The Fourth Place

In individualism the individual is sovereign, and collective action is by the consent of the individual.

In collectivism the collective is sovereign and all individual action is by consent of the collective.

The fundamental issue is that only an individual can have a mind.

If any individual chooses to use their mind at any point then the threat or use of violence is inevitable. Violence will be used either to steal the benefit of the action or prevent the action from occurring at all.  i.e. Tax and other forms oppression and enslavement.  As the use of tax, regulation and oppression increases, the mind is going to be used less often and typical behaviour will become less rational and less productive – we get poverty and crime. Simples.

Examples in support: welfare dependency, gang violence, a majority of inventions coming from other countries, self imposed tax exile, the royal mail.

I fail to see how collectivists and altruists can fail to recognise this, even at the level of the subconscious, or as some form of cognitive dissonance. They must be evil, or very stupid, I think mostly the latter.

LPUK deputy leader Andrew Wither’s wrote an article on Economic Voice about the infantile reaction to snow in the UK and places blame squarely on the welfare system. In the comments I wrote suggesting another reason:

I’d love to go out and – unpaid and uncompensated – clear a few meters of public pavement outside my home. I see it as a social nicety and wonder why my neighbours are not doing the same already. If we all did our bit the whole street would be a lot safer for pedestrians [including me].

Then of course, I turn on the BBC and hear about all the liabilities and insurance money available to people who slip on imperfectly cleared paths and the anchor person giggling about how cynical they are being. I am lead to understand that if I don’t do a perfect job – by some unknowable standard – then I open myself up to being sued for some huge amount of money.

The message is that the only way for me to be safe in the snow is to sit deliberately inactive and watch people struggle over the snow that it’s well within our power – my power – to remove and wait for the council to take up all the insurance risks and “do something”.

This is madness.

I was – unfortunately – able to confirm the advice of the BBC, sort of.

I contacted my Labour MP who started a three-way conversation with the Labour Council who responded with a Times article stating:

Private landowners are not obliged to clear snow or ice from the highway, even if the road or pavement passes over their land. Indeed, from a legal point of view it may be risky for private individuals to clear these areas. By sweeping snow from one part of the pavement you can create a danger in another area and if someone is injured, you will be liable for negligence or nuisance.

On your own land, it is a different matter. You owe visitors a duty under the Occupiers Liability Act 1984 to take reasonable care to ensure that they are reasonably safe. This means that if you know someone (such as the postman) is likely to walk up your garden path, and you also know that the garden path is slippery, you must take reasonable steps to clear the path of snow and grit it if necessary.

So… the law places an unchosen obligation on owners of roads and paths to protect arbitrary users from anything nature throws at them, absolving the people who actually chose to risk it and then creates liabilities to anyone seeking to reduce the dangers of their own environment voluntarily. In practice this obligation is not met and nobody seems to expect it to be met.  I think this is a clue that the obligation is irrational and ridiculous, people see it cannot scale to the main land owners, the councils, who consistently fail to meet it.

My take, following Peikoff (audio @ 11:37) is that nature is not something Government should ever try to protect people from, this principle would justify too much. The placement of this obligation on landowners is exactly an attempt to protect the masses from nature and is also a form of coercion applied to owners of roads, paths and other types of land.

Instead of placing unchosen burdens on land owners, the pedestrians and drivers that use the land should accept responsibility for the risks they have but should also be able to volunteer their assistance subject to landowner consent. All that is required is a change in law transferring responsibility clearly to the road user and mitigating the liabilities to people acting in good faith to help out. No duty or obligation needs to be placed on anyone because safer paths and roads are a rational value to most of the population.  In practice this is a small change, most people expect the paths to be unsafe after its snowed and there is actually very little carping about legal obligations.

Given the present conditions of thick ice coating London paths, its hard to imagine how the most incompetent action would make anything worse but I expect a body of folk knowledge would develop about how to tackle snow under this regime. We would learn how to act and when, using what tools and materials and we would gather those things in advance. The creation and distribution of this  knowledge to neighbours and tenants would be encouraged by the landowners as they act to protect and restore of the value of the land. They would ask people to stop handling it incorrectly and announce their actual preferences. I submit that this folk knowledge is evidently missing in the UK, and cite the lack of rock salt in general stores as evidence that we don’t know what to do, or care to learn.

For this to be fully effective the ownership pattern for roads would need to change, knowledge sharing would work better when coordinated by local road owners such as residents associations or chambers of commerce covering a few streets each. To have the authority to speak to volunteers without accepting an obligation from Government implies the sale of roads to these organisations. I think this would be popular as it would provide a local actor in solving similar parking and bin collection issues. Concentrating ownership to groups of residents would enhance the incentives to act voluntarily as all the benefits of action (improved safety, cleaner streets, more convenient parking) would go directly to the residents.

Of course, this could be phased in gradually as grass roots groups form to buy their roads from Councils, and those people that prefer the old system can negotiate a contract replacing the imposed obligations of the Occupiers Liability Act, or leave the roads in the hands of councils.

I just finished reading Atlas Shrugged interspersed with the first few chapters of Jamie Whytes Bad Thoughts, which is another book that is already coming in useful.

I loved Atlas Shrugged. Probably this means I’m both mad and an ass hole by the reckoning of most people, but never mind. I’m not going to be put off because a book and an author I admire is disliked by lots of other people, this is an appeal to the authority of the people, not even to experts, and rests neither on logic or on facts. If I’m to desist from admiring Ayn Rand it will be because she’s wrong and for no other reason.

Trying to follow up a reading of Atlas Shrugged by conscientiously googling for Ayn’s Rand  critics is a painful experience. There is so much garbage said about the book. I’ve identified some broad categories of criticism:

1. She’s wrong – without any justification – often the critic admits to having not actually read the book or only skimmed it, and gets details wrong.
2. She’s wrong due to some X, where X is an argument adequately discussed in the pages of Atlas Shrugged. Inherited wealth for example, is dealt with in a speech by Francisco d’Anconia. Or the criticism that to survive we all draw from society the means of our survival – this is exactly the premise of the book, she is mostly having a go at the destruction of those means by the moochers and enslavers who do not draw out those means in exchange for some value.
3. She’s wrong due to some Y which she forgot to mention, but its actually easy to guess what she’d say. A Y might be old people, there is Hank Rearden’s mother in the book, who is looked after despite giving nothing, including love, to her son and Hank is described as wrong for doing so. I’d guess that a different Mrs Rearden that did offer some value to her son, say Wisdom, should indeed be looked after as there is something in that for all parties. Children came up as well, but there is loads about children and childhood in the book. Somebody wasn’t paying attention.
4. She’s wrong because some  Z is implausible and essential, where Z is a prop in the book that is not necessary to the plot or which is easily replaced by something more plausible. A motor powering a whole town by converting static electricity in the air, is no different from a town powered by a hydroelectric power plant. In fact, anything remotely technological, would have done since the point she was making is that its the mind that powers civilisation – try replacing that. Sheep farming and candles made of animal fat, would actually have enhanced the plot value of the valley – since both require a mind -  but would have been inconsistent with the valley as it would be near to the end of the strike.
5. She’s wrong or the book is bad because thing N in the book is clearly wrong, but N is not in the book. A strawman argument. A country could not be and isn’t powered by a handful of intellectual elites say the critics, but this is not described in the book. The book describes a spectrum of secretaries, dispatchers, foremen, engineers, industrialists and inventors with different levels of talent and a tactically selected few hundred of the most talented go on strike in the valley, hundreds of thousands strike in other ways both before and after the pivotal speech by Galt telling them to strike. Somebody wasn’t paying attention.
6. Her book is M where M is a feature of books normally held to be bad, long boring, having 2D characters etc fair enough I guess!

I enjoyed the book because it granted me a sanction to discard contradictory moralities, and encouraged me to value that which is an achievement and to take joy in achievements around me, including competence in people. Since I live in London suddenly there was a lot to take joy in, I was giddy for days even as I continued to finish the book.  I found it useful because it enumerated some virtues – reason, courage, honesty, pride, productivity – which I went straight ahead to use as a check list to evaluate those around me – which lead to some useful observations about some people in my life.

For all that, however, the book is in fact rather too long and boring on account of repeating itself a bit too much. Some of the characters are a bit flat e.g. Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, John Galt but developing them in more depth would only serve to make the book longer. I guess its a matter of what you value, if you want a fun read this is not the book, try Pratchett, but if you value the philosophical content as well then there it is.

Then there is this overlap between the philosophy and the plot of the book which is hard to separate and works both ways. I believe Ayn Rand has compromised the expression of her philosophy for the plot of the book, which necessarily has a focus on striking, but I don’t think she is actually advocating going on strike for real. In the other direction, the critics can of course say stuff like the characters acted as a collective set of strikers or the hidden valley is a communist utopia, and use that as evidence of a contradiction in the philosophy.

I need to be careful as well.  If I’m to use this philosophy to some extent to make decisions then I must know it accurately – living according to a plot device is stupid. This is why some non-fiction Objectivist material is on my wish list. Living by a creed is widely recognised as useful and is widespread practice that helps a lot of people to make decisions and live better – I’ve seen that with my own eyes. Usually the creed is irrational and its dignified by the term “religion”, strangely I can’t think of a similar word for rational creeds so that’ll do.

So  yeah I might be about to be sucked into the Objectivist “religion” and become a complete ass by most people’s definition – perhaps that’s not even new – but if I do it’ll be because its right. I won’t be describing myself as Objectivist any time soon, not until I’ve read a lot more about it and heard from competent critics. So far I have no reason to suspect its wrong, but there is no need to hurry.

at the time of the 1988 Budget the top 1 percent paid 14 percent of all income tax – by 1997 this rose to 21 percent. And why? Because the top rate was cut from 60 percent to 40 percent.

Interesting.

By this time tomorrow this petition will have 500,000 signatories or more.

UPDATE: last time I make a prediction like that, top spot today though at 29 thousand, woot!

This letter deserves wider circulation.

While the recognition of the internet as an important facilitator of economic growth is accurate and in some senses laudable, I find issue with the Government’s recent announcement of a universal service obligation for internet infrastructure companies.

A universal service obligation can only increase costs on the companies involved and must involve a large Government subsidy, a new tax or the involvement of the BBC – a dominant player in the TV and on-line industry who also benefits exclusively from a special tax. Such options involve a direct use of tax payer money, an explicit redistribution of wealth that will be harmful to economic growth in the short term, a slackening of competition in the telecommunications market, and potential bias introduced by a determinedly left-wing state media company. These side effects are I feel they might make a the measure an overall negative for the economy, broadband service quality and media independence.

An alternative free-market solution exists, but at a time when the Prime Minister is repeatedly criticising other parties for doing nothing, this option requires the Government to sell the idea of doing less than it does already. It is a laissez-fair option.

Wireless internet services allow for the widening of broadband coverage without necessitating the laying of cables along every street, or if there are tall buildings or other high spots in an area, without even requiring the raising of antenna masts. For example, I work at a building in central London that is signed up to a service run from the top of the Centre Point building.

Unfortunately these services traditionally operate using a small band of electromagnetic spectrum which has been left unregulated. An expensive licence is required to expand into other areas of spectrum and licensees are unlikely to share spectrum as readily as they do in the unregulated section. Simply put, more available spectrum means a better wireless broadband service but the Government is selling this monopoly access to this resource to rich corporations at the expense of normal people.

The solution is very simple indeed, and this is to reserve additional blocks of spectrum for unregulated use – that is, to stop regulating parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum previously allocated to analogue television provides a spectrum gap and an immediate opportunity for decisive action.

This idea and the deregulated spectrum are called “Open Spectrum”, because access to the spectrum is open to the entire market of providers from individuals, to small grass roots charitable or hobbyist operators (for an example see SPC’s Open Wireless Network), and commercial operators of all sizes – not just large corporations. This free-market access has the potential to fuel an immediate growth in coverage combined with a gradual increase in service quality as device manufacturers improve the technology. Interestingly, it may even drive a shift in infrastructure ownership away from Government and corporations and literally into the ownership of the people, with individuals voluntarily co-operating to mesh their own devices together to further improve services.

A Frequently Asked Questions document is available which covers this from a historical and technical perspective, and is quite accessible to laypersons.

Derived from a letter sent to my MP.

Vote for this guy:

You deal with a lot of social issues on the album, especially that of gun crime. What solutions would you propose to the government to tackle these issues?

Nothing. It’s not the government’s problem. They are not dying… we are. They are not losing friends and family, we are… so it’s our problem. The sooner we realise that they really don’t give a fuck about us, the quicker we can stop blaming everybody else and take responsibility for our own actions. As soon as we blame someone else for our condition then we’re saying that they have control over the situation and we have no control. If we have no control over our own lives then we’re fucked. The reason that we, for the most part, feel so powerless is because we have been systematically programmed to give our power away. One of the most powerful things we have is our mind and the ability to think individually and independently. This power is eroded on a daily basis. We are force fed false information and false public opinion, which reinforce a uniform way of thinking which in turn turns us into the robots we are to day. We need to wake the fuck up and change what we don’t like! Sorry about that I can go on forever.

That’s Genesis Elijah, clever young chap.

Question put to him by UK Hip Hop in an interview in 2005.

Not the first time I’ve quoted that, but somewhat topical I think.

A mailing list message on the topic of Microsoft Live’s search privacy prompted me to take another look at peer to peer web search applications, and I discovered two – YaCy and Faroo – both promise to protect your anonymity while searching, but paradoxically both will index the web using your click stream.

There are some interesting concepts at work there, in particular YaCy’s reverse word index coupled with downloadable Linked Open Data such as DBPedia, WordNet could form a powerful combination as long as the privacy protection was sound.

I was pleasantly surprised to find my old phone, like many others, has a value despite being broken and unusable. Mobiles are a great example of the market delivering on reduce, reuse, recycle.