Postliberalism, economic growth, cheating progressives, muslim mayors and Marx (etc.)

A collection of links and so forth

Going to have a bash at sharing (especially now Twitter is disappearing into its own contradictions) some of the more interesting things I’ve read recently. Not that I’m any kind of organised or assiduous reader but these are things that have crossed my path and pinged something inside my head.

Aaron Renn is one of the best writers on urbanism, blessedly untroubled by any need to stick with its popular themes and it is great that he has begun to write and review interesting ideas around conservatism, Christianity and the role of men in our modern societies. In an article talking about a review by Ross Douhat of Patrick Deneen’s book ‘Regime Change’, Renn quotes Douhat - one of those quotes that make me almost shout ‘yes, that!’:

“...by the end of Deneen’s book I wanted not so much more policy detail as more sociology — meaning, a convincing narrative of exactly how a peaceful “regime change” usually happens, how ideas prosper or fail inside networks and institutions and with what political support, how worldviews rise and fall through conversion or replacement, how long or shorter marches through institutions are usually accomplished.”

I can’t comment on the book but, as conservatives, we definitely need more sociology.

This being said, Deneen is a leading proponent of an essentially authoritarian post-liberalism - Stephanie Slade takes a pot at his ideas in Reason:

‘Students of history may be relieved to hear that University of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen is not—despite what the schematic just described might suggest—arguing for fascism. Instead, the fourth quadrant represents what he refers to throughout the book as "common-good conservatism."’

It does seem to me that a lot of post-liberalism rests on the idea of throwing out the baby with the bathwater because getting rid of the water is more important than keeping the baby. And the baby, since you ask, is called ‘Prosperity’.

The problem is, of course, that modern liberalism isn’t interested in the baby either - as Joel Kotkin (another interesting writer who came out of urban geography to become a leading critic of what he calls ‘neo-feudalism’, that idea that the future is a future where individuals don’t own things while corporations and governments do own things). Kotkin has, of course, spotted that the progressive liberal anti-growth alliance - when will conservatives realise again that economic growth is a good idea? - is a real problem. Here’s a sample of Kotkin talking about the clash between Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government and the government of oil-rich Alberta:

“In pure economic terms, the world needs what Canada has, including commodities that it could produce with far better environmental control than, say, Indonesia, the Congo or Bolivia. Eschewing the resource sector would pose a fundamental problem for a country that has long depended on resources for its economic prosperity.”

This is why Liz Truss’s Growth Commission is an important initiative. We need to break away from the dangerous idea that economic growth is a bad thing:

“The former prime minister has convened the non-partisan group, which is being called The Growth Commission, to investigate the causes of sluggish growth.

The commission, which is to be chaired by Douglas McWilliams, the leading economist, will also analyse the impact different policy decisions have on GDP per capita.”

While I’ve said all along that Liz Truss was right, it is good that her initiative here isn’t parochial and will draw on expertise from the USA, Europe and Japan. And let’s remember, the baby we don’t want to throw away is economic betterment - lots of things on the conservative agenda can contribute to that betterment without us endorsing the anti-growth protectionism of Deneen.

Meanwhile Helen Dale, whose observations on the ‘culture war’ stuff are often bang on the money, reminds us that affirmative action is cheating:

“If you use your ethnicity to get into a prestigious university when your results would not otherwise be good enough to get you into that university, you are a cheat.

Yes—as SCOTUS makes clear—the universities built and maintained this pernicious system. But every single student wrongly admitted thereby is a cheat.”

This observation presents us with the main flaw in modern progressive ideology - it seeks to equalise outcomes mostly by pulling one group down in favour of another. This works fine until competing inequalities provide the wrong answer - liberals were delighted when Hamtramck, Michigan elected a Muslim as its mayor. Until that is, the mayor, Amer Ghalib started behaving like a traditionalist muslim and banning Pride (and other) flags:

"For those politicians who don’t understand the situation in Hamtramck but they released statements to criticize us for passing" the resolution, Ghalib said in a statement released Saturday afternoon, "you do not know our city more than we do, and you will not know the consequences of opening the door for every group to fly their flag on city properties. Our residents are all equally important to us, and we will continue to serve them equally without discrimination, favoritism or preferential treatment to any group. The city government will stay NEUTRAL and IMPARTIAL toward its residents."

We are, I suspect, going to see a load more of this sort of problem as the faith of minorities becomes more apparent. There is a profound arrogance about liberalism in its belief that minorities arriving in liberal democracies will automatically embrace progressive values.

In terms of what I’m thinking about there are several things that bother me:

The growing campaign against vaping in the UK. Hardly a week passes without one or more articles, clearly with origins in activist anti-vaping groups, calling for limits on advertising and even bans. And, while lots of it emanates from Bloomberg Philanthropies funded groups in the USA (plus the WHO, where the tobacco work is nearly wholly funded by Bloomberg), the Australian approach is gaining traction. As Chris Snowdon put it:

“And your model is Australia, the only developed country in the world where rates of both underage smoking and underage vaping are going up and where the Australian Border Force is so busy trying to keep vapes out of the country that it is struggling to control drugs and guns?”

Although the pro-housing lobby in the UK has made headway, the NIMBYs still hold all the cards. I’m curious about the reasons for NIMBYs winning more often than YIMBYs - the obvious answer is that all politics is, in the end, local. Here from Locality’s ‘Commission on the Future of Localism’ is a sort of of NIMBY charter:

“Localism must be about giving voice, choice and control to communities who are seldom heard by our political and economic institutions. Localism should enable local solutions through partnership and collaboration around place, and provide the conditions for social action to thrive”

The challenge for conservatives is to square this circle - allow free individuals and families the choices that allow them to thrive while recognising that communities need to, as far as is possible, be self-governed. But let’s never confuse local control with small government. Here’s an example from good old California:

“In Huntington Beach's lawsuit against the state, the city says the laws "deprive the City Council of its authority to zone property" and complains that allowing private companies to build homes without the city's subjective authority "overburdens existing city infrastructure, damages environmentally sensitive areas of the city, and devalues affected private properties."

Republican Mayor Tony Strickland, who lives in the kind of "affordable-housing" project his current policies likely would forbid, makes the hackneyed NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) argument: "If people in Huntington Beach don't want to live in a suburban community…they'd move to Los Angeles or San Francisco."

While we’re on the matter of American cities here’s a great article (two parts, link is to the second part), looking at the history of urban development in the American West:

“Part one of this essay showed how the political tradition of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln gave rise to the successful spread of American civilization into the forbidding region between the 98th parallel and the Pacific Coast Ranges. Part two of this essay will bring the story of America’s western cities up to the present, looking at how federal policies combined with the West’s distinctive form of capitalism to create the nation’s most modern metropolitan megaregion.”

Finally a couple of links to interesting articles - the first explaining how the Russian revolution made Marx famous and the second looking at the economics of extortion in Italy.

“In reality, Karl Marx (1817-1883) died in London in relative obscurity. He had a small number of intensely devoted followers in socialist and communist movements, but few people outside of those far-left circles had any knowledge of his work in his lifetime.”

“We develop a simple taxation model under asymmetric information to find the Mafia optimal extortion as a function of firms’ observable characteristics, namely size and sector. We test the predictions of the model on a unique dataset on extortion in Sicily, the Italian region where the Sicilian Mafia, one of the most ancient criminal organizations, operates”

Finally Bairstow was definitely out but Carey will never ever hear the end of that decision to appeal for the batsman walking out of his ground at the end of the over.