She avoids the effort, and the stress, for her future self: future her is lazy, so present her must be proactive. This is the very definition of sustainability; building things to last, not just for the present, quick buck.

Sustainable = Lazy

The same strategy could work for most businesses. If you train your staff well, early on, and foster/maintain a thinking, pro-active atmosphere in your office, you’ll need to spend less on management and other overheads going forward, and have less HR headaches. And your customers will be happier because, compared to your rivals, you’ll provide faster, better customer service.

The same could be said for most other aspects of a business. An initial investment of time/money/effort can improve time/money/effort situations further down the line. There’s a strong business case for sustainable business practise in almost every situation.

So, why are most businesses not lazy enough?

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a sustainable business culture. And this has a lot to do with an irritating piece of economic theory: the comparison of present and future worth via accumulation functions.

Basically, this means that people value Jam Today more than Jam Tomorrow – putting the Jam in your cupboard* until tomorrow means it loses economic value. This means that you have to make a certain amount of return on your Jam (typically more than you’d get out of investing the Jam somewhere and getting a return) in order for economists to think there’s any point to your having the Jam.

Their logic is perhaps clearer when thinking about a business – there’s no point to doing business if you could make more money by selling it and putting the money in a savings account.

However, the logic is ridiculous by any sustainability measure. We made Jam with our strawberries so that they would last.

Economics needs to start properly accounting for the rocking increase in efficiency obtained by spending half an hour last week thinking about the problem – building a model of economics that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels for growth but grows out of better analysis, technique, information sharing and quality.

We need to stop powering our economies with finite resources and start powering them with brains. By being lazy.

—

* or fridge, if you’re insane and don’t understand the point of jam.

Cameron was talking about paying off personal debt and banks leading to businesses not individuals, so it’s actually not a contradiction.

Debt isn’t that much of a problem if you know how to pay it off; the problem was the deficit. Because Osbourne’s “plan A” (or “non-plan”) isn’t producing the growth he required, we’re still borrowing an NHS every year, just as Labour left things; the opposite of knowing how to pay it off, we’re uncontrollably borrowing more and more!

The real problem with Labour’s borrowing wasn’t their spending post 2008. Once the debt was huge and a crash happened, they were kind of pinned – Bailing out banks, stimulus, and QE were all sensible things to do.

The real problem was the fact that they ran a boom-time deficit from 2002 onwards (the very opposite of Keynesianism) and this when the crash happened we still had a massive debt and had trouble borrowing more to fix things without taking a credit rating hit (and thus paying more interest; quite important when you have a huge debt!)

While Scameron and Gideon, playing pin the tail on the boar (ish market,) might not be doing much to help, I much prefer them (and Vince and his “plan A+”) at the helm than Milliband and Balls, who were part of the team that ruined everything in the first place, and don’t seem to have learned from it. Bring back Alistair Darling, who actually had a deficit reduction plan, and you might persuade me.

You’re right on the causes of the current problem, although the structural problems you describe were all legacies from Labour (lack of lending to businesses from the post-crash credit squeeze, etc) and while I agree with you on more redistributive tax (which thanks to the Lib Dems this government is extending (10k threshold) and maintaining (50p rate)) I don’t believe that leaving a massive deficit running, to the point where it takes the 50 years you describe to finally pay it all off, is a sustainable solution.

This century is going to be harder than the last, as we have an environmental as well as an economic crisis to fix. Burying our heads in the sand and saying “la la la” while the debt mounts won’t fix that.

Terrorism, in so far as it is defined (since it’s an etymological misnomer,) is generally held to refer to an attack on a state which damages citizens or infrastructure or both.

Setting yourself on fire as an act of protest is pretty much the ultimate peaceful demonstration. I would say it’s pointless, but it was just such an action which sparked the Tunisian revolution, and this arguably the entire Arab Spring, so clearly not. However, it is still further than any protester should have to go.

Perhaps if China were to give Tibet an augmented version of the autonomous status it has conferred on many other regions, say by giving full political and economic control to a locally elected governing body, the deeply peaceful inhabitants of Tibet wouldn’t keep choosing to peacefully, if visibly, kill themselves in frustration.

Contributions should clearly rise, for the foreseeable future, in line with standard public sector pain, or (as the Union rep pointed out) we’re really not all in this together.

On the inconsistent point; devolving the power for the future, while specifying at least how harsh to be for now, makes perfect sense to me, dude.

MPs need to take this seriously, because if the second best enumerated public servants in the land can’t cut their own pay without a fight, then we’re in for a seriously turbulent ride to budget sanity in 2015.

I do agree with the assertion that Liberalism is a mission to destroy privilege, however the article chooses the moat bizarre definition of privilege I have ever seen; inequalities created by the State.

Presumably these would be inequalities like the destitute being entitled to housing benefit, while millionaire bankers must pay for their own second home, or that people in job centres are entitled to state funded assistance in CV writing and interview technique, while the poor old Etonians funded to the eyeballs by their parents have to make do with the best education money can buy.

Privilege is in none of these places: it is embedded in the sharp elbows of the middle classes. It’s in the unpaid internships, which Nick Clegg, accompanied surprisingly by Louise Mench, has rightly attacked as an affront to Social Mobility, since only those who can afford to live off their savings or parents are able to buy this work experience that often catapults them into the graduate jobs market.

Now tackling unpaid internships is a nontrivial problem &em; the line between these and volunteering, without which the charitable sector would not survive, is a thin and ill-defined one. But this does not give Liberals, those enemies of privilege and vested interests, license to sit back and ignore their effect on keeping the children of the poor down!

A far higher priority must be set on removing barriers to social rising (and falling, which is the flip side of mobility) than on making sure entitlements are not abused. And no priority at all should ever be afforded by any Liberal government to cutting off the lifelines of those who depend on them; which the current government is misguidedly doing thanks to it’s Conservative, not Liberal, influence.

This version of privilege, in short, is that of the Libertarian Tories who which to see homelessness soar and children go hungry, because it is closer to an “Ideal Market”. And The Liberal Democrats, the Social Liberal Internationalist Green party that we are, will never stand for that.

[[EDIT: The police actually retracted the statement the next day. I'll leave my reaction here for the world to see, though.]]

Now I am no anarchist, as my previous posts should testify, however I have sympathy for many groups defined by the holding of an idea I refute; Muslims are treated despicably by many in the UK for no reason other than holding a set of beliefs, and the police are also more likely to stop and search them owing no doubt to (possibly subconscious) racial prejudice; I deem this to be wholly unacceptable too.

This case, though, is in my mind even more insidious. The police are taking it upon themselves to persecute people for holding a political position. To quote from the witness/whistleblower appeal leaflet:

“Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police.”

Whether or not we have a state is a matter for the whole British public during elections, and nothing whatsoever to do with the jurisdiction of the police. An elected government is perfectly within it’s rights to disband all police forces tomorrow – and this is a good thing. (the power to do it, not the thing itself…)

Moreover, this is the police directly attacking people over their thoughts – literally thoughtcrime – and encouraging others to report their neighbours thoughts – straight out of the totalitarian playbook. I hesitate to blame Labour’s appeasement strategy with The Sun and Chief Constables for the Metropolitan Police Force’s decision to take the unconscionable initiative here, but I could do.

Now let’s be clear; if an anarchist were to commit a crime in the name of her political beliefs, and this can be proven in a court, I have no issue with them being punished. Objection to the existence of law isn’t an excuse to break it, harming people or property in the process. But neither should the police be allowed to harass people based on holding such a philosophical position.

We need to see the prosecution of this police force under the human rights act, and if that isn’t a legal option then we need an explicit new law protecting citizens’ freedom of political thought and expression from any state actor; police, army, bureaucrat, politician. Such legislation shouldn’t be necessary, because no police force should be stupid enough to enter the realm of politics like this; but apparently they are, so it is.

A General Election now?

Holding a general election before the government’s economic rebalancing strategy has been allowed to fully play out would be a disaster for the Lib Dems. The Tories are buoyed up by their supporters’ perverse preference for public service cuts, but ours aren’t, and if the fiscal tightening is even seen to be damaging the economy there is no way we would muster more than our (surprisingly high) 9% rock-bottom support, even following a campaign push.

The Lib Dems’ Interest or the National Interest?

The problem with this line of argument against letting Cameron take the fall over hackgate is that it plainly demonstrates our conviction, as activists, that the National Interest and our Party Interest overlap completely; a premise which is now shared by a startlingly small amount of the 24% of people who voted for us in May 2010.

We should not be arguing against the resignation of anyone at this stage, but in favour of the judicial, parliamentary committee and police enquiries being allowed to run their course and follow the evidence where it leads – in favour, in other words, of justice. It is most definitely in the National Interest not to have a Prime Minister implicated in criminal, or even reproachable, behaviour.

If Cameron is implicated by any of these investigations (which he hasn’t been yet, in my opinion) then there is little we can do to protect this government (and our electoral interest) in any case, and as such we should not be seen to try and defend the indefensible.

Clegg should not be wading in to defend Cameron, in case he eventually has to resign

Our responsibility should be to defend the government, surely, since the Sovereign Debt crisis in Europe at the moment would surely hit us following a collapse of the government, but not the actions of the prime minister who may need to step down. It is a difficult line to walk, and Clegg did mention to Andrew Marr that we need to be concentrating on the economy, not this crisis, but he went to far in saying he did not think Cameron would need to resign. That is for the Tory spin doctors and ministers to risk their credibility doing, not our party leadership.

If we need to have a General Election this summer as a result of this scandal then so be it; that in itself should not be enough for the markets to damn us. After all, if they start shorting our debt and the price recovers following a new, stable government a fortnight later, they’ll lose money on the shorted transaction, just as the market says they should.

Am I an atheist?

No. I’m an agnostic, since I don’t believe there’s any evidence for or against the “God exists” hypothesis. The Dawkins position that God doesn’t exist is just as absurd as the theist position that he or she does.

Note, I don’t believe in God and I don’t not believe in God are both true for me. But that’s where I make a further distinction from the atheists – I don’t believe the question is relevant. There are far more pressing questions for humanity, which we can obtain answers to, and we should be looking at those instead of arguing over whether a beetle in a box exists just because we say it does (or doesn’t.)

Why do I care about the Moral Laws argument then?

Because the moral laws argument applies to all non-theist (atheist and secular) political theories.

So, why is there a contradiction?

Secular liberal philosophy isn’t morally relativist, that is it requires there to be acts which are universally thought to be wrong (crimes,) and this is what Wittgenstein was attacking when he said that without a God handing them down you can’t have Moral Laws because they have no origin.

I have argued before that there should be such a thing as International Law and that it should be enforced – what Wittgenstein (and Sam Bowman on twitter) are asking me is how do we decide what international (or indeed national) laws should be, and therefore how to human rights arise?

Our Survey Says

The classic “Democrat” answer to this question is “Whatever a legislature elected by the people decides” – democracy is literally mob-rule, and the laws come out of some averaging of mob opinions. However, these are not permanent laws – the people can change their mind (as we’ve seen with laws on, for example, homosexuality over the years.)

I agree to an extent with the democrats, in the sense that I think the approval of laws should be done by elected representatives, although I do go further and argue for one theory to be put, very strongly, to the people for their approval. It is a theory which should win all arguments by having its basis in fact rather than opinion, and as such should be a possible set of universal moral laws, and it is the one espoused by the Utilitarians and Radicals in early 19th Century Britain.

I don’t believe in maximising human pleasure before you scowl at me for arguing for bestiality and all those other Bentham consequences; although David Cameron’s recent moves towards measuring happiness rather than growth are moving in a nearly-correct direction.

The quantity to be maximised may be happiness and may be something else (although it certainly isn’t growth since that is unsustainable,) but just like with the laws and conditions to maximise it it should be discovered by experiment.

This is where the liberal harm principal (a Radical idea from JS Mill in the 19th Century) comes into its own, since we can measure the “harm” on a person scientifically; economic, medical and psychological. From these data we can construct a moral theory which is, like our scientific understanding of the universe, a “best guess” at a set of moral laws; which is an objective source of such laws to satisfy Wittgenstein (and Sam.)

I thought this question was about Human Rights?

But, you see, we’ve now built a framework in which we can prove scientifically that a world with human rights is better (by some metric that must also be discovered) than a world without them; as such they must become part of our set of universal moral laws.

And, to pick an example, the simple manifestation of the “right to life” is a two-parter: firstly that there be a law against murder, and secondly that the state not execute people (both of which are fundamental consequences of the harm principal.) You can start to get picky about things like abortion, but you have to define who is covered by Human Rights, and if you define this to be separate, living humans (as opposed to biologically dependant and potential humans) then abortion does not break the murder law. Additionally, if you want more than just a definition, look at the wellbeing and status of women in societies with legal contraception and, often, abortion. Thus, even when a seemingly simple Human Right becomes complex, we can see that a pseudo-utilitarian calculus helps us resolve the problem and stumble across a “universal moral law”/a moral law derived from the universe.

We should also not forget that there are still significant problems in Sudan and South Sudan, where we hear of “heavy bombing and gunfire,” and while numbers of deaths go unreported (presumably for lack of reliable numbers,) we know of the 70,000 people displaced last month as the creation of the new country was underway, and in Libya, the ongoing civil war continues to claim lives.

It is surprising to me that one of the few commons rules from societies across the world, that killing people is generally considered wrong (even if there are occasional exceptional circumstances), is violated so frequently by people everywhere. To find the causes we need to look in a few different places.

Guns and Ammo

Firstly, we must consider technology. There is a (possibly apocryphal) story that knights of old, wearing armour and carrying a sword onto a battlefield, actually rarely aimed to kill their opponents. The natural human aim in such situations was to disable your opponents; put them out of the fight – but scenes from Gladiator et al of some strident actor slicing off limbs and stabbing people in the abdomen, fire in his eyes, are vastly exaggerated.

The psychological theory is easily understandable; it is harder to kill someone when you can see the expression in their eyes, hear their moans of pain, and so on. Thus, the story goes, killing people with guns, bombs and other weapons which act at a distance makes it much easier to kill much more frequently. I’m not sure I believe in this school of thought, although it may contain an element of truth.

Exceptional Circumstances

The alternative, and in my mind more probable, explanation is that people have chosen to expand the definition of the get-out clauses, to make “allowed killing” more frequent.

I don’t presume to provide any new insight into the Rwandan Genocide, nor to place the blame at the feet of the dutch or native populations, but the radicalisation of the population and the killings that followed were an instance of extending the exceptions to the rules; making killing members of the Tutsi minority more acceptable via a generalised historical and political narrative.

The rules have been twisted in an entirely different way in Libya, where the world’s failure to remove a corrupt, undemocratic and violent leader has led to the justification of a struggle against him, and those who support him. This is also an extension of the normal circumstances where it is considered acceptable to kill someone; Gaddafi’s crimes are not to be tested in a court, but on the battlefield, and most of those paying the price are not in positions of any power in the regime and thus are only marginally responsible at best for the transgressions.

In Northern Ireland during the height of the unionist-republican war, a people who are anecdotally more serious about their christianity than most in the british isles were tearing up the rulebook on what was acceptable, and eagerly murdering and torturing other people simply because they were born on the wrong side of town. This, like Libya, was all justified in terms of a wider political struggle, but ultimately this became hollow, unyielding and uncompromising rhetoric that was eventually defeated by Tony Blair’s devolution pincers – making Northern Ireland’s so-called politicians the exception out of themselves, the Welsh and the Scottish. While we still see riots in Belfast on Orange Day, the politicians have learned that people prefer the language of reconciliation after years and years of polarisation, and the rise of the Alliance Party is testament to this.

I could name many other examples, Gun Ownership in the United States, non-peacekeeping missions by western forces across the middle east (including both Iraq and Afghanistan, which started out as wars against the native governments) and significant amounts of Israel’s “meet stones with tanks” approach to the Palestinian people, as well as their rocket-propelled retaliation, and more, there are always even more instances of this. However, this is a blog post, not a dissertation.

What went wrong?

The examples I have laid out are all failures of several things. Firstly a failure of politics, or rather the failure of politicians to take responsibility for standing up against a populist but dangerous movement. Additionally, a failure of the rule of law, where international crimes are inconsistently and rarely prosecuted, or in the case of the US Gun Ownership where the law itself is plainly wrong. Finally, a failure of morality, where people forgot their common humanity with all members of our unique and wonderful species and descended into insanity.

The third failure cannot exist without at least one of the other two – at least not on the huge scale discussed in all these examples. Political collapse is also only possible if international law is not properly enforced – putting on leader’s shoulders the responsibility to keep their government’s actions within some basic standards is essential to ensuring they act in ensuring the protection of all members of their societies. And so I believe all this comes down to the enforcement of international law – which I’ve already written about.

Media plurality is completely separated from criminal law – and quite rightly! The OFCOM acquisition guidance, including the much mentioned “fit and proper” test, doesn’t go into details of an owner’s criminal record, as it’s all about making sure there’s a responsible, diverse set of media outlets distributing news. OFCOM looks at the proprietor’s conduct while running other broadcast media channels to see if they stick to the rules, and as such, a parliamentary debate isn’t allowed (under competition law) to prohibit Murdoch from buying the rest of Bskyb, and why they had to simply apply pressure until he backed off (as he did, in spectacular fashion, this afternoon). Parliament is still sovereign, of course, but in order to interfere it would have to repeal competition law, which would also (probably) involve leaving the EU, which would be a much busier afternoon!

But some people DID break the law…

Criminal behaviour is something completely different to plurality, and is dealt with by the Police not a regulator-QANGO. There was, however, a problem where the police failed to fully investigate suspected crimes including voicemail hacking and bribery of police officers, and that’s why we’ve got ourselves an independent judicial enquiry that can pull in former Met officers and quiz them alongside the journalists and politicians. In the meantime, the Met have got their act together and are also investigating the hacking itself, finally, too.

What’s to be done about all this?!

Finally, in addition to all of this, we have people calling for new regulation of the Media. I was lucky enough to attend a Westminster Skeptics meeting on Monday, and a few interesting points were raised about how this should (or should not!) be done.

Firstly what I’d like to point out that if existing criminal laws had been followed, or if the police had done a real investigation in 2002, most of the horrible bits of this wouldn’t have happened – all the victims of the nations tragedies wouldn’t have had their privacy invaded and been hounded by the gutter press.

Of course, politicians would still be cozying up to media barrons like Murdoch, which isn’t a healthy state of affairs anywhere, and that’s one bonus of the judicial enquiry – the full nature of this unconstitutional relationship will be exposed, and the next election might not be about getting the Sun on your side.

But in particular, one WesSkep speaker David Allen Green said that existing media laws (namely the policial neutrality laws and libel law) were a strong enough framework already, and that with proper police investigations all would be well. I would only differ from this slightly — Libel law is not universally assailable (it costs a lot to get into suing people!) nor universally applicable (it is impossible to defame an idea, hence the legitimacy of the No2AV campaign full of downright lies,) and as such doesn’t really work as a proper regulator to make sure media coverage is not dangerously misleading at times.

These are not insurmountable problems though, and with appropriate access and reframing I think a response-based system of regulation could work. It sure beats an even quasi-governmental censor for individual stories because, as Mill argued, restricting freedom of speech cannot be satisfactorily distinguished from restricting freedom of thought, which we can plainly never do.

Edit: Nick Clegg gave a speech on this today, and I agree with Nick.