate why they think democracy is such a good thing, for much the same reasons that Christians in 1700 rarely described why Christianity was a good thing. But the broadest arguments fit into two camps.

The first is that democracy is an instrumental good - voting generally, and universal suffrage specifically, are ways to ensure peaceful good government. Voting itself is neither good nor bad, but it produces much better governments than non-democratic procedures.

The second is that democracy is an inherent good. Having people collectively decide their leaders on a regular basis is the morally correct thing to do, and participating in this process should make one feel virtuous.

I can sympathise with the former argument, although I think it needs some obvious qualifications.

I cannot really believe in the latter argument any more.

In the first place, it seems that the univariate comparison between western democratic countries and third world non-democratic countries vastly overstates the treatment effect of democracy. This is an enormously complicated empirical question that the development economists war over viciously. But even just in terms of the anecdotal discourse, the democracy boosters never seem to consider the harder cases. I'm not even talking about the cases like Singapore or Dubai, which they tend to wave away as despotic, if prosperous. But was the Austrian empire ca. 1900 a despotic and terrible place to live? Hardly. By any measure of its cultural, scientific or literary output, or just general standards of living, it seemed quite pleasant indeed for the time, although it certainly wasn't democratic. Or for a modern example, would Lichtenstein be meaningfully improved by transforming it to a democracy? It's hard to see how.

Democracy boosters also never seem to want to talk much about the first world cases where democracy is receding. Quick, name an important EU-wide decision made in the last few years that was decided by anything like a popular vote! No rush, I'll go and get a coffee and check up on you when I get back. Are you railing against the EU? Maybe for their economic policy, but what about their internal governance? I don't think so.

I think there are at least two good arguments for democracy as an instrumental good. The first is the analysts consensus forecast problem - the median value of the forecasts from lots of independent analysts tends to be more accurate than the forecasts of most individual analysts. If lots of people all estimate what they think is best for the country and vote on it, the variance of the mean of our estimates is likely much lower than the variance of any one individual. So a democratic process is less likely to screw up by picking an oddball policy.

The problem arises when people aren't voting based on what they think is in the country's interests, but their own. If 51% of people get together by voting to expropriate the remaining 49% (which seems like a fair description of the west today), it's hard to see how the analysts consensus forecast improves this.

The second is the idea of increasing popular support - democracy makes people feel they have a stake in the outcome and a way to vent their grievances, hence there is less civil disruption and fewer coups. I think this definitely has a value, but then again absolute monarchies used to be quite popular at times too, especially when they had a good king (although they'd be highly unpopular now. Again, except Lichtenstein).

But if democracy is justified as an instrumental good, it's surprising how rarely people make the obvious qualifications - that its value will depend greatly on who is voting, and what they're voting for. If the people voting are mainly fools, madmen or thugs, I don't expect the ballot box to transform them into Thomas Jeffersons. If you vote for Hamas, you will get Hamas.

This leads us to the limited moral argument for democracy - that even in the case of bad outcomes, people at least get what they deserve on average. We'll put aside the case of whether the minority getting expropriated deserves their fate for their inability to stop the majority. By this rationale, the Coptic Christians are now being 'deservedly' hounded out of Egypt, just like the Christians were 'deservedly' hounded out of Iraq.

But more generally, should we celebrate when societies are transformed from undeserved good governance to deserved poor governance? Rhodesia was a racist semi-democratic state with a functioning civil society whose benefits flowed mainly to the whites, but whose level of growth was pretty good. When this transitioned to the fully-democratic (at least initially) Zimbabwe, what resulted may or may not be considered less racist (it depends on how you score the massive violence against white farmers), but it's a basket case society that has ruined and impoverished nearly everybody, black and white alike, outside of a tiny ruling elite. So celebrate! They're now 'deservedly' reliant on foreign food aid instead of exporting food to the world.

You see the problem?

Of course, the true believers think that democracy and voting have a more basic inherent moral quality - it's just the right thing to do.

You cannot reason out any system of morality without axioms, so there's not really much to dispute in this statement. I disagree, but your mileage may vary. We are still, however, entitled to ask what shadow value you place on this moral good relative to other moral goods. In other words, how much ruin in Zimbabwe are you willing to tolerate for the fact that they now have universal suffrage, instead of restricted suffrage?

I value the rule of law, and peaceful stable societies. To the extent that democracy produces this, great! To the extent that democracy destroys this, then a pox on democracy.

In the west today, it seems about a zero NPV proposition. Like all NPV calculations, it depends on what the alternative is. Transitioning from modern Britain to North Korea would be a huge step backwards, but is that really the relevant counterfactual? Europe is slowly becoming less democratic each day and nobody seems to much notice or care.

To the extent that democracy works in the west, it seems mainly because the west has cultural values that support peaceful, stable government, and they vote accordingly. I celebrate this fact, but I think it would lead to nearly equally good outcomes if they didn't vote.

This doesn't fit neatly on a sticker that you can put on your chest after leaving the polling booth. Then again, not much sensible advice ever does.

Good News, Bad News

People are apparently still surprised that when you take a country like Egypt and remove most of the forces ensuring law and order (however imperfectly and corruptly), this kind of thing happens.

At this late stage in the proceedings, I honestly cannot figure out why they would be.

Shylock's free tip to aspiring female reporters - if offered the lucrative assignment of covering the freedom-loving democracy protest in Tahrir Square, Cairo, you should politely decline.

My initial reaction to the first-mentioned story was "You mean they're still sending in female reporters to cover these events without a full bodyguard contingent? Seriously?".

Thank goodness she seemed to escape less harmed than some of the other cases, in part because she managed to not get separated from the rest of her news crew. That's when things tend to go downhill really fast.

The bad news is that public rapes are up.

The good news (apparently) is that people are voting!

The bad news is that the voters include the rapists.

The other bad news is that they're voting for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Not sure I'd score this as a win overall, methinks.

Things that make me feel patriotic

I was in an English-themed pub on Friday night (in the US of A), watching the Australian Rules Football Grand Final. I don't know why, but it seems to be a regular trend that random sporting events in the US, of whatever sort, are screened by British pubs, usually with British proprietors (this guy was from Liverpool).

As those of you who watched know, it was a great game (I'm a Dockers man, so I didn't really care about the result, but it's rare to see such a close finish). The crowd was quite Aussie-heavy, and it was enormous fun to be reminded of the subtle cultural differences between Australia and the US. Things started well when some player had been knocked down after failing to prevent a goal, and some guy yelled 'Get up, you wuss!'.

Anyway, what warmed my heart greatly was that at some point, the camera flashed to a picture of Julia Gillard, the Australian Prime Minister, in the crowd. At least three quarters of the room booed loudly.

What a refreshing change from the bogus choreographed boosterism and cheering of the US national conventions! Julia Gillard is deeply unpopular, but the irritation went deeper than that (and I suspect that the fraction of the room booing was considerably larger than the fraction that would have voted for Tony Abbott at the last election) Indeed, I'm quite confident that if you'd been in that room in previous years, the response would have been very similar for Kevin Rudd, John Howard, Paul Keating or any other Prime Minister.

Australians tend to regard their politicians with a mixture of suspicion and contempt. This holds almost equally for the ones they vote for and the ones they don't. And this seems to me to be a far healthier attitude for a free citizenry to have towards the people that want to rule over them.

I remember when Barack Obama got elected in 2008, and they had the huge victory celebration in Chicago. Such a spectacle would be inconceivable in Australia - the whole idea simply wouldn't pass the laugh test. I'm meant to spend my night turning up to cheer for a politician? If you held it, nobody would turn up.

When politicians turn up at non-political events of national enjoyment, such as the AFL Grand Final, Australins tend to resent the intrusion. The whole 'man (or woman) of the people' nonsense is recognised for the contrived and artificial performance that it is. Meanwhile, the whole vibe given off is of a monarch enjoying the privilege of swanning into prime seats at major sporting events by virtue of their position.

And none of this needed to be explained to anybody in the room. This healthy disrespect of government authority was entirely spontaneous and widespread.

In a free country, elected officials may get your vote, but they ought not get your cheerful subservience. The message, which politicians everywhere need to be reminded of, is clear: we tolerate your presence out of a conviction that voting is superior to dictatorship, but we do so reluctantly and grudgingly. Do not mistake this for a desire to be ruled.

Some Thoughts Regarding The Repulsive Slaying of American Consular Officials in Benghazi

So this is  where "democratic" revolution in Libya has gotten us. Some nobody in the US makes a film months ago saying nasty things about Islam. Newly liberated Libyans decide that the anniversary of September 11th is a grand old time to respond by sending a mob to butcher US consular officials. Local authorities are either complicit in this, or powerless to stop it.

So we now have in Libya a society where the important decisions are being made by the terrorists - thuggish, humourless religious fanatics who are on hair-trigger alert for anyone, anywhere saying things that might hurt their delicate and precious feelings (or their supporters). Either the government supports this, or the government is unable to stop this. I loathe the old butcher as much as anybody, but I am at a loss to hear the explanation as to how this state of affairs is a clear improvement over Gaddaffi.

We've also got the same trend going on in Egypt, causing the US consulate to make cringeworthy statements attacking US free speech trying to defuse the mob on its doorstep. Another triumph for democracy! Things were so boring and predictable under Mubarak.

Look, I understand why US embassy officials might say cowardly things to try to save their skin when an angry mob is on their doorstep. The bigger question is, why did the Cairo embassy staff feel that they were on their own, and the only way out was appeasement?

It's somewhat a trick question. Embassies are always at the mercy of the locals, at least in the short term. What protects them is the threat of the sovereign might of the country. Sometimes this registers with the mob directly. More likely, it registers with the local country officials, who rein in their citizens instead of letting them murder foreign diplomats.

So the real question becomes this - why did the mob (and the local governments) feel that they could violate US sovereign territory and murder US citizens with impunity?

This is why. This is why.

Gary Brecher had some strong thoughts on what a real response to the Iranian hostage crisis might have looked like. I wouldn't want to take it as far as he suggests. But there's a whole range of possible options that would have sent a clear message of deterrence for future embassy looters. You can bet, however, that the appropriate response sure as s*** didn't involve sending in 8 helicopters in some hare-brained rescue scheme doomed to failure.

Beckwith had no choice but to scrub the mission right there in the desert. All because Carter only authorized eight lousy choppers.

When Nixon heard about it, he had a great comment: "Eight? Why not a thousand? It's not like we don't have them!"

Clinton, meanwhile, sent a firm and fearsome lesson by bombing a camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Yeah, they got that message loud and clear.

This time around, everyone, from the consular officials, to the mob, to the local government, predicted that the US certainly wouldn't do anything beforehand, and likely wouldn't do anything afterwards either.

So far, they've been right.

In the Iranian hostage crisis, at least, the US was under the moral blackmail that any strike on Tehran would likely cause the deaths of the US consular officials.

Well, that ship has already sailed this time. The question is what the US is going to do.

We've got a thousand choppers now, too. Are you holding your breath for a military response? In election season? I'm sure not.

If the US isn't willing to strongly punish countries that violate its embassies, it has no business putting consular officials in hellhole countries in the first place.

In the likely event that no serious military response is forthcoming, let me advance the following prediction:

Expect more fatal attacks on US embassies, and sooner, rather than later.

A Great Question About Charter Cities.

Charter Cities are an interesting example of how modern development might work. As pioneered by Paul Romer, the basic idea is that they would function somewhat like a special economic zone, where the rules being enforced are different from the surrounding country, and most likely imported from a country with better levels of development, such as Canada. In other words, think of somewhere like Hong Kong, but run with Canadian laws and officials.

Romer looks to be making some progress on the idea of creating one in Honduras, which I think would make an interesting experiment. It certainly can't be much worse than what else is going on in Honduras (or anywhere else in Central America), so qualifies as 'worth a shot'.

The thorny question is - if you want to just recreate Hong Kong, isn't that (*gasp, shudder, cross-yourself-thrice*)... colonialism? And we all know that that was worse than Hitler!!

Well, that's a bit tricky. Romer does have two conceptual difference that he can point to.

The first is that the city is to be built on 'uninhabited land', so nobody is (in theory) being dispossessed to make this colony. I mean, charter city! Sorry.

The second, and more interesting one, is that the rules in this city will only be enforced on those who voluntarily enter. It's like a genuine version of the social contract, because you apparently get to choose whether to join in the first place. Of course, it's not clear how things will work if the laws change while you're in there. I guess you can leave again - maybe. Who knows.

The real question is, how much difference do these distinctions really make? Are you still deep down just recreating the Racist Hitlercaust that was the British Empire?

There's two ways of answering this. In the court of progressive public opinion, Romer is doing a pretty good job of attempting to circumvent the nominal complaints of the anti-colonialism crowd. There's still the awkward aspect that if it's white Canadian officials ruling over local Hondurans it might not make for great photos, but that more of an aesthetic complaint than a concrete example of injustice. The jury is still out on this, since it's a sufficiently untried idea. Romer in his TED talks tries to get the anti-colonialist crowd on board with these musings:

Why is this not like colonialism? The thing that was bad about colonialism, and the thing that is residually bad in some of our aid programs, is that it involved elements of coercion and condescension. This model is all about choices - both for leaders and for the people who will live in these new places. And choice is the antidote to coercion and condescension.

But screw progressive public opinion. Do you buy the distinction?

The 'vacant land' thing is fine, and is a good start. But confiscating land is a one-off startup cost that may well be worth paying to set up Hong Kong. The ongoing injustice, if you think there is one, is the lack of choice by citizens as to who they're going to be ruled by. And everyone here will be free to enter or exit, so no problem! Sounds watertight, right?

Mencius Moldbug would disagree. He delivers a long and stinging rebuke of Romer - I think it's perhaps unfair on Romer personally in parts, but I think he makes a great argument that if this actually works, it will do so for the same reasons that colonialism works. In other words, Romer wants to pretend that this is nothing whatsoever to do with colonialism, when in actual fact it's probably best described as colonialism with a better PR department, redesigned for modern political sensibilities to appeal to progressives.

But even that may not be enough. The Achilles heel of the current setup is that progressives, Romer included, at heart all believe in democracy. The system being proposed is definitively undemocratic at a local level (but for which individuals join only by choice).

That's fine - the city claims a right to enforce its laws, and people, by entering, forfeit the right to change the rules themselves.

But is this a credible threat by the city?

Moldbug, I think very presciently, looks ahead and asks a very tough question that I fear Romer doesn't want to answer:

Professor Romer, here is a question for you: suppose your good Mr. Castro says yes, and you get your Guantanamo City up and running, with its Haitian population and Canadian proconsuls. It is, of course, a smashing success, with investment galore.

And then, in ten years, a mob of Haitians gathers in the beautifully landscaped central square, wearing coloured rosettes and throwing rotten eggs, all chanting a single demand: democracy for Guanatanamo City. The Canadians, all in a tizzy, call you. It's the middle of the night in Palo Alto. You pick up the phone. "What should we say?" the Canadians ask. "Yes, or no?"

If they say yes - what, in ten years, will be the difference between Guantanamo and Haiti? If they say no - what do they say next? You'll notice that you have no answer to this question. Hell has little pity for those who decide to forget history.

Perhaps the reason you have so much trouble imagining this scenario is that your own country has been so successful in suppressing actual political democracy, in favor of the administrative caste of which you are a member. To you, the proposition that "politics" should affect the formulation or execution of "public policy" is no less than heresy - like Velveeta on a communion wafer.

Thus, you reinvent colonialism by simply teleporting this managerial state from Canada, where democracy has been effectively suppressed, to Cuba, where democracy has been effectively suppressed. But the subjects of your new state are not Canadians, or even Cubans. The job has not been done.

If you want to suppress their lust for power, a lust which grows in the heart of every man, you can do so. All it takes is a bit of gear and the will to use it. As Wellington said: pour la canaille, la mitraille. But then, my dear professor, you are really reinventing colonialism - not just pretending to do so, for an audience as ignorant, hypocritical and naive as yourself.

Bingo.

Charter cities, should they get off the ground, will last only up until the local citizens start agitating for democracy.

Which they will.

And when that happens, do you think the Canadian administrators will have the nerve to tell them no? And to order the local army and police to enforce such an edict? What, exactly, is the argument that Canadian public servants will be able to advance as to why they should use force to suppress political agitation for a democratic vote? Can you see them making any such pronouncement without their heads exploding?

To ask the question is to know the answer.

I'd be delighted to see Charter Cities succeed. They seem a damn sight better than foreign aid. Moldbug claimed that he didn't think the idea would ever get off the ground. In the three years since, it looks like he might be proved wrong on this point.

But I fear he'll be right on the larger point.

Iterate forwards, Mr Romer. The day will come when you'll have to face a stark choice.

One choice will make you the next Deng Xiaoping.

The other choice will make you the next Ian Smith.

The implications for the ethics of these choices are complicated and thorny.

The implications for economic development, (which this was apparently all about in the first place), alas, are not.

The Imagined Thoughts of Randolph Churchill

John Derbyshire reprints this wonderful essay by Winston Churchill, written in 1947, where he recounts a fictional conversation with his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who had been dead over 50 years by that point.

If you ever doubted that political views have changed a lot in the last 200 years, this essay does a great job of imagining how a Tory in the 1890s would view the history of Europe in the 20th century.

To pick a line that is straight out of Mencius Moldbug, how's this from Churchill:

'War?' he said, sitting up with a startled air. 'War, do you say? Has there been a war?'

'We have had nothing else but wars since democracy took charge.'

'You mean real wars, not just frontier expeditions? Wars where tends of thousands of men lose their lives?'

'Yes, indeed, Papa,' I said. 'That's what has happened all the time. Wars and rumours of war ever since you died.'

Indeed.

Read it all here.