They "Don't Want-ta"

I suggest that if you find the story that now follows implausible, you really don't know Ireland.

Back in the bad old days (circa 1988) when Evil stalked the land, a well-got businessman of my acquaintance imported in his briefcase a floppy disc of business software for which he had paid £100 in Manchester. Although he knew well that there was zero chance of being caught "smuggling" it in, as plenty of others still do regularly, being an upright pillar of the business community, he approached the customs officials at Cork airport seeking to pay the proper excise duty and/or VAT.

Under pressure now, he may allow that he was indulging his curiosity and/or being a bit disingenuous. If one were being cynical - a rare event hereabouts, I know - one might suspect that he had recently encountered the UK Internal Revenue services on a typically unsympathetic day, and wished to compare and contrast.

The man to whom he spoke was rather taken aback - "£100 for that ?" - and clearly had never seen a diskette, nor wanted to know of imported software. Having unsuccessfully ventured to suggest to my friend several excuses for non-declaration that might be usefully claimed, he finally said "Yerra, go on, we'll let you off this time", but my friend was insistent. He tried to explain that he intended to use it in his business and it would cause all sorts of accounting problems, as well as awkwardness with the tax and VAT Inspectors if it wasn't all "above board".

The official looked at him as if he had just tried to persuade him that Charlie Haughey was the Son of God, but agreed to see what he could do. He then walked down to the other end of the office, and made a phone call.

The official was - you've already "twigged", haven't you ? - one of those endearing characters with a naturally clear Cork voice which carried all the way down to where my friend waited.This is how it went:

Mick, howzit going ?... Great stuff... Go way ! I hate those Meath fellas more GAA gossip deleted...Listen, Mick, I have this fella here with a piece of plastic that he says he wants to declare...no,no, he's not from expletive deleted Dublin ... yeah, Irish...yeah really...I think he's one of them family name deleted fellas, I know ... looks useless to me...£100...looseware or sumpthin'...no, that's it, soft, yeah...I dunno...is there a code ?...no, I know, yeh, yeh...(snort) yeah...no, Mick,

...no...

I already told him that but he don't want-ta...

Over at Public Inquiry, Anthony Sheridan says:

... the people should indeed take ownership, not of the reform process, but of the political system itself

I say that many of the people - he calls them "morons" - Anthony and his ilk get most annoyed about, e.g. Eoghan Harris, already tried to get "the People" to do that: they "don't want-ta".

It's not some kind of accident that we have a Fianna Fáil-dominated government, or that we have had one so often: it is the result of a functioning electoral process that is not "rotten", and produces political leadership which is the genuine free choice of the voters. Like it or not - and I don't - we have to live with this. (Only until the next election, if the opinion polls are to be believed, mind you, when Anthony will get to suffer under a different set of "morons").

This does not mean that there is nothing for good people like Anthony, his nephew Gavin, Dr Elaine Byrne, John Handelaar and many others to do. Mr HandelaarIf nothing else, and there is plenty more where those named are concerned, they are part of the corps who provide the "eternal vigilance" without which our freedom from tyranny will atrophy.

Anthony, temporarily (I hope) carried away, calls for our "current rotten system" to be destroyed so that it can be replaced with ... well, "the people should take ownership", Anthony says. This would seem to mean in practice (bear with me !) that pure, idealistic, good people - by whom is meant, one has to suspect, people like himself and Elaine Byrne - with rational, transparent, ideas uncorrupted by money, or anything else, would guide The People to A Better Place.

Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that Elaine, anyone who shares her views, or indeed anyone is capable of putting into place - just like that, Tommy Cooper-like - a "system" that works better. It just might be otherwise (though I doubt it) if everyone was like Anthony, or like you, or even like me, but everyone isn't, and they are never going to be.

And don't fool yourself that it is otherwise anywhere else in the world, even if it is undeniable that Ireland is very imperfect in all sorts of maddening, and impoverishing, ways.

Watch How These People Vote

Last month, I remarked that there will always be banking crises. Readers may have been sceptical, but wisely did not dare to say so.Via Paul Kedrosky (again) I learn of the tired fool site which reproduces Tacitus in regard to a banking crisis two millenia ago.

Tacitus refers to the fact that every member of the Senate was involved in banking abuses. This prompted me to look at the Register of Members Interests for the Irish legislature. Here is the list of the 20 or so of our representatives who admit to being bank shareholders

More Enjoyable Handball

Joe Higgins famously compared questioning Bertie Ahern to playing handball against a haystack. A major reason for Ahern's success is that eventually the Opposition more or less gave up the attempt to pin him down.

Against this background, Wednesday's ruckus in the Dail and the various mutterings about our new Taoiseach's dictatorial tendencies look to me to be good news for the Opposition. Cowen leads with his chin - often in a most obnoxious fashion - in a way that is refreshing after 10 years of Bertie-speak, but which risks being caught with a clever upper-cut. Opposing politicians are a bit out of practice, but sooner or later they will re-discover the art of traditional debate.

It is gratifying to again have a lawyer heading our government, but I reserve judgement on Mr Cowen. He is articulate and intelligent, but I have not yet detected significant political skills.

One thing about Cowen that repels me is his facility (which other ministers have been slipping into also) for contemptuous and rather juvenile put-downs of Enda Kenny. I have never been a fan of the FG leader but this sort of attempted humiliation of him for his short-comings tells one more about the person uttering it.

Until You Consider the Alternatives ...

Courtesy of Arnold Kling, I learn of two thought-provoking quotations provided by Peter Klein:

Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. (Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3rd edition, pp. 262-63.)

The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation. (Frank H. Knight (1938), quoted in F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 152.)

The quotations have stimulated some interesting comments on Klein's website, which you can read by scrolling down to the end of his web-page.

Kling's collaborator Bryan Caplan is probably the leading current ideologue of what seems to be a strongly anti-democratic tendency among an influential coterie of economists in the United States. (See, for example, this). I must get around to reading his "Myth of the Rational Voter" soon.

Perhaps his book will answer the questions for me, but I have been reading (to my great enjoyment) Caplan on the Web for a couple of years now, and I find it difficult to believe that his view of politics can really be so limited. He is certainly not a limited person: his views are always intelligent and well-informed, and I'd bet that he is a wonderful human being.

I'd also make a small bet that his Myth is a straw-man. As an observer of politics in several jurisdictions for several decades now, I have never heard it suggested that voters were rational, except in the broadest sense. By the latter, I refer to the notion, which I tend to share, that in choosing between the alternatives on offer, the electorate generally successfully selects the "lesser evil", which qualifies as rational behaviour in my view.

I am guessing that Caplan will object that one cannot reliably reach a rational conclusion by using irrational criteria. That is where I am forced to the idea that his thinking is limited, because he seems to insist that rationality is reducible to the idealised situation where one is choosing between readily reckonable probable outcomes to the options being made available.

That is never, and can never, be the situation facing even the best-informed voter. As, if my memory serves me well, Arnold Kling himself has confessed, your gut is often more reliable than your brain in the real world.

Voters are to blame

A retiring Belgian politician and former Prime Minister has delivered himself of some uncomfortable verities. According to Certain Ideas of Europe

Jean-Luc Dehaene ...neatly traces a line linking society's growing individualism to its litigiousness (Belgium is very litigious), and the modern world's mania for passing endless new laws, that many like to blame on politicians. Forget it, growls Mr Dehaene. The nanny state is the fault of voters.To quote:

"I'm a politician from another age. An age when politics was more structured. In which citizens belonged to organisations. Nowadays, we live in an atomised society, made up of citizens living as individuals, let's say living emancipated lives. And who have this feeling that politicians are there to resolve all their individual problems.

You can really see it when you are a mayor. What people are most concerned by is dirt. In particular, dog mess. It's a real eye-opener. Inside their homes, their dogs have to be super clean. Once they're outside, they can do what they like. But when their owner sees another dog making a mess on the street, what does he do ? He calls the police or the mayor! And politicians are supposed to solve the problem, or otherwise, people - who seem to think there is a solution to every problem - will go to court. They'll sue over everything and nothing, even over noise from a playground! In other words, we, the politicians, we have to pass new laws and rules covering everything. Even when it makes no sense for me, the mayor, to have to pass some new rule banning dogs from doing their business on the road! But if I don't do it, it's a judge who is going to come up with the rule instead."

As for Belgium, so for Ireland too, I believe. All right, one does have to ask whether politicians deserve any blame for failing to provide leadership. However, even allowing for this, I strongly believe that voters' infantile attitude to their roles as citizens is a major factor. Politicians are too slow to object to the lazy casting of themselves as the scapegoats.