EU begins to blossom

EU begins to blossom

A series of stories from England displays the features of the emerging transnational order:

Everything has to be totally controlled by rational legal standards, up to and including:
1. Things that precede all possible human law, like the ultimate use of force (i.e., war) to decide whose law shall prevail. See “Non-Accountable Organisations” on the extraordinary presumption that it is the NGOs that should decide whether there should be war and how it should be fought.
2. Things in everyday life that can’t be regulated completely because people have to get a lot of different things done and you can’t have a rulebook for all of them. The EU doesn’t see it that way, though. For example, after this year they will only permit knife blades to have a maximum length of 10 cm (a bit less than 4 inches). It seems that that most knife-related injuries and deaths in EU countries are caused by blades longer than that, so they decided to clamp down.
Unfortunately, the totally administered society doesn’t work. It’s not simply that attempts to outlaw war or eliminate all danger fall short of their goals. Rather, the administrative state destroys informal relationships necessary for a tolerably orderly and productive way of life, partly because it rejects them as insufficiently rational and controllable. The problems come out most vividly in connection with family life and crime:
1. For an example of the effect of the destruction of family relationships, consider “Nights away with parted parent ‘bad for babies’”. Bounce the kid around because there are no real connections, just temporary rational arrangements to satisfy current needs until they change, and they’ve got problems. The answer inplicit in the article? More studies and better-designed social policy!
2. The bottom line: Police ‘unable to cope’ with volume of crime. In the totally administered state only direct application of force helps: “Recently, when hundreds of officers were deployed from central London to deal with a terrorist scare at Heathrow Airport, crime in the capital soared.” Things used to be quite different in England. For example, the increase in robberies in Lambeth (a south London borough) in 2001 was greater than the annual number of robberies in England and Wales throughout most of the 1920s.
Since the whole concept is inhuman and unworkable the obvious thing to do is drop out. Unfortunately, they’ve thought of that: a clause in the new European constitution would make it illegal to leave the EU without permission of two-thirds of member states. After all, if you could just leave there wouldn’t be universal control of everything, and how would that be?

Posted by Jim Kalb at April 07, 2003 04:34 PM | Send

Comments

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2457429.stm

Old hat, but merry old England can now be justifiably classified as a police state.

Posted by: Jason Eubanks on April 7, 2003 5:46 PM

Jason, this article was discussed at “View From the Right” when it came out, and it’s well worth posting again. Who would’ve thought the country of ORWELL, NO LESS, would come to this! It’s beyond mind-boggling … it’s absolutely sobering and, yes, frightening. How any individual or group who supports this arbitrariness, this totalitarianism rearing its ugly head IN THE MOTHER COUNTRY — THE COUNTRY OF BURKE, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! — how anyone who gleefully, shamefully supports this civil and moral crime (because of what it does to their imagined enemies) can imagine FOR ONE INSTANT that it won’t in due course turn on them, exactly as they now use it against others, is incomprehensible.

Of course, that’s not the reason it’s wrong — but one would think they’d see AT LEAST THAT!

Somehow, they don’t.

Posted by: Unadorned on April 7, 2003 6:32 PM

Tony Blair has been a great guy but his instincts - and those of his party - run towards statism, bureaucratic control, and unaccountable supra-national organizations. As a result, all sorts of traditional British liberties (which we’ve inherited and often expanded) are indanger of being quashed by the Euronannies. I wish we could offer the British some viable alternative to joining the EU.

Posted by: Wim on April 14, 2003 11:53 AM

Wim, there are two ways to lose your most important liberties: surrender to a statist bureaucracy or surrender to an absolutist belief in free markets. Europe and America share both characteristics, but Europe tends more toward left liberal statism, whilst America more strongly represents right wing free market liberalism. I wouldn’t wish either option on my friends, although the right liberal way does seem to leave more space for conservatives to operate within.

Posted by: Mark Richardson on April 14, 2003 9:27 PM

Mark, what is wrong with an absolutist belief in free markets? I mean, how could a person’s liberties be violated so long as no-one in an unfettered free market refrained from force, fraud or theft?

Posted by: Arthur on April 15, 2003 3:29 AM

Arthur, I suppose it depends on what you mean by liberty. If all you mean by liberty is the freedom to do what you want, then I suppose an absolutely free market poses no problems.

But what if your sense of freedom is tied in with being able to live your life according to your own better nature within a community? An absolutist belief in free markets is inevitably detrimental to this kind of freedom.

For instance, an absolutist belief in a free market requires that capital and labour be able to move freely around the world. This means that nations are no longer able to establish immigration restrictions to uphold their own ethnic traditions, nor are they able to limit the intrusion of foreign cultural influences.

Similarly, an absolutist belief in a free market requires that there be no restrictions on the economic participation of women. This undercuts the traditional role of men within the family as providers, and the traditional role of women as homemakers. The clarity and stability of traditional family life suffers as a result.

Similarly, an absolutist belief in a free market requires that the efforts of a community to protect a valued physical environment are overridden by the individual right to dispose of property as desired. In other words, it means that I can disregard the wishes of an entire community and knock down a valued heritage site as part of my individual property rights.

None of this means that capitalism is inherently wrong, or that we have to have a centrally planned economy. It just means that an intelligent regulation of the free market is required to uphold a set of higher values.

Posted by: Mark Richardson on April 15, 2003 9:37 PM

Mark Richardson writes:
“If all you mean by liberty is the freedom to do what you want, then I suppose an absolutely free market poses no problems.”

Sure it does. An “absolutely free market” can be as free or as tyrannical as any other abstractly utopian arrangement; what distinguishes it from other utopias is that it uses a semantics of “property” to describe its coercions.

Posted by: Matt on April 16, 2003 12:26 AM