[1] General Commentary - The Abuse of Environmental Concern

In a political order of the type dominant in the West, to gain unrestricted power you need to secure (the appearance of) democratic legitimacy. Once you have the approval of the majority of the electorate, awesome power is at your disposal. After all, you represent the people, and according to the totalitarian concept of the Volkssouverän, there is no higher power and, thus, no institution that can rein in the sovereign.

In separate posts, I will have to look more closely at how little most of the powers actually exercised by a democratically elected government are in any meaningful way related to the will or the approval of the majority or most others among the voting population.

For the time being, let me talk about the ominous twin requirements of gaining a majority and, to that end, creating the impression that the power-seeking party is the champion of issues everyone must have an inescapable interest in supporting. Democracy is supposed to represent the people, but as institutionalized and practised today, it requires their manipulation, their becoming overawed and fervent followers of the ideas of trend-setting luminaries. Or just hordes that cannot look as fast as they are being showered with faits accomplis. Of course, this is the result of disdain for the individual and her personal freedom - once the respect of the individual is superseded by the assumption of his depravity and the ensuing doctrine that demands the alternative of orderly collectives, spoon-feeding and patronization assume the quality of worthy duties.

Enter environmentalism - a sub-species of the alarmist road to unrestrained power. Environmental fearmongering is a variant of the trick by which a "state of emergency" serves to persuade the public to grant extraordinary powers to the government.

Real concern for the environment requires non-trivial resources of dedication, careful investment and the incentive to come to grips with matters that can be rather counter-intuitive, intricate and in need of long-standing familiarity. In fact, stewardship of nature will be exercised with maximum responsibility, competence and skill if people have a genuine stake in the environment, which is when they are twinned to it by property rights, instead of being incited to act as vicarious hecklers relieving themselves of frustration and hatred in the manner of an inveigled mob.

'He who would do good,' wrote William Blake, 'must do so in minute particulars. General good is the place of the scoundrel, the hypocrite, and the liar.'

The dichotomy of man and nature is spurious; self-responsibility is the greatest contribution that man, as part of nature, can make to its thriving. A society marked by self-responsibility creates the cognitive diversity, the moral discipline and the material wealth that best help us adapt fruitfully to and advance along with the rest of nature.

The problems start, once the natural incentives of our political order envelope the issues, effectively biasing the chances for success in terms of sensationalist, apocalyptic and totalitarian messages.

By totalitarian I mean the desire or ability to force general subordination to a given scheme - the restriction of freedom under the pretext that superior needs cannot be met unless extraordinary powers are granted to government. Hence, the analogy with the suspension of liberty under war conditions.

Once in a position of power, large clientèles can be moulded, pressurized or served under the double justification of democratic legitimation and apocalyptic license ("this government has been elected to stop climate change - will you oblige, please"), which explains the increasing politicization, i.e. corruption of science, the media or public agencies portrayed as disinterested servants of a neutral cause.

Volk ohne Raum (a people without enough space to live) was a powerful slogan used by the Nazis. The imagery of a people suffocating in an endangered environment and being forced to seek relief of the most radical form remains highly evocative to this day. It is a great means of persuading people that collective needs are pressing and meritorious enough to be put ahead of egotism, to which personal freedom, the sine qua non of a modern civilization, is demagogically reduced.

Our political system does not reward discernment but crudeness. It reserves success, recognition and power to the demagogue and has had ample time to transform the institutions of society and the minds of people to systematically pursue adverse selection in favour of radical distortions of reality.

Preposterously, yet understandably, elected leaders of powerful democracies, Merkel of Germany and Blair of the United Kingdom e.g., consider it their duty, mandate and capability to reduce global temperature by 2 or 3 degrees centigrade, earning widespread applause , even though the proposed procedure (reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions) is ineffective, because anthropogenic CO2 emissions are as good as negligible compared to non human sources of CO2, and the by far largest reservoirs of CO2, the oceans, emit the substance as a consequence of higher temperatures rather than CO2 causing global temperature to rise. All evidence suggests that there is no greenhouse effect, as the regions of the atmosphere where it should be measurable have not heated up in the predicted manner. The same leaders denounce other nations, especially the USA, as scoundrels for not complying with Kyoto resolutions, while the USA has performed much better in terms of the treaty's aims, and European countries, including Germany, have fallen short of the benchmarks they had committed themselves to.

Nonetheless, the need for even higher and more stringent standards (of pretending to achieve the useless) is being dramatized by the very laggards, who have a sound record of making promises and not keeping them. (In another post, it will be necessary to investigate contemporary democracy's numbing effect of accustoming the population to an inexhaustible tolerance of the breach of promises.)

Pious commitments to world saving environmental action turn out to be all about a desperate or a reckless straining after effect. They are all about looking or sounding good with no concern for substance. They are not about the environment - or else, the green zealots would care to consider that if all icebergs of the world were to melt, by the laws of physics, the sea level would not change a bit (just to mention one of countless vulgarizing distortions that are used to scare people into concurrence). They are about power. They are about controlling what is "politically correct" - a precise sounding phrase to describe the fashion of the day, the fleeting outcomes of unprincipled politics, the eternal nexus of the bully and the coward, the conning and the conned.

Little wonder that an experienced political salesman, Al Gore, has become the hero of environmentalists.

Our mind is part of the environment. Let us be protective of it.

For a laudable exemplification of the point in question do take a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f8v5du5_ag

PS

From: http://www.freemarketnews.com/Analysis/178/8125/landfair.asp?wid=178&nid=8125

"I got an email from John Wilder, who wrote a paper titled GLOBAL WARMING CLAIMS REFUTED. Wilder puts a pencil to the claim of seas 20 feet higher by virtue of ice melt.

Let us look at what it would take to raise the ocean’s surface by a mere one foot, which certainly does not constitute flooding. One foot of depth is a cubic foot. We know by definition that a cubic foot of water is 7.48 gallons. Knowing this we now can simply calculate the numbers. You first figure how many square feet there are in a square mile of ocean surface. It is in excess of 17,000,000 square feet. You then multiply that times 7.48. You then take that figure and multiply it times 130.5 million square miles. This gives you a total number of gallons of water or ice it takes. To put that into perspective, you can then take a known land size like the Continental United States of 3.5 million square miles and calculate how much ice it would take to raise the world’s oceans by one foot.

Here's the math:

One Square Mile one foot deep: 5,280*5,280*7.48 = 208530432 Gallons of water or ice

208530432 Gallons of water or ice*130,000,500 Square miles of Ocean = 27,023,756,105,216,000 Gallons of water or ice

((27 023 756 105 216 000 / 3 500 000) / 7.48) / 5 280 = 195 497.923 miles.

Here's Wilder's conclusion:

After having done the math, it would take ice covering the United States over 196,000 MILES HIGH! Space starts at 62 miles high. Clearly there is not enough ice on the planet to raise the world’s oceans by one foot much as less having flooding like the ridiculous 20 feet that Al Gore claims."

[6] News from Absurdistan: The Monarchs of Europe

At the risk of sounding repetitive, it does not appear that Germans are worried about the goings-on described below. They are primarily looking for (the appearance of more) efficient government as promised or implied by a strengthening of the EU institutions, other considerations are of secondary concern, to put it mildly.

By the way, the title of this post - "The Monarchs of Europe" - is somewhat infelicitous in that the monarchy as a historically prevalent phenomenon was constantly under pressure from and eventually gave way to demands for constraints on the powers exercised by it. We are moving in the opposite direction.

From "EU Referendum" http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2007/06/dangerous-and-deliberate-obfuscation.html:

Under the heading "A dangerous and deliberate obfuscation" we read:

"Much of the focus on the changes proposed by the "mandate" has been on headline issues such as the appointment of a full-time president and a "high representative" to act as an EU foreign minister. Perforce, less attention has been given to other changes in what are almost casually referred to as "institutional changes".

These, Blair would have us believe, are simply changes of rules to make the European Union "effective". More specifically, he told us:

This deal gives us a chance to move on, it gives us a chance to concentrate on the issues to do with the economy, organised crime, terrorism, immigration, defence, climate change, the environment, energy, the problems that really concern citizens in Europe. And this is why it was important to get out of this bind into which we had got with the constitutional treaty, to go back to making simple changes in our rules that allow us to operate more effectively now we are in an enlarged European Union, but most of all allow us to work effectively for the betterment of people inside the European Union.

In the manner of the joke about the Lone Ranger and his sidekick Tonto, however, the key to understanding what is going on is to ask, "who's this 'us' paleface?"

To answer this, we look to the European Council "mandate" where, in paragraph 12, we find the dense but superficially anodyne statement that:

The institutional changes agreed in the 2004 IGC will be integrated partly into the TEU and partly into the Treaty on the Functioning of the Union. The new Title III will give an overview of the institutional system and will set out the following institutional modifications to the existing system, i.e. the Articles on the Union's institutions …

The reference to the "2004 IGC" is of course the code for the EU constitution and the important modification here is to the "Articles on the Union's institutions".

To find these, we have to go to Article I-19 of the failed constitution where we see the definition of the "institutional framework" and a statement of its aims. These are expressed in terms of the "Union" telling the institutions that their aims are to: "promote its values; advance its objectives; serve its interests, those of its citizens and those of Member States; and ensure the consistency, effectiveness and continuity of its policies and actions".

Now, the crucial point here is that the first three of these objectives are entirely new. And, of these, the third is especially important: to: "serve its interests, those of its citizens and those of Member States".

However, this is but a curtain raiser to another short insert in paragraph 12, which states (by way of one of the institutional changes): "the European Council (transformation into an institution…)".

This is of huge significance. Originally set up in 1972 by Jean Monnet, the European Council was presented, during its first meeting under president Pompidou as a "fireside chat" between the heads of states and governments of the then nine members of the EEC.

Indeed, the first meeting was in fact held in Pompidou's private salon, with members lounging in armchairs and even sitting by the fire, but Monnet had far greater ambitions for it. He styled it as nothing less than a "provisional government" of Europe, its task being to steer Europe though the "transition from national to collective sovereignty" (Memoirs, p. 503).

However, as is the way with the incremental development of the European Union, the European Council enjoyed a half-life outside the treaties, acquiring the appellation "summit", and reported almost universally as such by the media, growing from its origins as an informal "fireside chat" to the full-blown monster that it is today.

But, while it remained, in treaty terms, an informal body, it was formally recognised in the Nice Treaty (Article 4) which first defined its role as to "provide the Union with the necessary impetus for its development" and to "define the general political guidelines thereof".

Thus, while it was seen as a meeting of heads of states and governments (now assisted by foreign affairs ministers), the inference being that they were representing their respective nations, the European Council was being drawn into the treaty maw. Although not yet a fully-fledged institution, it role was being more clearly defined as a representative body of the European Union.

Now, with this proposed change, the European Council is being defined fully as an institution. Furthermore, its aims have been set out, which it shares with the Commission, the EU Parliament and the European Court of Justice. It now will have developed into Monnet's "provisional government", acting, to all intents and purposes, as the "cabinet" of Europe.

The problem, of course, is that the members are still made up from the heads of state and governments of the member states. But, rather than representing their respective nations, they now act as a corporate body – an institution – the aims of which are, in respect of the Union, to: "promote its values; advance its objectives; serve its interests, those of its citizens and those of Member States; and ensure the consistency, effectiveness and continuity of its policies and actions".

Crucially, the requirement to serve the interest of the Union comes first, the "citizens" come second and the Member States come third. The order is neither accidental nor without significance. The European Council has to put the Union first. Tony Blair's "us" is the European Union.

Serving the EU is, de facto, what the European Council already does, but this is now to become de jure. That such an important change is tucked into a paragraph of an obscure document which few will read – and fewer will understand – is another of those dangerous and deliberate obfuscations, designed to defeat easy analysis.

It also represents a very significant transfer of power from member states, our leaders having been hijacked and impressed into the service of the Union – all the more dangerous because, as far as the media and the general public is concerned, they are part of an invisible institution, one that will, to them, remain a "summit".

COMMENT THREAD"

[5] News from Absurdistan - Pretending To Fight for Ideals We Do Not Have

Democracy - as we know it - between fine print and bombs:

Politicians are trying to sneak the EU-constitution past the people. If they need to do that, you can tell that such a "constitution" is the very opposite of what a constitution is supposed to be: a means to limit the powers of government.

Angela Merkel has German soldiers risking their lives in Afghanistan to bring democracy to the country, while doing her very best to strengthen the undemocratic regime in Brussels that has largely replaced a meaningful parliamentarian democracy in Germany.

"Merkel stages a coup d'état in the fine print

The resolution agreed yesterday in Brussels by the European Council on the EU's proposed constitutional treaty represented an extraordinary coup d'etat, unprecedented in the history of the "European project". To understand the awesome significance of what happened it is necessary to appreciate just how this weekend's decision marked a complete departure from all the normal rules which govern the agreement of such treaties.

All the previous treaties extending the powers of the body now known as the European Union, from Rome through Maastricht to Nice, have been preceded by what is called an "inter-governmental conference" (IGC), a process of negotiation lasting several months between the governments involved. Under the rules of the Vienna Convention governing international treaties, the participants in an IGC have acted as sovereign governments in their own right, free to agree, on a basis of unanimity, which further powers they were prepared to hand over to the supranational government of the EU.

On this occasion, to secure the new treaty they are all so desperately keen to see in place, there will still have to be an IGC, as the rules require. But what is wholly new about yesterday's resolution is that, for the first time, the European Council has given an "exclusive mandate" to all the governments involved that they can only be permitted to discuss the treaty the European Council wants. In other words, they are no longer allowed to act as sovereign governments, as the international rules on treaties require, but can only act under the orders given them by the European Council.

This may sound like a typically arcane nicety of EU procedure, but it is of huge significance. The European Council is itself a "Community institution". It is therefore ordering the sovereign governments to hand over more powers to itself. This is something which, until it so dramatically changed the rules yesterday, no one would have thought the Council had the power to do.

We are thus to be presented with the constitution it wants, without any further opportunity for it to be amended. But, unless they decide to change the rules yet again, it will still have to be ratified by all 27 member states, several of which will need to hold referendums. Mrs Merkel's clever coup d'etat is not yet quite complete."

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/24/nbook124.xml

Judging by the rhetoric of the politically correct, you would think the Germans are up in arms against the destruction of democracy, but no: most people think we are doing a humanitarian job in Afghanistan and compliantly suppose the European bureaucracy is a government more efficacious than its domestic precursor.

Hauptsache, wir werden regiert - main thing, we are being governed.

One ambition of my blog is to explain how the hollowness and contradictory nature of the current political creed prevailing in the West is bound to disarm the people intellectually, deaden or train them to accept the powers that be, thus dragging us further down the path toward a tyrannical state.

As for Afghanistan, try this: " NATO and US-led troops are failing to co-ordinate with their Afghan allies and thereby causing civilian deaths, President Hamid Karzai has said. He criticised his Western allies’ “extreme” use of force and said they should act as his government asked. “Innocent people are becoming victims of reckless operations” because the troops had ignored Afghan advice for years, Mr Karzai told reporters. He was speaking after a week in which up to 90 Afghan civilians were killed." -Common Dreams News Center. For the full article see: (http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/23/2047)

If an all-out supporter of Western military interference in the internal affairs of Afghanistan is as discontent as this, one wonders just how popular the Promethean warriors for democracy are in other circles of the invaded country.

Democracy is a precious good, but it is bound to be turned into an evil instrument unless rooted in coherent and firmly observed principles.

[1] Fundamental Issues - The Rule of Law and the Economy

[This post is in statu nascendi]

(2) Anticapitalist economists and their misconception of the rule of law (part II) - continued from "[4] News from Absurdistan - Chörman Freedom".

The formulation and application of legislature by any power considered legitimate (i.e. nowadays, government approved by majority vote) is all that is required for the rule of law to obtain. This is the prevalent doctrine in the West.

Creating law(s) - or rather producing legislature - to adjust the economy to politically desired demands is in this reading a legitimate and highly important task within the framework of "the rule of law".

The German concept of a "soziale Marktwirtschaft" ("social[ly benign] market economy") follows this doctrine. According to it, it is incumbent on those enacting "[the rule of]" law to enforce politically willed constraints on the economy so as to create socially palatable (or politically approved) outcomes rather than accepting results that are not affected by intervention on the part of politically organized interests.

This position is based on a fundamental fallacy that distorts both economics and law, the latter having once been called "the science of freedom", to which status it ought to aspire again. Like practically all other branches of the social sciences, law and economics have taken their sight off their genuine subject-matter, becoming adjuncts of a political agenda. Their original subject-matter was the study of the conditions of self-generating order - not the second guessing, narrowly interested dabbling in such order.

However, properly understood, the rule of law is not a safeguard against capitalism (or if you will, unwelcome outcomes of the economic processes) - it is the very precondition of capitalism and all of its outcomes, irrespective of their being deemed unwelcome after the event by this party or another. After all, with respect to the realm of commerce, the purpose of the rule of law is to ensure that economic transactions are entered into under the condition that generally applicable rules of just conduct are being observed.

The concept of justice, more precisely the quality of being just, adheres uniquely to human conduct. It is meaningless and, indeed, very dangerous to apply it to outcomes divorced from or unrelated to the obligation to act in accordance with rules of just conduct. But such "divorced outcomes" are precisely what the roundabout processes of the economy add up to. We can and should act in a just manner when participating in economic affairs, but having acted in such a way, the economy, the sum of such action, can never be just or unjust.

An anonymous process, whose overall outcome has not been deliberately brought about by anyone, cannot be meaningfully said to result in just or unjust circumstances.

In the words of F.A. Hayek:

"Since the consequences of applying rules of just conduct will always depend on factual circumstances which are not determined by these rules, we cannot measure the justice of the application of a rule by the result it will produce in a particular case. In this respect it has been correctly said of John Locke's view on the justice of competition, namely that 'it is the way in which competition is carried on, not its result, that counts'...That it is possible for one through a single just transaction to gain much and for another through an equally just transaction to lose all, in no way disproves the justice of these transactions. Justice is not concerned with those unintended consequences of a spontaneous order which have not been deliberately brought about by anybody." (F.A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Volume II, p.38)

An anonymous process cannot be said to "act" in a just or unjust manner.

As in a game, a player's conduct may be judged to be just or unjust, depending on his adherence to the rules, but the outcome, the loosing or winning of the participants, is an event divorced from the notion of justice or injustice. The game's final result is not and cannot be regarded to be his responsibility, unlike his observance and most advantageous use of the underlying rules.

"The rules of just conduct thus merely serve to prevent conflict and to facilitate co-operation by eliminating some sources of uncertainty. But since they aim at enabling each individual to act according to his own plans and decisions, they cannot wholly eliminate uncertainty. They can create certainty only to the extent that they protect means against the interference by others, and thus enable the individual to treat those means as being at his disposal. But they cannot assure him success in the use of these means, neither in so far as it depends only on material facts, nor in so far as it depends on the actions of others which he expects. They can, for instance, not assure him that he will be able at the expected price to sell what he has to offer or to buy what he wants." (item, p.38)

The point of the rule of law is to have (among other things) capitalism, not to fetter, truncate or meddle with it.

Ron Paul writes pertinently in "Freedom Under Siege":

"Total freedom of contract and association is what the "pursuit of happiness" is all about. Once this principle is violated, the gradual but steady erosion of our liberties can be expected unless the principle of individual rights is reestablished.

Free choice means that the incentive to produce is maximized, since
it's assumed that we can keep the fruits of our labor. In a free society, an
individual benefits from wise and frugal decisions and suffers the
consequences of bad judgement and wasteful habits.
The state should neither guarantee nor tax success, nor compensate those who fail.
The individual must be responsible for all of his decisions. Because some suffer from acts outside of their control, we cannot justify the use of violence to take from someone else to "help out." People in need are not excused when they rob their neighbors, and government should not be excused when it does the robbing for them. Providing for the general welfare means that the general conditions of freedom must be maintained. It should never be used to justify specific welfare or any transfer of wealth from one person to another." (Chapter 1, p.39)

By contrast, the doctrine of the soziale Marktwirtschaft which is practically unanimously held by Germans, from highly acclaimed professors of economics to the people you meet in a café, completely misses the link between justice and an economy that deserves to be called free.

A free economy is an economy as it unfolds in a free society. For a free society to persist the rule of law must prevail. The rule of law ensures that the behaviour of economic agents is in line with rules of just conduct. The rule of law requires that - beyond that - no intervention take place concerning the outcomes of the processes of economic activities in a society.

The German insistence to correct the market economy in order for it to become "social" has the disastrous effect (a) to preclude the rule of law and to replace it with arbitrary interventions largely dictated by the rule of the strongest (in the political arena) - i.e. the concept of justice has been abandoned and ousted by political correctness, i.e pressure from the politically dominant -, and (b) to weaken the economy severely.

Jurists in Germany do not understand that the rule of law is concerned with the same thing as economics is. Economists in Germany do not understand that economics is concerned with the same thing as the rule of law is. Both are concerned with the preconditions of a free society, a spontaneous or self-generating order as it emerges from the interaction of individuals whose personal liberty is protected by the law and whose commercial dealings are governed by generally applicable rules of just conduct. Generally, Germans do not begin to have a suspicion that capitalism (the economy of a free society) and the rule of law (the legal order of a free society) create a kind of self-organizing order that alone deserves to be called a civilization.

Instead, Germans are passionately distrustful of others and, therefore, accept the limitation of their personal freedom by mythical agents of collectivism. It is hardly recognized that it is this collectivism - representing an unbroken tradition since the country's inception - that gives them grounds to be distrustful of others. Tell them about self-generating order, and they shudder with fear of anarchy.

The authorities tell the Germans that they live in a Rechtsstaat (i.e. under the rule of law), and the people are convinced of its existence, proud to live under it and disdainful of peoples in other parts of the world who do not honour the rule of law, while in fact, we are facing a case of not just the emperor having no clothes on but an entire population running around nakedly.

And so, our nation building efforts in Afghanistan - bristling with guns - are designed to introduce a democracy that we no longer have and a rule of law that never existed in Germany.


[This post is in statu nascendi]

[4] News from Absurdistan - Chörman Freedom

The other day, I had a conversation with an American and his German wife. At one point, I suggested it being somewhat reassuring that in the States you do come across people who understand freedom, while in Germany the concept is not known. The German lady cut me off to propose: "...but there is so much crime in the US," and went on to tell me about a host of frightening things that she attributed to "too much freedom" over there.

The lady's view is representative of the notion of freedom that people in Germany have: freedom, to them, is tantamount to a dangerous lack of state control. And if people are to be granted freedom, it must be carefully dosed and judiciously monitored by the authorities.

Germans feel very strongly about this and get awfully puzzled when freedom is characterized as a fundamental value, rather than a residual to be tolerated once our lives have been appropriately organized and regulated by the state.

This stance is not confined to the casual political philosophers among the population at large, it is ardently held by the intellectual elite.

Two examples:

(1) Legal positivism

Recently, I listened to a speech given by one of the foremost minders of the rule of law in Germany, a man holding a position roughly equivalent to that of a Member of the Supreme Court in the US. He posed himself the question: "Do the political parties in Germany take too many liberties?" ("Nehmen sich die Parteien zuviel heraus?"). I should add that of the few parties in Germany virtually each one is somewhere, somehow in power on the federal or state level, or otherwise involved in positions of effective political power - so the question was really meant to read: Are the ruling parties taking too many liberties?

The conclusion of his lengthy deliberations was clear cut: "No, not at all." And, in a sense, he was absolutely right, our guardian of the rule of law in Germany. For, there are no restraints on those who rule. You got the approval of the majority? Fine, go ahead and do as you like. The odd fig leave aside, Germany continues its tradition of absolute power, which under the doctrine of the Volkssouverän is granted to the Parliament (sovereignty, that is: the highest and unrestrained power resides in the people represented by the parliament). And that is considered the rule of law according to one of the foremost jurists of the country.

Legal positivism, one of Germany's most calamitous exports, the idea that the law is set by whoever happens to be in power, legal positivism remains the fundamental philosophy of law in this country, linking up the Kaiser, the Führer and the Volkssouverän to form an unaltered tradition.

The only serious complaint that the guardian of the rule of law levelled at the political parties in Germany: "Wir brauchen charismatischere Führer" - "We need leaders with more charisma." Like himself - who had a lot of charisma, but unfortunately not the kind of legal education one would expect to be rewarding by paying him a salary.

Again, here is the problem: Not even the intellectual elite in Germany is aware of the basics of a free society. Let them disagree with freedom, if they must - but make sure they know the argument in favour of liberty - but they do not.

(2) Anticapitalist economists and their misconception of the rule of law (part I)

Last year, I attended a lecture given by one of Germany's most illustrious economists. Actually, a chap considered a staunch adherent of the free market. In his lecture he ran the audience through the numerous problems of the German economy, painting a pretty bleak picture. He wound up on a remarkable set of conclusions: Firstly, he seemed convinced that history has come to its final stage in Germany in that mass unemployment has become an eternally insurmountable problem. Secondly, his list of solutions to the ills of the German economy was headed by "Purer Kapitalismus" ("undiluted capitalism"), which he and the audience had a dismissive laugh at. Thirdly, the remedy that he favoured was "der aktivierende Sozialstaat" ("the activating welfare state"), by which he meant a policy change that would take the country away from rewarding idleness to enforcing participation in the labour market. Apparently, the idea here is to terminate unemployment benefits for those unwilling to take a job. Alternatively, those who do take on a job at a wage below the minimum wage will receive compensation for the shortfall from the welfare state. A new version of the Reichsarbeitsdienst, which is the term to describe conscripted labour in the Third Reich, when unemployed Germans were drafted to work, famously contributing among other projects to building the Autobahnen? From the lecture it was not clear whether German firms would be required to take on staff they otherwise would not be willing to employ - or what alternative arrangements are to be applied. Be this as it may - here you have German-style free market solutions. The audience was pleased by the brilliant advancement of German economic policy that the guru had adapted from the teachings of Lenin et al. to the "needs" of present-day Germany.

Chörman freedom.

In the next post ([1] Fundamental Issues - The Rule of Law and the Economy), I shall explain the fundamental fallacy in the German conception of the relationship between the rule of law and the economy. After all, our clever economist came to his quaint conclusions because he is trapped in a German dogma, according to which "the rule of law (German-style)" is supposed to correct the inherent viciousness of the economy. Germans are proud of a so-called "soziale Marktwirtschaft" ("social[ly benign] market economy") whose outstanding accomplishment is seen to consist in correcting the intrinsic malignancy of a "free" market economy through the wisdom of political fiat.

Again, "free(dom)" has an unbecoming ring to German ears. "Social" is deemed better than "free".

[3] News from Hypocristan - Cheap Talk and the Armchair Resistance Fighter

Germans like to advertise their uncompromising anti-fascism - the more so the less the cost of acquiring such a reputation.

"Why did you not fight against Hitler?" asks a son his father.
"I was born in 1946 [one year after Hitler's death]," replies his father.
"Well, why didn't your generation...the contemporaries...?"

Let me highlight two problems with German Vergangenheitsbewältigung [the effort to come to grips with the Nazi-past].

First, there is a convenient tendency to be so historically specific about the issue as to effectively take a uselessly ahistoric stance. Nazism is not likely to reoccur in its historic form. By couching anti-fascism in terms of the reality of the historic Nazi-regime, one is barking up a tree that is no more and will never grow again.

It is not the paraphernalia of historic Nazism that should preoccupy us but the alarming state of being intellectually disarmed so as not to understand freedom and the horrendous dangers of its absence. And in that all-important respect, people nowadays are hardly more knowledgeable and ready to act appropriately than at the time when Hitler gained and held power in Germany.

Second and relatedly, relying on the benefit of hindsight is much easier than living up in the present day to the standards of courage and political discernment that today's critics demand of people who lived in the Nazi-period.

Part of "coping with the past" should consist in appreciating how difficult it was for many people in the 1920s and 1930s to see through and oppose what then constituted "political correctness".

The Weimar Republic (1919-1933), preceding the Third Reich (1933-1945), was - irrespective of constituting a democracy - completely dominated by enemies of freedom - Marxist social democrats, communists, national socialists and other anti-liberal (European meaning, i.e. anti-libertarian) forces, who in one way or another preached the nation's birth theme of the citizen's duty to obey and live for an authoritarian and paternalistic state.

After dropping the "national" prefix in 1945, socialism continued to be viewed as being capable of assuming a desirable form and was supported by the majority of Germans immediately after the war.

It was a fluke of history that one man - Ludwig Ehrhard - was able to put Germany on a non-socialist track in 1948 (pulling off almost an accidental coup, see the first post in this blog).

But the totalitarian forces would eventually prevail, most notably in the form of the Studentenbewegung (the student's movement) in the mid and late 1960s - a movement that would prove formative for the political development of the country ever since.

When the rebellion's spontaneous fire subsided, the Marxist student's resolved to go on "a long march through the institutions" - der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen - and have largely succeeded in this attempt, with their anti-libertarian thinking now permeating the social institutions of the country. Incidentally, the student's movement drew much support, sympathy and admiration from its anti-fascist stand, while the more fundamental fact that it - like the Nazi movement - was utterly opposed to the values of freedom and fiercely advocating a totalitarian society remained largely unnoticed.

That totalitarian structures can take other forms than those experienced under the Swastika or the Hammer and the Sickle is little appreciated in a country obsessed with backward looking views of totalitarianism.

Opposition to the system is no longer en vogue, the radicals with leadership potential are busy at the troughs of a political infrastructure that invites and rewards special interests, especially when embellished by socialist mystique ("capitalism is destroying the planet").

Those who demand - as a matter of course - that people living in the 1920s and 1930s should have known what we know today about the Third Reich and should have risked their lives to stop Hitler, are (or could be, if they cared) much better informed, command more resources and have far more leeway for resistance than Germans living 50, 60 or 70 years ago.

Yet, when you ask them to do something about the things they do not like in our political culture, they drop back into their armchair and mumble: "There is nothing you can do about it."

The roots of apathy are manifold, but an important contributor to it is the primitively truncated conception of democracy that prevails among the population - essentially, the accomplishment of compulsory state education: the government has been democratically elected, so what it does is legitimate.

And this superficial and facile philosophy of legitimate power has so lulled the majority that the political caste is increasingly confident to stretch their presumed mandate further and further away from any meaningful source of empowerment or even drop any democratic pretences - which, in turn, gradually weakens democracy and heightens the importance of pure marketing - the strong preference for alarmist contentions attests to it, and who would not be willing to concede little understood freedom and democracy to, say, the need to save the planet? Hence, also the proliferation of "Wars" on this, that and the other.

Recently, we had the case of a young man, Murat Kurnaz, born in Germany and spending his life here, only to end up in Guantanamo after being seized during a sojourn in Pakistan. There was a brief flare of indignation when his gruesome fate as a suspected terrorist and his total innocence were eventually revealed to the German public. The domestic authorities, heavily involved in the history of Kurnaz's imprisonment, however, pointed out that the man holds a Turkish, not a German pass board - and that settled the matter. No more indignation.

People in Germany do not know a concentration camp when they see one, it seems. Even worse, one does not generally encounter the position here that Guantanamo is not a concentration camp. It is just that - it kind of is not our business. So much for Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Maybe, it will take several decades for people to feel sufficiently removed from any risks to ardently denounce what has been done to that young Turk.

[2] News from Absurdistan - What Is 'Doublethink'?

As of writing these lines, Germany's most frequented DE>EN - EN>DE on-line-dictionary reveals uncertainty as to the meaning of the term "doublethink".

http://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=307224&idForum=2&lp=ende〈=de

Is this a case of the confused finding it difficult to sort out their confusion? I suspect so. I harbour the presumption that muddled thinking is essential to upholding what a vast number of people in Germany consider their dearest believes. The ever-present intimidation of "political correctness" both expresses and enforces "intellectual" commitments concocted from inconsistency, cowardice and opportunism.

Let me give you an example of how doublethink serves to fend off the moral overload people are constantly exposed to these days:

Recently, a senior civil servant told me that he had applied for a new job. He regarded himself the best candidate for the position but was almost certain he would not be considered because the second best applicant would likely be favoured on the grounds of being a woman. He thought this unjust. When I challenged him to protest the probable decision, he switched to a different position, underwriting the need for positive discrimination (affirmative action) on behalf of women.

The implications of the underlying theory which he espoused startled me: The first assumption was that there is a uniform view as to the station women deserve in our time. The second assumption was that this standard of where women should have arrived at in our days has been anticipated by all men in human history, only to be studiously violated by them until very recently. The third assumption was that the male conspiracy behind the suppression of women established a guilt among contemporary men and an obligation for them to make good in terms of positive discrimination favouring women.

In the course of our discussion, he remained trapped in doublethink, firmly believing both that it was not right to pass the best candidate over and that such injustice assumed the quality of just behaviour when it came to restoring women's rightful station in contemporary life.

Eventually tired of the debate, he told me that the issue was of little import as the promotion would involve only a negligible pay rise and that his present position required only one or two days effective work per week and thus left much leeway for other activities to satisfy his needs.

Incidentally, the man's job is to define what our pupils are to be taught.

A hallmark of our time, assiduously promoted in the educational system and asserted by a haggling variant of democracy, is the replacement of consistent principles of justice by a calculus of popularity ("but that is what everyone thinks") and expediency ("why, I can/can't get away with it"). The idea that justice rests on consistent principles gives way to a notion of justice based on the enforcement of organized interests.

Once special interests are fortified by a majority, the totalitarian concept of democracy (i.e. the belief in the unconstrained power of a majority) guarantees that these special interests define justice - arbitrarily, of course.

Democracy as we know it, i.e. the philosophy holding that political power defines justice, overrides consistency and, thus, creates moral overload and the need for doublethink.

Main Entry: dou·ble·think
Pronunciation: 'd&-b&l-"thi[ng]k
Function: noun
: a simultaneous belief in two contradictory ideas

(Source: Merriam-Webster)

[1] News from Absurdistan - Are You a Good Christian?

To overcome the dearth of left-wing parties that do actually profess to be left-wing, a new party has constituted itself in Germany: "the left" headed by a certain Herr Oskar Lafontaine. In his inaugural speech Herr Lafontaine pronounced that "a socialist does not have to be a Christian. But a Christian must be a socialist." Now, that leaves some Christians with a problem, for how are they to know whether they are Christians, or more fundamentally: socialists. Who is a pseudo-Christian scoundrel and who is a sound Christian? These and many more pressing questions will be finally addressed and exhaustively resolved by a new force in the country.

[1] Understanding Freedom (UF) - The Meaning of Freedom

The title of my blog is "Understanding Freedom".

The term "freedom" has a range of denotations. Let me make it clear in what sense I am using the expression:

An individual being independent of, free from or protected against arbitrary interference by another person or other persons.

Thus, freedom defines a social relationship, a state of affairs unique to the interaction of human beings.

The way I use the term, it does not mean "inner freedom" nor the physical "freedom" (i.e. ability) to have or accomplish something. It is entirely a negative term, denoting the absence of a certain type of interference - namely, the imposition of one person's will upon another person.

So, what do I mean by "arbitrary" and what by "interference", and when is "arbitrary interference" absent so that freedom prevails?

Freedom presupposes that the individual is given a private sphere, a realm of circumstances that no one else is entitled to interfere with.

Freedom is a protective condition that gives an individual the ability to act in line with her own plans and decisions.

Freedom is the absence of certain impediments to our conduct - specifically, the absence of that type of coercion by others that suspends a person's ability to act in line with his own plans and decisions.

"Arbitrary" means "in disrespect of personal freedom".

"Arbitrary interference" is the intrusion into or violation of the protected realm of the individual, an encroachment on personal freedom.

An example - that also shows how much the ability to discern the basic requirements of freedom is disappearing: Private property, the protected realm of the individual, is arbitrarily re-categorized as belonging to the public sphere, as when privately owned bars, restaurants and other places are called "public places" and rules are enacted that prohibit the owner and his guests to smoke.

It is common today to organize special interests, gain formal political legitimacy for these (mostly by representing them as the outcome of majority rule) and impose special concerns on the public in clear violation of the requirements of personal freedom.

Rather than putting political proposals to the test of being compatible with personal freedom, nowadays, the only test (if any is applied in the face of institutions either very loosely or not at all legitimized) pertains to procedure (majority approval) but not substance (adherence to the rule of law).

This is the totalitarian concept of democracy.

By contrast: A right - as the fundamental building block of freedom - is a permit to act in one's own self-interest with total control over one's own life and property as long as others are not injured nor their property taken or damaged.

...if German Soldiers Would Not Be Required to Kill and Die [C 3]

Originally, going to war in Afghanistan was sold to the public as an indispensable means of protecting the West against a hotbed of international terrorism. There is ample evidence in the meantime that this rationale had not been pursued seriously. No consideration had been given to selective measures indubitably related to legitimate Western self-defence. Thus, the public was not told that the Taliban were ready not only to negotiate with the West but to extradite Osama Bin Laden. To no avail: the West had its mind set on all-out war and regime change.

The Germans asked to play a special role in this: They would fully support the war and help their allies to kill and die - if German soldiers would not be required to kill and die.

So long as the number of German casualties does not touch the threshold of adverse attention and the folks back home have goose pimples for all that touching humanitarianism our soldiers bestow on the savages of Afghanistan, we are happy and proud to shape the fate of that foreign country, always ready to use force against indigenous spoilsports recklessly refusing to accept the generous blessings of the Western jihad.

"Welfare has no principle," said Immanuel Kant; there will be more occasion to spell out his point; for the time being, let it be said: our domestic notion of welfare - which is based on the arbitrary power of dominant interest groups and boils down to the law of the strongest (in the political arena) - is constitutive of our imperial adventures, too.

For more see

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,475198,00.html

The below excerpt describes the task of German reconnaissance jets that are being deployed to Afghanistan to ferret out and pinpoint enemy fighters so they can be taken out by allied troupes. The killing job itself is referred to as "Kampfeinsätze" (combat deployment), which the Germans insist that they are not participating in. Can you fathom the hypocrisy! We are not doing anything bad, we just tell our friends where the "bastards" are, we don't shoot at the enemy, we make sure we don't get shot at and otherwise provide school benches for the illiterate to look nice and humanitarian.

We try to stick to the bright side of war, endeavouring not to get overly involved - after all, at home, we are not too serious about the purpose the war is meant to impose on Afghanistan: democracy (see my previous post - [C 2]: "The Essence of Political Culture in Germany").

"Die mit speziellen Kamerasystemen ausgestatteten Aufklärungsflugzeuge sollen Taliban-Stellungen ausfindig machen, damit diese von Nato-Partnern gezielt angegriffen werden können. Sie selbst sollen sich nicht an Kampfeinsätzen beteiligen."

And from a letter to a friend:

In den Nachrichten (ARD, ZDF z.B.) wird das Geständnis Mohammeds unverblümt in Verbindung gebracht mit der Möglichkeit, dass es unter Folter erzwungen worden sei - als handele es sich dabei um eine Nuance. Der Tatsache, dass Folter - ob in diesem Fall angewendet oder nicht - in den USA legalisiert wurde, wird kaum Beachtung geschenkt, geschweige denn, dass eine Protestbewegung in Gang käme oder das wunderbare antifaschistische deutsche Volk sich dagegen auflehnen würde. Stattdessen Nibelungentreue auf der ganzen Linie: Was man den Islamisten vorwirft, betreibt der Westen mit militärischer Beihilfe der Deutschen: die Verbreitung des eigenen Glaubens (an die Demokratie) mit Feuer und Schwert. Deutsche führen Krieg in einem Land, das ihnen nichts getan hat - und keiner stört sich daran. Das bisschen Interesse, das man der Sache entgegenbringt, gilt der Hoffnung, den Krieg so zu führen, dass deutsche Soldaten nicht gefährdet werden.

Ursachenforschung, das Ausloten der tatsächlichen Hintergründe des kriegerischen Einfalls in Afghanistan - alles ersetzt durch oberflächlichen Medienrummel: Die deutsche Öffentlichkeit lässt sich so leicht für dumm verkaufen wie damals als der angebliche polnische Überfall auf eine Radiostation in Gleiwitz als Rechtfertigung des Angriffs auf Polen überschwenglich begrüßt wurde:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/031507a.html

The Essence of Political Culture in Germany [C 2]

Freedom has never been understood, endorsed and vigorously defended by the larger public in Germany. There is an unbroken general belief in the utter need to be ruled and regulated by a powerful state supposedly capable of replacing the inherent vices of its subjects by the superior foresight and benignity of those who happen to govern. The powers that be have it easy in Germany, the country of “anticipatory obedience” (vorauseilender Gehorsam). The only deeply felt political attitude to be found among contemporary Germans is a passionate desire to be ruled. People do not even care, who is ruling them. What is important to them is that they are being ruled, no matter by whom.

Is this an exaggeration? Judge for yourselves: Germany is waging a war of aggression against a country that has done no harm to Germans: Afghanistan. There is no opposition to this among Germans. The declared aim of regime change is considered an exercise in humanitarian help. Leading a jihad to bring democracy to a people by way of “fire and sword” is deemed one of the great accomplishments of our political culture. We are so giving (again). Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen, meaning: may the world thrive under the influence of the German way.

How little people in Germany really care about anything but being ruled somehow by someone is revealed by no lesser dignitary than the former Bundespräsident (head of state) Roman Herzog, who calls into question the existence of a parliamentary democracy in Germany, pointing out that 80% of the rulings binding to the German citizenry have been decreed by a European bureaucracy backed by no democratic credentials.

After more than fifty years of “conscientious” grappling with the Nazi-catastrophe, the core creed of the average German boils down to this: Let them do what they like as long as my pension looks safe.

From a letter to a friend:

Rough English rendering of the below German passage:

...actually, nobody is concerned with the way we are being ruled...What people are adamant about is that we should be ruled.

Hence, even the question thought to be of overriding importance to us model-democrats - i.e. who ought to and should be allowed to govern us - is not posed in honesty.

Little wonder that a much more momentous issue receives no attention at all: how can we make sure that those who govern us (representing a very limited government, one hopes) will do the least damage possible.

...aber in Wirklichkeit interessiert sich niemand für die Art, wie wir regiert werden...Hauptsache wir werden regiert.

Also, selbst die einzige Frage, mit der wir, die ach so guten Demokraten, uns befassen zu müssen glauben - nämlich wer soll und darf uns regieren - ist nicht ehrlich gemeint.

Was nimmt es Wunder: Die demgegnüber viel wesentlichere Frage stellt natürlich keiner: Wie können wir dafür sorgen, dass die, die uns regieren (hoffentlich eine very limited government), den geringsten Schaden anstellen können.

For the "democratic" character of the EU see:

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2004/08/myth-of-week.html

For the former Bundespräsident's contention that it is hard to consider Germany a representative democracy see:

http://www.welt.de/politik/article715345/Europa_entmachtet_uns_und_unsere_Vertreter.html