Stumbling and Mumbling

"Managed" migration & multiculturalism

The Spectator's leader contains (at least) two silly claims. First:

Nobody sane can be opposed to a managed migration system that functions well

Leave aside the fact that a well-functioning managed migration system is just impossible. Leave aside too the nasty and illiberal smearing of one's opponents as mentally ill. My gripe is that this claim is just false. Everyone's opposed to managed migration.
Put it this way. I'm hoping to migrate to Rutland soon. And no state functionary is stopping me. There's no border control on the A606 where some BNP-supporting leech on the tax-payer will ask me dickhead questions or lock me up. No-one is managing migration into Rutland. And no "sane" person thinks they should.
So, if a managed migration system is unnecessary in Rutland, why is it "sanity" for Britain? What's the difference?
One possibility is that immigrants to Britain put pressure on public services. But many migrants to Rutland put pressure on Rutland council's services; many move there for the schools. And insofar as immigrants claim welfare benefits, the solution is to deny them these, not to manage their entry.
Another possibility is that I'll not be bidding down Rutlanders' wages in the way immigrants bid down Brits' wages. But this is is just false; insofar as immigrants reduce wages for low-skilled workers, they'd do so even if they stayed at home.
A third possibility is that Rutland doesn't need an immigration policy simply because the numbers moving to Rutland are small. But say there were 600 people a year moving into Rutland. Would everyone really support immigration controls then? Unlikely. As many would welcome demand for their houses and services as would want to keep out Peterborians or Lincolnians with their funny accents and stinking food. But 600 migrants to Rutland is equivalent to over a million into the UK.
The second silly claim is this:

...the misguided creed of ‘multiculturalism’, the invention of white left-wing ideologues...

This is just illiterate boilerplate partisanship. If Matthew D'Ancona had read to the end of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia - a book not generally considered left-wing ideology - he'd have found a chapter, A Framework for Utopia, in which he says:

Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions...many particular communities internally may have restrictions unjustifiable on libertarian grounds.

This, surely, is multiculturalism. Sure, it's not precisely the left's notion of it. But the differences between Nozick's conception and the left's concern the limits of the state, not multiculturalism as such. Could it be that multiculturalism - in some senses at least - is not a left-wing ideology but just freedom?

Corporate totalitarianism

The Thoresen review of generic financial advice hasn't got the attention it deserves. Which is a shame, because it demonstrates a sinister ideology - a mix of corporatism and totalitarianism.
The totalitarian aspect lies in the presumption that the state should concern itself with individuals' character. "Good money sense needs to be as much part of people's lives in the 21st century as healthy eating and keeping fit" says Thoresen. But the people cannot be trusted to be prudent left to their own devices. They must be taught to be so. Hence Thoresen's recommendation that the "government" (meaning taxpayer) must spend up to £832 million  providing financial advice.
Nor is it merely the state that must do the teaching. The lessons must be more intrusive than that. Thoresen wants them inserted into soaps*.
And guess who'll benefit from this? The financial "services" industry. Thoresen reckons (pdf) it could gain over £5bn, as financial advice cuts bad debts, reduces the need to advertise and drums up demand for savings products. All this at the tax-payers' expense.
The justification for this, Thoresen claims, is that it'll be a net saving for taxpayers. He reckons the government will make up to £6bn, as it rakes in tax revenues from the additional savings products and spends less on pension tax credits.
But this is highly doubtful. Good financial advice should direct people towards tax-efficient savings vehicles such as ISAs and personal pensions. So tax revenues could fall. And it should tell poorer ones that there's no point saving modestly for a pension, as they're guaranteed a minimum income anyway.
What we have then, is a nanny statism in which tax-payers' money is to be used to prop up private industry. And where does the supposedly objective report which recommends this come from? The chief executive of a financial "services" firm.
As I said, big business and free markets are two different things.
* He forgets that Corrie has already featured a financial advisor - Richard Hillman - who was a psychopathic serial killer, which was a pretty accurate estimate of the moral standing of the industry.

Law vs bargaining power

Was the defeat of trades unions in the 1980s really such a great victory for free market liberalism?
The campaign to give temporary and agency workers the same legal rights as full-time ones raises this question.
What it shows is that campaigners now try to to protect workers not through organized unions but through the law. What used to be done by unions is now done in parliament, with minimum wage or health and safety laws or the proposed agency workers' bill.
The problem is, though, that the law is a much blunter weapon than unions. Take agency workers. Some of these, as Johann shows, are genuinely being ripped off. Others, as the CBI claims, are workers who value the variety of work that temping offers. The law cannot distinguish the two. In principle, though, trades union organization could. A stronger union movement would protect exploited agency workers, whilst not throttling happier agency workers in red tape. Similarly, whereas legal minimum wages don't distinguish between areas of low and high labour costs, or between sectors with elastic and inelastic demand for labour, a sensible strong labour movement could.
In this sense, those who want the state to butt out of the labour market should regret the decline of unions, as the gap these have left has been filled (partly) by crude laws.
Workers' bargaining power can be a substitute for the law.
And here's where there's (yet another!) case for a basic income. As this would give workers an income regardless of whether they worked or not, it would increase their bargaining power and thus reduce the need for labour market laws. With a basic income, workers would be freer to take or leave agency jobs, low-paid or dangerous work. So there'd be less need for legal protection.
So, if you want a free market, one way to get there is to empower workers to be able to take or leave bad jobs.
But then, we know why this option gets such little consideration, don't we?

New Labour as Sharia

If there's such a hoo-ha over the Archbishop's call for some aspects of Sharia law to be recognized by UK law, why shouldn't there be an uproar about this?:

A legally enforceable cinema-style classification system is to be introduced for video games in an effort to keep children from playing damaging games unsuitable for their age, the Guardian has learned. Under the proposals, it would be illegal for shops to sell classified games to a child below the recommended age....
Ministers are also expected to advise parents to keep computers and games consoles away from children's bedrooms as much as possible, and ask them to play games in living rooms or kitchens facing outward so carers can see what is being played.

The thing is, there are at least three parallels between this and Sharia:
1. Both believe the law should intervene in private life, in people's bedrooms. In this respect, both differ from the liberal conception of law, which recognizes a private sphere.
2. Both reject the clear liberal distinction between what's legal and illegal. Instead, some actions - such as letting one's children's play unsupervised indoors - though legal, are frowned upon (makrooh) by the authorities.
3. Both are founded upon a belief that is perhaps wrong but certainly doubtful (pdf) - in one case that there's a God dictating our actions, in the other that the causes of teenage violent crime can be managed away by state intervention. 
So, could it be that New Labour is closer to Sharia - in its less barbaric form of course - than it is to liberalism? Threats to liberty don't just come from people with dusky skins.

Bosses & bansturbation

If anyone was ever stupid enough to think that big business was the friend of freedom, Mark Moody-Stuart, chairman of Anglo-American, should disabuse them.  He wants to ban cars that do less than 35mpg.
You have to admire his self-restraint in not expressing this opinion during the 39 years he worked at Shell. But there's nothing else to admire.
In particular, his argument against current arrangements - whereby people who drive silly cars pay more fuel tax - is especially daft:

When we eliminated coal fires in London we didn't say to people in Chelsea you can pay a bit more and toast your crumpets in front of an open fire - we said nobody, but nobody, could have an open fire.

What this misses is that it was just impractical to make people in Chelsea pay to emit smoke. To do so would have required an army of inspectors to catch people out. The market-based solution, a price on smoke, was inefficient. By contrast, the market-based solution to gas guzzlers - fuel duty - is efficient.
In failing to appreciate the virtues of markets and freedom, Moody-Stuart reminds us of an important fact -that bosses, as well as government, can be enemies of liberty.

Exploitation and freedom

Russell Roberts argues that Wal-Mart can’t exploit workers because so many people apply for jobs there. Is this valid, or is it the sort of error that Norm deplores?
To see the problem, imagine a sort of Gulag Archipelago, in which some prison labour camps are more oppressive than others. Prisoners are free to apply to enter particular camps, but not free to leave the archipelago. There will then be thousands of applicants to enter the less onerous camp, and successful applicants will be happy to get there.
But it doesn’t follow that these are not exploited. And their freedom is horribly limited. It‘s a choice amongst oppressive exploiters; the option of leaving the system altogether doesn’t exist, at least for the individual*.
To Marxists, capitalism is like this archipelago. It offers choices of degrees of oppression and therefore some freedom. But the choice that matters most doesn’t exist. In capitalism, workers lack an outside option. 
The question is, are Marxists right? Defenders of capitalism would reject my analogy in two ways:
1. They would define coercion (and hence unfreedom) as only the conscious actions of state agents. Men in the archipelago are coerced. But men in capitalism are not.
2. Under capitalism, the outside option is a natural state of rural idiocy - subsistence farming and poverty.
Marxists reply that point 2 is wrong; outside options should be richer than a state of nature, with various forms of socialism among them.
And, they say, point  1 is a narrow etiolated conception of freedom that drains the notion of value. What’s more, people have often been deprived of an outside choice because state-sanctioned primitive accumulation has robbed them of their land**. As the man said:

Nowhere and at no time has the large scale ownership of land come into being through the workings of economic forces in the market. It is the result of military and political effort. Founded by violence, it has been upheld by violence and that alone.

(That’s not Marx, its von Mises.)
As you know, I side with the Marxists on these points. But that’s not my main point. The point is merely that long queues for jobs at Wal-Mart, or at any factory in the third world, is no proof at all that workers are free and unexploited.
* It’s possible that the prisoners could collectively revolt and overthrow the Gulag system. Does the fact that they don’t do so show tacit consent? This raises issues for another day.
** If you think it relevant that the primitive accumulation described in these links happened under a "Communist" government, you misunderstand Marxism as badly as the Chinese government does.

Moronic metal-detector scheme

How bad an idea is this?

Metal detectors are to be installed at hundreds of schools in England as part of a drive to reduce knife crime.

I see six objections.
1. It's not the job of schools to stop young people carrying weapons. It should be the job of the police. I say "should be" because they seem to have lost sight of this.
2. Cost. The money spent on these, and on searching pupils could be spent on other things, like teaching them something.
3. Effectiveness. The kids most likely to be caught by this scheme are the terrified, bullied ones who carry knives only for self-defence. The real criminals will either switch from knives to less detectable weapons such as acid or pepper sprays, or simply not turn up to school.
4. Possible counter-productivity. Put yourself in the shoes of a rebellious but law-abiding teenager. Mightn't he think: "if I'm going to be treated like a criminal, I might as well act like one." I would.
5. Changing the culture of schools. Metal-detectors send a message: schools are not places of learning, devoted to the cooperative pursuit of knowledge. They are merely yet another site at which the iron fist of the state treats its subjects with contempt and suspicion.
6. Liberty. This represents a growing tendency to harrass and stigmatize law-abiding people. Everyone is to be treated like a criminal. Except, that is, criminals.

Freedom vs happiness

Freedom doesn't make us happy.  This is not a new observation,  but this paper (pdf) by Dan Haybron gives us one of the best statements of the idea I've seen. He argues that humans are generally psychologically unable to make choices that make us happy. For example:
1. We're bad at forecasting our future tastes. In particular, we fail to foresee that we'll adapt to our new circumstances.
2. We have positive illusions. We think we're better than we are; we exaggerate our ability to control our environment; and we are too optimistic.
3. We value hard, quantifiable, things like money more than less quantifiable but important things  - which might explain why people prefer the drudgery of long hours in factories to rural life.
4. Because we're loss averse, and value what we have, we stay in situations where we're unhappy, like frogs who stay in water getting gently hotter until they boil to death.
There's more here (pdf) from Christopher Hsee.
Most economists acknowledge these tendencies, but suspect they are mere quirks, small and cheap deviations from rationality. But, asks Haybron, might they be wrong? Might these be more ubiquitous, and more damaging to our well-being, than economists suppose?  Why, he asks, should human psychology, which evolved to deal with hunter-gatherer conditions, be well-equipped to make us happy in liberal societies?
Perhaps, he says, humans might benefit from constraints upon choice.
It's important, I think, to be clear about the implications here. It doesn't follow from this that freedom is not important. Perhaps its value is intrinsic, not consequentialist. Still less does it follow that anyone is in a position to tell us which constraints would improve our well-being; it's an almighty leap from the thought "freedom doesn't increase happiness" to "I know what's best for people". And it leaves open the questions: why does subjective well-being matter?  Is this really what we should be striving for?
Perhaps the message is just that freedom and happiness are two different things.

Why is free speech valuable?

What's so special about free speech? This is one question raised by the Oxford Union's invitation to David Irving and Nick Griffin that hasn't, I think, been adequately answered.
I reckon there are three answers that just won't do.
1. People have inalienable rights to free speech.
But what's the origin of these rights? If they arise out of a social contract, it might be reasonable to argue that Irving and Griffin have forfeit their rights, by effectively opting out of the contract. Irving has repeatedly tried to deny his critics the right of free speech. And both deny that blacks and Jews should be equal members of society. So why shouldn't we deny them the rights possessed by normal people?
2. Free speech is a way of approaching the truth.
Luke Tryl, who invited the men says: "The only way to win the battle with these people is to show their views to be ridiculous and stupid." In this, he echoes Mill, one of whose arguments for free speech was that men's errors were corrigible, and so discussion could lead to the truth.
Now, I'm not sure this is true of anyone; most of us cling too much to our Bayesian subjective priors however much rationality and evidence is thrown at us. And it's certainly not true of Irving. His views have been proved false in two law courts and yet he still holds them. The man is immune to reason and truth.  This just couldn't happen.
3. In banning speech we are arrogantly assuming our opinions to be infallible.
But our opinions that racism and Holocaust denial are wrong are surely infallible. What's more, given the damage done by such beliefs, it's wrong to oppose them lightly. Rortean irony is attractive in most cases, but not here.
Instead, I suspect that there are two other arguments for free speech. One is the slippery slope argument. If we use the law to suppress racism, we can use it to suppress religious hatred or even class hatred. And that leads to Ian Bone or Richard Dawkins being imprisoned. "Free speech for all" is a bright line principle that stops us having to decide arbitrarily where to draw the line between permitted and impermissible speech.
The other argument is about the nature of truth and equality. To use the law to suppress false speech is to suppose that matters of truth should be decided by those in power. But this is not so. The "Truth" - or approximations thereto - is owned equally, by all of us. The state has no more business deciding what is true than deciding what is beautiful.
The truth, then, being common property, should be protected by all of us. And this means that whilst I have no desire to use the law to suppress Irving and Griffin, I wholly support those who protested so vigorously last night.

Immigration & liberal values

Matthew Sinclair argues for limiting immigration:

4.6 per cent of the British population have arrived here in the last ten years. A great many of those have arrived with values incompatible with the Western tradition that Britain is a part of...Further immigration at the same rate might make it utterly impossible to defend liberal values whose defence is already looking fragile...An undermining of common values walks hand in hand with an undermining of national identity and the willingness to compromise.

As an argument for limiting immigration in total, this won't do. "Liberal values" and "national identity" are two different things. Many Brits' love of freedom is sadly lacking. Immigration can be a way of shoring up this love. Generations of Jewish immigrants (and their descendants) have surely contributed to support for liberty. The immigration of Ugandan Asians in the 1970s rekindled entrepreneurial spirits. And one way in which the sons of Caribbean immigration in the 50s have been a welcome presence is by combatting oppressive policing.
Indeed, you'd expect many immigrants to love freedom, if only because they have experience of its opposite.
What's more, immigration controls are inherently an attack upon liberal values, because they curtail people's rights to live and work where they want, and hire whom they want. They accelerate, to use Matthew's words, the "slow death of the values that define what is best in our society."
Which brings me to the problem. I omitted an important line in the above quote:

Compare immigration to Britain now with previous waves of immigration that were smaller (the Huguenots were about one per cent of the British population) and didn't have the same clash of values and it is hard to see a parallel for the kind of challenge we already face.

What Matthew means by "immigration now" is "Muslims"; there's no "clash of values" between us and, say, Polish plumbers.
Let's - for the sake of argument - concede that Matthew is empirically right. Why does this justify general immigration controls rather than just a limit on Muslim immigrants? How would blanket controls on immigration help protect liberal values when they are inherently anti-liberal and stop supporters of those value entering?
Why don't people who share Matthews concerns call merely for a ban on Muslim immigrants?