Liberal Vision

The Prince, the Politician and the Player

We didn’t so much “wheel out the big guns” in Zurich, for the England’s 2018 World Cup Bid over the past couple of days, as haul out “bloody great canons”. And had David Cameron been anywhere like as good during the General Election Leaders debates as he was today in the final presentation – he would have won the Tories a clear majority single-handed back in May. I am rather surprised and somewhat delighted that despite going into this process  in second or (maybe even) third place, Cameron has had the balls to go for it. With all the talk of how Blair won the Olympic bid,  Cameron is putting his political neck out – and that takes a bit of guts.

I was against the Olympic bid -it was hugely costly, London-centric and however you look at it we are hardly a nation of 100 metre sprinters and shot-putters. Football is however the great national sport of this country. The event would be hosted right across the country – spreading the love (and the financial benefit) countrywide. And we have the stadiums (or stadia?) and the fans and the carparks, training grounds and hotels pretty much sorted in almost all circumstances.

I confess I am somewhat conflicted about government getting involved in the process – and have never had much time for royalty – but I guess my love of the beautiful game is winning this particular battle – a case of “whatever it takes”…. So I will take Cameron involvement, and the royals lending a hand and, for the record, I am hoping we will win. Yes the FA is in need of a total overhaul, its relationship with the Premier League is a disaster, many of the big clubs have lost contact with the fans and too many of the smaller clubs are run by numpties and dimwits….and lets not even talk about the players…. But for all that,  we are a football mad nation… I am a self-confessed football fanatic – and the World Cup is the finest competition in the world.

It’s anyones guess who will win it. Mafia ridden-Russia, financially-stricken Spain/Portugal, safe but dull Dutch/Belgians or the serially-rubbish-at-international-football English. I hope its us. Good luck to the prince, the politician, the player -and everyone else involved.

UPDATE: Conflict over. Russia wins the bid to host 2018 World Cup.

A Liberal Literary Hero: Mario Vargas Llosa wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

Liberal Vision has already celebrated the award of the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, and now we celebrate the award of the literature prize to the liberal Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whose great literary achievements have been accompanied by major contributions to  politics, and to political commentary in the Americas and in Spain.  For an overview of his literary achievements go to William Boyd at The Guardian and Marie Arana at The Washington Post.  Neither do justice to Llosa’s political views though, respectively describing Llosa as ‘libertarian right’ and ‘neo-liberal’.  Llosa defines himself as a liberal and criticises the use of the term ‘neo-liberal’.  While ‘libertarian right’ is a less intrinsically insulting term than neo-liberal, why should we call an advocate of progress in general, of secularism, gay marriage, and abortion rights, ‘right-wing’?

Llosa, who has Spanish citizenship, withdrew support from the centre-right Popular Party in Spain in 2007, to support the formation of Union, Progress and Democracy, which drew some of its leaders and activists from the Spanish left.  In any case, Llosa himself has ever adopted a right-wing identity, and that should be respected.  He clearly thinks of liberalism in the sense understood by classical liberals and libertarians, referring approvingly to Adam Smith, Tocqueville, and Mises.

Llosa began as a Communist in politics, but publicly turned against Latin America’s Communist icons Castro and Guevara, after persecution of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in the early seventies.  In the eighties Llosa became a public advocate of liberal political and economic ideas, culminating in his 1990 campaign for the Presidency of Peru, against the forces of left populism, Marxism, and the emergent authoritarianism of Alberto Fujimori.   Unfortunately Fujimori became President, but Llosa has continued to contribute to public life in Peru.  His resignation, a few weeks ago, from a commission overseeing a museum to commemorate a dirty war against he insurrectionary left, forced the government to drop a law to grant effective amnesty for human rights abuses of that time.

Llosa’s turn from Marxism to liberalism has earned him extraordinary enmity from leftist literati and intelligentsia, who are determined to smear him as supporting right-wing dictatorship and violent United States interventions in Latin America; and as a chauvinistic despiser of indigenous peoples in Latin America.   Llosa’s political writings and his literary creations clearly contradict such claims.  His novel The Feast of the Goat (2000) is a condemnatory portrayal of the right-wing dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.  The novel many consider his best, The War of the End of the World (1981), shows the horror of cruelty and fanaticism from all sources, referring to real events in nineteenth century Brazil.

Not only has Mario Vargas Llosa made a major contribution to liberal thought and culture, his son Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a very notable liberal writer on economics and politics, particularly with regard to Latin America.  More information can be found at The Independent Institute, where his journalistic articles are regularly posted.

Sadly only a small proportion of Mario Vargas Llosa’s political commentary is presently available in English.  There are some quotations below taken from items available online.  Names of  items, with links, are listed below, followed by items discussing Llosa on leading liberal websites.

‘Liberty, I believe, is the greatest contribution of the culture that created the sovereign individual, the owner of rights that other individuals and the state must respect at all times.   The culture that gives liberty an unprecedented and primary role in all realms of life has attained its leading role in science and technology, and has produced an abundance of wealth’ (‘The Children of Columbus’)

‘Globalisation opens up a first-class opportunity for the democratic countries of the world—and especially for the advanced democracies of America and Europe—to contribute to expanding tolerance, pluralism, legality, and liberty’ (‘Global Village or Global Pillage?’)

‘The idea of a world united around a culture of liberty is not a utopia but a beautiful and achievable reality that justifies our efforts’  (‘Liberalism in the New Millennium’)

‘Thus, the liberal I aspire to be considers freedom a core value. Thanks to this freedom, humanity has been able to journey from the primitive cave to the stars and the information revolution, to progress from forms of collectivist and despotic association to representative democracy. The foundations of liberty are private property and the rule of law; this system guarantees the fewest possible forms of injustice, produces the greatest material and cultural progress, most effectively stems violence and provides the greatest respect for human rights. According to this concept of liberalism, freedom is a single, unified concept. Political and economic liberties are as inseparable as the two sides of a medal.’ (‘Confessions of a Liberal’)

Links and Texts on Llosa:

• Mario Vargas Llosa (1995) Reason, ‘The Children of Columbus: From Violent Conquest to Common Culture’, LINK
• Mario Vargas Llosa (2001) Reason, ‘Global Village or Global Pillage? Why we must create a universal culture of liberty’, LINK
• A slightly different version of the above can also be found online
  ‘Liberalism in the New Millennium’ in ‘Global Fortune: The stumble and rise of world capitalism’, edited by Ian Vasquez, Cato Institute 2000.
• Mario Vargas Llosa (2005) American Enterprise Institute, ‘Confessions of a Liberal’, LINK
• Michael Valdez Moses, ‘Viva Mario’, Reason, LINK
• Nick Gillespie, ‘Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Prize in Literature  Reason, LINK
• Ian Vasquez on LLosa’s Nobel Prize, Cato@Liberty, LINK
• David Boaz ‘The Politics of Mario Vargas Llosa’, Cato@Liberty, LINK
• Ian Vasquez (2009) on Llosa’s view of Venezuela under Chavez. Cato@Liberty, LINK

It’s that time of year again: teen-lesbo-erotic A Level results day

A-level results … congratulate the kids … record passes … record A grades … not enough University places … dumbing down … getting easier every year…

yadda…

yadda…

And yadda again.

But this year, thanks to the interweb, you need not even buy a copy of any of Fleet Street’s finest rags; for THIS WEBSITE has compiled all the best shots of busty, ecstatic 18 year olds clutching result papers while screaming and taking up the classic “about to hug” lesbo-erotic pose that excites so many old Torygraph-reading retired Colonels.

Here’s my favourite of all time:

Do you think it’s airbrushed? Should the shots include more boys?

H/T: Alec van Gelder.

Freedom, but only for Jesus-loving ‘Murcans

The 9/11 attacks were coined an “attack on our freedoms” both in the USA and in other parts of the West (like here). This seemed like reasonable rhetoric, at least until the US government came up with the Patriot Act and a variety of plans to drop a load of bombs on people in the Middle East.

The latest sadly ironic post-9/11 assault on freedom involves the reactionary opposition to some community centre in New York which will apparently include a mosque. This has widely been reported as a plan to “build a mosque on ground zero”, yet as this blog post shows, the mosque isn’t even that close to ground zero:

To borrow Big Apple parlance, the mosque is “two blocks” away. Presumably some flats/shops/offices in that area even include people called Mohammed.

The Redistribution Delusion

One of the most important books for left liberals in recent years has been the “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better“. It’s important for number of reasons, however the main one is that it appears to provide an empirical basis to justify policies that redistribute income for no purpose other than redistribution.

In some Liberal Democrat and Labour circles it has been treated with a sense of uncritical reverence usually reserved for religious tracts.

This is not entirely without reason, it is a good read, and the weight of statistical evidence, both comparisons between countries and between US states, across multiple social trends do seem to point to unarguable case that more equal societies are, on the whole, nicer places to live.

Those then claiming to seek “evidence-based politics” should be pleased by the detailed rebuttal issued by Policy Exchange today – Beware of False Prophets.

The 125 page white paper is also a cracking read and debunks the Spirit Level correlation arguments almost entirely, bar in the one instance of infant mortality, often using their own evidence. A table at the end summarises the problems

The rest of the paper goes through each of the claims in detail and provides comparative analysis, showing what happens when extreme cases are removed (for example the US heavily distorts murder rate correlations, Japan life expectancy).

Clusters of nations that do not explain inequality relationships elsewhere, but might reflect the result of cultural history (Remove Scandinavia and most inequality relationships collapse between the rest).

Highlighting selective use of evidence, such as country choice, and which social statistics they regard as important (they ignore all trends where more equal societies have it worse for example suicide rates, HIV, boozing and divorce).

That socialism encourages suicide does not surprise me, who aspires to be an arbitrary average? But I remain respectful of people’s right to choose the miserable philosophy for themselves. The Spirit Level also ignores rapid improvements in life expectancy in countries where inequality has also been rising.

The Spirit Level does not look a correlations that better explain social trends than income inequality. In their US data for example the uncomfortable conclusion of the counter-analysis is that “the proportion of African-Americans in a state is often a much stronger predictor of social outcomes than the level of income inequality”. True or not, it is a stark warning against using isolated social trend correlations to drive prescriptive policies.

On a smaller note within the same theme, when I had the opportunity to put a question to the author of the Spirit Level at a meeting last year, I asked him whether if his or similarly modelled data showed ‘rich’ countries with less freedom had better social outcomes than those with more freedom, he would advocate policies that reduce freedom. His prickly non-response did not suggest the kind of critical open mind that separates genuinely curious researchers from political activists.

An approach evident in his Equality Trust response to the Policy Exchange paper today, which does little more than reiterate previous points, rather than answer the challenges raised.

Prior to this publication I had thought the main problem with the Spirit Level was that it confuses correlation with causation, and suffers the delusion that very different states can simply be planned into better shape by state action if only we knew the right lever to pull. But this powerful rebuttal also makes clear that the correlations used are highly suspect, selective, and in many cases simply wrong.

As the report notes “Despite the enthusiastic reception this book has received from social commentators, its claims are unsupported. The ethical debate over inequality remains unresolved.”

This is not an argument that inequality doesn’t matter, or conversely that it’s a good thing. It is an argument against the distributionalist position that it is the only thing that matters or automatically more important than other social goods.

It is against the notion that by throwing money at redistribution all other things improve. General social trends it would seem are bad at improving your health for you, you may need to make some effort yourself.

To believe the Spirit Level has ended the left/right distribution/aspiration debate in politics, let alone within liberalism, is a delusion.