A short report by the Centre for Policy Studies, Keith Marsden’s “Big, not Better?”, published in April this year claims to provide evidence from 20 countries that slim governments work better. It’s a conclusion I like to hear. Unfortunately the evidence is less than solid.

The report compares 20 industrialised economies and classes their governments as big or slim depending on which side of a 40% of GDP threshold their government revenue and expenditure lie. Slimmer governments are shown to have lower top rates of tax, higher average growth figures and lower debt and deficit burdens on average.

Marsden then goes on to argue that slimmer governments also fared better in terms of social gains with inequality only slightly higher while achieving higher growth in employment and spending on public services while also spending more on defence.

The choice of success indicator is decidedly odd in some cases [1]. How much of a success story high employment growth is, for example, depends on the wider context: if near full employment is maintained throughout, then employment growth should largely be constrained by population growth and migration. It is possible then that slim economies with large employment growth figures simply had high unemployment to start with.

Unemployment rates given in the statistical appendix are consistent with this interpretation: Total unemployment rose from an average of 6.9% to 7.5% for the slimmer governments [2]. Among these averages we find substantial falls in unemployment for Australia, Canada and Ireland. On the other hand, Latvia and the Slovak Republic –two high unemployment economies– only enter the sample during the later 2000-2005 period. Without them, average unemployment would have been 5.98%.

When it comes to spending on public services and defence spending, the indicators chosen are input variables. Outputs may be harder to measure and compare, yet they should be what matters. Didn’t Britain’s New Labour government demonstrate that improvements –e.g. in the NHS– need not be reflective of spending increases? Shouldn’t that line of reasoning be one of the main supports for a pro-supply side argument?

Increased spending on public services, at first sight, looks like an odd indicator for the success of slim government. Doesn’t a rise in public service spending show that government is getting bigger? Well, that depends on how you look at it. The increase noted refers to real expenditure rather than expenditure as a percentage of GDP. The argument could therefore be made that increased spending on public services becomes economically sustainable in slimmer governments, where public finances seem to be better managed [3].

So, “Big, not Better” does present some background data consistent with support for supply side economics. It does this on the basis of a small, incomplete data set and a very crude analysis. Keith Marsden’s verdict that “… the analysis and prescriptions of the early supply siders were correct” therefore seems like a daring conclusion to be reached on this basis. With a more detailed discussion and a more cautious conclusion this report would have deserved to get taken more seriously. As it stands, one should be reluctant to rely on it in support of a small government agenda [4].

[1] Choice of time periods is another potential issue. GDP growth figures are given for the 1998-2008 period while export and investment growth averages are based on 2000-2005 data. For a number of indicators the 1990-2000 interval is compared to the shorter 2000-2005 period. It is not immediately clear what motivated the choice of time period, although this may simply be an issue of data availability.

[2] It fell from an average of 7.2% to 6.7% for bigger governments.

[3] This still would be a tentative argument. The relevant data in the statistical appendix are patchy, with budget data missing for 4 of the 10 slimmer government economies.

[4] The media reaction to this report turned out to be supportive to neutral nevertheless:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/04/07/do0701.xml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7333749.stm

Keith Marsden “Big, not Better?” Centre for Policy Studies

http://www.cps.org.uk/cpsfile.asp?id=1013

“I am increasingly worried by all kinds of legislation regulating peoples’ private lives. We are approaching a situation which I would call lifestyle-regulation. I don’t want a society in which people are told how to live in the privacy of their own homes. We must not deprive our citizens of the right to make independent decisions.” (source)

These are the words of Günther Verheugen, Vice President for Enterprise and Industry in the European Commission and member of Germany’s Social Democratic Party. The remarks were made in an interview to the German tabloid ‘Bild’. When asked about proposals for restrictions on automobile advertising, he was equally hostile:

“Enough! Keep you hands off advertising! Advertising belongs to a market economy. It must be allowed to advertise a product which is legally traded in the market. In the case of nicotine or alcohol there are reasons for restrictions – in the case of cars I am certain that no such case could be made.” (source)

Verheugen, of course, is no libertarian. He also supports the EU’s environmentalist agenda more generally. The fact though that environmentalism is seen as too authoritarian by a mainstream socialist should at least give some reason for hope.

Remember, when over one Million people signed a petition against a national road pricing scheme? Since then, road pricing plans have not enjoyed a high profile, but they have never been dropped. Traffic regulation anyway makes regular appearances in the news, so this monthly rant will look at two policy documents: a recent one from Conservative Way Forward and a more dated monograph on road pricing by the institute of economic affairs.

On the 26 February 2008, the daily telegraph reported on a Conservative Way Forward policy document titled “Stop the War against drivers” (pdf). One of the most interesting aspects of this document is not what it says about traffic as such but what it implies about politics in general. Another is how it differs from what one should expect from a Tory approach on road pricing.

Press attention in cases like this tends to focus on policy recommendations – unfortunately, some recommendations coming out of that text are rather daft: Most prominently, its author, Malcom Heymer, recommends that advanced drivers should get higher penalty point limits. The general emphasis on a less prescriptive approach to traffic regulation seems sensible though.

Regulating the roads

At first sight, traffic planning may seem to banal a political topic to merit in depth discussion. Yet, this is the one banality which in one way or another impacts on everybody’s life; it is also one problem area which is simple enough to bring out the systemic failures of top-down planning with unrivalled clarity.

In “Stop the War against drivers”, Heymer elaborates at length on how speed limits initially served as a rough guide to driving conditions and gradually became incorporated into an environment of ever more tightly set and more rigorously enforced speed controls. The effect of this and complementary prescriptive approaches has been to relieve drivers of individual responsibility. Motorists should therefore be expected to drive more absentmindedly adding a new source of risk to the one just reduced.

What is obviously true for traffic planning tends to be true more subtly for social engineering in general terms: gradual reductions in individual responsibility and initiative are destined to encourage irresponsible behaviour –not necessarily in the sense of character deterioration, but simply because most skills atrophy if they don’t get used.

If paternalistic regulation is one example, the declining efficiency of potentially useful measures is another. The reliance on speed limits is one such instance. Recent suggestions for routine alcohol controls are another: drunk driving is already contained at a low level so pushing more resources into enforcement is unlikely to make much of a difference.

A look at the wider policy context reveals that different aspects of social policy are littered with similar examples: Assuring universal access to basic education probably did a lot for social mobility, insisting on 50% university enrolment for each age cohort is unlikely to do the same. X-raying hand luggage for weapons will have improved aviation security but banning nail clippers and toothpaste from planes will probably not produce a similar improvement.

A market for roads?

Heymer’s observations on the consequences of excessive traffic planning make this text worth reading. More surprising is the casual way in which road pricing is dismissed as an option.

Heymer rejects road user charges on civil liberties grounds, because it is bound to increase the overall road tax burden and because it is likely to be ineffective at cutting congestion. Demand for road space is driven by income growth, it is not a demand response to an increased supply. This matters, since the UK is badly endowed with roads compared to other countries at similar per capita income levels.

This conclusion is not necessarily what should be expected from a conservative position. Road user charging is –after all—commonly viewed as a market oriented approach and there are arguments in favour that should apply in principle. It is not clear, for example, why a Scottish highlander should pay the same road tax as a Londoner. It also seems plausible, that higher road tax income could in principle fund more extensive road building in high density areas where there is more demand for road space.

Pricing our Roads

The case for road user charging is made in an institute of economic affairs monograph on the topic: Glaister, Stephen and Daniel Graham (2004) “Pricing our Roads: Vision and Reality“. The authors have been involved in advising the government on this topic and the monograph surveys their research results.

Glaister and Graham confirm the causal relationship between economic growth and rising demand for road space. They also point to the widening discrepancy between transport taxes and related spending. In this respect, road user charging could help if the receipts were hypothecated for transport spending as is the case with the London congestion charge. (On the downside, this study also points out that the administration costs of the London congestion charge absorb over half the revenue raised.)

So, road user charging could in principle help establish a link between road space demand and funds available for transport improvement. This leaves the question, whether the overall transport tax burden would need to increase.

According to Glaister and Graham this largely depends on the magnitude of the environmental component of the road usage charge. If this environmental charge is low, then a mainly congestion charge based system should distribute the burden of transport tax from thinly populated areas to more densely populated ones while the overall amount of transport tax receipts ought to fall. As the environmental tax component is increased, the overall transport tax burden will rise eventually.

It is also important to consider some of the limitations of this study. Glaister and Graham apply their model results to traffic data for the year 2000 and point out repeatedly that large benefits from road usage charging are confined to the most congested areas. The case for a national charging scheme is weakened by this observation.

Any model based study has to involve some simplifications and this study is no exception. Yet, one of the main problems with Glaister and Graham’s approach seems to lie in the way they approach externalities.

everything is negative

In economics, the term externality refers to an effect whose impact is not reflected in the market price. Externalities can be positive or negative in principle: pollution from cars is a negative externality since it affects anyone who breathes the polluted air and does not get compensated for the air quality deterioration. Congestion imposes a negative externality on all other road users.

A classic example for a positive externality is the case of a beekeeper whose bees pollinate surrounding orchards and thus add value to them. In the present context, an efficient transport system allows workers to travel to the place of employment where their skills are used most effectively. Part of the efficiency gain is internalised through higher wages or profits, but the general availability of a wide array of highly developed labour skills in a given geographical area can be seen as a positive externality that makes the location in question more attractive to business. Transport externalities have positive aspects (mobility) as well as negative ones (congestion and pollution). Which of the two aspects prevails is not clear a priori.

Glaister and Graham present transport externalities as purely negative. This is the right thing to do if the intention is to model those negative externalities in isolation, but this is not what the authors set out to do. They aim to estimate the private and social cost of transport and then calculate the cost increase required to bring private and social costs into line. If possible positive externalities are ignored, the desirable cost of motoring is bound to be overestimated.

Not a market driven approach

It should be clear by now, that road pricing, as considered in practice, is a far cry from emulating a competitive market. Such a market is not exhaustively defined by flexible pricing, but requires realistic entry possibilities for new and competing suppliers of transport alternatives. So long as it is not realistically possible for independent competitors to supply cheaper or better alternatives to state owned roads, there will simply be no competitive market in roads.

The closest road pricing comes to a market model, is therefore monopolistic competition –if various public transport alternatives are seen as potentially competing products. If a profit seeking monopolist engages in more sophisticated pricing, he will do so in order to extract greater revenue from consumers. In doing so, a monopolist will supply less output than providers in a competitive market would [1].

It is for this reason that hypothecation is necessary to ensure that congestion charging receipts are directed to improving transport services. If such an arrangement were to work more efficiently than in the case of the London congestion charge, it would still be a political decision, not a market outcome.

Conclusion

Congestion charging then should correctly be classed as a more sophisticated approach to planning rather than as a market driven policy. This classification itself is of course no reason for either accepting or rejecting it.

The main reasons for rejecting any congestion charging scheme are twofold:

1. The civil liberties argument is simple but powerful in this context: The government is obsessed with surveillance and control while being spectacularly inept at safeguarding data. Each of these, the government’s totalitarian ambitions and its tendency to leak data should in itself be sufficient to reject congestion charging in the absence of a complementary implementation of countervailing safeguards.

2. Road users are charged excessively as it is, with very little of the appropriated funds being directed into improving transport facilities. This state of affairs provides a moral case against yet higher charges.

There is a further reason to specifically reject a national charging scheme: the available research shows that large benefits from congestion charging are confined to the local impact on the most congested areas.

[1] It is a standard result of Microeconomic theory that monopolists supply less than suppliers in a perfectly competitive market. Of course, the predicted lower supply does not follow from the profit motive as such.

Well, here is Fitna. If there is anything wrong in the way it portrays Islam, surely the proper reaction would be to point out calmly where the mistakes lie.

I have just watched it, and I can spontaneously think of the following flaws:

Some developments are presented as obviously undesirable (at least by implication) when it is not always clear why: Fitna bemoans the availability of Sharia compliant loans; why is this a problem rather than simply a new but voluntary contractual arrangement catering to a new customer group? Why is it a problem if an Islamic school sponsors a trip to Mecca?

Other points are more controversial, but there is still plenty of room for disagreement. The film points out, for example, that the Burka is not banned in the Netherlands. Why should it be? There may be a case in some scenarios (e.g. where hiding your face constitutes a security hazard) and in those cases no religious dress-code should give rise to a special exemption. Beyond this, I predict that opinions on the desirability of a ban will be strongly divided.

Robert Spencer at Jihadwatch claims the film is accurate. I haven’t read the Quran and couldn’t read it in Arabic at any rate; like many, I have no way to check whether the translations in the subtitles are accurate.

I expect that a lot of Muslims and multiculturalists will now be offended –I don’t think that greatly matters. What interests me is whether there are any factual errors, misleading interpretations etc. So if anyone reading this knows of any, feel free to use the comment function to point them out.

Update: Germany’s Der Spiegel points out that the film –which is supposed to illustrate quranic verses put into practice– wrongly attributes female genital mutilation to the Quran. (This crime is regularly committed in some Muslim societies but apparently has no foundation in the Quran itself.)

Labour’s Hariet Harman has proposed the introduction of quotas that would discriminate by race or sex to establish a politically preferred sex and ethnicity composition of the work force in a particular firm. (source) Many readers commenting on this telegraph article have argued that this move would be illegal under European rules. It probably wouldn’t be: the European Court of Justice already ruled in 1997 that sexist discrimination can be acceptable when it is undertaken with an egalitarian political motive.

As the date of the verdict should suggest, there is nothing new about this arrangement. The currently fashionable euphemism is positive action rather than positive discrimination but, other than that, the proposed arrangement is exactly what has been practiced in Germany and other countries for years: to allow racist and sexist discrimination among otherwise equally qualified candidates. If this law is passed and implemented as it usually has been on the continent, it would probably make little difference. One assumption underlying this measure is that the proportion in which members of different ethnic groups and of either sex qualify for different professions is equal to that with which they are represented in the population at large. Only then can one hope that discrimination in favour of the less strongly represented group will lead to demographic convergence [1].

In the UK, this assumption seems to be questioned, since the proposed discrimination measures may extend to university admissions: “The proposed change in the law could also affect universities, allowing them to select more female students in subjects areas [sic] such as the sciences where men have traditionally dominated.” (source) If such a measure is effective at university level, without being subject to equal entry qualifications, it could result in a move towards demographic balance in admissions (and possibly graduations) only to produce an end-result where female and minority candidates in some subjects obtain systematically lower grades. For a group of people with consistently lower entry grades this outcome should not be surprising. And yet, it would no doubt be blamed on (politically incorrect) discrimination to be made up for by “positive action”.

[1] It should be remembered that discrimination is supposed to take place subject to equal qualification in the case discussed. If this was not so, demographic representation could of course be achieved at the expense of quality.

The archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks on sharia have, to some degree, been simplified in public discussion. However, a full understanding of Dr. Williams’ argument does nothing to improve his message and does not weaken the conclusion that a partial adoption of sharia is unlikely to be feasible. Full knowledge of the lecture delivered at the Courts of Justice merely defines Dr. Williams’ outlook as collectivist and authoritarian.

Dr. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury has this month destroyed what little was left of his reputation by calling for the formal acceptance of parts of sharia in British law. It is worth noting that he was not the first to do so. Dr Suhaib Hasan, a Muslim Council of Britain spokesman, had done much the same thing in late January.

I will not elaborate on how and why official recognition of a separate body of religious law is incompatible with the notions of a secular state and equality before the law. Others have done so extensively and more prominently.

There are two aspects of this discussion which are worth pondering in more detail:

1. If there is a move towards the acceptance of sharia, can it remain partial in scope? and

2. What do the archbishop’s remarks imply for the social order more generally?

1. A Limited Role for Sharia in Britain?

During the discussion surrounding Rowan Williams’ remarks, it was pointed out repeatedly, that informal sharia courts already operate in Britain. These courts, of course, do not have any legally enforceable power over anyone who doesn’t accept their role in the first place.

To the best of my knowledge, anyone can voluntarily enter into an agreement appointing an arbiter for civil disputes. In this sense, informal religious courts at present have no more legal authority than an agreement between two neighbours would have if they decided to consult the local postman for a judgement on their private quarrels. That is not to say that religious courts do not have a lot of clout in their local community, but formal legal authority they have not.

This would change under the archbishop’s proposals. Dr. Williams not only proposes some administrative simplification. He does not merely want informal court verdicts to be formally approved more easily, but would like to see members of different religious communities to be automatically subject to legally binding judgements by their respective religious courts.

The thin end of a wedge?

Of course, Williams does not advocate sharia criminal law. He explicitly criticises the prohibition of apostasy in Islam. The question however is not simply what Dr. Williams wants but what should realistically be expected once some aspects of sharia are given formal legitimacy.

At this point, it is essential to bear in mind that Dr. Williams is not alone in demanding legally binding religious laws. In the case of sharia, this desire is shared by numerous Muslim community leaders. Many of these are classed as moderate, but even those moderates’ views clash with core values of Western secular society.

The MCB’s Abdul Bari, for example, does not seem to feel too strongly about confining sharia to Muslims. After all, he is on record asking for the adoption of arranged marriage in mainstream British society. Dr. Suhaib Hasan, calls for the introduction sharia in family matters. He does not press for sharia criminal law, because he thinks it unlikely that demands in that direction will be met –in other words: this is a purely tactical position, there is no indication that he actually believes that there is anything wrong in principle with sharia criminal law. [1]

Should one expect people like Abdul Bari and Suhaib Hassan to have decisive influence in this matter? There are good reasons to expect that they will have such influence within the Muslim community. Many ordinary Muslims may indeed mainly or only care about the application of sharia in family matters or similar civil disputes.

These ordinary people are not the ones that will set the political agenda though. Political lobbying is much more likely to be undertaken by community leaders like those mentioned above. Once the basic objective of formally codifying sharia for some areas is achieved, they can be relied upon to work towards an extension of the scope of the legal paradigm which they regard as inherently superior.

Will those extensions in scope be granted? In principle, they wouldn’t need to be. The Muslim community in Britain still is a relatively small minority [2]. Muslims alone can’t swing elections, nor is there any other obvious way in which they can dictate the legislative agenda. If Muslim leaders’ political demands are a necessary condition for a gradual expansion of sharia, the government’s ideological bias provides the complementary necessary condition.

The origin of a situation in which the formal endorsement of pre-modern religious law is even considered lies in the government’s self inflicted ideological weakness; in their reflexive inclination to give in to the demands of cultural or ethnic minorities without much reflection on the contents of these demands. The current weakness of secular democracy therefore arises from Western society’s insecure relativism much more than from any external threat.

2. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Ideological Background

In this context, it is worth asking in which direction the Anglican Church is going. Bishop Nazir Ali, who famously raised the issue of no-go area for non-Muslims, is quoted in the same context bemoaning the loss of influence of the Anglican Church and warning of a possible separation of Church and state.

Yet it is precisely the absence of such a separation which is the core of the problem, an issue which becomes apparent in Rowan Williams’ speech.

So what exactly did the archbishop of Canterbury say in his Courts of Justice Lecture? The full text of the speech is available here . The main argument, put concisely, is as follows:

The lecture explores the central question about the relationship between secular and religious law and notes that there is substantial room for interpretation of sharia. Muslims and members of other religious communities have multiple loyalties and regard their religious loyalties as supreme. Secular law should therefore protect religious convictions, as identified within the relevant community, against legal rules which are otherwise valid for citizens in general. At the same time, citizens’ rights should be protected from oppression within religious communities. Conflicts between these two objectives can be overcome by enforcing respect for human dignity as such.

Dr. Williams’ lecture transcript reads less like an appeal to religious conservatism than a post-modernist, communitarian manifesto. The archbishop appears to be highly suspicious of any judgement which is left to private, individual decision making. Indeed, the main aim of this lecture, aside from claiming legal privilege for religion, seems to be a call for a social structure where all forms of human interaction are somehow embedded into some community based hierarchy.

This vision of society shows a totalitarian tendency since it systematically sub-ordinates the individual under the community. It is totalitarian not in the sense of a centralised hierarchy but in a society centred around a plurality of communities with largely unrestrained authority over their members. Individual liberty would in such a system be constrained to the choice of the controlling community.

Dr. Williams goes so far as to state that “It would be a pity if … a person was defined primarily as the possessor of a set of abstract liberties and the law’s function was accordingly seen as nothing but the securing of those liberties irrespective of the custom and conscience of those groups which concretely compose a plural modern society.” [3] Yet, in a free society and as far as the law is concerned, that is exactly how a person should be defined. This is not to deny that the individual citizen would develop a much more complex identity in his or her social interactions, but these should as a rule not be controlled by the state.

The closest Dr. Williams comes to calling for a protection of individual liberty is when he demands respect for “human dignity as such” which he defines as “a non-negotiable assumption that each agent (with his or her historical and social affiliations) could be expected to have a voice in the shaping of some common project for the well-being and order of a group.”

Note that this definition refers to an assumption of an expectation, not its realisation. Even if this expectation is fulfilled, what is demanded here is nothing more than a very loosely defined right to participation in a collective decision making process. There is simply no allowance at all for the protection of individual rights against the power of the collective.

Conclusion

The archbishop is right when he argues that the public discussion of his remarks does not reflect what was said in his Courts of Justice lecture. The problem for him is that the wider context of the lecture does nothing to improve his message.

With respect to the particular issue of sharia, it is apparent that Dr. Williams is incredibly naïve about the likely extent of moderation within contemporary Islam. As a result, he is unduly optimistic about the prospect of selectively endorsing parts of sharia as part of UK law. In other respects, e.g. with regards to freedom of speech [4] or opposition to the secular state, he simply shares the Islamists’ authoritarian perspective.

As regards his wider view of society he simply endorses the brand of communitarian authoritarianism which formed the ideological basis of the Blair-Brown regime. An ideology which has given us a revival of censorship, intense government surveillance and countless attempts to put government agencies in charge of micro-managing citizens’ private lives.

[1] That Dr. Hasan would otherwise approve of sharia criminal law is not a matter of speculation, the telegraph quotes him as saying: “Even though cutting off the hands and feet, or flogging the drunkard and fornicator, seem to be very abhorrent, once they are implemented, they become a deterrent for the whole society.”

[2] Mike Hume puts it at 3% of the total population.

[3] The omission indicated (…) refers to an interpretation of rights leading to the conclusion of individual liberty. The quotation appears in one of the later paragraphs of the lecture beginning “I labour the point because…”.

[4] In the lecture, Williams explicitly endorses religiously inspired censorship: “I have argued recently in a discussion of the moral background to legislation about incitement to religious hatred that any crime involving religious offence has to be thought about in terms of its tendency to create or reinforce a position in which a religious person or group could be gravely disadvantaged in regard to access to speaking in public in their own right…” This statement seems to indicate that Dr. Williams does not view freedom of speech as a right to be protected but instead perceives the public expression of opinion as a social engineering tool whose use should be directed towards producing outcomes desired by the relevant authorities. Islamists may disagree with Dr. Williams regarding the social outcomes seen as desirable, but could probably be relied upon to endorse his rejection of freedom of speech as an individual right.

In a recent telegraph column, Simon Heffer argued that heroin addicts should be made for to pay for their NHS treatment. He further argued that making users of illegal drugs pay for their treatment is justified because these drugs are illegal, even though some legal drugs may also give rise to expensive health problems. Making drug users pay for the health costs of their drug habit is not implausible in principle. The problems lie in the details of Heffer’s argument and they matter in practice.

Legal and illegal drugs

The argument that illegal drug consumption deserves a harsher treatment simply because it is illegal may have merit from a legalistic perspective. From an ideological viewpoint, it is disappointingly circular.

It is a task of political discourse to argue about what kind of action should be illegal in the first place. These arguments should have some basis in the values inherent in the meta-context of their underlying ideology.

To simply accept that a particular prohibition is appropriate because a legislator has decided to outlaw something is at best consistent with an authoritarian mindset. Not a conservative authoritarian mindset, nor a socialist one, just an authoritarian one without any specific reference values.

The classical liberal view

What then would a classical liberal argument in this case look like? Two basic principles of classical liberal ideology are important here:

1. the view that the state should not protect responsible adults from their own folly so long as they respect the rights of others, and

2. that these adults should be held responsible for their own choices.

On this basis, there is no reason why users of recreational drugs should not pay for the health costs arising from their drug habit.

Practicalities

There is no a priori reason either why this accountability should be limited to users of particular drugs. Having said this, it is also not obvious why a state health authority rather than a private insurer should be in charge of holding drug users to account.

There are reasons why a reasonably competitive insurance market may do a better job of this [1]. If consuming a drug –such as cannabis- comes with a small risk of a very costly health effect, the extra insurance cover could still be quite cheap, if paid for in advance by a large number of drug users.

If a state rationing body charges the drug user after the event, the cost for the individual user can be very high. In practice the cost may not be recovered at all if the pothead is unable to pay.

Heffer’s target group, junkies, are in fact least likely to be able to pay the cost of their treatment. The pragmatic option in this case may simply be to do what the Swiss did and give them their Heroin for free [2]. Not because they have a moral right to receiving it, but because it may well work out cheaper for the rest of us, while eroding drug dealers’ profits.

The problems with authoritarianism

One problem with Heffer’s argument, as presented in the telegraph, is the absence of an underlying value framework. Heffer’s article freely admits that over-eating, drinking and smoking are legal for the moment, thus implying that their legality may soon change.

If any legislated prohibition is self-evidently legitimate then the reasoning that applies to Heroin and Marijuana consumption today could just as legitimately apply to smoking, exceeding food rations or alcohol consumption tomorrow.

Heffer goes so far as to demand Chinese style mass executions for drug dealers. If any state legislated consumer prohibition is sufficient for such a punishment, then what applies to heroin pushers today could just as validly apply to the butcher, the brewer and the baker tomorrow.

Those who read Heffer’s column regularly will of course know that he largely holds conservative values. One can guess that he feels strongly about drugs because they combine adverse health effects, with an anti-establishment counter-culture and support for organised crime.

Moral posturing vs. pragmatism

It is therefore likely that his main reason for demanding that junkies pay for their treatment is a desire to make a visible punitive gesture rather than an attempt to internalise costs. A similar desire for political signalling may well underlie his demands for the death penalty for drug dealers.

This is where the structure of the political argument becomes important from a purely pragmatic perspective. To the best of my knowledge, there is no strong evidence that authoritarian regimes are particularly effective at suppressing the drug trade or drug consumption. There is evidence –past and present– that a combination of drug prohibition and high drug prices provides a fertile ground for the growth of organised crime: both, the Taliban and the FARC thrive on it just as Al Capone did in the past.

A liberal approach –combined with a healthy dose of pragmatism—therefore has the potential of limiting damage by eroding drug dealers’ profits, by internalising more of the costs of at least some drug consumption and by limiting the costs to third parties in other cases. Authoritarian grandstanding, on the other hand, is more likely to be useless at best, counterproductive at worst.

[1] One reason why a competitive market should lead to a better solution is because competitors have an incentive to outperform inferior service providers. We can, for example, assume a situation were Cannabis users are excluded from standard health cover for psychosis and have to buy extra insurance in the private sector (assuming that the legal framework allows this).

If private insurers then charge too high a premium, any competitor can offer a better premium and attract extra business. In theory, the insurance premium should therefore gradually reduce to reflect the expected cost of the risk. In practice, competition isn’t perfect and there is a limit to how well this mechanism works. The basic fact remains though that where there is some competition, consumers can put pressure on suppliers by voting with their feet. Where there is a legally protected monopoly supplier no such option exists.

[2] The Swiss programme of giving Heroin free of charge to existing addicts apparently was highly successful. (In the quoted case, the drug had to be consumed on the premises in a setting that was deliberately unappealing.) Similar approaches may work elsewhere, although there may be specific factors to this particular success

Back in October, Jack Straw demanded a ‘Bill of Rights and Responsibilities’. I anticipated at the time that positive rights would receive more emphasis in such a project –at the expense of negative rights constraining the power of the state. Straw’s recent comments in the Guardian appear to confirm this prediction.

The notion of positive rights or positive liberty is popular with many genuinely well intentioned people: after all, who could deny the importance of access to food, housing etc. for individual autonomy? When The Economist criticised Amnesty International’s expanding human rights mandate for including economic entitlements, Amnesty International responded by arguing that these rights were just as important as traditional civil liberties.

Amnesty International is missing the point: the issue simply isn’t one of relative importance but of functional difference. From a purely pragmatic angle, it is worth noting that there is simply no evidence of a general trade-off between liberty and prosperity –the contrary seems to be the case. If access to resources, like housing or educational and health services is the issue, then a generalised increase in prosperity should be best placed to provide this.

There is a more fundamental ethical question though: those who value liberty for its own sake should be careful not to confound the issues of liberty and prosperity. Important as material resources are, it is simply not true that greater access to resources automatically makes people more free. Tom Palmer has made the point in a recent CATO institute podcast, where he pointed out that people in Nazi Germany had access to modern technology, including cars and telephones, but could hardly be said to be more free than German’s who lived before those inventions were available.

Negative liberties are designed to constrain the power of the state to prevent its growth into a totalitarian institution. Access to economic resources, via entitlements or otherwise, is convenient and useful, but can not be relied upon to preserve liberty. To see why this confusion can become truly dangerous, just look at Jack Straw’s recent Guardian comment.

Straw argues that liberty actually has increased under New Labour. To support his ludicrous claim, he points to some limited achievements (the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Human Rights Act) and then lists the ways in which a number of interest groups have benefited from legislation.

Requiring adjustments for disabilities is likely to make life easier for disabled people by restricting the liberty of all to do business with disabled people in whatever way they see fit. Whether this restriction is justified can be discussed at length, but an increase in liberty it is not.

The introduction of the minimum wage is essentially a prohibition on employment contracts with a lower wage. It benefits those who receive a higher wage as a result. It also is clearly a restriction of liberty since it reduces the number of contractual agreements which people are allowed to enter into.

The same is true of most measures which Straw lists in New Labour’s defence. Most legislative programmes will benefit somebody somewhere. That doesn’t mean they advance liberty. It is not a bad thing to make the trains run on time or cut NHS waiting lists but it is not an inherently liberal measure either.

Straw omits to mention most of the clearly authoritarian legislative projects he shares responsibility for. (Henry Porter makes up for this here, and here). Yet the combination of this omission with his bizarre apology of New Labour’s record on liberty makes it clear why positive liberty is such a pernicious concept: Straw’s method consists in defining every law that has in some way been useful to somebody as freeing its beneficiary from the effects of not having said law.

Thus any legislation at all can be classed as an act of liberation. This means that any law can be invoked as a counter-weight to the loss of civil liberties under New Labour.

To claim that New Labour’s decade of tyranny has been good for liberty, by those standards, then reduces to saying that a lot of laws have been passed under the Blair-Brown regimes.

¡Me gusta cuando calla, porque está como ausente!
Se below for an artistic interpretation of the recent Hugo Chavez - Juan Carlos love-in:

To be fair on Chavez, it must be hard for the chubby autocrat to suddenly find himself at a meeting were others not only can disagree with him but need not even ask his permission before doing so. I guess he just isn’t used to this anymore.

Anyway – long live the King!

With just about everyone outside Sudan agreeing that the whole Muhammad-the-Teddy-Bear affair is crazy there is surely no need to repeat this. The market, meanwhile, responds in a predictable way: for an increasing choice of cuddly Muhammads see e.g. here.