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What an extraordinary spectacle the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing provided yesterday. It could scarcely have done a better job of illustrating one of the defining themes of our present time: the resurgence of China as an economic and cultural power.

I have mixed feelings about the event and the social and cultural trends it symbolises, feelings I suspect will be shared by many lovers of liberty, prosperity and human industry. China has clearly come an enormous distance since the catastrophic Mao years, and the continuing rise in the living standards of millions, and the resulting potential for improving economic, scientific and cultural relationships with the Chinese people, are to be warmly welcomed.

However, China has a great distance yet to travel, especially politically: it must not be forgotten that the Chinese government (for example) still censors and intimidates peaceful political and cultural activists, detains people without trial, sometimes for years, forces women to have abortions, and employs labour camps and the death penalty. There is no case for incremental improvement here: every second this state of affairs continues is an insult to the principles of moral governance, and it is hard not to see a sinister note in a grandstanding spectacle, however impressive, organised by such a regime at the expense of its people. (It must be admitted that our own house is not entirely in order in the individual rights department, but a sense of proportion must be retained.)

I know little of China’s politics: I have no idea, for example, whether these Olympic Games are likely to improve the political situation there or worsen it. However, I have had the pleasure and privilege of meeting many Chinese people in academic, commercial and social settings in Britain, and had some thoughts of a personal scale which I considered worth writing down.

One of the things which fascinates me about Chinese people around my own age today is their sense of nationalism. When the Olympic torch came to London some months ago, the Tibetan independence protesters and the enormous police cordon received a great deal of press, but there was also a great throng of Chinese people on the streets cheering and waving Chinese flags. The dominant view among modern young Chinese people seems to be a strong sense of pride in their national history and culture.

For a long time, I must confess this has struck me as surprising and slightly creepy. I myself have very little in the way of nationalistic feelings about Britain, and find it hard to understand those who do. Long-time readers of this blog will know that I am broadly pessimistic about social and cultural trends in Britain: while I consider myself very fortunate to live in this time and place, and have no burning desire to move elsewhere, I see this country as a declining cultural, political and economic power which has lost its way morally, and with it much of its unique sense of identity. I hold fundamental philosophical views which are starkly in opposition to the vast majority of my compatriots, which inevitably leads to a sense of alienation from them.

When I see the British or English national sports teams in action, for example, I often struggle to muster any motivation to support them: why should I root for others’ sporting success, simply because we emerged from our mothers’ bodies in the same approximate geographic location? (Besides, I don’t even have that in common with a lot of them, these days!) Many of the people who share my values and who I admire most, both in my own personal life and in the world in general, come from different countries, and I see that moral affinity as far more important than mere geographical happenstance. I have far more in common with the “foreign” people I went to university with than I do with at least 90% of Britons.

So perhaps you can understand the slight unease I have felt at the overt displays of nationalism I see from my Chinese friends and acquaintances. There is nothing wrong with a sense of pride in and affinity with the values embodied by your country (if any, and if those values are correct), but there is something wrong with loving your country and what it stands for simply because you were born there: that’s arbitrary and divisive. And China, as I pointed out earlier, is currently a country with a far-from-spotless political record: unequivocal love of such a country, therefore, in my mind rings sinister echoes of Europe’s blood-stained recent past.

However, I have been thinking about this since the Olympic opening ceremony, and I am beginning to reinterpret this Chinese nationalism in a more benevolent light. The contradiction I have always struggled with is that when I get to know individual Chinese people, it is rare that I do not get on with them very well indeed. I share with many of them a fundamental attitude towards life: a sense of human potential, a sense that hard work will bring success, a sense that the future can and should be better than the present, a sense that the world doesn’t owe me anything and that I therefore must do things, and can succeed at them. And that is a profound basis for friendship, regardless of cultural differences. These traits are not typically found in advocates of totalitarianism, and suggest to me that the Chinese people do not have the government they deserve.

I freely admit that my sample is biased. The Chinese people I have met are largely among the best China has to offer: smart enough to penetrate the highest levels of Western academia and business, usually having rich parents who have benefited from China’s recent economic boom, or having lived in the West for a long time. But intelligence and riches are hardly guarantees of the kinds of virtue I have described, and I cannot help thinking that perhaps this fervour for China is just an expression of cultural optimism, the sense that tomorrow not just can but will be better than today.

Perhaps the reason I don’t fully understand it, and am not fully at ease with it, is because that is something I haven’t felt about Britain since I was old enough to have a considered view on the subject. Perhaps, rather than being a blind faith which renders Chinese people oblivious to the problems in their country, it will inspire them to identify and correct those problems ever more quickly. Perhaps it will lead them to examine and carefully select the best elements from Eastern and Western cultures to create a society of extraordinary greatness - and perhaps their example will inspire us in the West to rediscover the ideas responsible for our own progress a short century or two ago.

Wishful thinking? Possibly. But surely this is not pure pie in the sky either. The cultural optimism of the Chinese gives me some badly-needed optimism of my own for the future. Life is not a zero-sum game: the success of China does not have to be a threat to anyone else, and it could prove to be a great blessing. We should continually be on the lookout for ways to engage and befriend the Chinese people without offering sanction or support to their government. We have a real chance to build a great future together.

The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law.

The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system — as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history.

All previous systems had regarded man as a sacrificial means to the ends of others, and society as an end in itself. The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary co-existence of individuals. All previous systems had held that man’s life belongs to society, that society can dispose of him in any way it pleases, and that any freedom he enjoys is his only by favour, by the permission of society, which may be revoked at any time. The United States held that man’s life is his by right (which means: by moral principle and by his nature), that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.

– Ayn Rand, in “Man’s Rights”, published in The Virtue of Selfishness

Yaron Brook just keeps getting great articles published on Forbes.com. Here is his latest. He writes:

Considering the many jubilant boasts by “flat world” devotees in recent years, you might have been tempted to regard economic globalization as a juggernaut, powered by inexorable forces of technology and history.

Big mistake. There’s no preordained direction for the world economy–only an undetermined future that will take the shape of whatever ideas and policies we choose to uphold. The lack of an intellectual defense of capitalism has left free markets vulnerable.

He goes on to give extensive evidence.

He’s exactly right. The view that the world is on an unstoppable path towards economic liberalism and social progress is extremely common among intelligent people today. I find this amazing given the obvious ongoing expanse of state power at the expense of our liberty which is occurring in the UK and other western nations — a phenomenon which is being warmly welcomed by many of its citizens.

It is true that in western countries over the past two or three decades there has been an increase in the role of the private sector in areas of public life which used to be considered the sole preserve of government: British train operators are the perfect example here. But far from being evidence of respect for free markets, this proves only that modern governments tend towards the fascist economic model of collectivism rather than the communist one. The resulting private organisations are almost always regulated monopolies or licensees, trading only by the grace of the state (which may be withdrawn if “the public interest” requires it) but shown political favouritism — and used as convenient scapegoats by our politicians when things go wrong.

And yes, some countries, such as China and India, are becoming freer (albeit from a very un-free starting point), which is good news for everyone. But there is nothing inevitable about the future political or social direction of any country. That is determined, ultimately, by the philosophic views of its intellectuals, politicians and citizens. Freedom is not an inevitable product of modern economics, or the scientific world view: to survive, it requires a moral defence. This defence is sorely lacking in our culture, and, from what I understand of them, it is also lacking in China and India as well.

Brook again:

For all of capitalism’s astounding accomplishments, the intellectual underpinning sufficient to deflect its critics has never been fully identified or understood. Capitalism and the profit motive continue to be viewed with suspicion.

After all, even in America, we live in a culture that lauds self-sacrifice, community service and “giving back” as its moral ideals. Businessmen who selfishly pursue profits, in contradiction to those ideals, are consigned to a moral dungeon from which they can only hope to escape on evenings and weekends. This is why Barack Obama can get away with belittling the “money culture,” his wife can smugly counsel youth to shun “corporate America” and John McCain can brag about working “out of patriotism, not for profit.”

The odor of moral suspicion that clings to capitalism helps explain why, decade after decade, businessmen are first to be blamed for the never-ending crises actually caused by statist market distortions. Whenever some new emergency arises, culpability falls first on greedy capitalists, whose profit-seeking is regarded as morally suspect, and rarely on government regulators, whose selfless policies are regarded as morally unquestionable.

…

[America's] founding principles withered because no one could morally defend self-interest. For individual rights to prevail in politics, nothing less than a revolution in ethics will be required–a bloodless revolution–not of arms, but of ideas. You’ll know that struggle is over when businessmen are finally viewed not as moral pariahs or ciphers but as paragons of virtue, precisely because they pursue profits.

This isn’t to say that the right ideas won’t ultimately win, either here or in the surging economies to the east. But it should act as food for thought to anyone who thinks the world is on a permanent course towards ever-greater protection of individual rights, with the corresponding reduction in state power. The idea that this could or (more importantly) should happen is about 100 years out of date in western cultural history, and in terms of the history of philosophy, it effectively died several decades longer ago than that. Unless it can be resurrected, freedom has no chance of lasting in the long term.

I was shocked this week to read a post at the ASI weblog by Tim Worstall on the difficulty of making economic predictions and calculations. The ASI (Adam Smith Institute) is one of the UK’s leading free-market think-tanks, and Worstall’s post reflects on one of the standard arguments in favour of economic freedom. However, in doing so, it betrays a disastrous lack of understanding of the case for freedom.

The key part of Worstall’s post is as follows:

We simply don’t know enough about the economy to be able to plan it: if we can’t even forecast growth or inflation, then how can we forecast sufficiently well to be able to plan anything else? The number of houses needed? The technological changes that are going to happen? The demand for sugar? It’s simply not possible to do so thus we shouldn’t even be trying.

Harford does point out that at least baby steps are being taken though. One major problem with the forecasts is that not only don’t they anticipate changes called “structural breaks”, a change in technology say which changes the necessary assumptions of the models. Not only do they not anticipate them (and thus make them useless) they fail to even recognise them when they have happened.

But even if structural breaks cannot be predicted, that is no excuse for nihilism. Hendry’s methodology has already produced something worth having: the ability to spot structural breaks as they are happening. Even if Hendry cannot predict when the world will change, his computer-automated techniques can quickly spot the change after the fact.

This is an advance: at least we can now say why our model has failed to mimic the real world, even if only after the fact. No doubt in another century or two we’ll be able to predict such structural breaks and at that point perhaps planning, perhaps even socialist calculation, might be possible.

So, until 2208 we seem to be stuck with the only useful calculation and planning method we’ve so far discovered, markets and their interactions. It’s good to get these things sorted out for a few lifetimes at a time, isn’t it?

What this amounts to is an argument along the following lines. It’s impossible for the government to know what the demand for various goods and services is now, or will be at any point in the future, since this data is constantly and rapidly changing under a vast array of interlocking causes, and is diversely spread through the economy (in the brains of individuals, the computers of corporations etc). Any attempt by the government, therefore, to try to dictate how much of each good should be produced in each location, will necessarily end in disaster: the only practical means of solving this problem which has been found so far is the price incentive mechanism created by free market capitalism.

Now, up to this point I find the argument quite unobjectionable: it is one which has been made repeatedly down the years, most effectively and originally by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in his classic work Human Action. In the form stated by Worstall, I do not believe this argument identifies the deepest reason for the need for economic freedom — I am not sufficiently familiar with the works of the Austrian economists to know whether they did any better — but up to this point, I agree with the argument as far as it goes.

However, implicit in the extract I quoted above is another premise, which I believe is disastrous, namely: if the government could somehow get hold of the necessary information, and cram it into a large enough computer, it could solve the economic calculation problem, and coercive centralised economic planning would become practical and moral.

This is a terrible misunderstanding of why capitalism is the only moral social system. One of the foundations of the argument for capitalism — which is the system of individual rights, individual freedom — is that the individual is the fundamental valuing entity in the economic system. Any discussion of value is ultimately one of the value-judgements of human individuals, since individuals are ultimately the only entities which can produce or evaluate values. Corporations, societies et cetera are merely aggregations of individuals who have joined together to pursue their values, to the extent that they perceive them to be aligned: they are not entities capable of producing or deciding values, above and apart from the individuals which comprise them.

For example, when a corporation ponders the wisdom of a particular large investment (such as the construction of a new factory), it considers whether this will maximise the value of the company for its shareholders. These shareholders, in turn, may be corporations themselves, such as pension funds, but these in turn will be concerned with maximising value for their shareholders, fundholders or other owners: ultimately, there must be individuals at the end of the chain. Without them, the concept of value is nonsense: if no human beings benefit from something, who or what can possibly benefit from it?

This is then combined with the observation that only each human being is in a position to decide what is of value to himself, to distinguish between the vast collection of possible options open to him and decide what to do. What to have for lunch? What career to choose? To go to the gym after work, or the cinema, or the pub? What books and art and music to value? Where to live? The idea of someone else choosing these things for you, knowing better than you do what you value, is absurd. Even if you make objectively bad choices, such as taking drugs, provided you have not infringed others’ rights to make their own choices it is better for you to take the full consequences of your mistakes and learn from them for next time, than for someone else to step in and force you to do the right thing.

(Obviously, another crucial component here is the egoist morality, the idea that it is moral for you to pursue your own self-interest, in contrast to altruism, which holds the welfare of others as the standard by which to judge your actions.)

Putting this all together, it becomes clear that the only possible route to a moral social system is one where the individual is left free to pursue what she perceives to be her own self-interest, to the extent that she does not violate the rights of others to do the same.

For the same reasons, it is equally obvious that no argument for central government planning of any kind can possibly be sustained on this base. Government planning necessarily involves the state coercing individuals to act in ways they may not wish to: what careers to choose, what goods to produce and where to send them, what goods to buy, where to live. It consists of forcibly overriding the individual’s rational judgement and telling him to act as the government decrees. Given that individuals clearly know their own interests far better than the state, the only conceivable justification for such a system is one where the individual is not held to be the basic unit of value, but something else is.

There have been many candidates for that “something else” over the years — God, race, and economic class being the most common and most destructive historically — but common to all these systems is the morality of altruism and the politics of collectivism: some group (or at least someone other than you) is entitled to your servitude, regardless of what you perceive your own interests to be.

Such a philosophy cannot logically serve — and historically has never successfully served — as a base for capitalism and freedom. If you are not entitled to serve your own interests, it is brazen effrontery to suggest that you be left free to do so: you must be forced to serve your proper masters.

What, then, of the idea of an omniscient state supercomputer which plans all economic activity? Well, suppose for a moment that such a thing were possible (which it is not, Worstall’s arbitrary speculations to the contrary notwithstanding). What would it tell people to do? On the standard of egoism and capitalism, it could only tell them to do what they were going to do voluntarily anyway!

You could argue that our fantasy system would give people a powerful tool to help them serve their own interests: for example, it might tell them what the demand for cars was going to be in a particular area at a particular time, enabling them to make a profit by ensuring that demand was met. But then no coercion would be required, and the essence of a centrally planned system is gone: there is no actual central direction, only powerful information tools.

(This is clearly an absurd fantasy in any case: the number of cars demanded in a particular area is a function not only of a huge array of macroeconomic factors, but of the decisions and value hierarchies of thousands of individuals living in and travelling through that area. To predict it would require you to know their locations, read their minds, understand their desires and predict their decisions in real time — in fact, you would need to know considerably ahead of time to make sure the cars were manufactured and delivered in time.)

However, if you throw out the egoist-individualist standard (for example trying to serve some altruistic notion of the “public good”, which always means sacrificing certain individuals’ interests for the sake of others’), you are necessarily left with the tyranny, enslavement, individual misery, and economic destruction of some form of collectivism. Even a government supercomputer cannot change human nature, and the argument against enslavement is not just that it would not maximise practical benefits for the would-be masters.

(To continue the example from above, if you ignore the actual desires and interests of the individuals concerned, you could work out how many cars you think people ought to want in an area, decide which of the applicants are most deserving, and tell the rest of them that it’s just tough, that their peaceful actions aimed at satisfying their rational desires are to be thwarted, that they have been enslaved to fund cars for others on this occasion, but that never mind, they might be successful next time. But I suspect this is not what Worstall had in mind when he fantasised the future success of socialist planning.)

Worstall’s implicit belief that planning might somehow be made to “work” one day is incredibly dangerous. The only factor needed to sustain collectivism is the idea that it is in fact a moral ideal, but merely impractical. Regardless of what modern cynics might tell you, human beings are in fact very strongly influenced by moral questions, and many would rather be moral than practical. People will quite happily walk into the disaster of socialism, even without a magic supercomputer, if they believe it is the right thing to do. If you additionally concede that, one day, advances in technology might bring the collectivist moral ideal into practical reality, the ideology gains an extra degree of poison.

As Ayn Rand famously and repeatedly observed, the only way to defend capitalism is to defend its moral base. Collectivism is not just impractical, it is fundamentally and permanently at odds with human nature, and it is immoral. To make this observation is not “nihilism”: it is quite the opposite, the only way to defend a proper understanding of reality. Unless enough of us believe this and act on it, the descent of mankind into another corpse-piling form of collectivism is only a matter of time.

There has been a great deal of discussion about violence in the media recently, after another series of particularly barbaric crimes has come to light. A wealth of evidence shows that British society is considerably more violent than it was some decades ago, and it is natural to wonder why.

A recent BBC article points to the rise in violent behaviour among young women (an increase of almost 100% in three years, according to the BBC’s cited statistics), and is typical of the kind of coverage this issue gets. The explanations offered are of the order of the following:

It’s usually based on territory, [the violent girls] say, and happens between their all-female group and other groups of girls from different estates, often preceded by verbal sparring, rumour and gossip.

And:

Victim Support says the main underlying reason for this aggression is people growing up in violent homes or suffering abuse at the hands of a partner.

And:

The peer group always plays a large part in it, says consultant clinical psychologist Elie Godsi, author of Violence and Society: Making Sense of Madness and Badness.

“There’s a lot more of a ‘ladette’ culture where young women are aping and mimicking the traditional behaviour young men engage in.

“So there’s a small element of that, although I wouldn’t put too much [importance] on it.”

Many young people feel alienated from their family and community, he says, so the peer group plays a big part in gang culture, causing behaviour that the individual on her own would not contemplate.

I believe these explanations have some merit. However, they do not go deep enough. The root of these problems is something that only philosophy, the deepest of all human sciences, can discover.

It seems to me that in asking what the cause of violent behaviour is, we are asking the wrong question. Madsen Pirie recently argued that there is no such thing as “the cause of poverty”, because poverty is the natural state for human beings. He explains:

If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come. To ask what causes poverty is like asking what causes cold in the universe; it is the absence of energy.

I completely agree with this. To gain an insight into poverty, one must begin by observing that it is the state in which mankind began, a state from which a certain (small but ever-growing) proportion of our species has recently begun to rise. To understand why people are poor today, we must first understand why any of us ever became rich. (The reason, as Ayn Rand identified, was a cultural respect in the West for the power of reason to comprehend reality, combined with the political freedom which allowed human beings to put that power into action.)

I am not suggesting that violence is some kind of “default” state for human beings: that has worrying determinist overtones. However, I do feel confident in saying that the initiation of violence is the consequence of a failure to exercise our distinctively human faculties, a reversion to the state of our evolutionary ancestors. I believe it is more helpful to ask what factors lead to civilised human behaviour, than to consider directly why people are violent.

In the world of the lower animals, violence and force rule the day completely: the “law of the jungle”, to use that apt metaphor, is in effect. Animals have no means of dealing with each other besides force: they compete for a fixed pool of life-sustaining resources (food, water, mates, shelter etc) without any means of increasing its size. They have no concept of “live and let live”: they simply take what they want from the world around them. If no other animals needed the consumed resources, all well and good; if they did, well, it’s a tough old world out there. True, examples of cooperation and symbiosis do exist, but these are matters of comparatively rare accident, not conscious intent. As millions of years of evolutionary turmoil indicate, the relations between animal species are often violent, unstable, and brutal.

Man is unique among (known) living species in having another way to live, as a matter of systematic, conscious choice. The glory of man’s recent achievements are all due to his particular form of consciousness, a form giving him a power no other animal can rival. I speak of communication, voluntary trade, calculated mutual self-interest, scientific understanding, artistic and moral imagination, peaceful productive coexistence: in short, I speak of reason, the conceptual level of consciousness.

It is reason which allows us to cooperate consciously with our fellows to produce wealth, not just take what we find lying around; to trade, rather than threaten or defraud, to satisfy our needs to mutual advantage; to think, to gain an ever-deeper understanding of the laws governing existence and how we can exploit them to make our world a better place to live. The result is a wondrous anomaly of natural history: for the first time, there is a species capable of living peacefully, rationally, without any recourse to violence.

Yet, the slightest glance at the history and current state of our world will show that this is a potential which has been rarely actualised. With a few exceptions, man’s existence has been marked by a violence comparable to (and sometimes utterly eclipsing) anything found in the animal world. The violence has always been started by people who believed they could cheat on their nature and survive by force or fraud.

Man has within him the power to fly to the stars, and yet he has spent much of his history killing and threatening his fellows, like his animal inferiors. What explains this paradox? The fact that with the awesome power of reason, comes a terrifying responsibility: reason, man’s distinctive means of survival, is not automatic. With the power to think, comes the power to be wrong.

The lower species are never wrong. Their means of survival — teeth, claws, wings, muscles, roots, leaves — are sometimes insufficient, and in that case they die, but there is no error present, merely inadequacy. There is no breach between their consciousness (those organisms who possess consciousness) and reality. The mechanisms which sustain their lives function automatically, mechanically: man is the only creature who must exercise volitional control in order for his means of survival to function correctly.

Every human being has a fundamental, irreducible choice: to think, or not to think. In every moment of her life, a person can choose to engage her consciousness, to strain to grasp her situation conceptually; equally, she can fail to do so, either through willful evasion or lazy default. The result of the former course, taken on a social scale, is the creation of unprecedented wealth, the institutions of political freedom, and the ever-deeper understanding of our universe. The result of the latter is the disease-ridden starvation of mystical tribal existence, the stifling and terrifying atmosphere of a religious Dark Age, the anguish of a concentration camp — or of a bloodstained, vomit-filled gutter after an alcohol-fuelled punch-up following a Friday night binge. The same fundamental evil, the default on the sacred responsibility to think, underlies it all: the only difference is one of context and degree.

To end or reduce violence, then, one must defend and uphold reason, in a concerted and unending effort across time. There are no basic means of dealing with other human beings besides reason and force, and they are mutually exclusive: the use of one destroys the possibility of the other.

The growing violence of our society is a necessary consequence of its growing abandonment of reason, first by its philosophers, and then by its people. Thousands of young men and women are growing up without ever discovering reason’s power to improve their relationships, their economic circumstances, and all the other aspects of their lives: the result is their resort to the only other mode of operation for our species, the scourge of mankind since time immemorial.

This is a failure of education and child-rearing on a massive scale, a failure which would be bad enough in an era when people had no way to know better, but one which is unforgivable today, given the ready availability of the truth and the means of putting it into practice.

(To avoid any possible misunderstanding, I must add that the retaliatory use of force is often morally necessary. A policeman is not immoral or irrational for defending someone’s person or property from attack: quite the opposite. But if force is being used in retaliation, that implies that force has been initiated by someone, and that requires an irrational default on the part of the latter.)

What, then, is the cause of violence? Wrong question. What is the cause of peaceful, productive, moral behaviour? Reason. If you want to heal our world, you must uphold and defend reason in our culture, especially the intellectual realm.

If enough of us do this, in whatever ways our individual talents allow, then the human race has a future — but only then. As Dr Peikoff has memorably put it, saving the world is the simplest thing in the world: all one has to do is think.

This is just too funny!

As I said a few posts ago, I have no desire to reopen the immigration debate on this blog, so comments are off for this post. But I cannot resist a brief comment on the recent House of Lords report on immigration, which claimed that immigration has brought “little economic benefit” to the UK. In response, of course, the usual suspects have renewed their calls for immigration restrictions.

To recap my position, I favour a free society with (more or less) open immigration. Assuming an individual is not a known criminal, hostile foreign agent or terrorist, is not carrying any infectious diseases or similar, and is able to negotiate proper accommodation in this country, I hold that no-one has any right to prevent his entry. Nor is there any breach between the moral and the practical: like many Britons, I have personally gained enormously from immigration into this country, in terms of the friendships and economic relationships which would otherwise have been impossible.

To prevent confusion, I must add that this does not mean I support the present government’s approach, which has resulted in high levels of immigration without the other policy changes required to make this workable (fully private health care and education, lifting of restrictions on housing supply, proper pursuit of victory in the war against Islamic totalitarianism, proper policing and criminal justice, etc etc).

Reaction to the House of Lords report has been varied. It has given great encouragement to those who want tighter immigration controls, and they have reacted with the usual populist denunciations and demands. There are people who recognise the importance of immigration and want to defend it; however, the one argument no-one has used is precisely the one which is vital if the defence of immigration is to be successful.

According to the BBC News report, the peers claimed:

The use of GDP as the measure of immigration’s economic contribution was “irrelevant and misleading”.

Instead, GDP per capita - or income per head of the population - would be a better measure, the report said.

“Our general conclusion is that the economic benefits of positive net immigration are small or insignificant,” it said.

The one premise which all sides in this debate seem reluctant to challenge is that if immigration has a negative impact on GDP per capita, it should be stopped. On this view, would-be immigrants must justify their presence in the country by demonstrating an above-average “contribution” to “British society”. This is a vicious collectivist premise which must be opposed. I strongly suspect that a proper immigration policy would increase wealth production inside Britain enormously, but this is a consequence of the moral case for open borders, not a foundation of it.

A person’s rights do not depend on the amount of money he or she earns, or the amount of tax he or she pays. They impose no obligations on him except of a negative kind: to refrain from violating the rights of others. Britain is not the property of “the people of Britain”; mob rule may not be invoked to violate the rights of people who do not produce above the average amount of wealth.

Provided immigrants obey the law, and pay their own way (or are cared for by voluntary charity), they have every right to remain, regardless of the effect on economic statistics. The root of this right is the individual’s right to think, and to act on the basis of what she perceives to be her own self-interest, provided she respects others’ rights to do the same. This right applies equally to all human beings, regardless of their country of origin, their professional qualifications, or their earning power.

If the Government is allowed to violate people’s rights because they earn below-average income, why restrict such violations to foreigners? Why not start ejecting poor British people as well? That would have an equally positive effect on GDP per capita. (How can the Government resist? The whole of “British society” would benefit! Um, except all the people in it, given that the principle of rights would have been thrown out of the window.)

Of course, no-one with any decency would countenance this, which shows that this premise in the immigration debate amounts to an ugly nativism. Any true advocate of freedom and individual rights will reject it, and work towards a society where we can safely open our borders.

I’m delighted to see the ARI has launched a new special-subject website, AtlasShrugged.com, with lots of great material on Ayn Rand’s masterpiece. Of particular interest to me are Onkar Ghate’s courses on Galt’s Speech (audio) and Atlas as a whole (video). Cool!

The ARI’s new channel on YouTube is well worth browsing as well — there are some good Q&As on there as well as snippets of some lectures and debates.

It’s great to see the ARI embracing these vital new media.

When I heard Nightwish were coming to the UK for the first time in years, I almost fell over myself to buy tickets. They are one of my all-time favourite bands; it was they who introduced me to symphonic metal in the first place. They were touring on the back of an album I really liked, their first tour with their new singer Anette Olzon, and I really expected great things from their live set.

I was at the Astoria show on March 25th, and though it breaks my heart to say it, Nightwish were desperately disappointing. This is undoubtedly the greatest band in this genre of music, both in the quality of songwriting and the talent of the musicians, and they really had something to prove following their very spectacular breakup with their previous singer, the classically-trained Tarja Turunen, so I think I was justified in expecting great things from the show. However, they got off to a really bad start, and while they made a recovery as the show went on, for my money they did not redeem themselves.

They started, as these shows usually do, with a recorded orchestral introduction with the lights down low. (Apparently it was taken from the Passion of the Christ soundtrack.) This sort of thing can be very effective when done right, i.e. if you make it exactly the right length to build the excitement of the crowd to fever pitch, and then kick into the first song to send them over the edge of insanity. They certainly couldn’t have wished for a better audience: we were making an incredible amount of noise, and I can honestly say I have never been so excited before a gig. However, they got it wrong from the start: the intro was too long, and they started to lose the crowd.

When they eventually arrived on-stage and started Bye Bye Beautiful, a huge foot-stomping song, I was amazed by the lack of energy emanating from the band (in contrast to the noise they were making). Apart from Jukka, the drummer (who was excellent all night, giving absolutely everything), they all frankly looked tired. Anette, in particular, looked as if she would rather be naked in a Finnish winter than on stage: she looked really unhappy, and was conspicuously avoiding the high notes. I wondered if she might be ill. It’s true that the band members are generally fairly chilled-out types - I wouldn’t expect to see Tuomas or Marco dancing all over the stage - but it would be nice at least to see them enjoying their music. During the early part of the set, I got this overwhelming feeling of lethargy, that something wasn’t right.

The set list they used was (with album in brackets after each track):

• Bye Bye Beautiful (Dark Passion Play)
• Dark Chest of Wonders (Once)
• Whoever Brings the Night (DPP)
• The Siren (Once)
• Amaranth (DPP)
• The Poet and the Pendulum (DPP)
• Dead to the World (Century Child)
• The Islander (DPP)
• Last of the Wilds (DPP)
• Sahara (DPP)
• Nemo (Once)
• Wishmaster (encore - Wishmaster)
• Wish I Had an Angel (encore - Once)

Dark Chest of Wonders is one of my favourite songs, with its truly symphonic orchestral accompaniment, but the mix meant you could hardly hear the intricate harmonies. I have heard so many bad mixes at the Astoria over the years that I might now believe it was impossible to do it well, were it not for the fact that I heard an absolutely brilliant show there last April by Within Temptation, another female-fronted metal band playing a very similar style of music. WT got absolutely everything right: perfect mix, perfect set list, wonderful sense of energy and theatricality, and great performances from every band member from start to finish despite being in the middle of what must have been an utterly exhausting tour.

The worst part of the show was The Siren. It’s a great song, but not suited to Olzon’s voice at all. She has much more of a “clean”, pop-music voice than Tarja, and this song is supposed to be about the Greek legend of angelic nymphs luring sailors to their deaths with the beauty of their voices. Instead, Nightwish sounded like a cover band. (Imagine the Spice Girls trying to sing opera. OK, that’s way harsh - Anette is miles better than the Spice Girls - but you get the point!) I practically had my head in my hands at this point.

Thankfully the concert picked up after this. They did a great job with Amaranth (Anette really started to sing the way she can, hitting some great high notes and looking a bit happier too), and The Poet and the Pendulum, another huge symphonic epic, was also well done (though as with Dark Chest of Wonders, the effect was not as good as it could have been due to the mix). I enjoyed the intricate keyboard solos in Dead to the World, and then a pipe player came on to accompany the band for the folk-style The Islander and the great instrumental song Last of the Wilds, which, combined, was probably the high point of the night.

But I (along with many others in the crowd) was stunned when, just one song later, Anette announced that Nemo would be the last song: they can’t have been on stage for much more than an hour at that point. Two fun encores and the night was over, just when I felt they were starting to play well. I’m sure this was due to the curfew or some such, but it was still disappointing (change the stage over a bit faster after the support band, can’t you?).

I left the venue that night crushingly depressed. In fact, I’m still depressed now, two days later. I just can’t believe such a great band could play so badly. I have been defending Nightwish to all and sundry at the top of my voice since they changed their singer; I honestly didn’t think they would survive the loss of Tarja, and I was overjoyed to be proven wrong by the fantastic album that followed. I expected to be vindicated by a live performance which announced “we’re back, better than ever!”. Instead, they looked a shadow of the band who played the End of an Era concert in Helsinki. If the mix had been just a bit better (so that you could hear the keyboard and guitar solos properly), and the first four songs had been played with a bit more energy, it might have rescued the evening.

I still love Nightwish. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be so upset with them. They are a great, great band, and I still think the new lineup and the new music are terrific. I find myself making excuses for them. Maybe the show sounded better from downstairs. Maybe I was just tired after a hard day at work (yeah, right - I doubt I could ever be too tired for Nightwish!). Maybe they were ill, or exhausted from all their travelling. From various forum postings I’ve seen since, other fans seemed to enjoy the exact same show. (I’d be interested to hear the views of others who went, including on the other two nights, yesterday and today.) Nonetheless, from genius, one always expects greatness.

Despite my disappointment, if Nightwish come back to the UK, you can be sure I will be at the front of the ticket queue again, giving them another chance to show what they can really do. They have given me such joy over the years, that I owe them that much. Please, guys, come back again soon and blow me away!

Update (3/4/2008): Here is a review of the concert on the 26th with some excellent photos. This reviewer enjoyed it, and I haven’t yet found anyone who didn’t. Never mind: I’m well used to holding unpopular opinions by now!

The Spring 2008 issue of The Objective Standard will be out soon. There’s already one article from the issue available freely to all online, an excellent piece by Craig Biddle advocating open immigration. I have no desire to reopen the immigration debate on this blog, but I encourage everyone interested in the subject to read Craig’s article, with which I agree 100%.