Violence is never far from the surface of Palestinian society, but it’s rarely so plainly self-destructive as the emerging civil war between Hamas and Fatah. The murderous struggle for power that has divided Gaza and the West Bank into Hamastan and Fatahland looks like the last nail in the coffin of any chance of two states, at least any time soon.
But it’s rarely acknowledged that, even before the factions started dropping their opponents’ chefs off tall buildings, the Palestinian territories were nowhere near ready for statehood. It’s common to assume that there is some kind of wilful refusal on the part of the West to allow the recognition of the two-state solution, a stubborn, spiteful reluctance to do what’s right. It is no such thing.
New states need time and effort to help them stand alone, to be able to enforce their authority, to defend themselves and fit into the international system. In the years following independence, Israel needed the military support of France and Britain, and to be propped up financially by West Germany. East Timor, the last state to gain its independence, needed the midwifery skills of both the Australian military and the UN, and it stills needs their assistance, five years on.
Any new state needs a national identity that gives its people an attachment to its territory, a government that can enforce its authority across the whole of that territory, institutions that work, and, usually, the support of a sponsor. A state that lacks these, is, regardless of who recognises it and however many fine words are said in its support, will fail, in one of the numerous ways that states can collapse, divide, be undermined, or invaded.
The usual concept for a Palestinian state - recognition of a unified nation consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, with the two joined by a corridor of land exchanged with the Israelis, and the whole state governed from the West Bank by a unified government - is a recipe for failure.
The territories are not a proper country, but are an artificial cobbling-together of two unconnected areas of the old mandated Palestine. The West Bank and Gaza’s only connection is that both identify themselves as not being nations in themselves, but as territories full of refugees from their real country. It is as nonsensical as if Wales and Scotland were to form a union, governed from Edinburgh, based solely on their Celtic ethnicity and their hatred for the English.
Only it’s worse than that, since Wales and Scotland have history, institutions and identities that don’t depend on their common enemy. The Palestinians don’t. When Israel was created, many of the Palestinian refugees fled from Israel to what was then Transjordan, now Jordan, and which then controlled the West Bank. Others went north to Lebanon, south to into Egyptian-occupied Gaza, and others scattered further. But those who would come under Israeli occupation in 1967 saw themselves not as nations under occupation, but as exiles facing their expeller.
Unlike the hundreds of thousands of Jews of Arabia who were expelled from their homes at around the same time, the Palestinian Arabs never made a new home in the their new home. Partly this was because the Arab states were, at least until 1973, deadly serious about wiping out Israel as a state; the Palestinians kept as refugees to repopulate an Arab Palestine, and as a handy, if callous, propaganda vehicle for diverting the anger of their restive peoples.
As a consequence, the Palestinians still have very little that is not part of a broader Arab or Islamist identity, or dependent on their status as refugees from Israel. The territory that the West wants to see become their state is not what they see as their real home. In short, there is no nation of Palestine that fits with where the Palestinians live, an identity that binds a people with their soil. Instead, the Palestinian identity is one that’s constantly looking over the border into their past, or looking across the Middle East to what they share with their co-religionists.
It’s fairly obvious that any model of Palestinian statehood will, if it’s to be permanent, need Palestinians to see their nation as the one that’s under their feet, not as the one that’s over the border. For those who like looking for flashes of silver tucked inside the darkest clouds, the separation of the Palestinian territories into two statelets could be the first stage in this process. It could bring about the evolution of two giant refugee camps into proper little countries.
Separated, not just by geography but by different ideologies and different national stories, the two statelets start to look more like nations, rather than just holding camps. Of course, it does not seem much of a step forward to have a statelet controlled by Hamas, one that is drifting closer into the orbit of Iran, that may allow itself to be used as a forward base full of rockets and human shields, and that is in no position to have civilised relations with any other state, but there is at least a glint in that undeniably nasty thundercloud.
For without progressing from the politics of exile, there can be no viable Palestinian state. Without a real sense of nationhood that connects the Palestinians to their homeland, it’ll be virtually impossible to establish them a successful new state. In an area as pressurised as that between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, it’s impossible.
The question is whether the de facto separation of the two statelets can ease of the Palestinians’ transition into a post-refugee nation. My guess is that it has a reasonable chance, if only because that progress was all but impossible under the old, cobbled-together model of statehood, a model that institutionalised the politics of exile. It’s true that any good that may come from this nasty little episode of bloodletting will take years at least, more likely decades, and it’s also true that predicting anything with any certainty in the Middle East - except war, hatred and sandiness - is a mug’s game.
But breaking the link between Palestinians' roots as exiles and their future as self-governing citizens is essential. Actually achieving this is a possibility for the long run, no more. But though Keynes’ famous words of scepticism pointed out that “in the long run we’re all dead”, in Gaza and the West Bank at the moment, that maxim is becoming equally applicable to the short run. Anything that gives a real chance of stability to the region, however remote that chance may be, ought to be taken seriously.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
A Self-Indulgent Boycott
So, the Universities and Colleges Union has voted to support a boycott of Israeli universities. With the rather Dave Spartish manner that these fine minds have, it’s nothing so straightforward as a plain call for boycott. Instead, the UCU will circulate a motion to all its branches to discuss calls from Palestinian trade unions for a "comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions". The boycott motion is going to branches for "their information and discussion", which is no doubt something to forward to.
It’s hardly worth discussing why this union wants to boycott Israel for its actions in the occupied territories, but not China for its actions in Tibet, Russia for its actions in Chechnya, India for its actions in Kashmir, Turkey for its actions in Cyprus, or any of the thousand and one other boycotts that would be at least as justifiable as the one they want.
The fact is that Israel, and its policy towards the occupied territories, has become an icon for much of the Left. Quite plainly Israel is not the wickedest country on earth, to be singled out and despised for its deeds; but yet it is an icon of loathing, to be singled out for what it represents.
The membership of the UCU is largely composed of middle-aged radicals, made diverse by a handful of middle-aged ex-radicals. That may be an unfair generalisation, but in any case, it’s much less of a one than describing Israel as an apartheid state. Its campaign priorities are the usual mix of public sector self-interest and tedious leftist sloganeering - no to privatisation, no to ratting on potential terrorists, yes to boycotting Israel.
Like most of the rest of the current Establishment, the academic establishment is the product of the Sixties and Seventies. Back when they were young, Western imperialism was still the great bogeyman of radical politics. Africa was going through a traumatic decolonization, and most of the colonial powers were fighting either to leave with dignity, or to cling onto their colonies as long as possible.
Empire represented all that was bad about the old Britain, with its stuffy Victorian attitudes and its appeal to all those fashionable Marxist clichés of exploitation and ruling classes. It was bound up with the old establishment, and was an emblem of everything that the new wave of politics and culture wanted swept away. Little could be easier or more enjoyable for the new generations than kicking imperialism as it went down.
Those who came of age back then still have an obsession with fighting imperialism. Anything that resembles a proper, old-fashioned Empire - rich, white people having power over poor, brown ones - sends into a frenzy those who have failed to evolve since the 1960s.
The misfortune of Israel is to have created the perfect icon of white imperialism. Their deeds are no worse, and often much better than many other countries involved in territorial disputes. But the ossified old Left couldn’t care less about Chinese imperialism, the squabbles of India and Pakistan, or any other imperial or quasi-imperial conflict. All they care about is bringing down white imperialism, once and for all.
The conflict in the occupied territories pushes all those old buttons. You have a power armed with the latest, most sophisticated weapons available, versus passionate, stone-throwing natives who have no weapons but their bodies and their cunning. It is the rich versus the poor; greedy European settlers versus the honest peasants who’d farmed the land for generations. It plays beautifully to the imperial stereotypes of these rather old, unimaginative people, who remain stuck with the bogeymen of their youth.
It takes little effort to see this conflict through the prism of white imperialism. Swap redcoats for IDF infantry, gunboats for helicopter gunships, and rebelling natives for rebelling natives, and one great bogeyman morphs into the other without effort. For those whose intellect is this shallow, who react rather than think, it makes perfect sense to fight Israel as the new imperial power, the heir of the Raj and the new adventurers.
It’s no coincidence that the two great boycott campaigns of the last half-century have been against the two states that push these buttons. Neither South Africa nor Israel was targeted for being the most monstrous regime around, but for sparking guilt and shame amongst the Empire-hating generations.
Apartheid South Africa was cruel, brutal and racist, but it was a competent government, and by no means the most tyrannical even on its own continent. Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is cruel, brutal, racist and so incompetent that its people are either fleeing or starving in their millions. But as it bears no resemblance to a white imperial power, it faces far less condemnation.
Israel is cavalier in its treatment of the Palestinians, and it is yet to completely kick the old vision of a Greater Israel. It is often heavy-handed and ruthless. But it is a tiny nation on the fringes of the Middle East, still surrounded by nations who want to see it weakened or destroyed. It faces guerrilla warfare, either from Hezbollah, or from Hamas or the other Palestinian Islamists, sponsored by those states that want to grind it down. It wants, reluctantly, to get out of the occupied territories, but not to be forced out, and in doing so it wants to ensure that its borders and resources are secure. Much as any other state would.
It takes a considerable degree of blinkeredness to twist Israeli policy into the charge sheet of a Public Enemy Number One. Even if we limit ourselves to academia, in the week British academics voted to boycott Israel, Iranian academics began being arrested for daring to talk to Western universities. If the UCU wanted to boycott nasty regimes there’s no shortage of choice. Making the choice Israel says much about their real motivations.
This boycott, as with the South African one, has little to do with fighting injustice and everything to do with the gratification of the smug lefties who dominate the UCU. It is self-indulgent to the point of obscenity to do this, to punish a nation for one’s own pleasure, regardless of the effect it has on those who may be suffering. Nations that feel unjustly attacked usually retreat into a bunk mentality. But hey, who cares whether it will do any good for the Palestinians, so long as it’s good for a few Western egos?
Quite aside from the stupidity of this self-righteous, self-indulgent boycott, whose only purpose is to make some decrepit old fools feel brave and daring again, it is a great shame that British academia should have leant its name to such an enterprise. It is only natural that the old elite should be some way behind the times. But it is inexcusable for it to be a full century behind the times.
To be driven by a desire to attack the British Empire is, in 2007, when the great issues concern the Islamic world and the new economic superpowers of the East, as stupid and absurd as it would for someone living in coffee-house Georgian London to be obsessed with fighting the divine right of kings. No one whose mindset is stuck in a previous century can have much to say about today’s world. Intellectually as well as physically, they're on their way to the grave.
It’s hardly worth discussing why this union wants to boycott Israel for its actions in the occupied territories, but not China for its actions in Tibet, Russia for its actions in Chechnya, India for its actions in Kashmir, Turkey for its actions in Cyprus, or any of the thousand and one other boycotts that would be at least as justifiable as the one they want.
The fact is that Israel, and its policy towards the occupied territories, has become an icon for much of the Left. Quite plainly Israel is not the wickedest country on earth, to be singled out and despised for its deeds; but yet it is an icon of loathing, to be singled out for what it represents.
The membership of the UCU is largely composed of middle-aged radicals, made diverse by a handful of middle-aged ex-radicals. That may be an unfair generalisation, but in any case, it’s much less of a one than describing Israel as an apartheid state. Its campaign priorities are the usual mix of public sector self-interest and tedious leftist sloganeering - no to privatisation, no to ratting on potential terrorists, yes to boycotting Israel.
Like most of the rest of the current Establishment, the academic establishment is the product of the Sixties and Seventies. Back when they were young, Western imperialism was still the great bogeyman of radical politics. Africa was going through a traumatic decolonization, and most of the colonial powers were fighting either to leave with dignity, or to cling onto their colonies as long as possible.
Empire represented all that was bad about the old Britain, with its stuffy Victorian attitudes and its appeal to all those fashionable Marxist clichés of exploitation and ruling classes. It was bound up with the old establishment, and was an emblem of everything that the new wave of politics and culture wanted swept away. Little could be easier or more enjoyable for the new generations than kicking imperialism as it went down.
Those who came of age back then still have an obsession with fighting imperialism. Anything that resembles a proper, old-fashioned Empire - rich, white people having power over poor, brown ones - sends into a frenzy those who have failed to evolve since the 1960s.
The misfortune of Israel is to have created the perfect icon of white imperialism. Their deeds are no worse, and often much better than many other countries involved in territorial disputes. But the ossified old Left couldn’t care less about Chinese imperialism, the squabbles of India and Pakistan, or any other imperial or quasi-imperial conflict. All they care about is bringing down white imperialism, once and for all.
The conflict in the occupied territories pushes all those old buttons. You have a power armed with the latest, most sophisticated weapons available, versus passionate, stone-throwing natives who have no weapons but their bodies and their cunning. It is the rich versus the poor; greedy European settlers versus the honest peasants who’d farmed the land for generations. It plays beautifully to the imperial stereotypes of these rather old, unimaginative people, who remain stuck with the bogeymen of their youth.
It takes little effort to see this conflict through the prism of white imperialism. Swap redcoats for IDF infantry, gunboats for helicopter gunships, and rebelling natives for rebelling natives, and one great bogeyman morphs into the other without effort. For those whose intellect is this shallow, who react rather than think, it makes perfect sense to fight Israel as the new imperial power, the heir of the Raj and the new adventurers.
It’s no coincidence that the two great boycott campaigns of the last half-century have been against the two states that push these buttons. Neither South Africa nor Israel was targeted for being the most monstrous regime around, but for sparking guilt and shame amongst the Empire-hating generations.
Apartheid South Africa was cruel, brutal and racist, but it was a competent government, and by no means the most tyrannical even on its own continent. Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is cruel, brutal, racist and so incompetent that its people are either fleeing or starving in their millions. But as it bears no resemblance to a white imperial power, it faces far less condemnation.
Israel is cavalier in its treatment of the Palestinians, and it is yet to completely kick the old vision of a Greater Israel. It is often heavy-handed and ruthless. But it is a tiny nation on the fringes of the Middle East, still surrounded by nations who want to see it weakened or destroyed. It faces guerrilla warfare, either from Hezbollah, or from Hamas or the other Palestinian Islamists, sponsored by those states that want to grind it down. It wants, reluctantly, to get out of the occupied territories, but not to be forced out, and in doing so it wants to ensure that its borders and resources are secure. Much as any other state would.
It takes a considerable degree of blinkeredness to twist Israeli policy into the charge sheet of a Public Enemy Number One. Even if we limit ourselves to academia, in the week British academics voted to boycott Israel, Iranian academics began being arrested for daring to talk to Western universities. If the UCU wanted to boycott nasty regimes there’s no shortage of choice. Making the choice Israel says much about their real motivations.
This boycott, as with the South African one, has little to do with fighting injustice and everything to do with the gratification of the smug lefties who dominate the UCU. It is self-indulgent to the point of obscenity to do this, to punish a nation for one’s own pleasure, regardless of the effect it has on those who may be suffering. Nations that feel unjustly attacked usually retreat into a bunk mentality. But hey, who cares whether it will do any good for the Palestinians, so long as it’s good for a few Western egos?
Quite aside from the stupidity of this self-righteous, self-indulgent boycott, whose only purpose is to make some decrepit old fools feel brave and daring again, it is a great shame that British academia should have leant its name to such an enterprise. It is only natural that the old elite should be some way behind the times. But it is inexcusable for it to be a full century behind the times.
To be driven by a desire to attack the British Empire is, in 2007, when the great issues concern the Islamic world and the new economic superpowers of the East, as stupid and absurd as it would for someone living in coffee-house Georgian London to be obsessed with fighting the divine right of kings. No one whose mindset is stuck in a previous century can have much to say about today’s world. Intellectually as well as physically, they're on their way to the grave.
Friday, June 1, 2007
Incentives and welfare
More than fifteen years after the USSR was put out of its considerable misery, it’s easy for us to ignore how much Western society still owes to Marxism. China has now abandoned communism for dictatorial capitalism, and soon the only little red books will come from Smythson boutiques. Castro, the seemingly immortal old fool, might have made his last seven-hour speech. And yet our beloved welfare state is still popular, still the sacred cow of British politics, and still runs on the basis of ‘from each according to his means, to each according to his needs’.
Karl Marx‘s communism was based on the belief that, come the revolution, the factories and infrastructure would be taken over by the proletariat, and everyone would spontaneously work together for the benefit of all in society, capable or incapable, weak or strong. Everyone will put into the common pool of labour what they can, and take only what they need. We could all do whatever our souls dictated, helping society whenever we could, and relying on our comrades when we couldn’t. The communist citizens’ actions, efforts and choices would be based on the needs of society as a whole, rather than the needs of the individual.
A post-revolution utopia is, crudely, what a welfare state tries to replicate. Our taxes are broadly taken on one’s ability to pay. This communal pool of money funds payments to those who meet various tick-box criteria for neediness. Benefits are provided according to how many children one has, whether one has a disability or a job, and how much or how little one earns.
The idea of council housing is that one should be able to have the kind of house that one needs, wherever one needs it. A drawingroom flat in Kensington sounds good to me. NHS hospitals will, in theory, treat you regardless of your wealth or the extent of your culpability in causing your own illness. State schools promise to house as many children as you can produce, if not educate them. And they’ll do so almost regardless of how well or badly they behave.
The welfare state’s help is largely unconditional. If you have three children by the age of eighteen and need assistance, you’ll likely be given a place to stay and a little money. It makes no difference whether you’ve been abandoned, careless, or have picked motherhood as a career, lowly as it is. All that matters is one’s need.
The benefits system does make one key break with pure Marxism, in that it acknowledges the problem of cheating. Marx would never dream that his good, good communists would cheat one another, to take more from and give less to society than their abilities and needs dictated, but even our dimmest, wettest socialists accept that not all people are entirely selfless. Some - perhaps those who won’t accept that there might be any fraudulent incapacity claimants on the welfare rolls - might think that this is only because property hasn’t been abolished yet, but the less said about them the better.
We compel people to pat their taxes, and to take no more than their officially-sanctioned due. We take this seriously enough that we lock up anyone who disobeys. And by doing so we implicitly recognise just why the welfare state fails.
We are not Marx’s perfect, communally-minded proletarians. If offered something unconditionally - like state benefits - we tend to take it without thinking too much about the interests of wider society. Those who control the welfare state are keen to squash those who take money from the system without considering broader society, so long as it’s the illegal kind of social fraud. The legal sort, where people take from the pool out of self-interest alone, is of no concern to them.
It is not particularly in society’s interests, for example, that subsidised child-rearing should result in teenagers picking motherhood as a career, lowly as it is. Those who become single mothers by choice are neither the honest, hard-done-by saints of Guardian mythology, nor the immoral, grasping demons of the Mail. They are often just following their own self-interest, and think it more satisfying, and more secure, than struggling to get and keep a checkout or cleaner’s job.
But the statistics overwhelmingly show that for the rest of us, our subsidies unwittingly promote violence against the mother, the child, and, when the child grows up, against the rest of us too. A child brought up by its mother and her boyfriend is thirty-three times as likely to be abused as one brought up by married parents, and seventy-four times more likely to be killed.
Funding Sure Start, crèches and subsidised babysitters not only makes life easier for hard-pressed, poor parents, but makes the prospect of pregnancy a good deal more attractive. Not only can a not particularly bright young girl choose motherhood as a passport to some degree of security and status, but the more the state provides help and assistance, the less responsibility she has to bear. It becomes a more attractive an option if there is a state institution for her to subcontract the graft of motherhood to; allowing her to carry on the lifestyle she’d have otherwise, and letting the Treasury pick up the tab.
The great failure of left-wing economics is to ignore the power of these incentives. Marxism and welfare statism share a belief that people will not change their behaviour if offered cash for doing x, or given penalties for doing y. We ignore such petty matters, and simply do what is fundamental to our essence, to the core of our being. Or soul, to those who take the opium of the masses.
People will look after their own health even if there’s a free service to rectify it if they don’t. Higher taxes won’t change what people do for a living, or how much of it they do. No one will be put off saving for their retirement, blowing the lot instead while young, just because their state pensions will be means-tested. They wouldn’t, surely, decide to follow their self-interest, have some fun in their youth, and vote to have some of my money instead when they retire? What happened to the communal interest?
Not many socialists really think this out, but just have a vague sense that we are above such petty money-grubbing, that there are more important things in life that a few pence on income tax, a little pensions credit or a meagre few grand in bonuses. And it would indeed be much nicer if we all did what was in our society’s interests, and ignored the consequences for ourselves. The descendents of Marx feel in their bones that the power of society is so much more powerful than crude, capitalistic bribes.
It is true that people won’t sit down to calculate exactly how much extra or less they will make under a new rule, and calibrate their utility-maximising response to the penny. But young people might see the old getting means-tested pensions, and the benefits of their grandparents’ personal saving wiped out, and decide to care rather more about having fun than saving prudently and boringly for the future. Just remember to take it instead from your own, unborn grandchildren. Changes in incentives change the atmosphere that people make decisions in, and if the incentives hit the spot, they change those decisions themselves.
Not even Marx, as it happens, was quite as naïve as our unthinking lefties. He recognised that life under capitalism was a life where egoism and self-interest runs society, in all kinds of ways. His silliness lay in thinking that property was the cause of this, and that revolution and the extermination of the capitalist classes would create Utopia. But Nye Bevin and chums thought that self-interest could be abolished by Act of Parliament, and that once child benefit, unemployment insurance and the NHS were established, the good, socialist citizens would use them only in the communal interest. His intellectual - and I use the word hesitantly - descendants have never questioned, or even thought much about it. As always, it’s easier to fell regimes than the ideas behind them.
Karl Marx‘s communism was based on the belief that, come the revolution, the factories and infrastructure would be taken over by the proletariat, and everyone would spontaneously work together for the benefit of all in society, capable or incapable, weak or strong. Everyone will put into the common pool of labour what they can, and take only what they need. We could all do whatever our souls dictated, helping society whenever we could, and relying on our comrades when we couldn’t. The communist citizens’ actions, efforts and choices would be based on the needs of society as a whole, rather than the needs of the individual.
A post-revolution utopia is, crudely, what a welfare state tries to replicate. Our taxes are broadly taken on one’s ability to pay. This communal pool of money funds payments to those who meet various tick-box criteria for neediness. Benefits are provided according to how many children one has, whether one has a disability or a job, and how much or how little one earns.
The idea of council housing is that one should be able to have the kind of house that one needs, wherever one needs it. A drawingroom flat in Kensington sounds good to me. NHS hospitals will, in theory, treat you regardless of your wealth or the extent of your culpability in causing your own illness. State schools promise to house as many children as you can produce, if not educate them. And they’ll do so almost regardless of how well or badly they behave.
The welfare state’s help is largely unconditional. If you have three children by the age of eighteen and need assistance, you’ll likely be given a place to stay and a little money. It makes no difference whether you’ve been abandoned, careless, or have picked motherhood as a career, lowly as it is. All that matters is one’s need.
The benefits system does make one key break with pure Marxism, in that it acknowledges the problem of cheating. Marx would never dream that his good, good communists would cheat one another, to take more from and give less to society than their abilities and needs dictated, but even our dimmest, wettest socialists accept that not all people are entirely selfless. Some - perhaps those who won’t accept that there might be any fraudulent incapacity claimants on the welfare rolls - might think that this is only because property hasn’t been abolished yet, but the less said about them the better.
We compel people to pat their taxes, and to take no more than their officially-sanctioned due. We take this seriously enough that we lock up anyone who disobeys. And by doing so we implicitly recognise just why the welfare state fails.
We are not Marx’s perfect, communally-minded proletarians. If offered something unconditionally - like state benefits - we tend to take it without thinking too much about the interests of wider society. Those who control the welfare state are keen to squash those who take money from the system without considering broader society, so long as it’s the illegal kind of social fraud. The legal sort, where people take from the pool out of self-interest alone, is of no concern to them.
It is not particularly in society’s interests, for example, that subsidised child-rearing should result in teenagers picking motherhood as a career, lowly as it is. Those who become single mothers by choice are neither the honest, hard-done-by saints of Guardian mythology, nor the immoral, grasping demons of the Mail. They are often just following their own self-interest, and think it more satisfying, and more secure, than struggling to get and keep a checkout or cleaner’s job.
But the statistics overwhelmingly show that for the rest of us, our subsidies unwittingly promote violence against the mother, the child, and, when the child grows up, against the rest of us too. A child brought up by its mother and her boyfriend is thirty-three times as likely to be abused as one brought up by married parents, and seventy-four times more likely to be killed.
Funding Sure Start, crèches and subsidised babysitters not only makes life easier for hard-pressed, poor parents, but makes the prospect of pregnancy a good deal more attractive. Not only can a not particularly bright young girl choose motherhood as a passport to some degree of security and status, but the more the state provides help and assistance, the less responsibility she has to bear. It becomes a more attractive an option if there is a state institution for her to subcontract the graft of motherhood to; allowing her to carry on the lifestyle she’d have otherwise, and letting the Treasury pick up the tab.
The great failure of left-wing economics is to ignore the power of these incentives. Marxism and welfare statism share a belief that people will not change their behaviour if offered cash for doing x, or given penalties for doing y. We ignore such petty matters, and simply do what is fundamental to our essence, to the core of our being. Or soul, to those who take the opium of the masses.
People will look after their own health even if there’s a free service to rectify it if they don’t. Higher taxes won’t change what people do for a living, or how much of it they do. No one will be put off saving for their retirement, blowing the lot instead while young, just because their state pensions will be means-tested. They wouldn’t, surely, decide to follow their self-interest, have some fun in their youth, and vote to have some of my money instead when they retire? What happened to the communal interest?
Not many socialists really think this out, but just have a vague sense that we are above such petty money-grubbing, that there are more important things in life that a few pence on income tax, a little pensions credit or a meagre few grand in bonuses. And it would indeed be much nicer if we all did what was in our society’s interests, and ignored the consequences for ourselves. The descendents of Marx feel in their bones that the power of society is so much more powerful than crude, capitalistic bribes.
It is true that people won’t sit down to calculate exactly how much extra or less they will make under a new rule, and calibrate their utility-maximising response to the penny. But young people might see the old getting means-tested pensions, and the benefits of their grandparents’ personal saving wiped out, and decide to care rather more about having fun than saving prudently and boringly for the future. Just remember to take it instead from your own, unborn grandchildren. Changes in incentives change the atmosphere that people make decisions in, and if the incentives hit the spot, they change those decisions themselves.
Not even Marx, as it happens, was quite as naïve as our unthinking lefties. He recognised that life under capitalism was a life where egoism and self-interest runs society, in all kinds of ways. His silliness lay in thinking that property was the cause of this, and that revolution and the extermination of the capitalist classes would create Utopia. But Nye Bevin and chums thought that self-interest could be abolished by Act of Parliament, and that once child benefit, unemployment insurance and the NHS were established, the good, socialist citizens would use them only in the communal interest. His intellectual - and I use the word hesitantly - descendants have never questioned, or even thought much about it. As always, it’s easier to fell regimes than the ideas behind them.
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