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.

Rejoining the Commonwealth

Marc Coleman (now writing for Independent Newspapers, by the way), wrote on Sunday July 29 2007about this.

Apparently, the UK's Minister for European Affairs, Kevin Murphy, recently hinted in Parliament at an invitation to the Republic to re-join. MC agrees with me that this should be ignored, but we don't agree on the reasons. For him,

... I'm a Jacobite (we haven't gone away, you know). My problem starts not with Britain, but with the nature of its monarchy. Being the central binding force of the Commonwealth, that same monarchy and what it stands for is crucial. The principle on which the current British monarchy is founded - the Act of Settlement - should be unacceptable to any modern pluralist democracy.

That 1704 act bars any Catholic from ascending to the throne of England and bars any British monarch from marrying a Catholic..

But perhaps the most problematic issue for Ireland joining the Commonwealth is a statue that still stands outside the Houses of Parliament: the statue of Oliver Cromwell.

As any objective historian agrees, Cromwell engaged in the systematic depopulation of Ireland, wiping out over one-fifth of the native population. Not content with that, he sent letters to parliament rejoicing in the slaughter of what he called the "barbarous wretches".

His confiscation of land from the native Irish laid conditions for a sequence of famines from which this country is only beginning to recover.

For some this is ancient history. Sorry, but no matter how long ago it occurred, genocide must never be forgotten or forgiven. The deeds of Hitler must always be remembered, lest they are repeated. Likewise those of Cromwell. Cromwell was a racist and a mass murderer who plunged England into its darkest period of intolerance and bigotry.

A Jacobite I am not - I believe that they are in fact long-gone from everywhere except Independent House - but otherwise, that's all fair enough. I also agree with him that "modern Britons are amongst the most decent and tolerant people on earth" but emphatically do not concur when he says ". ... I hope that some day Ireland will rejoin the Commonwealth".

For me, it is as simple as this: we have grown out of it, just as children grow out of living at home.