Could a conservative/libertarian solution have worked in South Africa?

April 10, 2010

 With the recent death of South African far-right leader Eugene Terreblanche, the curtain seems to have closed on white South African nationalism.

 While Terreblanche may have played a part in his own downfall, he isn’t exactly the only White farmer to be killed in South Africa in recent years – since the end Apartheid at least 3000 white farmers have been murdered. Things aren’t much better for most Blacks either, with AIDs, high crime rates and economic inequality making life for most Blacks at least as bad as it was in the 1980s.

 This raises the question as to whether South African after WWII could have chosen some kind of middle-path between the impractical, radical traditionalism of Apartheid and the utopian egalitarianism of western-style democracy.

 While there may have been some advantages to the Apartheid system, the attempts to control people’s movements and recreate defunct national homelands was both highly disruptive and economically unsustainable. Since the Black workforce was unable to move to where the work was, it became necessary to import large numbers of Blacks from other parts of Africa to do the jobs than South African Blacks couldn’t get to. This not only made life more difficult for native Blacks, but it made the demographic situation of whites even more precarious. Another big problem with Apartheid was the fact that it created unnecessary division between Whites and Asians, with disaffected Asians becoming a key part of the liberal and socialist opposition to the Apartheid regime.

 One alternative to Apartheid was that hinted at by moderate South African conservatives like Smuts – a form of limited demographic government with freedom of movement and association but with a restricted franchise to protect the White and Asian minorities from the tyranny of the masses.

 By allowing people to live and work where they wished it wouldn’t have been necessary to import cheap labour and Blacks would have been able to obtain higher wages and better access to land for housing. Instead of limiting the franchise along ethnic lines, the South African government could have restricted the franchise to those owning property or holding a tertiary education. This would have ensured that the majority of Whites, and most educated Blacks and Asians, would have been able to vote, and that fewer Blacks and Asians would have reason to want to undermine the government.

 With genuine freedom of association (not the watered-down post-60s kind) liberal whites would have been able to mix with affluent Blacks and Asians in the cities, while poor whites and Boer farmers would have been free to form white nationalist communities to protect themselves from the Black underclass.

 Admittedly, such as a system would still have drawn opposition from a lot of Blacks activists and western leftists. It’s also unlikely such as system would have kept crime under control as well as the Apartheid system did. However, it would have been much more sustainable from an economic perspective, would have been  arguably less prone to corruption, and would have been easier for western centre right governments to politically defend. As it was, the ideological gulf between the South African government and the centre-right parties of other Western countries made it too difficult for them for them to make a reasonable case for maintaining trade and sporting links with South Africa in the face of widespread centre-left opposition.

 While it’s no longer possible to turn back the clock and radically change the current political system in South Africa, this example illustrates the potential for a workable middle path between traditionalism and liberalism and the dangers in implementing radical traditionalist solutions that are totally out of sync with modern liberal values.

3 Comments | Conservatism, Egalitarianism, Left liberalism, Libertarianism, Race, South Africa | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

Hayek’s “The Mirage of Social Justice”

March 21, 2010

“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way people would like the world to work – whereas economics represents the way it actually does work” (Levitt & Dubner, Freakonomics, p. 11).

In Law Legistlation, and Liberty: The Mirage of Social Justice (Vol. 2, University of Chicago Press, 1976), Friedrich Hayek explores the concept of “social justice” or distributive justice, which he finds wanting and destructive of any real understanding of justice. Due to its complexity, it is difficult to do justice to Hayek’s argument against the political application of the concept of social justice in a brief article, but attempt to do so I will. Hayek begins his argument by contrasting the difference between a general rule (as in the Rule of Law) and the public interest, which he defines as a collection of private interests or majority rule. The former must be universally applicable to all citizens, whereas the latter merely implements the preferences of the majority. For example, today American citizens commonly think that the Supreme Court should reach decisions that coincide with the opinions of the majority of the voting public, a view which is reflected in the philosophy of judicial activism and the idea that the Constitution is a “living document” that must reflect the current mores of the citizenry. Thus, when deciding upon such cases as abortion and affirmative action, the Supreme Court begins to take on the duties of a legislative body, handing down “progressive” decisions in line with contemporary morality, whereas according to the intent of the Founders, the Supreme Court was supposed to only determine whether legislative acts were Constitutional or not and the unenumerated powers to enact social policy were to be the venue of the state legislatures. The Founding Fathers did not consider it to be the Supreme Court’s role to act as a legislative body, reflecting the will of the majority (or in the above cases, an elitist and powerful minority). As James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper, No. 10, “Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”

In Hayek’s view, justice in the Open Society concerned “rules of just conduct,” which he defined as “those end-independent rules which serve the formation of a spontaneous order, in contrast to the end-dependent rules of organization” (p. 31). In other words, in a free society that is not planned and controlled by a central authority, the rules must be fair and equally applicable to all, as in a baseball game, and not be directed towards a preferred outcome, as in picking winners and losers. This is the exact opposite, for example, of the tenets of affirmative action or outcome based education, however compensatory those policies might be.

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Posted by markamagi

Libertarianism: Left or Right?

February 8, 2010

I generally refer to my political philosophy as conservative libertarian, in order to distinguish it from left libertarianism or modern American “Progressive liberalism.” Hayek’s preferred term, “classical liberalism,” causes too much confusion in contemporary political discourse, although when I say that I am a conservative libertarian what I mean is that I want to conserve the classical liberalism of America’s Founders, with such core principles as individual and economic freedom, limited government, and the rule of law. Whatever confusion has come about regarding political nomenclature, at least in America, is largely a result of the Progressive movement and the fact that it has turned the term “liberal” on its head to mean one who favors a concentration of power in the hands of the state and as one who advocates state intervention in most facets of life, whether Constitutional or not. The Republican Party and the conservative movement, to a large degree, have gone along with this distortion of the understanding of the political term “liberalism,” to such a degree that the term has now become a derogatory epithet that not even the left will own up to, the preferred term now being Progressive. And to add to the confusion: while in nineteenth century speech, “liberal” was in opposition to “conservative,” in that earlier era a conservative was someone who favored a monarchy and aristocracy, and was usually opposed to free institutions and free markets, whereas a contemporary conservative is in favor of such things.

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4 Comments | Conservatism, Egalitarianism, Left liberalism, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Political correctness, US politics, liberty | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by markamagi

Political Correctness: A Vast Left Wing Conspiracy?

July 22, 2009

During the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, Hillary Clinton used the phrase “vast right wing conspiracy” to describe and label her husband’s political enemies on the right. While there may have indeed been a concerted effort on the right to bring Clinton down, in point of fact, if any conspiracy in American politics deserves to be called “vast” it would be the “vast left wing conspiracy,” which has at least since the Progressive era attempted to redefine American politics in a leftward direction. While the early Progressives had some success in that effort, the left in America really came into its own during Roosevelt’s New Deal. As I have stated elsewhere in “What’s in a Word?” , the very term “liberalism” was redefined by Progressives during that period to mean something entirely different. As James Burnham so aptly described this redefinition in Suicide of the West (1964), classical liberalism, with its belief in individual liberty, had been transformed into modern liberalism, with its primary principle of egalitarian social justice (based on the influence of Marxism and other socialist doctrines). I’ll risk quoting Burnham again because he so appropriately describes that redefinition of liberalism:

This difference in human character type corresponds to a theoretical conflict within the ideology of modern liberalism: the conflict between the principles of free speech and the other individual freedoms on the one hand, and the principle of egalitarian social justice on the other. Essentially, it is a conflict between individualism and regimentation: the individualism that the liberal ideology derives from its past and the regimentation it has absorbed in the present. This conflict is real, and can be hidden but not solved by discussion, negotiation and compromise. It is a fact that liberalism’s inherited principles correspond to individualism, and a highly atomistic individualism at that. It is equally a fact that the Welfare State and plebiscitary democracy mean a good deal and an increasing deal of regimentation. One or the other must give way; and, on the evidence of the past generation, there is little doubt which is the tottering horn of that particular dilemma. (p. 171)

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3 Comments | American Conservative, Cultural Marxism, Egalitarianism, Left liberalism, Multiculturalism, Political correctness | Permalink
Posted by markamagi

Whatever happened to the meritocracy?

January 27, 2008

With student debt in New Zealand rapidly rising, and students taking longer to pay back their debts, one might think more politicians would be asking whether so many students should actually be going to university.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a massive surge in the numbers of students attending higher education, and a correspondingly rapid increase in student tuition fees. In keeping with overseas trends, both Labour and National claimed this increase in enrolments was essential for the country’s “knowledge economy.”

Whether this surge in university enrolments was really necessary is debatable, unemployment was rapidly increasing at the time and perhaps many young people didn’t know what else to do, although technological changes were increasing the need for a more educated workforce.

However, that was then and this is now. Today unemployment is running at about 3 percent and there’s a fair supply of jobs, often paying relatively high wages, which do not require an academic degree, and can be learned either on the job or through combined work and study courses at technical colleges.

Unfortunately though, the government and the universities are still committed to outdated principles of egalitarianism and market populism, which are failing both students and the culture/economy of the country as a whole.

In a meritocracy, access to university should be based not on ability to pay, but on ability to pass, yet this cannot be guaranteed if places are offered to students who lack the aptitude, commitment and intellectual curiosity to complete a university degree.

This is an issue that the British Conservative party is at least tentatively addressing, but which still seems to be taboo in contemporary New Zealand politics. Every student who fails a course, increases the cost of a university education for other students, yet universities continue to offer places to students who have not done sufficiently well at school to warrant access to a university.

Egalitarians claim testing is unfair on adult students who have left school some time ago, but this can be be overcome by assessing adults students using aptitude tests instead of scholastic exams.

Not only are intelligent, hard-working students from working and lower middle-class backgrounds incurring heavy debts, because they have to subsidise lazier or less intelligent students, including a few upper-middle class airheads, but they’re also having to subsidise students taking academically soft subjects of little cultural or commercial value.

Dumb-downed subjects like American studies, and pseudo-academic subjects like Communications, add little to the cultural or economic vitality of the country, yet are popular with students looking for an easy pass, and subsequently tie-up valuable tax dollars that could be spent reducing fees for those taking more academically rigorous courses.

Similarly, it’s not the place of publicly funded institutions to fund ideologically biased subjects like Feminist studies. If you’re going to fund Feminist studies, then why not potential subjects with a right-wing bias like libertarian studies or ethno-nationalist studies. Once you open the door to this kind of post-modern market populism then where do you draw the line?

Furthermore, the market populist principle of funding institutions according to student demand, means that universities have to plough for trade and waste precious tax money on advertising, instead of restricting access and attracting students through lower fees.

Market populism and egalitarianism may have been noble or progressive ideas in the minds of Baby Boomers, but for today’s students, they’re leading to a future of debt and disillusionment.

Leave a Comment » | Education, Egalitarianism | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman