I’ve been reading the Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian and was struck by an episode in Post Captain . The hero, Jack Aubrey has been given command of a ship but is being pursued by his creditors and faces indefinite imprisonment for debt if they catch him. Reaching Portsmouth and his crew, he turns on the bailiffs who have been pursuing him and routs them. Several are knocked down and, in a marvellous twist, Aubrey presses them into service on his ship.

It struck me on reading O’Brian that this kind of thing would happen routinely in a libertarian Nozickian utopia. On the one hand, bankruptcy and limited liability, the first great pieces of government interference with freedom of contract would be abolished, and imprisonment for debt presumably reintroduced. On the other hand, since Nozick envisages a minimal state with no real taxing powers but a continuing responsibility for defence, reliance on conscription would be almost inevitable. From Nozick’s viewpoint, any form of taxation constitutes slavery, and fairness is not a proper concern of policy, so there can be no particular objection to the press gang as opposed to, say, voluntary recruitment financed by involuntary income taxes.

Also, at the weekend, I went to watch the final day of the Australian Surf Life Saving Championships. Apart from a brief stint in Sydney, I’ve never lived close enough to a surf beach to watch this archetypally Australian sport. Very exciting, though you need a big screen to see what’s happening in the middle stages of the race, particularly in the swim legs.

Update 26/3Libertarians come in many different flavours, and quite a few have objected to the characterization above. To my mind, the combination of “libertarian’ and “utopia” leads irresistibly to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. For clarity, therefore, I’ve referred specifically to Nozick rather than to libertarians in general.

I’ve been reading the Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian and was struck by an episode in Post Captain . The hero, Jack Aubrey has been given command of a ship but is being pursued by his creditors and faces indefinite imprisonment for debt if they catch him. Reaching Portsmouth and his crew, he turns on the bailiffs who have been pursuing him and routs them. Several are knocked down and, in a marvellous twist, Aubrey presses them into service on his ship.

It struck me on reading O’Brian that this kind of thing would happen routinely in a libertarian Nozickian utopia. On the one hand, bankruptcy and limited liability, the first great pieces of government interference with freedom of contract would be abolished, and imprisonment for debt presumably reintroduced. On the other hand, since Nozick envisages a minimal state with no real taxing powers but a continuing responsibility for defence, reliance on conscription would be almost inevitable. From Nozick’s viewpoint, any form of taxation constitutes slavery, and fairness is not a proper concern of policy, so there can be no particular objection to the press gang as opposed to, say, voluntary recruitment financed by involuntary income taxes.

Also, at the weekend, I went to watch the final day of the Australian Surf Life Saving Championships. Apart from a brief stint in Sydney, I’ve never lived close enough to a surf beach to watch this archetypally Australian sport. Very exciting, though you need a big screen to see what’s happening in the middle stages of the race, particularly in the swim legs.

Update 26/3Libertarians come in many different flavours, and quite a few have objected to the characterization above. To my mind, the combination of “libertarian’ and “utopia” leads irresistibly to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. For clarity, therefore, I’ve referred specifically to Nozick rather than to libertarians in general.

I bought one of those CDs that promises “explicit language”, but it was even harder to understand than usual. All I could make out was a lot of swearing. Can I take this to the ACCC?

Valdis Krebs presents this map of purchasing habits for political books, using the techniques of cluster analysis. Krebs’ main point is that the books divide readers into two sharply separate clusters, color-coded on the assumption that one group of readers are Democrats and the other are Republicans. The diagram also coincides with the standard left-right coding.

I have a couple of observations on this. The first is the trivial one that this color-coding is the exact opposite of the one that would naturally be used in Australia or the UK (back in my days as a folksinger, one of my more successful pieces (this is a highly relative term( was about a Labour leader who “went in [to office] Red and came out Blue”. Without wanting to load too much on to arbitrary signifiers, this does seem to me to support my view that there’s a bigger gulf between liberals and the radical left in the US than elsewhere. Even if the mainstream left party in other countries does not adopt the red banner of Marxism there’s sufficient continuity along the political spectrum to make it’s adoption by the right unlikely.

The second thing that’s striking is that, on the left-right orientation, I come out as a moderate. I’ve read nearly all the blue books that are within one or two links of the red zone, and none of those on the far left of the diagram. On the right, I’ve read only Letters to a Young Conservative .

Looking again at the titles of the books I’ve read, while there’s a vaguely leftish slant to them, one could scarcely call either Clash of Civilisations or Elusive Quest for Growth supportive of the left. The striking thing is that these are mostly the serious books, while those on either side are mostly lightweight polemics (I’m inferring this from the reviews I’ve read of some of them and the titles of the others). But it would appear from the cluster analysis that those who read leftwing partisan diatribes also tend to read serious books (and vice versa) while those who read rightwing partisan diatribes don’t read anything else.

In terms of the debate that’s been going on for some time about the relative intellectual capacity of the left and the right, the cluster analysis seems to imply that the left is doing a lot more to enhance its intellectual capacity than is the right.

(Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution)

I’ve had some pleasant lunches with Peter Spearritt, who heads the Brisbane Institute[1], a local thinktank for which I do occasional odd jobs, such as speaking engagements and commissioned papers.

In all of this I never suspected that Peter was at the centre of Brisbane’s Web of Power. But that’s what Malcom Alexander of Griffith University has concluded, after performing an ‘interlocking directorships’ analysis of the kind popularised by C Wright Mills in The Power Elite. The most connected connectors are those who sit on the board of the Institute.

Among the features of interest are the small size of the elite. On the generous criterion of two board memberships, it contains only 314 people. From my interactions with them[2], it does seem that, within this group, everyone does indeed know everyone else. Brisbane is still that kind of place.

The other notable feature is the dominance of the public sector. Thanks to the ‘global city’ phenomenon, few large private corporations have head offices in Brisbane these days. All the noted by Alexander as being at the core of the affiliation network are in the public sector, with the exception of the Queensland Council of Unions. However, many of the members would also be directors of locally-based corporations.

To generalize this point, if, like me, you’re concerned about the concentration of power in global cities, and the potential for crony capitalism that it creates, this is an additional argument in favour of public ownership.

fn1. For those interested, I’d classify the Institute as non-partisan but mildly left of centre on balance. Its backers are more concerned with promoting Brisbane (and Queensland more generally) as an intellectual and cultural centre than they are about a particular policy agenda. As Australian readers will know, Queensland is in need of such promotion to offset the ‘Deep North’ image built up during decades of government by rural conservatives, and reinforced by the Pauline Hanson outbreak a few years ago.

fn2. I’m on the periphery of the Web,, being on the board of the Queensland Competition Authority which regulates, among other things, prices for infrastructure monopolies.

The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years by Bernard Lewis. Among much useful information, this book contains the interesting snippet that the name Palestine was imposed by the Romans after crushing the Jewish revolt of about 70CE and referred to the long-departed Philistines, and the claim that the first state religion, incorporating heresy hunts, persecution of unbelievers and so on, was Zoroastrianism in Persia.

I’m also rereading Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins. I agree with Dawkins on a lot on the issues he disputes with, for example, Stephen Jay Gould. Nevertheless, and particularly in relation to human society, he reminds me of those economists who have been so dazzled by their exposure to the powers of the market mechanism that they are unwilling to recognise either defects in the mechanism or the possibility that many phenomena are better explained in other ways. The most obvious example, in Dawkins’ case, is the attempt to model the development of culture in terms of memes. As with, for example, public choice theory or the economics of the family, there’s enough going for the idea that it can’t be demolished in a sentence. But, again as with these examples, and depending on way in which it is applied, it either:

• explains only relatively trivial instances of cultural evolution, like jokes and catchphrases
• is rendered vacuous through the use of redifinitions that render the theory irrefutable, for example by making ‘memes’ synonymous with ‘ideas’; or
• provides an account of important phenomena that is obviously wrong, for example by failing to observe that political ideologies like, say, Marxism or political sociobiology owe more to conscious design than to selection and recombination

The relative absence of this kind of stuff is one reason I prefer Climbing Mount Improbable to much of Dawkins’ other work.

I’m always suspicious when I see a quote attributed to some historical figure that seems too neatly in tune with the preoccupations of today. Take this widely-cited quote, attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero in 63 BC

The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt

What’s wrong with this? For a start, the concept of bankruptcy didn’t emerge until the Renaissance and neither did double-entry accounting, without which the concept of ‘balancing the budget’ makes no sense. The Roman Republic did not have anything that really corresponds to “officialdom” – there was no standing bureaucracy and most public offices were held for short terms by aristocratic figures like Cicero himself. And foreign aid was not something the Romans went in for. On the other hand, if you wanted a statement that perfectly encapsulated the views of a large group of Americans in the late 20th century, when this quote seems to have surfaced, you couldn’t do much better than this.

At a minimum, there’s some free translation being used here. But my guess is that the quote is entirely bogus. Does anyone have any info?

Instant update Yet again, Alan from Southerly Buster comes to my rescue. He writes: Everyone reliable seems to agree the Cicero quote is bogus. So is the Petronius quote.

Disgrace by JM Coetzee. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a year or so, and the Nobel Prize (along with the interesting, if not strictly relevant, fact that Coetzee is now living in Adelaide) finally prompted me to read it. It’s a bleak look at post-apartheid South Africa and at the human condition in general. The hero is a middle-aged academic, formerly a classicist and now reduced to teaching communications who leaves his job in disgrace after an affair with a student, and goes to live with his daughter on a remote farmlet. Coetzee got into a lot of trouble in South Africa over the central scene, in which the pair are attacked by a group of black marauders, and for the generally pessimistic outlook of the book as a whole. His latest book, Elizabeth Costello has an Australian writer as its main character, and covers some of the same themes as Disgrace, including animal rights and how to talk about evil. I was impressed by the excerpt I read in Prospect but haven’t yet seen the book.

Last night, I went to a concert by Margret RoadKnight, looking back on forty years on the folk scene. She showed off both her vast range of traditional and contemporary music and a voice that hasn’t lost any of its quality in the thirty years I’ve been listening to her. Accompaniment was provided by Bruce McNicol, late of the Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band. The concert was held at the very snazzy Judith Wright Cultural Centre and the audience was much more cultural centre than folk club. With the exception of the goateed youngsters taking the tickets mine was just about the only beard there.

Parliament of Whores by PJ O’Rourke. There can be few contemporary writers with more epigones than O’Rourke. Just about every newspaper has one these days (for a while, the AFR had two), and the blogosphere is full of variants on the same riff.

O’Rourke himself was a lot funnier in his National Lampoon days, satirising the Left, not exactly from within, but at least from close-up, than he is as a fully paid-up Republican party animal. Still he can always raise a laugh, which is more than can be said for most of his imitators.