"It has only just been revealed that the judiciary invented their own set of Treaty Principles..."

"The Treaty Debate is great. We've just found out, courtesy of our King's Counsels, what has broken the economic back of this nation. It has only just been revealed, thanks to their letter to the PM, that the judiciary invented their own set of Treaty Principles. ...
    "Most of us had heard about the 'principles' before, but until the Treaty Debate was opened recently, we had no idea that they were so embedded [by lawyers and judges] into our Constitutional arrangements.
    "Many countries have affirmative action programs. However I know of no country that has [embedded within it] a constitutional requirement of 'outcomes,' not opportunities, being equalised amongst the citizenry, other than maybe a few Communist States that failed & no longer exist. ...
    "[O]ur Judiciary seem not have the foggiest idea of the practicalities of the problem. Once you put equitable outcomes, not opportunities, in a Constitution, you're requiring governments to raise massive tax revenues to achieve equalisation. You're shifting taxation powers from elected officials to judges. Let's at least be grateful to our King's Counsels for explaining why NZ's standard of living has been falling, harming the livelihoods of all ethnicities."

~ Robert MacCulloch from his post 'Now We Know how NZ's economy became broken: The Judiciary wrote a Communist-style Constitution without Consultation; without People Knowing.'

Well, that's sunk it.

 

In the absence of any cogent reason to think otherwise, and we've been given none at this stage, the direct cause of HMNZS Manuwai running onto a reef while on a simple survey, then catching fire, and then sinking, looks like nothing less than blithering incompetence. And an inquiry by the Navy about the Navy doesn't give confidence we'll ever know much more.

The author of a history of the Royal Navy in the Pacific, John McLean, observes that 

The sunken Manawanui was a survey/research vessel. It was doing survey work in Samoan waters when, under the control of Yvonne Gray, it went to the bottom of the ocean. Surveying has been an important function of the Royal New Zealand Navy since its creation in the Second World War and before that hydrographic surveys were carried out by the Royal Navy which defended the seas around our coasts until the 1940s. The centuries old principle of surveying is that the surveying vessel - or "mother ship" if you like - stays out at sea while the inshore surveying is done by the ship's small boats. That way they can get in and out of shallow waters, reefs and even river mouths. They then return to the survey vessel where the charts are drawn up. So why did Commander Gray take the large and valuable ship so close to the reef?

Given that this was a survey vessel whose commander appeared to have no idea of how to safely survey, and no clue where the ocean floor was, is there any reason not to think blithering incompetence?

To which, in the absence until then of any cogent reason to think otherwise — and in a climate of "diversity hires" — readers, writers and commentators (including Mr McLean) have been raising the issue of Commander Gray's lesbianism. Not that being a lesbian makes you unable to command a ship. But, in an era of widespread diversity hires — when the recently retired Chief of Navy Rear-Admiral David Proctor feels the need to boast that "having wahine (women) as commanding officers on more than 60%of our ships as well as heading up other important portfolios, is a realisation of that goal ['to celebrate the diversity of our personnel']" — it surely makes you more likely to be promoted to command one before you're fully competent to do so.

Which we're entitled to think has happened here. Particularly when Gray's colleague, Fiona Jameson, captain of the frigate HMNZS Te Kaha, is not just another poster girl for "inclusiveness," but also for sheer blind incompetence. As McLean observes:

Gray's ship sank while Jameson crashed Te Kaha into Auckland's Kauri Point ammunition depot, leaving a gash of more than half a metre that cost $220,000 to repair. At the time of her appointment to Te Kaha Jameson gushed, "Now as I take command with three other women [commanding officers], I get....a greater normality around wahine toa leadership". The poor thing can't even speak English properly let alone steer a ship without hitting a wharf.

Observing this from Britain where he's exploded many a PC pomposity himself, author Peter Boghossian sums up:

Highlighting that the captain of the sunk ship is a lesbian and implying that’s the cause of the crash is grossly irresponsible. Yet we will increasingly find ourselves in this predicament as we hire and promote people on characteristics other than merit. And it’s only beginning.

So it is.

"If Liz Truss’s car-crash premiership is to be a cautionary tale, let it be one about the dangers of affirmative action."

"Amid all the commentary on [Liz] Truss’s rapid rise and precipitous fall—which one year on blames either her free-market purism or the Whitehall 'Blob,' according to political taste—one key component of her career has been conspicuous by its absence. Truss’s rise coincided with the 'modernisation' era of Conservative leader David Cameron. And because she is a woman, Truss benefitted from preferential treatment within her party and sympathetic treatment in the media, even from traditionally hostile papers, in spite of numerous gaffes and failures. The liberal press may now wax apoplectic about Truss’s uselessness, but it surely protests too much—after all, it did so much to foster the tokenistic political climate that put her there....
    "When David Cameron was elected Conservative leader in 2005, he introduced his 'A-list' as part of an effort to remodel the party along the lines of Tony Blair’s incumbent New Labour and make it less male, pale, and stale. ... After he assumed power as head of a coalition government in 2010, Cameron made Truss a junior minister for education in his 2012 cabinet reshuffle.... the reasoning behind that decision: it was 'clinically designed to neuter claims Downing Street had a "women problem".' New female appointees were duly met with praise in the press, and hailed in the left-wing 'Independent' as 'the rapid rise of Cameron’s new girls.' ...
    "Before his election, Cameron had pledged that a third of his ministers would be women in the next parliament, and he was under pressure to deliver. Accordingly, ... on the morning of the [2014 cabinet] reshuffle, Cameron decided to promote Truss to the cabinet position of environment minister, a decision the former PR man would later describe as 'gut instinct.' 'I looked at people like [Truss and others],' Cameron recalls of the reshuffle in his autobiography, 'and saw the modern, compassionate Conservative Party I had always wanted to build.' ...
    
"Affirmative action is often used to placate media criticism, and politicians may even announce sex- or race-preferential appointments explicitly and be praised for doing so. Lavish praise then follows for the appointee, who is somehow held to have struck a 'historic' blow for representation. But how can box-ticking be considered ground-breaking female advancement? ...
    "The very question of 'women's advancement' requires us to view individual female politicians as representatives of women in general—a supposedly monolithic political category, whose interests are presumed to be the same. In reality, Truss’s rise was good for one woman and one woman only: herself (though the honour of being the UK’s shortest serving prime minister ever is surely a dubious one). To consider Truss’s high-flying a win for women as a whole is to subscribe to a collectivist mindset over a meritocratic one that values individual talent and ability."

~ Laurie Wastell, from his article 'The Disaster Artist: Was Liz Truss Britain’s first affirmative-action prime minister?'

Hobson’s Pledge: Racism?

 

The commentariat is all aflame attacking the “Hobson’s Pledge” movement, launched this week by Don Brash. Their vision for New Zealand, they say, “is a society in which all citizens are equal before the law, irrespective of when they or their ancestors arrived in this land.” Brash warns in particular of “iwi participation agreements” in proposed RMA amendments that “would virtually entrench co-governance and partnership obligations with some Maori into local government, creating an under-the-radar constitutional change”; and cites the ongoing farce of Maori seats in parliament and, increasingly, in local government that tribalises governance and decreases democracy and individual rights.

But “they’re racist!” says the commentariat in response. Which is odd, because the very foundation statement of the “Hobson’s Pledge” movement is that we should all be colour-blind before the law. (Hence, Hobson's Pledge, i.e., “He Iwi Tahi Tatou | We Are Now One People.”) And in calling the group things like "pale, male and stale," their opponents themselves reveal just a touch of the racism (and sexism) they claim to oppose.

So how do we resolve this apparent contradiction? Let’s start by looking at how several alleged luminaries justify their claim.

Writing for Stuff, Laura McQuillan doesn’t even try to. “Is Don Brash's new Hobson's Pledge the support group that white people need?” she asks rhetorically in a piece that bizarrely references “Black Lives Matter,” the National Front and some skinhead group called Right Wing Resistance before pulling out and quoting entirely unrelated comments on a piece of clickbait she’d written the week before asking “Which is New Zealand’s whitest region?” all garnished with a quote she’d simply made up herself from a fellow she claims to be “leader” of 1Law4All. (He’s not.) But I bet she thinks she’s not the racist – and that making up quotes is probably “justified corruption.”

Talking out of his arse, Hone Harawira also simply asserts the moot. "Come on, absolutely this is racism and it's time somebody called it out," he says, offering no argument for his claim Brash is “a redneck or a racist.” Neither does professional Maori Willie Jackson, who litters his “debate” with Brash will claims that he’s old, that he’s talking rubbish, that everyone is against Maori, and that so-called “urban Maori” need more privileges from the government. Jackson, of course, represents (or claims to) so-called “urban Maori.”

Jackson, Harawira, Susan Devoy and others talk about the bad “outcomes” that confront Maori, young and old, but none bother to address the claim that the law is not colour-blind and should be, nor show that these bad outcomes can in any way be attributed to racism. (Indeed, a strong argument exists that it is Maori over-reliance on welfare and legal privilege that has all but guaranteed the bad outcomes they cite.)

But there’s more. Media darling Toby Manhire takes on the important topic of logos and where the Hobson’s Pledge website got that picture above. Answer: like most media pics these days (including those the luminaries themselves use, it’s from an American photo library.)

Tim Watkin too conflates the issue of privilege and legal privilege, as if they were one and the same. (No, Tim, they’re not.) But he at least acknowledges the existence of so-called “affirmative action,”  while asserting its effects have been positive – “what Brash calls 'Maori privilege.'” he says, “others call redressing the wrongs of history… an effort to tackle 150 years of race-based privilege [that] is helping avoid more unrest in this country.” (How Maori seats, Maori scholarships, Maori welfare, Maori educational tokenism, and iwi co-governance in local government “avoids unrest” we are not told however.) And he is big enough too to acknowledge “there are valid issues lurking among [what he calls] nonsense -

for example, the fact that settlements are based on where tribes happened to sit in a moment of history (1840), how far respect for Maori spirituality goes and how we manage Maori representation in local government. But it's all based on an intellectual foundation made of rubble and rubbish. The profound wisdom that we should all be equal before the law is twisted and imprisoned in what becomes an argument for privilege to be entrenched with a certain people (Pakeha) at a certain time in history (today).

If you can make sense of that last sentence, by the way, then you’re a better parser of sentences than I.

He argues constitutional law, and gets it wrong, saying:

They [the Hobson’s Pledge movement] show their failure to understand the most basic ideas of a constitution, by on one hand saying "The Treaty of Waitangi is not in any meaningful sense New Zealand’s constitution" and yet in the very next line saying that the Treaty did cede sovereignty, protect property rights and establish Maori as British subjects.
    Even given that slanted interpretation, it clearly acknowledges that the treaty deals with rights and power, which is, er, what a constitution is all about.

It’s certainly true that ceding sovereignty, protecting property rights, and establishing Maori as British subjects with all the rights and privileges thereof are the foundations for something that might become a constitution – something, importantly, that would elucidate what those rights and privileges are, and how a government would be constituted to protect them. That something would be a constitution. But it would need something much more comprehensive than the Treaty’s three spare clauses to become one.

And it would need much else excised from modern law …

I’ve been saving the best for last. In recent years Mihinirangi Forbes has become almost the patron saint of media types. Posted at the taxpayer-funded ivory tower of Radio NZ under the title of “Analysis,” RNZ’s “Māori Issues Correspondent” asks of Brash and co right off the bat ‘How Pākehā are you?’ It’s worth some fisking because it captures so many of the criticisms.

The group's website is emblazoned with the saying "He iwi tahi tātou - One People" - a phrase famously used by Governor William Hobson as he greeted Māori chiefs as they arrived to sign the Treaty of Waitangi, the country's founding document.
    It's a document guaranteeing iwi full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands, forests and fisheries. That's not promoted on the lobby group's website.

Well, yes it is. Unfortunately, however, it’s promoted under the aegis of the conspiratorial “Littlewood Treaty” nonsense that talks about pieces of paper being discovered years later in drawers that, say the claimants, just happen to be the real Treaty.

The group nonetheless do acknowledge, and on the group’s very front page, that the Treaty did in fact guarantee to protect the property rights of all New Zealanders – those being the rights of both non-Maori and Maori over property they wish and desire to retain in their possession, to recognise all the relevant words of the document in question. And it’’s worth noting that Forbes and others fail themselves to promote the document’s guarantee that sovereignty was in fact ceded by the signatories.

Important point that.

Forbes continues:

It's also a document which grants Māori the same rights and privileges as Pākehā, but it's the word privilege which appears to have Hobson's Pledge members concerned. [Emphasis in the original.]

Forbes equivocation over the word “privilege” is of a piece with Watkins’s. The Treaty guaranteed all the rights and privileges of British citizens. Not more rights, or greater privileges. Not affirmative action or co-governance.

She continues, citing (as dishonest hacks will) the weaker arguments she can find from protagonists, before summing up in he r words the aim of the group:

Hobson's Pledgers are calling for a colourblind New Zealand, but one group featured prominently in spokesperson Dr Brash's interviews: Māori.
    Other members thought it important to question how Māori some Māori actually were.

A lot buried in two sentences.

Yes, Hobson's Pledgers are calling for a colourblind New Zealand. That this means they are arguing against the committed programme of affirmative action in favour or Maori means that the ongoing programme of affirmative action in favour or Maori be mentioned. No mystery there.

Yet she’s right to note that an organisation talking about being colourblind needs to be rigorous in its own ocular hygiene, and how Maori some Maori actually are is and always should be wholly irrelevant to anyone truly colourblind. So she has a point.

Mr McVicker, Mike Butler and Mr Oakley seemed offended when asked how Pākehā they were. They all said the question was irrelevant, with Mr Butler calling it a "race-based question."
    But they had no difficulty talking about the percentage of Māori blood people might have, including myself [says Forbes].

She has a point. A point I’ve made to many of these people before, and one that Forbes to her credit has recognised that Brash avoids.

But she concludes with the same equivocation as many others, between legal and economic privilege.

What did the human beings think of Māori inequalities in health, education, life expectancy or incarceration?
    Mr Shirtcliffe offered a quick reply:
        "We are a very simple, single focused movement relating to the issue of equality in governance and
        property rights; other issues are not for us."

Almost the right response. But that issue must be “for them,” because if that equivocation remains unchallenged, this ship called Hobson’s Pledge will take on water as every other similar project has.

And it will only fuel the cries of “racism,” even where it doesn’t exist.

So how do the critics of the group defend their claim that the group is racist? Simple: they don’t try to. They don’t even define what they mean by it, since of course that would make their job harder: Racism being:

Assessing the worth of a person by his skin colour and ancestry. The lowest form of collectivism -- what author Ayn Rand calls a "barnyard" form of collectivism.

The Pledgers don’t help themselves with ridiculous talk of bloodlines in a discussion that’s supposed to be about being colourblind, but the commentators don’t even try to properly justify what should be a serious claim, because they’re never, ever called on their dysphasia  by their media colleagues, and nor do they expect to. They publish in the full expaction of being able to write nonsense because they’ve all been taught the doctrine of “multiculturalism”: that all races are equal except for the one they think is “in power.” (Racism, to the Marxist/multiculturalist not at all being about colourblind individualism but about “power structures” and who inhabits them. Racism in this sense then being very much about not being colourblind, but about being able to skewer the “pale,male and stale” wherever you may find them.) 

This is how the likes of McQuillan can write lightweight fluff and Jackson can rely on nothing more than barroom bluster – and Forbes as can ask “how pakeha are you?” without being racist -- because they can all be confident that (to paraphrase Saul Alinsky) any means are justified in carrying out a social-justice warrior’s ends.

It’s how they can acknowledge all the affirmative action in favour of a race, can watch a race-based party form and exploit race-based seats, can sit back and say nothing as a race-based elite lord it over the peons they claim to represent,  all because in their minds these people are not “part of the power structure” – yet will write up a hyperbolic fervour should anyone have the temerity to call for one law for all.

They’re out of their minds.

.

Cue Card Libertarianism: Feminism

In the wake of imbecilic feminist indignation trumping astonishing astronomy and now Nobel-Prize winning cell biology research, this below seemed an appropriate re-post from 2006 … [STEM, by the way, “is an acronym referring to the academic disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics]

Cue Card Libertarianism - Feminism

Like most intellectual movements, feminism is a movement of many strands, some valid, some toxic.

The rebellion against the notion of women as reproductive animals devoid of intellect, incapable of logical thought, destined by their biology passively to serve the needs of men – a notion brilliantly catalogued and analysed by Betty Friedan in her ground-breaking 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique – was long overdue. Unfortunately, it also became misdirected through such vehicles as Wimmin’s Lib and Wimmin's Studies, and the idea that all wimmin are 'sisters,' that all men are rapists, and that all woolly Feminazis are good looking.

The essential wrong of the barnyard animal view of women was that it was collectivist. It said, in effect, that woman qua woman had an inescapable, predetermined role in life from which no individual deviation was possible, let alone permissible. This is clearly nonsense.

The Feminazis, however, went on to preach their own version of collectivism with a vengeance - instead of equality they simply wished to reverse whatever 'gender thinking' then existed, and to replace the perceived positions on the totem pole. By their view, women were not only not inferior to men, they were superior; they not only had the right to pursue a career, they had a right to take jobs from men through such political means as affirmative action programmes, quota systems and sisterly solidarity; not only were they not sex objects, but all men were rapists; not only were they not breeding machines, but motherhood itself was immoral; not only had there been oppression of women, but all of Western civilisation, particularly capitalism, was an edifice of patriarchal hegemony; not only were men and women not completely different, there were no differences between them at all; etc, etc.

Fortunately, enlightened feminists such as Camille Paglia and Ayaan Hirsi Ali emerged to counter such lunacies and encourage women to think of themselves as individuals, first and foremost. Libertarianism intersects with this strand of feminism.

Strictly speaking, the term feminism, as a legitimate assertion of individuality and rebellion against collectivism, is a redundancy; individualism is sufficient. See ‘Cue Card Libertarianism: Individualism’!

---

This is part of a continuing series explaining the concepts and terms used by libertarians, originally published by Lindsay Perigo in The Free Radical in 1993. The 'Introduction' to the series is here.

[Cartoon by Anti Feminist Comics]

Remember the Bhopal disaster?

Remember the Bhopal disaster in India? It was the world’s worst industrial disaster, in which more than half-a-million people were exposed to toxic gas released from a Union Carbide plant located in a built-up area. In scale, if not in human toll, it was comparable to BP’s Gulf of Mexico debacle.   Stephen Hicks reviews one of the textbook cases of so-called “market failure” that looks more and more like something else.

The 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India, is one of the major business ethics cases of the past generation. [A highly toxic gas escaped from a Union Carbine plant in a built-up area] and many people died. Awful.
    But I am weary of reading the standard journalistic accounts that run like this: In the name of profit, a large American multinational corporation neglected safety; as a result, many people, especially poor people, were killed and maimed, and the corporate executives involved have never been criminally prosecuted.
    Bhopal is an important case to learn from, but it is absolutely crucial to attend to all of the relevant facts, many of which the standard accounts omit.

Hicks offers five immediately relevant facts omitted in the standard accounts,

the most important [being the fact] that Union Carbide’s (UCC) presence in India was governed heavily by the Indian government and its aggressive, top-down industrial policy…

Hicks has the details, but the standard accounts also omit to mention that the decision to use the hazardous chemical MIC was the Indian government’s, not Union Carbide’s; that government directives also required the building of larger rather smaller facilities; that the Indian government was also pursuing an affirmative action programme, replacing Union Carbide’s foreign experts in engineering and agricultural chemistry with locals; and, finally, that the decision to situate the chemical plant in the middle of a residential community was the Indian government’s, not Union Carbide’s, exacerbated by a re-zoning policy that included giving thousands of construction loans to encourage Indians to build their homes near the chemical plant…

What he doesn’t say, but could have, is that it while it’s assumed in all the standard accounts that it was in the selfish interests of Union Carbide to risk lives, in truth it was no more in the long-term self interest of Union Carbide to kill thousands of people than it was for BP to risk ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

 Hicks observes that even twenty-seven years later there are still many questions to be answered about the disaster, but “before jumping to conclusions about culpability, it’s important that we frame the investigative questions accurately… [and] almost 30 years later, I have yet to come across a professional and objective set of answers to those questions.”

As I said myself a few years back when just seven of those responsible for the industrial disaster were finally taken to trial, convicted and sentenced,

the disasters caused by Union Carbine and BP (and James Hardie) show that the cosy relationship of big government and big business does not lead to big justice, or provide any guarantee against environmental or human disaster.  BP is one of the most politically active in its industry. The close links of BP to both government and environmental organisations should lead one to wonder whether “BP [has] been too busy spending money to [buy politicians, and to] impress the government and the public with how ‘green’ it is to look after safety adequately.” And Union Carbide and Dow Chemical, its new owners, seem to think it is easier to buy regulators and politicians—to hold its operations together “by duct tapes and bribes”—than it is to face justice, or to act justly. [Ditto for James Hardie.]
    And it’s not like the governments they buy deliver any of that “bought-and-paid for” justice to their constituents either. The Indian Government’s fascistic “Think Big” policy saw them forgo their role as referee and act instead as a player, and a bad one. (“The Indian government had its heavy hand on every aspect of the Bhopal plant, from its design and construction to its eventual operation.”)
    So, desperate to protect themselves and under pressure from the US Government not to charge Union Carbide’s executives, Rajiv Gandhi’s government instead accepted millions of dollars in out-of-court settlements from Union Carbide as "compensation for the victims.” But while all that money was received by the politicians, very little of that1989 settlement ever actually reached the survivors. The loop of political corruption closed out those who most needed justice from the disaster, just as that corruption and the politics that caused it helped make the disaster itself happen.
    Anti-capitalists will often suggest that we need big government as a “counterweight” to big corporates.  But is that really true? The fact is that stiff regulation protects no-one except those it shouldn’t, and simply invites big corporations to buy their even-bigger regulators.  There really is no greater force for corruption than an equation that puts together a big corporate desperate to escape justice, and a politician in pursuit of power and campaign funds. As PJ O’Rourke once observed, “when buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first thing to be bought and sold are legislators”—some of whom, like Al Gore, take that relationship with them even when they retire from the legislature.
    Just one reason that a complete separation of state and economics is called for, lest the poisoners and the parasites make common cause.
    As they have done all too frequently.

SCOTUS sacks racial preference law

Black activists are hailing a US Supreme Court decision of which the likes of Pita Sharples and Willie Jackson should take note.  While these two morons were calling for preferential entry to university for unqualified Maori entrants, a group of black activists was taking to the Supreme Court a case that opposed all such race-based foolishness.

Speaking to the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, which cascv, the members of the Project 21 black leadership network praised the result as “a step toward removing the racial trappings of a by-gone era and putting all Americans on equal footing.”

    ”It was clear to this Court that barring people from promotion because of the color of their skin is wrong. . .” said Project 21 chairman Mychal Massie. "True equality allows people to rise and fall on their merits. That's what this decision protects. How can one oppose such fairness?"

Beats me.  Try asking those two professional Maoris, Messrs Sharples and Jackson. 

Race-based racist foolishness

Q: What do you get when you cross a race-based party and a government education system? 
A: You get headlines like this one: ‘Give Maori Free Access To Uni’

It would be nice to think that racism was dead in New Zealand.  But it’s not.  It’s alive and well and thriving in Pita Sharples’ proposal for preferential entry to university for unqualified Maori entrants.

The “affirmative action” system admitting under-qualified Maori has been so “successful” – and only an entity occupying a race-based seat could call lowering standards based on race a success – that this numb nut wants to have it extended to Maori with no qualifications at all.

Dr Sharples, who is also Associate Education Minister, said allocating Maori places regardless of their qualifications would boost Maori participation at higher levels of study.

Well, yes it will.  It will but it will hardly earn them greater respect if they fail when they get there, or are coddled through their courses – and it will hardly endow them with respect for their courses or for their own learning.

It will not raise the educational standards of Maori; it will only lower educational standards for everyone.

Now it’s true that students can enter university and succeed without any substantive secondary success – I know this because I know students who have.  But this says more about the already appallingly low standard of New Zealand’s secondary and tertiary courses (there’s too little real learning being delivered at secondary level, and too few courses at tertiary level that truly necessitate it), and a lot about the courses these students choose. It’s possible for example to achieve a Bachelor of Arts or Education without any original thinking and any prior learning (that is to say, a Bugger All or a Bed, neither of which are worth much more than the paper on which the degrees are printed). 

In fact in most of the humanities faculties a working brain is a positive disadvantage.  But there other areas of learning where a student does need to have prior success and previous learning on which to build. Engineering and medicine are just two. It’s all but impossible to achieve a genuine medical degree or Bachelor of Engineering without some real hard graft, and genuine prior knowledge – impossible, that is, without the preferential coddling of students on the basis of race.

And as Thomas Sowell writes, "The dirty little secret about affirmative action is that it doesn't work."

    An even dirtier secret is that virtually no one really cares whether or not affirmative action works to advance minorities or women.
    It works politically to put its supporters on the side of the angels. It works for ethnic or feminist "leaders" as a rallying cry to mobilize support. For the mushy minded, it works to make them feel morally one-up.

And for politicians, it helps them get a headline.  So that worked well then.

What's this "equality of opportunity" nonsense we're now hearing?

John Key told Campbell in a chatty, mates-together to-camera the other night that he wasn't interested in the Labour mantra of "equality of outcome"; he intended instead to pursue "equality of opportunity."  His multiple dissemblings over the Maori seats (to abolish or not to abolish, that is the sixty-four seat question) has made it clear he has no bottom lines, but the "equality of opportunity" talking point was one that was raised in the campaign by David Farrar, raised again this week by John Key, and recycled just yesterday by National's ambitious Auckland Central bimbo Nikki Kaye: "I'm a National member because ..." says the Blonde Ambition, sniffing the air for clues ... "because I really believe in the equality of opportunity for all, not the equality of outcome."

Is this already a Labour-Lite talking point then?  Once is happenstance -- twice is surely design -- the third time must surely be evidence of collusion, especially by one so ambitious as Ms Kaye.

But is it a reasonable goal to pursue?  Is it even a good thing?   No, says George Reisman, it isn't.  It is no more reasonable to pursue equality of opportunity through the use of government force than it is equality of outcome: both of these are simply misguided attempts to use government power against the facts of reality.

The fact is that people are not born equal, and they can't be made equal by government decree -- and nor can the opportunities that are open to them. A responsible government should pursue neither the closing of gaps nor the equality of opportunity -- the result of both is merely new positions of privilege, a new aristocracy, and destructive nonsense like affirmative action and racial quotas. 

What it should pursue instead is the ending of privilege and the removal of government hurdles to individual action. 

In other words, it is not equality of opportunity that a responsible government should pursue but freedom of opportunity. That's really what it means to have one law for all.  "Let us consider what opportunities actually are," suggests Reisman, "and then establish some important facts about them."

    "An opportunity is merely an occasion on which successful action is
possible. It is a situation that an individual can take advantage of to his gain.
    What needs to be realized about opportunities is, first of all, that there is
no scarcity of them; they arise again and again. The second thing that needs to
be understood is that what is important in connection with them and deserves
to be fought for, as a matter both of justice and universal self-interest, is not
that vicious absurdity “the equality of opportunity” but the freedom of opportunity.
    ... what needs to be understood about opportunities is that they can be and regularly are created by individuals. Indeed, opportunities are themselves products of human thought and action..."

Opportunities are everywhere.  It's not the abundance of opportunities that is a problem, but the paucity of vision that is unable to see them.

    "Let us consider the abundance of opportunities. An opportunity exists
every time there is the possibility of improving oneself in any way. If one is
penniless and there is an unfilled job available that one has the ability to fill,
one has the opportunity of ending one’s pennilessness. If one has a job, and
there is any better job available that one has the ability to fill, one has the
opportunity to improve one’s position further. If there is any skill that one
does not possess, but is capable of learning, then one has the opportunity of
adding to one’s skills.
    In fact, in the nature of the case, the economic opportunities potentially
open to the individual far exceed his ability to exploit them, with the result
that he must choose among them, selecting some and rejecting others. This
follows from the fact that there is always room for improvement in the
satisfaction of man’s wants, and that the basis for carrying out such improvement
is the performance either of more labor or of more productive labor.
    In other words, built into the fact that man’s wants can always be satisfied more
fully or better is the opportunity for the performance of more labor as the
means of satisfying them more fully or better, and the opportunity for improving
the productivity of his labor.
    ... it follows that in the nature of things there are potentially limitless
opportunities both for increasing employment and for raising the productivity
of labor, for there are virtually limitless possibilities for improvement in the
satisfaction of man’s wants. Indeed, the potential opportunities for employment
always dwarf man’s ability actually to work, which is the major reason
that he must be concerned with raising the productivity of his labor.
    People may wonder, of course, how it can be true that there are virtually
limitless employment opportunities and yet, at the same time, the world in
which we live is characterized by chronic mass unemployment and the
experience of millions is that they have no opportunity for work. There is a
simple reconciliation of these facts. Namely, misguided laws and social
institutions deny man the freedom of exploiting the opportunities for employment
that the nature of reality offers him, and so force unemployment upon him.
   The problem of unemployment [about which we're going to see a lot more very soon] is is the result of the violation of the freedom of opportunity -- i.e., the violation of man's freedom to exploit the opportunities that that reality offers him. 
    The freedom of opportunity means, to be precise, the ability to exploit the opportunities afforded by reality, without being stopped by the initiation of physical force.

That's a great definition: "the ability to exploit the opportunities afforded by reality, without being stopped by the initiation of physical force."  And as we know, the biggest initiator of physical force bar none is the government.

People are unable to find work not because there is no work for them in reality, but because government and labor-union interference, based on the initiation of physical force, prices their labour beyond the reach of potential employers ... [specifically through] inflation of the money supply ... coupled with so-called pro-union legislation.

So if the new Key regime wants to do a decent job on this score, to promote the freedom of opportunity, then it must work urgently towards removing those misguided laws and social institutions that while building up a chosen few, restricts every other New Zealanders' freedom of opportunity. 

But that would assume it regarded freedom of opportunity as a goal worth pursuing, or even understood its desirability.

The Obamessiah cometh!

No, I haven't said much about Barack Obama.  Too much to be said and too little time right now to say it -- and too easy to look ungracious at a moment in history which is starting to look like it would when Moses came down from the mountains.

Because to see the reaction of Obamoids to this historic moment is like witnessing politics as religion -- a sentiment borne out by the messianic "grasping the arc of history" hyperbole.

These people really do seem to think that the coming of The One will heal the sick, calm the waters, and raise the dead.  And so does he, apparently.  Do you think they might have the wrong idea about what exactly politics does?  (The Onion strongly suspects they might.)

And what makes it history? Is it because he's the first president to come from Hawaii?  Or is it 'cos he's black -- the first black man in the White House?  Let's not fool ourselves, huh: We all know what it is, don't we, and the more everyone talks about his skin colour instead of his character -- including so many of those who voted for him -- we can be clear that forty years after Martin Luther King rang out his famous words, this presidential candidate has been judged not on the content of character, but on the colour of his skin.

That's not good enough.

But what it should be good enough to show is that if a black man can get the White House, then all the arguments for affirmative action and quotas and race-based law collapse overnight - and not just there, but over here as well -- so we really can consign race-based law to the dustbin of history.

I look forward to hearing any arguments why that shouldn't be so,

Anyway, I didn't want to say any more than that just now.  I wanted to point you to some good people who have:

• Obama - The Great Black Hope - Cactus Kate
• Obama: New Frontiers for the Republicans? -  Callum McPetrie
• My "First Black President" - Michael Vardoulis
• Obama Says: "Shut Down" All Tax Havens - Bob Bauman
• Post Election Market Blues - CNBC
• And so ... - Lindsay Perigo
• Lots of good stuff from Gus Van Horn
• How Big a Change? -  Tibor Machan
• and lots, lots more good commentary at this week's Objectivist roundup.

What's in back of Barry Obama?

I was curious to read Alexandra Starr's New York Times piece about Barack Obama's time at Chicago University, especially after reading Russell Brown's review which introduced it thus:

    With the brief, alarming season of Republican Idol on hiatus owing to a financial meltdown, the US press has been producing some serious -- and sometimes seriously good -- work. The Obama campaign presumably won't be upset with the story that appeared in yesterday's New York Times magazine under the byline of Alexandra Starr.
   Starr examines a side of Barack Obama that is surely rich with clues to his way of thinking and character, but which has been studiously underplayed by his campaign ... his decade-long career as a law professor at the University of Chicago.
   Through conversations with former colleagues and students, she depicts the professor as open-minded, inscrutable and thrilled by the contest of ideas. In a White House era characterised by tunnel vision, nonsensical proclamation and intolerance of debate (let alone dissent), Obama's traits might not seem optimum for the task of actually winning an election, but I'm quite tickled by the idea of the hold of the most powerful job in the world being able to countenance ambiguity.

"Ambiguity."  How very "post-modern." 

This is one of two pieces praised by Brown as "seriously good work," so I was keen to examine its insights.  What would Starr's piece reveal, I wondered, about Obama the Lecturer.  What might I find out about the nature of this ability to "countenance ambiguity."  Turns out Starr's examination of Obama's time as a Chicago law professor was more interesting for what it didn't say, and what it underplayed, then for what it could say. 

First of all, it seems he took just three classes -- Racism & Public Law, Constitutional Law and Voting Rights -- and this just was a part-time lectureship of about two sessions a week while he kept up his day job in the state senate.  So calling him a "former law professor" rather overstates his case.  Second, just look at the nature of the praise his students give him:

• "Escuder was impressed by his teacher’s ability to see both sides of an argument."
• “You never would have known he was going to be a liberal senator based on what he said in his courses."
• “Based on what I saw in the classroom, my guess is an Obama administration could be summarized in two words. Ruthless pragmatism.”
• “He wanted us to be aware of our biases so we could better avoid the pitfalls they can bring.”
• “I don’t think he’s wedded to any particular ideology.  If he has an impatience about anything, it’s the idea that some proposals aren’t worthy of consideration.”
• “I’ve read that he’s good at poker, and that doesn’t surprise me. He is good at not wearing his opinions on his sleeve.”

Can you see it too?  Can you see the common thread?  They all praise his intelligence, and there's clearly no question about that.   But all of the students quoted praise him for something else:  for rarely if ever showing his own opinions.    To them, this is the fundamental attribute about which they wish to give their former lecturer praise, and on which point of praise both Brown and Starr concur.

Now, it's certainly a good thing if a lecturer doesn't use his class as a soapbox for his own opinions, and the likes of Jane Kelsey, Susan St John and most of NZ's Association of University Staff should take note, but there is however more than one reason for not showing one's own opinions in class.  One reason is to be scrupulously non-partisan as a teacher.  The other is because one has no opinions*. 

So is Campaigning Obama any different to Lecturing Obama?  Well, not really.  Aside from "change" and "more regulation of Wall Street" --- something now that both presidential candidates agree on --  we're really no closer to being sure of what he really stands for.  Notes blogger Myrhaf:

He has shown an astonishing ability to flip-flop on his positions. On issue after issue, he has changed his mind, as if his principles and positions are of secondary importance to what the voters want to hear.

The surge won't work, he says one month, and he's against it.  And now he says it has worked, and he's for it.  Drilling won't work, he says one month, and he's against it.  And now he says it might work, and he's sort of for it.  This might impress us not just with his ability to see both sides of an argument and to "countenance ambiguity," but also to hold both sides at any one time and to countenance almost anything.

So what's the explanation?  Myrhaf has one, that he's a "blank screen president":

He has described himself variously as a "rorschach test" and a "blank screen" on which people project what they want to see...  Barack Obama's habitual way of thinking does not focus first on the facts, but on other people's emotional reaction to what he is saying... Always with Obama his primary focus is on what other people think. The reactions of other people guide him as he speaks -- and facts are malleable things that can be made to fit the needs of the moment... 

Based on what we've heard of Obama in the classroom and on the campaign trail, we'd have to agree that an Obama administration really could be summarized in two words. Ruthless pragmatism. 

So why are people looking for Obama's principles, then?  Obama is the perfect product of modern, progressive education. He has none. As Ayn Rand observed, "[The Pragmatists] declared that philosophy must be practical and that practicality consists of dispensing with all absolute principles and standards."  So why look for either principles or standards or positions that last longer than the range of the moment?  What takes the place of principles for Obama is the rapt adoration of crowds. "Look at the way he soaks up adoration when he speaks before large crowds," notes Mryhaf. For someone like Obama, in which fundamental importance lies "not primarily in the facts of reality but in what other people think, the adoration of the masses must be something like a peak experience. It doesn't get better than that."  What moves Campaigning Obama is not facts or ideas, but the emotional vibrations of his audiences. 

So what about all the conspiracy theories then?  Says Myrhaf:

Obama is greatly feared on the right as a crypto-socialist who is acting moderate to gain power. This is possible, but I don't think it is the fundamental explanation of his character. His radicalism in the past has been the result of being surrounded by radicals. In liberal Chicago, he did what was needed to rise in the Chicago political machine. He reflects back to people what they want to see. If anything, Obama's far-left positions show how far the Democrats in general have moved to the left.

So if this anlysis is true, then what's the greatest irony about Obama, the empty sponge and apostle of "change you can believe in"?  I'll leave the last word to Myrhaf: "Here is the greatest irony about Obama. If he were elected, his administration would change nothing...  Obama would be a servant, enacting policies others tell him to do."

* * * * * *

* The only "position" Obama ever actually revealed to students according to Starr, impossible to avoid given the nature of his classes, was on racism: "In his mind," said one student, "the real problem wasn’t racist attitudes some people may hold, but the fact that some minorities were starting at such a huge disadvantage. Issues like poor public education and the lack of access to credit seemed more glaring to him.” I can't help but note that it was legislative moves to address this "minority disadvantage" in the mortgage markets that kicked off the sub-prime crisis in the first place!  See Stephen Hick's flow chart for the simple illustration of how affirmative action led inexorably to capital destruction.

Cue Card Libertarianism - Feminism

Like most intellectual movements, feminism is a movement of many strands, some valid, some toxic.

The rebellion against the notion of women as reproductive animals devoid of intellect, incapable of logical thought, destined by their biology passively to serve the needs of men – a notion brilliantly catalogued and analysed by Betty Friedan in her ground-breaking 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique – was long overdue. Unfortunately, it also became misdirected through such vehicles as Wimmin’s Lib and Wimmin's Studies and the idea that all wimmin are 'sisters,' that all men are rapists, and that wooly Feminazis are good looking.

The essential wrong of the barnyard animal view of women was that it was collectivist. It said, in effect, that woman qua woman had an inescapable, predetermined role in life from which no individual deviation was possible, let alone permissible. This is clearly nonsense.

The Feminazis, however, went on to preach their own version of collectivism with a vengeance - instead of equality they simply wished to reverse whatever 'gender thinking' then existed, and to replace the perceived positions on the totem pole. By their view, women were not only not inferior to men, they were superior; they not only had the right to pursue a career, they had a right to take jobs from men through such political means as affirmative action programmes, quota systems and sisterly solidarity; not only were they not sex objects, but all men were rapists; not only were they not breeding machines, but motherhood itself was immoral; not only had there been oppression of women, but all of Western civilisation, particularly capitalism, was an edifice of patriarchal hegemony; not only were men and women not completely different, there were no differences between them at all; etc, etc.

Fortunately, enlightened feminists such as Camille Paglia have emerged to counter such lunacies and encourage women to think of themselves as individuals, first and foremost. Libertarianism intersects with this strand of feminism. Strictly speaking, the term feminism, as a legitimate assertion of individuality and rebellion against collectivism, is a redundancy; individualism is sufficient. See Individualism!

This is part of a continuing series explaining the concepts and terms used by libertarians, originally published in The Free Radical in 1993. The 'Introduction' to the series is here.
LINKS: Cue Card Libertarianism - Individualism - Not PC

TAGS: Cue_Card_Libertarianism, Libertarianism, Politics, Ethics