Utilitarianism

John Stuart Mill (c. 1870).

Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The trouble with Mill is that you if read a few of his then-contemporary critics, and then you think you have his measure with all your modern day access to knowledge, but all along he was throwing "mind grenades" set on "delay" and they sit in your head while you go on thinking you are rather smart. So Mill mentions the Stoics and how virtue is only a means to happiness and that there are other things, too. He mentions the Sophists and how Socrates (allegedly) challenged their ancient equivalent of what is happening in higher education today. But in mentioning the development of utilitarianism from Epicurus to Bentham (and unfortunately I have not read Bentham cover-to-cover as I will do in the future), so just when I think to myself: "Mill, you really are 'drawing a long bow here' [a favourite saying of one of my favourite professors]", the mind grenade goes off and my hubris is dashed and I am glad I didn't say it out loud but there you have it - it was certainly there. There is no mention of Aristotle and the "golden mean" and how achieving a mean across the spectrum of virtues achieves happiness, but, as Mill says, there are many things that amount to happiness in addition to leading a virtuous life, so bringing up Aristotle doesn't make a good deal of sense. One interesting aspect of the essay is the long note in the last few pages where Mill extends a good deal of courtesy to Herbert Spencer, someone I have read more about in Jack London's Martin Eden than I ever did in all the other secondary sources I have read put together. While Mill does not quite agree with Spencer, Spencer claims (according to Mill) that he was never against the doctrine of utilitarianism. So the Greatest Happiness Principle it is but if we do not also take into account Mill's ideas of liberty (in On Liberty), then the present-day situation where we are told what to like and what will make us happy and many of us go along with that and eat our smashed avocado, living in our high density housing, and paying for cups of coffee that we could make at home for a fraction of the price, which are not only much better, but we could also be happier because we were actually doing something for ourselves, while, as Tolstoy or even my mother would say, "in reality", we are succumbing to the biggest scam ever and then wondering why we are not happy at all. And J.S. Mill says all this in just under 122 pages of thick paper dating from 1895, which is nice, but with each cover-to-cover completion of classic works I edge ever-closer to the abyss of what I don't know and it scares me.

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Left-Right; Right-Left: How about a fourth revolution?

The state triumphant? Jean Duplessis-Bertaux's "Retour de Varennes. Arrivée de Louis Seize à Paris, le 25 juin 1791" (1791) via Wikimedia.

Today I read respected economist John Quiggin's latest in "Governments are buying up where the market has failed. Is this the end of privatisation?" via the TJ Ryan Foundation website.  Apparently, privatisation has failed because the government decided to start buying back infrastructure. Given the article appeared in The Guardian, you will excuse me for being a little sceptical about this trumpeting of the state's triumphant return to delivering services.

Poor regulation is not the fault of businesses. Indeed, there are some major problems that government brought about all by itself: forgetting to structurally separate Telstra before selling it off, then wanting to buy part of it back through NBN, and let's not forget the roof insulation debacle. 

None of these problems were caused by market failure. Clearly, these were government failures. Political reactions that buy back the farm are about winning elections and little else. It is a far cry from a failure of the free market.

Not that Quiggin says all of these things, but he does seem to be against privatisation. But being against privatisation, where government sells the farm and then promises to irrigate it and weed it and harvest it and then give all the proceeds to the private sector, is not the same thing as market failure.

Market failure occurs where the private sector is unable to provide goods and services at a profit. Broadband services to remote communities is a case in point.

But this is where ideology comes in. Rather than funding, transparently and directly, the actual cost of services to remote communities, it must be cross-subsidised. This means that the true cost of providing to the bush is hidden, and the costs of inefficiencies are buried in monoliths like NBN Co.

And while Quiggin acknowledges that this is not a return to socialism (or, more appropriately, social democracy), given that land titles offices are to be leased out (NSW) or sold (SA), it is largely a return to nationalisation of particular industries. This has happened time and again in the UK, Australia, and Canada, and so on with telegraphs and railways and other services, especially during war time. (There is even talk of the ACT Government buying back Canberra Stadium so it can bulldoze it to the ground and then build its own stadium - again - in Civic. But remember the original debacle that was Bruce Stadium?)

Quiggin notes that Pauline Hanson is using citizens' dissatisfaction with the private sector (which governments get blamed for anyway) and combining this with racism - a form of left-right politics where public ownership is combined with right-wing social policies.

The Hawke government, which introduced the majority of the reforms based on economic liberalism (or economic rationalism as it was known here), had more of a right-left agenda. Since Howard, we seem to be stuck in a race to the conservative right, or centre-conservative/right² ideology - the biggest government in history, pretending to be a small government, touting freedom while taking away the rights and freedoms of citizens more than ever.  

I made a joke to my class the other day about living in Australia versus living in the developing world. In many developing world countries, you can do whatever you like as long as you do not criticise the government, In Australia, you can criticise the government all you like but you are not allowed to do anything.

What has never been tried is a liberal-liberal approach. Imagine a free market with same-sex marriage, free trade agreements with universal health care and education, market competition for goods and services in the metropolitan areas and government-provided services in the frontier areas.

The trouble is not privatisation, but a half-baked attempt at it. And it isn't the same thing as libertarianism a la Ron Paul. Regulations are necessary. But should the government really have anything to do with holding back same-sex marriage? This has nothing to do with government.

But before we think that re-nationalisation is a new turn in politics, don't forget Kevin Rudd's essay in The Monthly on the Global Financial Crisis back in 2009. Choosing one economic orthodoxy over another is all history has witnessed since before the Great Depression.

Re-nationalising has been done before, and it will be done again. And it will be undone again, too. But what is missing is not the right economic policy, it is the right combination of economic AND social policies. Why liberal economics can't work with liberal social policy we may not know until it has been attempted. And whether this can produce better results than China's emerging model is another story.

While much of the above is a stream of thought, I have a few ideas of what to do about it. First, I might follow up on a recent Lapham's Quarterly podcast where John Micklethwait talks about his co-authored book (with Adrian Wooldridge) The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State. (Lapham's Quarterly is the magazine I have always longed for, and Lewis Lapham is like the Mortimer and Adler of "Great Podcasts". If you don't subscribe yet and you are into politics or history, then this is the duck's!)

Second, I need to consider rating policy decision such as Snowy 2.0, NBN, electricity, South Australia's great big Elon Musk battery, and so on, and putting together a quantitative paper. Some of Patrick Dunleavy's recent work might serve as an example.

But why oh why we can't have liberal economics and liberal social policy I will never know. And while I don't even pretend to have the temerity to critique Quiggin's views, I think there is something to be said for the paradigms that continue to wax and wane in the economy and society. 

That this all began in 1776 with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, in his argument for market liberalism, together with the United States Declaration of Independence, also from 1776, and its focus on political "liberty", provides an interesting starting point for an historical argument about the never-quite-coming together of these two ideals: liberty-liberty.

Note: See also William Hogeland's (2017) Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West via Lapham's Quarterly.

The Odyssey

Alexander's Pope's translation of "The Odyssey" (1752). Source: Wikimedia.

The Odyssey by Homer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Generally, I accept my lot in life and I really do enjoy my fate. Amor Fati. Then I read books like this, where after pages of frustration I am shaking with rage and I want to don my armour and take my stand with Odysseus and slay that pack of pissweak suitors for behaving like hyaenas over my unprotected hearth. I have to stand and walk as I read, angry at my young self for wasting all those years being an idiot, angry at my lot in life for not making me a Rhodes scholar, enabling me to speak and read every language on earth, read every great book ever written, while waves of adrenalin course through my chest, my back and shoulders tensing with my hands shaking as I read furiously, my body lunges with each spear thrust, getting frustrated at being unable to read because of the shaking, and passion compounds passion and I read so fast I start stumbling over words and have to slow myself down. The book ends and I sit down. And then I get cranky at Hollywood for all its bullshit, cranky that the story was never told as it was written. Cranky that the Trojan horse gets bare mention yet it becomes the central story of every recreation since, and then cranky that I didn't know that's because it was Virgil's The Aeneid where the details came from. And as the coursing anger subsides, the Homeric epics give me a glimpse of real life, and real heroes. They suffer doubt and frustration and anguish and shame and lose their courage. They are not super heroes who can never lose and they are not in control of their destinies and the gods play their part and one's fate happens and it is only one's inward citadel that can never be broached if we won't allow it to be. Unless we accept a Trojan horse as a gift. Thank God for Homer, whoever he (or they) may have been.

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