The Wire not only explodes the conventional myths that there are “good guys” and “bad guys” by presenting every character as multi-faceted and complex, it goes further and shows that if there are such things as clear-cut bad guys, understanding why they are bad is no easy task.

And it is a task that requires more than a 30-second soundbite for Sky News, and that is all the likes of Grayling care about!

I’m halfway through Series 2 at the moment – what a show. Mind you, the thought that Baltimore is somehow comparable to the UK has really never crossed my mind at any point.

(Leaving aside the fact that he is a *fictional character*…)

He is a murderer, drug-dealer and adulterer – but you allow him no agency, he cannot help being so?
He could only have been different had he been born elsewhere?
Why then does not *everyone* born thus, behave thus?
Give me a break.

the brutal, unflinching realism
Hello?
It’s a *TV show*.

Oh, and Grayling is a fool too of course.

I’m sure a very interesting discussion will unfold from this piece, Paul, so just a couple of quick observations.

Commentators (like John Gray) have already drawn attention to the futility of formulating grand plans for human salvation (or social control) which he considers to be little more than a secular outgrowth of various religious ideologies.

Humans are biological organisms and biology can NEVER be controlled – this is a basic tenet of Darwinism.
The iron law for ALL organisms is that they endevour (as far as possible) to manipulate the environment in order to increase the probability of passing on their genes (as well as providing the conditions that will improve the likelihood of survival for their genetic off spring).

If we accept Gray or Darwin’s argument then places like Moss Side are doomed to remain a shit hole because we simply do not have the means to alter, or more importantly transcend these basic elemental forces.

Politicians in general should leave TV shows well alone.

And the Tories should advocate the legalisation of all drugs. I wish.*

*Disclaimer: I have never taken nor intend to take any.

cjcjc,

So I think we can safely conclude from your ill-informed comment that you, like Grayling, have never watched The Wire.

Otherwise you’d realise that your comment that it’s “just a TV show” is a little like saying that American Pastoral or Rabbit, Run are “just books”.

Just a minute, D’Angelo has murderd (amongst others) a young woman for gain, not because he was born a Barksdale, but because he chose to. That is at the heart of his moral dilemma. Or are you suggesting there is no ‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’ involved in that shooting, that the girl he killed is as guilty as he is? D’Angelo comes to despise himself and to seek some kind of redemption, but that only has meaning if he himself considered himself to be the author of his own evil. I think you have grossly misread.

“Humans are biological organisms and biology can NEVER be controlled – this is a basic tenet of Darwinism.”

Well if by “Darwinism” you mean “evolutionary psychology”, well I don’t care because evolutionary psychology is a load of nonesense (see Simon Blackburn’s little book “Lust” for an excellent demolition)

If you mean “what Darwin said” then that statement is manifestly false. He never said any such thing. He was too sensible for such silly soundbites.

“The iron law for ALL organisms is that they endevour (as far as possible) to manipulate the environment in order to increase the probability of passing on their genes (as well as providing the conditions that will improve the likelihood of survival for their genetic off spring).”

Iron law? How come my girlfriend doesn’t want to have kids (ever) then?

“If we accept Gray or Darwin’s argument then places like Moss Side are doomed to remain a shit hole because we simply do not have the means to alter, or more importantly transcend these basic elemental forces.”

Well, that really all rests on the assumption that we don’t have the means to alter their environments. Which we do. It’s called money. You can raise it through taxation and apply it through something called redistribution.

You can help it along by not thinking that prison is a solution, and by decriminalising the drug trade.

Oh, but i make it sound so crass…go and watch The Wire.

John,

“Just a minute, D’Angelo has murderd (amongst others) a young woman for gain, not because he was born a Barksdale, but because he chose to. That is at the heart of his moral dilemma. Or are you suggesting there is no ‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’ involved in that shooting, that the girl he killed is as guilty as he is? D’Angelo comes to despise himself and to seek some kind of redemption, but that only has meaning if he himself considered himself to be the author of his own evil. I think you have grossly misread.”

good, important point.

I need to add a disclaimer:

I am not trying to say that there is *no* personal responsibility in what D’Angelo (or anyone else) does.

The Wire is too sophisticated to remove all aspects of the question of personal responsibility from its stroy telling, and reduce everything to a simple determinism.

What I was trying to get across – and haven’t done properly upon reflection, esp in this edited version – is the idea that we can’t JUST talk about personal responsibility. Determinant factors beyond one’s control which are fundamentally arbitrary matter too – and so the Tories ignoring those things and JUST focusing on personal responsibility is a profound mistake and also anithetical to the wire.

I didn’t mean to say that personal responsibility doesn’t matter.

Sorry, really I should have made that clearer

Letter from a Tory,

do you not find that The Wire fundamentally challenges everything that Tories hold to be true aboud society, and how to rectify its problems? Especially given that the whole thing is a stonking great critique of modern capitalism (ESPECIALLY series 2)?

Just wait til you get to Hamsterdam in series 3…that’s really going to fuck with your worldview, my friend.

Yes I have seen it, and of course any work of fiction is capable of “fucking with your worldview”….or simply reinforcing it, and, yes, of being “wrong” while still being powerful.

You seem to be citing it as somekind of “authority” whereas it simply reflects/reinforces your prior beliefs.

I would rather leave works of fiction out of policy discussions.
Grayling is a fool.

But there is also something rather amusing about:
“and so the Tories ignoring those things and JUST focusing on personal responsibility is a profound mistake and also anithetical to the wire ”

Antithetical to a TV show, you say?
They must be wrong!

“I would rather leave works of fiction out of policy discussions.”

Why? If the insights they provide are more worthwhile than the soundbites of sheltered politicians, would we not do better to pay attention to fiction?

What you seem to be saying is that fiction is inherently limited, that it cannot teach us anything about the world surrounding us.

So presumably Oedipus Rex, Hamlet or King Lear cannot teach us anything about our world, then? And presumably their impact has not been lasting and profound upon Western civilization?

I’m not saying that The Wire is on a par with Greek tragedy or Shakespeare. But what I am saying is that it is patently absurd to dismiss fiction as though it can have no bearing upon fact; as though simply be being virtue of fiction it can have no lessons which policy makers can draw upon.

“What I was trying to get across – and haven’t done properly upon reflection, esp in this edited version – is the idea that we can’t JUST talk about personal responsibility. ”

Ah, stop being so reasonable. Yes, this is right, but I still think that you are misreading with the Rawlsian liberal lens. Surely the impulse is much more libertarian. The only moments of optimism (on a broader social scale) in the series come with the withdrawal of state agencies (all of which are portrayed as complicit in the immiseration of the Baltimorians) allowing the poor to organise themselves freely. I am talking about the Hamsterdam expeirment. This is pretty classical libertarian thinking, perhaps wishful thinking, as is the public choice criticism implicit in the presentation of the agencies and organisations (council, police, unions, courts) all of which contribute to and prolong the problems they are officially present to solve.

Of course we learn something of ourselves from the great works – were that they were taught more widely.

But I’m not sure that you would use to King Lear to draw conclusions about how best to deal with the housing problems of the elderly.

But The Wire is not teaching you anything new (as far as I can deduce).
Rather you are citing it as “evidence” for something which you already believe.
The greatness you see in it thus derives from its closeness to your own pre-existing “worldview”.

And wtf Grayling is doing citing it, only he can know.

>>D’Angelo comes to despise himself and to seek some kind of redemption, but that only has meaning if he himself considered himself to be the author of his own evil.

I think it shows that the gang culture – reinforced by every member of his family – pushed him into actions at a young age which didn’t fit with his maturing conscience. We see it much more clearly with one of the schoolkids in series 4: with his mother and home life, he literally can’t escape the trap that his circumstances put him in even when his personality is completely different. I always saw D’Angelo as not being responsible until he started to question, because he literally didn’t know better. He was surrounded by people telling him it was the right thing to do and rewarding him for it.

I can’t think of any series of that show the Tories could claim for their own. Series 3 in particular would give half of them screaming fits, heh.

“I can’t think of any series of that show the Tories could claim for their own. Series 3 in particular would give half of them screaming fits, heh.”

I disagree, as per my post above. The libertarianism of series 3 is much closer to a Thatcher-right social view than a statist left one. The idea that social agencies contribute to the problems that they are designed to solve because the people who work in them will tend to serve their own interests by building coalitions to bid up public funding rather than alleviating social problems, is very Tory.

John,

Interesting perspective. I can see why lefty liberals and libertarians could find much common ground re The Wire: drug decriminalisation, for a start, and the reduction of an overbearing state that seeks to incarcerate vast swathes of its population for another.

But I’ve always seen The Wire as deeply critical of the operations of unfettered capitalism on American society: witness the plight of the white working class in series 2.

And David Simon’s point about education in series 4 seemed to me to be that the *state* has a role in improving education to solve complex social issues: e.g. not by juking the stats but by investing time and money into the poorest in society. I don’t buy the idea that Simon would welcome a libertarian end to state provided education through “coercive” taxation.

Furthermore, given the entrenched poverty that exists in e.g. black suburbs in Baltimore, the message of the wire always seemed to me that getting tough on crime and advocating easy solutions would never work, but rather what was required was to give the poor and downtrodden a stake in society as oppose to being an underclass. I don’t see how libertarianism, if applied to modern America, could achieve that.

Maybe if we went back to year zero with a starting gate theory of initial equality. But given the America that exists, it’s only the state that can resolve the immense social problems depicted in the wire.

though whilst we lefties and libertarians will disagree about that, we can of course agree that what the state is doing at the moment isn’t working.

which is an interesting conclusion: lefties and libertarians are going to be much more receptive to the wire than Conservatives can be, given their attachment to the simple narratives that the wire seeks to deconstruct.

So presumably Oedipus Rex, Hamlet or King Lear cannot teach us anything about our world, then?

Don’t sleep with your mother or go to live with your kids?

And as for simplistic Conservative views on society, I think that both sides have a tendency to ascribe nuance and wisdom to their own views and a blinkered, one-size-fits-all approach to their opponents’. The ‘if it’s broke then spend more money on it’ approach a la Toynbee looks pretty simplistic to me.

“But I’m not sure that you would use to King Lear to draw conclusions about how best to deal with the housing problems of the elderly.”

Sure, but probably because it was written for an audience and context over 400 years ago.

If it was written 5 years ago and was addressing the issue of drug decriminalisation, well then the story would be different.

Wouldn’t it?

New Labour has ‘The West Wing’

Conservatives have ‘The Wire’

I think the Lib Dems should snaffle the rights to ‘The Flumps’ right now before someone else does…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1mMQtk3IUE

“I think it shows that the gang culture – reinforced by every member of his family – pushed him into actions at a young age which didn’t fit with his maturing conscience. We see it much more clearly with one of the schoolkids in series 4: with his mother and home life, he literally can’t escape the trap that his circumstances put him in even when his personality is completely different. I always saw D’Angelo as not being responsible until he started to question, because he literally didn’t know better. He was surrounded by people telling him it was the right thing to do and rewarding him for it.”

The thing with Naymond (the kid you refer to) is that his character is another illustration of how luck runs so much in our lives.

He’s headed for jail or death by age 14, but completely by chance – and because of causal factors and influences he doesn’t even know abuot – he ends up being adopted by a former policeman and ends up with a life that is full of opportunity.

His former friend, Randy, by contrast, is not so lucky. He ends up in a group home, and the brief meeting we have with him in series 5 illustrates that he’s on his way to being either a prison or murder stat.

Again, it’s luck that plays so much of a role. Luck that neither child deserves.

“The ‘if it’s broke then spend more money on it’ approach a la Toynbee looks pretty simplistic to me.”

I think Toynbee is generally more sophisticated than that, but even if you’re right and she isn’t…The Wire definitely is.

The comparison between Baltimore and inner city Britain is reasonably safe when you consider that Baltimore suffered Reagonnomics at the same time as our inner cities suffered Thatcherism. If the Tories took that lesson from the ‘The Wire’ we could all be happy.

In fact, John Meredith, if you read interviews with David Simon he describes the character of “The Greek” as the personification of pure capitalism, and Marlow as the logical outcome of unregualted capitalism (the drug trade).

Both characters are the most unambiguously distasteful and “bad” in the entire 5 series (though the reasons for both are manifestly complex) – and both are porte paroles for unfettered capitalism.

Hard to reconcile that with free market minimal state libertarianism which actively promotes unfettered capitalism…

also, lol @ everybody who is just saying “the wire just confirms your worldview”

because that may be the case, but if The Wire is right, then I win…

I think Toynbee is generally more sophisticated than that, but even if you’re right and she isn’t…The Wire definitely is.

I agree. The point I was making is that people tend to ascribe more subtelty to their own arguments than the oppo’s.

It was, in fact, interesting that you picked out Oedipus Rex as one your ‘classics’, because that’s all about the clash between predestination and free will.

“And David Simon’s point about education in series 4 seemed to me to be that the *state* has a role in improving education to solve complex social issues: e.g. not by juking the stats but by investing time and money into the poorest in society. ”

The stat juking is a classic public choice problem, isn’t it? Any state intervention to improve education will take the form of target setting etc, which the institutions will then attempt to game, with no-one in the poliyty being motivated to call foul. This is pretty up-front and, agaion, a standard libertarian critique, so much so that I would be surprised if Simon did not call himslef a libertarian of some sort. The message seems clear: individual teachers and schools can transform lives, but governmental interference in this relationship will always fail.

“Furthermore, given the entrenched poverty that exists in e.g. black suburbs in Baltimore, the message of the wire always seemed to me that getting tough on crime and advocating easy solutions would never work,”

I don’t follow you here. The Wire attempts to show, in series three, that so long as the state agencies withdraw to the furthest limit, allowing the capitalist enterprises of the drug dealers to continue more or less unimpeded and others to structure their lives freely, the poor suburbs can, if not flourish, at l;east rise up somewhat. In other words, it is quite explicit that the main driver of social depriovation is not poverty.

“but rather what was required was to give the poor and downtrodden a stake in society as oppose to being an underclass. I don’t see how libertarianism, if applied to modern America, could achieve that.”

This is a view but not one I can see in The Wire. We see people here already with a stake in society but benighted because of the ‘war’ raging between the gangs and the police, a war that benfits the police, the politicians, and to some extent the dealers, but not the citizenry. When this war was suspended the people showed they could order their lives, that they did have a stake in society. I don’t know if this is realistic, but it seems to be pretty clearly the view of the writers.

“Maybe if we went back to year zero with a starting gate theory of initial equality. But given the America that exists, it’s only the state that can resolve the immense social problems depicted in the wire.”

This may or may not be true, but it is certainly not the view that can be found in The Wire where just about every positive intervention of the state is disasterous for the poorest and is shopwn to be necessariluy disaterous because of the structural nature of political organisations.

“which is an interesting conclusion: lefties and libertarians are going to be much more receptive to the wire than Conservatives can be, given their attachment to the simple narratives that the wire seeks to deconstruct.”

I half agree with you, although you should be aware that there is a strong ideologically libertarian streak in British Conservatism (see Danny Finkelstein and others) which is much more symapthetic to the worldview promoted in The Wire than any I can see in the Labour Party (although elements of the left outside of the Labour Party have it).

“In fact, John Meredith, if you read interviews with David Simon he describes the character of “The Greek” as the personification of pure capitalism, and Marlow as the logical outcome of unregualted capitalism (the drug trade).”

I haven’t seen these interviews but I can well imagine this. The confusion between capitalism and gangsterism is an old one. However, I think the revealed beliefs of the series trump opinions laundered through the press. I am not suggesting, though, that Simon is an advocate of ‘unfettered capiltalism’ which is, in any case, a contradiction in terms (try running up a joint stock company without recourse to reliabel, authoritative and policed contract law).

Since the “drug trade” would be run rather differently were it to be legalised (which it should be) – and if one of the “lessons” of the series is that it should be – it is rather difficult to argue at the same time that the drug trade as portrayed in the series is at the same time a metaphor for free market capitalism.

I was able to buy some nasty capitalist Nurofen the other day in perfect safety.

Yes, it is a bit shallow to present gangsterism as a metaphor for free market capitalism since, by definition, most participants in the gangster-market are not free, they are coerced at gun point.

“Since the “drug trade” would be run rather differently were it to be legalised (which it should be) – and if one of the “lessons” of the series is that it should be – it is rather difficult to argue at the same time that the drug trade as portrayed in the series is at the same time a metaphor for free market capitalism.

I was able to buy some nasty capitalist Nurofen the other day in perfect safety.”

Er,

The drug trade pre-legalisation is the portrayal of unfettered capitalism.

A drug trade post-legalisation would, by definition, not be unfettered capitalism because it would be controlled, regulated and probably taxed.

So what I said was completely consistent.

Are you just trying to wind me up?

Whereas there is no attempt being made to control the drug trade now.
It’s completely free of any state interference.

Right

John Meredith,

“Any state intervention to improve education will take the form of target setting etc,”

That’s a statment about empirical trends in the UK and US over the last 20 years, not a necessary truth about state invovlement in education provision. And even if it were, it might be an acceptable price to pay for state provision free to all, as oppose to fee-charged market (non)provision

“The message seems clear: individual teachers and schools can transform lives, but governmental interference in this relationship will always fail.”

The message is not so clear: I take it to be: government interference on the CURRENT MODEL fails. The model needs to be changed. E.g. the Government could pump money into the kinds of programmes that Bunny and his Psychologist mate were making progress with. Series 4 is in no way unambiguously advocating libertarian approaches to education!!

” don’t follow you here. The Wire attempts to show, in series three, that so long as the state agencies withdraw to the furthest limit, allowing the capitalist enterprises of the drug dealers to continue more or less unimpeded and others to structure their lives freely, the poor suburbs can, if not flourish, at l;east rise up somewhat. In other words, it is quite explicit that the main driver of social depriovation is not poverty.”

Different interpretation: Hamsterdam shows how decriminalisation will stop the murder and terror that accompanies the criminalised drug trade at present.

It will not solve the entrenched problems of these communtities, because they are down to abject poverty. But rather than making the plight of these communities *worse* by criminalising drugs, we can stop a lot of the needless pain and suffering that criminalisation brings. Actually tackling the underlying issues of deprivation, however, requires a lot more than just decriminalising the drug trade. That’s one aspect amongst many others that need to be undertaken.

“This may or may not be true, but it is certainly not the view that can be found in The Wire where just about every positive intervention of the state is disasterous for the poorest and is shopwn to be necessariluy disaterous because of the structural nature of political organisations. ”

you are right to a certain extent. but that the wire presents certain political structures as inevitably leading to some negative consequences, is not to say that it advocates almost total removal of those structures. It may instead be promting different ways of organising those structures and targetting the powers they wield. The necessary negative effects of some state actions may be the justified price to pay that overall benefits of state actions COULD bring (but we admitt at present are not). You’re not justified in inferring that the wire advocates libertarianism because it shouts loud and clear about the failures of government. The two things are very distinct. (I appreciate that you can throw this charge back at me, by the way).

The drug trade pre-legalisation is the portrayal of unfettered capitalism.

No it isn’t. It’s very significantly fettered by the actions of the state, which (among many other things) acts as a barrier to entry to potential suppliers.

It would certainly be improved by legalisation, regulation and taxation, but an illegal trade is not (by definition) an unfettered one.

“Whereas there is no attempt being made to control the drug trade now.
It’s completely free of any state interference.”

There’s a world of difference between futile and hopeless attempts to prevent a market existing outright, and the regulation of that market with laws and quality controls.

Given that the drug market just exists – for there is demand, and therefore supply – the current level of “interference” is just that: an attempt to prevent something which inevitably happens by interfering with different bits of supply and demand, not in order to regulate and control, but to stop. That, incidentally, is why the endeavour is hopeless. correspondingly, the markets goes on and to a huge extent government measures to stop it are peripheral, ineffective and useless.

For example, I;m sure I’ve read that drug seizures worlwide each year represent 0.1% of all the illicit substances in existence, most of which are being or have been traded. So apart from that 0.1%, the drug trade goes on pretty much unfettered by states’ interference (after all, the failure of criminalisation is most abundantly writ large by the fact there continue to be drug dealers and drug buyers). Even if we extend it up to say 5%, that still leaves 95% fo the market unregulated, unfettered and free to be put into the hands of the violent and the exploitationist at the expense of very often the extremely vulnerable.

By contrast, if drugs were legalised, regulated and controlled, the situation woudl be very different.

And notice that you could go and buy your neorofen *safely*, because it was subjected to industry controls and quality checks, and if it failed those standards then there is a legal mechanism for recourse (however abject it may often be in practice) for you to gain compensation from the pharmaceutical company that poisoned you.

Not so with the drug trade, you may note.

Actually, upon reflection Tim J and cjcjc do have a point, though I think it’s fairly mitigated by my above response at 37

However, I think it’s worth pointing out that i’ve gone down a bit of an alley I didn’t really want to and ended up focusing on drugs exclusively.

the point I really wanted to make was about “the greek”, whom Simon describes as a metaphor for unregulated capitalism. Note that the greek doesn’t just deal in drugs, he deals in anything that will make him money. And he’s completely amoral.

The metaphor is pretty strong.

Yeah, I am actually going to retract what I said about the illegal drug trade being a model for unfettered capitalism, because upon reflection that isn’t true.

what i really should have said when drawing attention to the Marlow character was that he is the logical outcome of the illegal drug trade: completely ruthless and without loyalty to anything but money and who sees extreme violence as ordinary behaviour for business.

And I think we can all – libertarians and lefties agree – that that is probably right.

And that drug legalisation would be a good idea.

So I admit, I was wrong.

Dear all commentators

There’s quite an attempt here for the left to reclaim the Wire from this Tory buffoon. Witness the above arguement about the amount of agency D’Angelo has in the murder of Avon’s ‘shawty’ in the first series. It would appear that you are just as bad as Grayling for trying to co-opt the events of the Wire to support various part of your ideological position.

Although there is compelling evidence to suggest that the show opposes unfettered capitalism (see the whole of series 2,) don’t the events of series 3 (I’m only up to this 3 at the moment, so I’m willing to eat my words is evidence to the contrary arises) demonstrate that a top down social policy intervention that is not evidence based creates a host of unforseen problems, doing as much harm as good and planting the seeds of its own destruction by sound-byte and target hungry politicians. I feel the message is thus…

Know what you are talking about, listen to people and the situation on the ground first before your ideological position.

Example the welfare state, noble intentions and laudable in keeping absolute poverty at bay for the most part. Though the issue of dependency and the welfare trap have a divisive effect on some recipients. I haven’t kept up with New Labour’s recent thinking I’m ashamed to admit (so please correct me if I’m wrong about this) but the proper left want to leave it be (perhaps introduce the living wage, as far as I know a completely untested policy) whilst the right wants to seriously tighten it up, roll it back in a way which frightens those with genuine claims to welfare.

Us on the left co-opting the lessons for this show to batter this tory drongo make us, I believe, just as bad and smacks of mickey mouse political thinking.

The drug trade it is not really an example of unfettered free market capitalism, as it has to secure itself against the state as well as other threats.

More generally, I think you are taking the poetic realism of a television series a little too seriously. Rawls’ moral arbitrariness, at least in its early form, relied on a highly abstracted notion of the self. It also uses a tacit assumption that we have no free will which leads to a highly impoverished and scientistic theory of liberalism/social democracy.

If you want to see the genius of The Wire, just watch the heart-wrenching moment Snoop asks ‘How’s my hair look?’

Now that’s a character you’d never dream you could sympathise with.

The metaphor is pretty shallow.

But then the overt political opinions of fiction writers are often (always?) shallower than the works they create.

BTW there are some Tories – albethey buffoonish ones, eg A Duncan – who do support legalisation, but have been gagged.

So, will the LD’s take a principled lead??

I would support them instantly if they did, irrespective of almost any other policies.

39 – Agree entirely.

If you want to see the genius of The Wire, watch the heart-wrenching moment Snoop asks how her hair looks. Now that’s a character you never thought you could empathise with.

44 – And there’s this fellow: “I am an instinctive libertarian who abhors state prohibitions and tends to be sceptical of most government action, whether targeted against drug use or anything else. And on the drugs issue, libertarians and sceptics can have a field day. About the only thing all our witnesses agreed on was that the government’s strategy was a failure and prohibition over many decades had not worked.”

Wonder what happened to him…

http://tinyurl.com/m4qj7t

Sorry about the double post.

Anyway,

‘Commentators (like John Gray) have already drawn attention to the futility of formulating grand plans for human salvation (or social control) which he considers to be little more than a secular outgrowth of various religious ideologies.’

Never understood your attachment to John Gray. At the very least this argument is defeatist, at worst Social Darwinist.

Darwin himself did not suscribe to this view, nor do neo-Darwinians like Richard Dawkins and OE Wilson. They are conscious of our animal heritage but do not regard it as determinant.

EO Wilson, that is.

@47 – yeah, I’m not optimistic about the reign of the boy king

“But then the overt political opinions of fiction writers are often (always?) shallower than the works they create.”

I’d go further than that and say that the opinions that artists hold as individuaols are pretty much irrelevant and can tell us nothing useful about the work.

I look forward to discussions in 20 years time about urban hell holes and the extent to which they are the same or dissimilar to today’s equivalent – the only thing we can say with certainty is that they will continue to proliferate, possibly in an even bleaker and violent form as the fight for dwindling resources takes its toll.

There will undoubtably be stylish TV programmes reflecting the latest nuance on these ancient themes (good vs evil, nature vs nurture, rich vs poor, etc) but it will be hard not to conclude that such threatening landscapes should be avoided like the plague whenever possible.
After all, its one to thing murmer approval at a clever telly show but quite another to have direct experience of the lifestyle they depict.

[8] I’m not sure you actually understand Darwinism – may I suggest the “Selfish Gene” as a useful starting point?

For example you say;
Well, that really all rests on the assumption that we don’t have the means to alter their environments. Which we do. It’s called money. You can raise it through taxation and apply it through something called redistribution.

Yes we have the means for a long time but sadly not the power to overcome the forces of nature (if we accept what Darwin, Gray, Dawkins et al are saying).
I have found no evidence that the hell holes can be eradicated – only talk about how it should be possible.

“Rawls’ moral arbitrariness, at least in its early form, relied on a highly abstracted notion of the self. It also uses a tacit assumption that we have no free will which leads to a highly impoverished and scientistic theory of liberalism/social democracy.”

All wrong, I’m afriad.

1) Rawls’ notion of moral arbitrariness rests on nothing more than noting that an awful lot of the endowments people possess are not deserved, but are a factor of the luck of birth. He extends this beyond merely noting that some people are born to rich parents (which they don’t deserve because birth is a lottery) all the way to observing that nobody deserves to be born clever or have the talents that are remunerated in market society. This has nothing to do with “highly abstracted notions of the self”.

Rawls’ discussion of the original position may indeed by vulnerable to the criticism of high abstraction. Lots of so-called “communitarians” thought so. But that’s a different area of his thought entirely. Me, I’m keen on the arbitrariness emphasis in Rawls, less keen on the Original Position thought experiment.

2) A tacit assumption that we have no free will? Eh? Where is this in Rawls? And what as it to do with arbitrariness? And furthermore, what if he’s right? Though, what if answering that question depends on what you mean by “free will”? And whether you’ve read Peter Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” before trying to answer that question. To claim that Rawls believed people have no free will is either outright wrong or a total oversimplification of a complex (Kantian) thought process.

3) “which leads to a highly impoverished and scientistic theory of liberalism/social democracy.”

What does “scientistic” mean? And why is one of the most intellectually fleshed out and debated political articulations in western history “impoverished” exactly? all because of some vague gestures about “free will” (undefined)?

No, you can’t write off Rawls in two quick sentences.

Two long books, maybe (though probably not), but not two sentences.

“I’d go further than that and say that the opinions that artists hold as individuaols are pretty much irrelevant and can tell us nothing useful about the work.”

Upon reflection I think that may often very well be the case.

Hi all,

I don’t really know why the above article has made everyone jump to an argument on drug legalisation. Surely the problem is more the ‘war’ on drugs turns potentially good cops into number-chasing goons and petit criminals into murderers?

Legalising drugs will bring about serious teething problems in our society, and the very implications would deter any political party from going anywhere near it. An argument on classification and enforcement is another thing, however…

“That’s a statment about empirical trends in the UK and US over the last 20 years, not a necessary truth about state invovlement in education provision. And even if it were, it might be an acceptable price to pay for state provision free to all, as oppose to fee-charged market (non)provision2

I am only claiming that it is the poliitical position expressed by The Wire, and I think that is pretty clear. You argue that we can’t read any deeper than ‘government interference on the CURRENT model fails’ but that ignores that The Wire explores various governmental institutions and agencies and shows them all to be structurally incapable of mitigating social problems. To repeat, the only successful social intervention in The Wire is the withdrawal of the police to its furthest limits from a community, that is the removal of governmental control.

“Different interpretation: Hamsterdam shows how decriminalisation will stop the murder and terror that accompanies the criminalised drug trade at present.
It will not solve the entrenched problems of these communtities,”

But that is your ideological prior, it is not born out in The Wire which portarays the community as a whole to be recovering after the mayhem of the gang wars has been contained. It clealry portrays people at the same levels of poverty having, potentially, widely different life choices and outcomes based on those choices.

“Actually tackling the underlying issues of deprivation, however, requires a lot more than just decriminalising the drug trade. That’s one aspect amongst many others that need to be undertaken.”

That is an opinion, but The Wire is not optimistic that state intervention can do it. It shows every governmental agency engaged in graft and coalition building at the expense of all else. It is in everybody’s interets outside of the streets that the gang war and poverty continue.

“This may or may not be true, but it is certainly not the view that can be found in The Wire where just about every positive intervention of the state is disasterous for the poorest and is shopwn to be necessariluy disaterous because of the structural nature of political organisations. ”

“is not to say that it advocates almost total removal of those structures. It may instead be promting different ways of organising those structures and targetting the powers they wield.”

It may, but that is a less parsimonious reading, especially when a large section of the series is devoted to the almost unambiguously positive effects of withdrawing state agencies from the lioves of the community. There is no parallel positive.

“The necessary negative effects of some state actions may be the justified price to pay that overall benefits of state actions COULD bring (but we admitt at present are not). You’re not justified in inferring that the wire advocates libertarianism because it shouts loud and clear about the failures of government. The two things are very distinct. (I appreciate that you can throw this charge back at me, by the way).”

Yes, I think my reading costs less than yours. Not that I think the Wire ‘advocates’ anything, but I think its political assumptions are libertarian in a leftish sense. It does not just shopw state actions failing bust suggests tthat they must fail because of the structures of public orgnaisations and despite the fact that many of the people working in them want them to succeed.

“Upon reflection I think that may often very well be the case.”

It is when the artists are any good. Even more so when they are the kind who like to throw sand in your eyes (although I don’t think Simon is one of those).

The wire is hugely overrated. Miami Vice was a far better exploration of the pervasive effects of capitalism on those who lack the legitimate means to benefit from it. And they had a much better toys and a so bad its good 80s soundtrack.

“The wire is hugely overrated. Miami Vice was a far better exploration of the pervasive effects of capitalism…And they had a much better toys and a so bad its good 80s soundtrack.”

This explains a lot about you.

Thank you.

Daniel H-G

You have this annoying tendency of writing what i am going to write before I do it.

Stop stealing my thunder!

Paul:

I wouldn’t say that too loud, many of the Tory Boys/Loonatarians/Harry’s Place goons/Racists here don’t like me because I swear too much but quite frankly, sharing this place with them and their awful ideas is enough to drive any man to fuck.

“I am only claiming that it is the poliitical position expressed by The Wire, and I think that is pretty clear. You argue that we can’t read any deeper than ‘government interference on the CURRENT model fails’ but that ignores that The Wire explores various governmental institutions and agencies and shows them all to be structurally incapable of mitigating social problems. To repeat, the only successful social intervention in The Wire is the withdrawal of the police to its furthest limits from a community, that is the removal of governmental control. ”

All I can about this is that I find it genuinely intriguing how two people can watch the same programme and come to such different conclusions.

I don’t think The Wire leads to those conclusions or intends to advocate them. But to be honest, explaining why will just mean repeating much of what i’ve said above and we’re already starting to go around in circles. Though I AM going to say that one can tentatively agree that the withdrawal of police is tantamount to the removal of government control, and not infer any libertarian conclusions. You will note that the left has for centuries viewed the police with great suspicion, perceiving it to be the enforcement of a capitalist state’s monopolisation of violence in defence of those that control the means of production at the expense of those that don’t (to use a Marxist analysis which has traction for non-Marxists).

Indeed, it’s worth remembering that most leftwing discourse centres around the idea that the state can be a force for good in a way that it presently is not. thus critiquing present social arrangements and failures of the state is (again, I repeat…see how we’re going in circles) straightforwardly an endorsement of libertarianism in any obvious sense.

“But that is your ideological prior, it is not born out in The Wire ”

I think what is becoming abundantly clear is that we both take The Wire to confirm our existing worldviews. Given that, I’m not convinced that discecting bits of it and saying “no look, I’m right!” is going to work…

“It may, but that is a less parsimonious reading, especially when a large section of the series is devoted to the almost unambiguously positive effects of withdrawing state agencies from the lioves of the community. There is no parallel positive. ”

All that tells you is that The Wire spends a lot of times pointing at things that are going wrong, but doesn’t concern itself so much with prescriptions for how to put them right. And this statement in particular

“a large section of the series is devoted to the almost unambiguously positive effects of withdrawing state agencies from the lioves of the community”

Is one I don’t think you are entitled to. It demonstrates how existing practices of state involvement in the community can be harmful and are in many cases not working. That’s not the same as saying that the state should therefore withdraw. You try to pass this off as mere observation, but you are in fact inferring positive prescriptions which I don’t see as being there (E.g. Series 4: how can the message possibly be as crude as: there are problems with state education, especially when it jukes the stats…therefore the state should withdraw? An equally plausible conclusion is “therefore the state should try a radically different but still highly active approach”)

“Yes, I think my reading costs less than yours. Not that I think the Wire ‘advocates’ anything, but I think its political assumptions are libertarian in a leftish sense. It does not just shopw state actions failing bust suggests tthat they must fail because of the structures of public orgnaisations and despite the fact that many of the people working in them want them to succeed.”

I can accept that, and I think in turn you’ll agree with the following conclusion about where the dividing lines fall:

Both liberal leftists and libertarians agree that The Wire paints a powerful picture of what is going wrong because of failed structures of public organisation, and depsite the fact that many people working in them want them to succeed.

However, the leftist liberals think that the solution is radical restructuring of those failed structures, whereas libertarians think that the answer is abolishing the structures in large measure completely without putting anything in their place on the assumption that structures of that sort must necessarily fail.

Which, upon further reflection, is hardly surprising.

Looks like you and I just spent several hours of our day confirming that eggs is eggs…

54: I think you are missing the link between the abstration and so-called arbitrariness. People’s talents, for example, are constitutive parts of their selves. They aren’t something they are endowed with like a house in someone’s will. They are things without which people wouldn’t be who they are. And to say someone doesn’t deserve to be who they are just sounds rather sophistic. The terms just don’t apply very well.

Or as Snoop says: “It is what it is”.

“E.g. Series 4: how can the message possibly be as crude as: there are problems with state education, especially when it jukes the stats…therefore the state should withdraw? An equally plausible conclusion is “therefore the state should try a radically different but still highly active approach””

I think this is the nub of our disagreement. I am not claiming that The Wire offers a prescription for social policy of any sort. But we must agree that the series is sceptical (to put it mildly) of the ability of public organisations to work unambiguously for the public good. What possible restructuring, given the assumptions of the series, could take place except for the one portrayed in Hamsterdam (minimal state)?

“However, the leftist liberals think that the solution is radical restructuring of those failed structures, whereas libertarians think that the answer is abolishing the structures in large measure completely without putting anything in their place on the assumption that structures of that sort must necessarily fail.”

Almost. I think ‘abolishing’ is too strong, though. Rather the libertarian position would be to limit drastically the power of state officials over the lives of the citizenry on the understanding that individual self-interest will always interfere with official institutional aspiration, and to place life decisions directly in the hands of those living the lives. This need not be a ‘right’ position, obviously.

Nick, the point is (or a point is) that the advantages conferred by being born into a rich family or by being born with highly marketable talents are not easily distinguishable morally. Why, for example, should Wayne Rooney be entitled to the wealth that his natural endowments earn him, purely by chance, whereas the children of the Duke Of Westminster don’t? Why do we consider one offspring ‘privileged’ and the other not?

“And to say someone doesn’t deserve to be who they are just sounds rather sophistic.”

But that isn’t what Rawls is saying.

What Rawls is saying is that material and social inequalities that make people’s lives go considerable worse or better cannot be justified when they flow from aribtrary factors of people’s birth.

It’s a point about the levels of inequality that a just society should be willing to tolerate, not about the metaphysics of personality.

Sure, the metaphysics of personality may come into it, and certainly what Rawls says may provide intriguing insights into our understanding of those metaphysics. But Rawls is primarily concerned with the levels of inequality that a just society can countenance, and argues that those flowing from arbitrary chance of birth should only be countenanced insofar as they make the worse-off better-off.

Now, one of the reasons I am suspicous of the Original Position thought experiment which Rawls brings to bear is that it *does* get into tricky issues about the metaphysics of personality.

But then, that’s a problem with the OP. Yet the OP is Rawls’ attempt to argue (without success, in my opinion) that rational agents must come to see that in a situation of rational personal disinterest they agree that arbitrariness cannot justify material inequalities beyond those required for making the worst-off better-off. It is not the same as focusing on arbitrariness as a determinant of inequality, and the limits of the justifications of that arbitrariness’ consequences.

Part of the reason the OP ultimately fails, IMO, is that it’s based on a deeply Kantian thought that ethics can fundamentally be sorted out through rationality: that all rational agents must ultimately converge on the same ethical conclusions.

I think that is just wrong. But I can still endorse the Rawlsian thoughts about arbitrariness and equality, except rather than using the OP to try and show that all human beings are fundamentally committed to that ethical position, I argued it to be an expression of my person-defining deeply held sentiments (i.e. David Hume’s approach to ethics, rather than Kant’s). This makes a lot more sense to me, not least because when I argued with libertarians they often say “look, inequality just doesn’t bother me, ok?” and i find that there is no way of arguing them out of such a position. If inequality doesn’t bother them, then we’re at brick-wall stage in the ethical debate: i can’t force them through reason to agree with me that it does matter.

I can, however, try and win elections (so to speak) by convincing lots of other people who haven’t made their minds up on such an ethical question that equality does matter, and that society goes better if we promote equality…

66.I think the key contention there is “morality”. Moral thinking isn’t very good at making those kind of distinctions because it isn’t really a domain in which it should be applied at all. Morality is about how you should treat people, not about what people “ought” to have.

“Morality is about how you should treat people, not about what people “ought” to have.”

It is about both, isn’t it? You can’t get into ‘oughts’ without some implict moral frame.

http://winstonsmith33.blogspot.com/2009/08/making-right-choice-part-2.html

Have a look at this brilliant writer and the comments below.

“[1]But we must agree that the series is sceptical (to put it mildly) of the ability of public organisations to work unambiguously for the public good.[2] What possible restructuring, given the assumptions of the series, could take place except for the one portrayed in Hamsterdam (minimal state)?”

re [1] Yes we must agree about that. But it is as consistent for me to argue that the solution is to try harder, and to tolerate the failures of public organisation on the basis that these can be outweighed by a) the benefits getting it right could bring and b) the worse outcomes that (IMO) relatively compelete withdrawal will bring, as it is for you to argue that the failures outweigh the benefits of attempting to reform, and that the costs of withdrawal are not so large but indeed bring great benefits.

Which then makes it an empirical question. Which we both think we’ll win (but my god, I don’t want to live through the necessary libertopia experiment you need to find out if you’re right, and I will do everything in my power to stop you having one )

re [2] Well quite obviously, legalisation as oppose to simple decriminalisation.

Note that legalisation would see a massively increased role for the state (quality control, taxation, regulation etc etc). So you don’t win that easily…

“This makes a lot more sense to me, not least because when I argued with libertarians they often say “look, inequality just doesn’t bother me, ok?” ”

Youb are talkin g to the wrong libertarians, or talking to them in the wrong way. Libertarians are concerned with liberty which should be equally apportioned. They are not inclined to trade liberty for material equality, whereas the traditional left is, that is the difference (broadly speaking).

Ok, so you fall back on an intuition. It is a popular technique these days. And I have a fairly strong “equality” intuition in me too. I just don’t apply it directly to income/wealth inequalities. But I also have strong intuitions about coercion, and I feel they are often more important, as practice and history reveals that aggressive means to perfectly agreeable ends, undermine the ends and diminish what good you had in the first place.

[65] But we must agree that the series is sceptical (to put it mildly) of the ability of public organisations to work unambiguously for the public good.

Yes, self-serving bureaucracy is a recurring theme when agencies are found wanting.
Here is a thoughtful analysis following the case of Baby P – a death that occurred in the type of depressing milieu depicted in programmes like The Wire.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5133966.ece

Understandably in situations where bureaucracies come under fire they usually react by creating more layers of administration or procedure to protect themselves from the consequences of failure, or further criticism.

“But it is as consistent for me to argue that the solution is to try harder, and to tolerate the failures of public organisation on the basis that …”

Yes, yes, but my point is that it is a struggle to claim The Wire argues for this or presents its fictional world in a way that makes it seem likely or even plausible.

“Which then makes it an empirical question.”

See above. It is if we are debating public policy (which I am happy to do) but not if we aspire to being exegetes of The Wire.

“re [2] Well quite obviously, legalisation as oppose to simple decriminalisation.Note that legalisation would see a massively increased role for the state (quality control, taxation, regulation etc etc). So you don’t win that easily…”

Oh come on, you think the state is more involved in the legal drug trade than the illicit? I mean, compare the costs.

“It is about both, isn’t it? You can’t get into ‘oughts’ without some implict moral frame.”

I am not so sure.

Someone gets hit by a meteorite. Someone else doesn’t. Unfortunate. But no question of morality there. Someone can play chess. Someone else can’t. Still no question of morality.

Someone shoots someone else without good reason, then that is a moral problem, because someone has mistreated or abused someone else. Inequalities in society are often problems of this kind, because the powerful often create institutions that harm or disadvantage others. But it is not because of inequality that we should oppose those policies but because they involve mistreating people.

“Someone gets hit by a meteorite. Someone else doesn’t. Unfortunate. But no question of morality there. Someone can play chess. Someone else can’t. Still no question of morality.”

No, the meteorite doesn’t have a moral message, but a moral (ethical) question does arise when being good at chess is lucrative. You may think that if you are good at chess you deserve to have more money than those who aren’t (and who are not equally well endowed in some other way), but you may not. Your position will reveal value frame or imply a value at least.

Your division itself implies a value frame though. It is also possible that “desert” has nothing to do with it.

Why should whether someone has more money than someone else be a question of morality, while whether someone is alive and someone else is dead not be? Prime facie, the meteorite case seems rather more important! Why does the moral question arise with respect to chess but not to the meteorite?

And to say someone doesn’t deserve to be who they are just sounds rather sophistic.

As I understand it, the argument is not the people don’t deserve to be who they are, it’s that they don’t deserve to benefit beyond everybody else merely from being who they are, simply because they got lucky by having a highly marketable talent.

Of course, this rather side-steps the fact that most talents require a great deal of hard work to utilise to their best, which is where it starts getting really complicated…

This is funny. Has anyone seen this already? http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23670834-details/Prince%27s+Trust+appoints+Wire+star+as+youth+crime+fighter/article.do

“Youb are talkin g to the wrong libertarians, or talking to them in the wrong way. Libertarians are concerned with liberty which should be equally apportioned. They are not inclined to trade liberty for material equality, whereas the traditional left is, that is the difference (broadly speaking).”

When i wrote “equality” I meant “material inequality”, obviously…

Though I do find it amazing how you lot can still cling to this idea that you’re all about handing out equal liberty, as though handing out property rights does not by definition restirct the liberty of others, and given that libertarianism sees no reason why property rights should be equally apportioned….

G.A. Cohen demolished this stuff. And here I really do think you are wrong. If libertarianism is coherently based on anything, it can’t be the bizarre claim that it is based on equal liberty given what libertarians think abour property rights.

Unless of course you have some new conception of property rights that gets around this…

“Ok, so you fall back on an intuition. It is a popular technique these days. And I have a fairly strong “equality” intuition in me too. I just don’t apply it directly to income/wealth inequalities. But I also have strong intuitions about coercion, and I feel they are often more important, as practice and history reveals that aggressive means to perfectly agreeable ends, undermine the ends and diminish what good you had in the first place.”

dunno if this was aimed at me, but if it was it’s wrong.

I don’t claim to have “intuitions” about objective moral facts, I claim to project personal sentiment out onto the world which is value-free as it stands. The exact opposite of intuition, as it happens.

[80] seems to have less insight than your average Tory?

“Why should whether someone has more money than someone else be a question of morality, while whether someone is alive and someone else is dead not be? Prime facie, the meteorite case seems rather more important! Why does the moral question arise with respect to chess but not to the meteorite?”

The cases are no bloody analogous, for crying out loud.

society can take steps to control/adjust for the results of material inequalities resulting from arbitrary talents.

as a general rule, it can’t stop random meteorite strikes.

In the one case you are talking about random death, in the other you are talking about distributive outcomes in society. If you can’t see why these things are different then it’s a case of if you have to ask you’ll never know.

“The wire is hugely overrated. Miami Vice was a far better exploration of the pervasive effects of capitalism…And they had a much better toys and a so bad its good 80s soundtrack.”

“This explains a lot about you.”

Thank you.

Try googling the word “Irony” .

“As I understand it, the argument is not the people don’t deserve to be who they are, it’s that they don’t deserve to benefit beyond everybody else merely from being who they are, simply because they got lucky by having a highly marketable talent.”

That might be true, although difficult to see how that might integrate with the characteristics of being likeable, or having a sunny disposition or a tendency not to want to commit crime. I still think it breaks down at the edges into a pure preference for equality over liberty though, once you start thinking about why people shouldn’t beneft from those characteristics. Even in Rawl’s original position, it doesn’t seem to be rationally justified but has something to do with the burdens of commitment to living in the same society (which kinda undermines the arbitrariness point in the first place since being born into a particular society with those commitments is itself pretty arbitrary).

“G.A. Cohen demolished this stuff. And here I really do think you are wrong. If libertarianism is coherently based on anything, it can’t be the bizarre claim that it is based on equal liberty given what libertarians think abour property rights.”

You might think that, but I think that most would disagree. Jerry Cohen seriously engaged with the ‘problem’ of self ownership but did not get around it (at least he admitted it WAS a problem for Marxists). Of course liberty is limited in all sorts of ways and people exist in communities where restrictions on liberty need to be negotiated (and where coercive forces exist beyond those of the state apparatus and sometimes with more significant effect than the state apparatus) but only a very vulgar libertarian would argue otherwise.

[troll]

[deleted]

“In the one case you are talking about random death, in the other you are talking about distributive outcomes in society. If you can’t see why these things are different then it’s a case of if you have to ask you’ll never know.”

But the relationships and commitments that we have developed in forming the society are themselves, arbitrary from a moral point of view. That random deaths from meteorites cannot easily be averted by social interventions is itself a product of fairly arbitrary technological contingencies.

[deleted]

[deleted]

“Of course liberty is limited in all sorts of ways and people exist in communities where restrictions on liberty need to be negotiated (and where coercive forces exist beyond those of the state apparatus and sometimes with more significant effect than the state apparatus) but only a very vulgar libertarian would argue otherwise.”

Lol, based on my experience, you’ve just called every Libertarian i ever engaged with (and to be fair, i’ve engaged with a few now) “vulgar”.

I’ll give you credit though, you’re by far the sharpest one i’ve had the fun of debating with in quite some time. So maybe you are entitled to call the rest vulgar.

Question, though: (assuming you are a deontological libertarian), lets grant that there may be some non-state structures that are more coercive than states, and let’s work on the assumption usually held by (deontological) libertarians that coercion is the worst evil…does that not justify the creation of a more than minimal state?

Nick,

“But the relationships and commitments that we have developed in forming the society are themselves, arbitrary from a moral point of view.”

Er yes, but what has that got to do with meteorites?

“That random deaths from meteorites cannot easily be averted by social interventions is itself a product of fairly arbitrary technological contingencies.”

I know!That’s why it is a different case from the case of material rewards!

If we had the technology to avert random meteorites, as a good leftist egalitarian I would advocate equal protection from meteorites for all.

And let’s take this to stupid extremes: let’s suppose some people were born with a genetic predispostion to be attractive to meteorites and thus more likely to die – I’d argue that to compensate for this arbitrary factor the state should take measures to protect the genetically unfortunate meteorite-attractors, on the basis that nobody deserves to be born attractive to meteorites.

But given that there are no such people and that there is no such way of pre-empting meteorite strikes, whereas there are mechanims to deal with inequality arising from arbitrary natural talents of inheritances, then the two are DIFFERENT.

“Both liberal leftists and libertarians agree that The Wire paints a powerful picture of what is going wrong because of failed structures of public organisation, and depsite the fact that many people working in them want them to succeed.”

Indeed – as I’ve argued on LC before it’s for that reason that intent is irrelvant. No one wants the public services to fail – even the right want them to suceed as they are funded by taxpayers – so a public servant, procalaiming he intends to do good is pissing in the wind if the structure he works within, is ultimately incapable of delivering good.
As a libertarian my argument would be that where public services fail, the service they provide should be taken out of the public sector (properly, not PFI’d off , given to a quango or local govt to run). The idea that the state should just try a different/new approach (which it’s been doing pretty much as long as the state has existed) is flawed because the failure lies in the nature of the state, not the particular approach it uses, which is unlikely to be truly “new” anyway. That just leads to more interventions, which fail and are changed, which leads to more interventions, which fail and are changed, ad infiniturm, all you end up with a bloated state, high taxes, a trashed economy, and the problems you started with still thereand in some cases worse than they were to start with (sound familiar ?).
It’s like asking the plumber who flooded your kitchen to come back and try again using a “new” wrench.

“Question, though: (assuming you are a deontological libertarian), lets grant that there may be some non-state structures that are more coercive than states”

I can swallow that.

“and let’s work on the assumption usually held by (deontological) libertarians that coercion is the worst evil…does that not justify the creation of a more than minimal state?”

‘Minnimal’ here is doing a lot of work, isn’t it? I guess we would have to peg that out, but I would certainly want more of a state than, say a Randian libertarian in full cry. In fact, I think the state has an important redistributive role and should, at least, be taking care of defence, healthcare, and education, in the sense of ensuring (being very general) that everybody is covered by those things, and the state needs to be able to raise taxes to those ends. What I want to see less of is the state managing things, because states are very bad at that. I also don’t think the ‘deontological libertarian’ designation is very useful. It describes a starting point but like most political positions there is a strong utilitarian component and utlilitarian considerations will often (but not always) trump others. I bet we broadly agree, here, don’t we. There are moments when liberty is more important than the balance of social befits achived by the liberation? Abolishing slavery with the attendant war and subsequent impoverishment of the freed slaves in the US, for example?

Incidentally, Alex Massie looked at the politics of The Wire back in December.

In any case, if you have to investigate The Wire’s politics, it seems to me that you might be tempted to conclude that it endorses a libertarian view of local politics, rather than conservative or liberal perspective. No wonder it’s such a trendy show to like… The evidence is there: manifest failure of a crippling and immoral war on drugs? Check. Manifest failure of a school system resistant to reform and implicitly ripe, therefore, for real school choice? Check. Desperate consequences of the criminalisation of prostitution? For sure. Ghastly consequences of local government and planning regulations held hostage by rent-seeking? Yup, that too.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/3241826/the-politics-of-the-wire.thtml

I’d be fascinated to hear what ‘choice’ of schooling these kids would have without state funding.

Since it’s Alex Massie talking, I suspect he’s talking about vouchers, rather than an absence of state funding…

Paul – the point is those areas of moral arbitrariness in which the state should legitimately intervene, on this account, changes according to morally arbitrary features like where and when you are born, and which society you are member of. For example, none of us right now have access to meteorite protection. 50 years from now, we all might. That is an inequality which is arbitrary and contingent on the time and place of our birth. These luck inequalities across time are so huge that I don’t see what these interventions can expect to achieve. The state can intervene successfuly (via distribution) in such a small slice of our quality of life that it seems really strange to found a core political philosophy on it.

@98 – it is possible to separate funding from provision

(eg see every health system in Europe except ours!)

I support Tony Benn’s premise that the inequalities within capitalism cannot be tempered, consequently the state should withdraw. The inequalities within capitalism are inherent and its’ laws, interventions and institutions will always serve the interests of the powerful. Unfortunately, I have never watched ‘The Wire’ so I cannot comment about the writer’s intentions.

To go back to the original article, the thesis is fundamentally flawed.

Of course the circumstances of our birth and our upbringing determine, to a large extent, who we become but the one thing that differentiates human beings from the rest of creation is the ability to exercise our will and the consequent degree of personal responsibility that ensues from that ability.

Sadly, hundreds of thousands of children are abused or otherwise damaged during their childhood. Many of those people exercise their will not to allow their own children to suffer as they did. So when Peter Connolly’s murderers battered him to death, they chose that course of action. They chose to do so.

Because they chose that course of action, they are responsible for the consequences. To mitigate their crime based on the circumstances of their own birth would be to sully the souls of all the others who make a different choice.

I thought this was a rather excellent article but I’m not sure about the use of the word ‘arbitrary’. I agree that it’s a matter of luck where you are born but the situation you are born into isn’t random.

Being born black and into a poor community is a matter of chance but the structures which you are born into are already in place.

This isn’t to deny agency but to recognise that your options are structurally shaped. Take a physics analogy: the trajectory of a single photon may be unpredictable but the behaviour of large numbers of photons is not. Behaviour which is unpredictable on an individual basis becomes a matter of probability when interaction and interference is understood.

In the same way, accepting that the behaviour of an individual might be determined by random factors (call it ‘agency’ or ‘free will’) does not diminish the fact that sociological factors can’t be observed when people are observed as a group and their interactions are understood. And this, in turn, is not to say individuals are unacountable for their actions.

103
The problem with that argument is that it is doubtful whether Baby Peter chose/willed to be battered to death. Since when did the laws of causality bypass human beings and for that matter single-out those who could or couldn’t choose? Or would you argue that baby Peter ‘chose’ the wrong parents?

The Wire not only explodes the conventional myths that there are “good guys” and “bad guys”

If there are no good guys or bad guys, then liberals cannot be good guys, and conservatives cannot be bad guys. Not the kind of idea I often come across on Liberal Conspiracy…

@ 98 I don’t think may people would argue against the state paying for education, the question is whether they should actually run/manage them as well. I would say not, based largely on first hand experience as a parent.

103
“The problem with that argument is that it is doubtful whether Baby Peter chose/willed to be battered to death. Since when did the laws of causality bypass human beings and for that matter single-out those who could or couldn’t choose? Or would you argue that baby Peter ‘chose’ the wrong parents?”

I would argue that his parents chose to have kids for the wrong reasons, as did their parents.

‘The Wire not only explodes the conventional myths that there are “good guys” and “bad guys”’

Also untrue. There is no doubt, even acknowledged by David Simon in one interview I read, that Marlo Stanfield is a bad guy. An interesting character does not equal morally ambiguous.

“Unless of course you have some new conception of property rights that gets around this…”

Well some libertarians (admittedly very few) are mutualists and have a usufructory attitude towards land ownership. Mutualists (and even some non-mutualist libertarians) also hold that the injustices causes by capitalism are in fact the result of various forms of state coercion that benefit big business, landlords and other holders of significant wealth. Hence some distinguish between a free market which they support and capitalism (what most would call state capitalism)which they oppose. That said one gets the impression from the majority of libertarians that their utopia is something like Tesco minus the state.

That was actually the essay question for last year’s Chris Tame prize, “Can a Libertarian Society be Described as ‘Tesco minus the State’”

I am told that very few entrants attempted to defend that proposition and most took the more radical path of decrying currently existing capitalist systems. So in some respects, we are closer to the left than many assume.

Without the state Tesco wouldn’t be Tesco, it would still be just one market stall among many others……………..

Without the State, Tesco wouldn’t exist.

Paul,

G.A. Cohen demolished this stuff. And here I really do think you are wrong. If libertarianism is coherently based on anything, it can’t be the bizarre claim that it is based on equal liberty given what libertarians think abour property rights.

The only problem here is that Cohen’s argument is not a very good one at all: http://wenar.info/media/Wenar_Meanings_of_Freedom.pdf is a nice response.

As for your moral arbitrariness argument, the sleight of hand there is the part where you assume your favourite baseline distribution (equality, or maximin, or whatever) as automatically being justified, and, by extension, non-arbitrary. Which it is not. Susan Hurley demolished all this stuff (and she really did) in her Justice, Luck and Knowledge.

Paul Sagar

Fuck me.

People actually take you seriously here?

“Why? If the insights they provide are more worthwhile than the soundbites of sheltered politicians, would we not do better to pay attention to fiction?”

Sheltered politicians…says the petulant little Oxbridge know-nothing with a glorious career of careerism ahead of him and penchant for deconstructing fictional television shows…not just that… arguing with the Tories’ deconstruction…pouncing on Tory gimmicks…you’re not even original sunshine. Any wonder the Left’s floundering like a beached mackerel with you and Sunny “tweeting from the climate camp and so up his relativist self he can’t work out which end of the toothbrush to use” Hundal on the case.

Between you, Comment is Free (if you’re a brain dead bourgeois basket case) and Harry’s Reich…you’ve turned politics into a day out at Hay on Wye. Bollocks to this, I’m going back to shouting at the telly. I get a more intelligent response that way. Go on delete away…can’t have the plebs spoiling the party…

Though I’ve been singing the praises of The Wire since 2005, I’d say the Tories would do better to read Sudhir Venkatesh’s Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.

S3 SPOILERS

Can I point a few things out about the Hamsterdam experiment that no-one here seems to have mentioned?

1. Bunny explicitly says at one point that part of the value of Hamsterdam is that his police units who are not working Hamsterdam now have much more time to do ‘proper’ police work. In this important respect, Hamsterdam shows not a withdrawal of the state, but a reallocation of resources to what Bunny thinks is important.

2. Carver enforces a tax on dealing in Hamsterdam to pay for the welfare of the now-unemployed lookout kids. He can only do this because as a representative of the state, he and his officers have a monopoly on (legal) violence.

3. The priest (whose name escapes me) gets public health officials to come down to Hamsterdam to hand out clean needles and condoms.

It’s pretty obvious to me that the ‘success’ of Hamsterdam (and let’s not forget, it is clearly portrayed as a pretty horrible place) is not down to the withdrawal of the state but due to the presence of the state in a new configuration. The state with more withdrawn when thinly spread across the entire Western district *without* Hamsterdam, not with it.

Finally, does it strike nobody as ironic that throughout this discussion of Rawls, no-one once thought to mention that one of the central characters throughout the show is, in fact, also called Rawls. What would Dep. Ops. Rawls think of the philosopher?

@117 – indeed, all three examples point to what legalisation would look like

[116] do you think we should be listening to Idris Elba? [see 80].

I’m finding it virtually impossible to distinguish between Grayling’s comments and those of a cast member brought up on the mean streets of Crack-ney.

For example we are told;
At the age of 22, he (Elba) grew frustrated at the lack of parts for black actors in Britain and moved to New York where he won the role in The Wire. He says he based his drug-dealing character on “some of the people I grew up with”.

Elba now lives in Atlanta but said a cover of Time magazine in America last year stating that British kids were “unhappy, unloved and out of control”, had alarmed him – “I thought to myself, is this really true?

“The breakdown of family life leads to parents not caring about what their kids are doing as well as kids not caring what their parents think.”

Sounds like exactly the sort of stuff we can expect from the Tories in ever greater volumes?

The depressing thing about many on the Left is that they seem to think the state is a solution to every problem and that all state solutions are equivalent. Talking of TV parables, I’m reminded of a scene in Arrested Development, when Lindsay and Tobias are discussing how to save their marriage:

Tobias: You know, Lindsay, as a therapist, I have advised…
[falls off the bed]
Tobias: …a number of couples to explore an open relationship where the couple remains emotionally committed, but free to explore extra-marital encounters.
Lindsay: Well, did it work for those people?
Tobias: No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but… but it might work for us.

Tobias is our statist, aware that the state doesn’t work a lot of the time, but this time it might work. But, even disregarding the evidence, why do people expect the state to be competent? It is run by those who are at the top not on merit (in the same sense as Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco) but because they can muster more political support than others, there is little incentive to succeed, there is little disincentive to avoid failure, and it is inefficient.

According to sanbikinoraion @ 117, the Hamsterdam experiment involves the state to some extent but it is not the state but its agents who are conducting the experiment: they are not enforcing the state law, because it has proved not to work. It is also helpful that they are on the frontline, local to the problems the state has caused – they can react faster to the information that has got to them more quickly than if they were more distant.

ukliberty, you are right that it is agents of the state working without regard for their mandates, but I struggle to envisage a situation in which a limited-area legalized drugs market could come into effect in a deprived city such as Baltimore without direction from (renegade) state agents with the power to coerce drug dealers into moving into the free zones.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a lefty pro-statist at all. My original comment was really pointing out that Hamsterdam probably couldn’t be claimed by the libertarians upthread arguing that it was an example of the withdrawal of government because state agents were the progenitors and maintainers of the project, and it could only have been them due to the legal powers invested in them by the state.

For the reasons you give, though, it is probably just as problematic to claim it as a victory for the state on the basis of the evidence I gave, because as you note they are not enforcing the law and in fact when the lawmakers get wind of the scheme, they shut it down pretty quick.

Of course, the higher powers only shut it down because they believe that the legalization of drugs is, net, a massive vote-loser for them. Eventually we may get to a situation in the US (and hopefully sooner over here) where the knee-jerk anti-legalization movement has been cowed by reasonable experiments around the world that show that legalization results in neither a landslide of jobless, feckless addicts nor a shifty-looking, slang-talking person of colour on every street corner.

(Of course, should trials of legalization result in more addicts etc then we would be wise to reconsider, but I don’t believe that that would be the result.)

120
Not this leftist, my position is that the state merely replicates existing inequalities but it is hidden under the rhetoric of fairness and redistribution.
All state intervention takes place to serve the interests of the ruling class.

monkeyfish/charliepolecat @ 115,

You may be right about ‘The Wire’, I have never seen an episode of it. But I would say that good fiction has a huge influence on public attitudes. You can probably quote the usual suspects better than I, but from Dickens to Irving Welsh, with stopping off at Hesse, Shaw, Brecht and Orwell I would argue that they are catalysts in changing what we think and who we are. Although the author that had the most effect on me was Sartre. I got well pissed when I finished ‘The Roads to Freedom’.