..some sadistic minion of the state.
Even given the intermittently risible state of our politicians it is still
worth voting as your vote does count. The opportunity to vote early and often
for the highest bidder is no longer an option - we have long traded $2 and
all the beer you can drink for a pocketful of broken promises and bombast.
In fact it was in 1856 that Victoria and Tasmania became the first places
in the world to introduce an effective secret ballot in elections which stopped
vote buying and coercion - this standard method of achieving secrecy in voting
which the rest of the world calls the Australian ballot.
It is apparent that there is a great disparity between the richest and poorest
nations, differences that cannot be explained by geography, supposed national
temperament, language, ethnicity or religion. As an example North and South
Korea were, until the end of WWII and the division at the 38th Parallel, a
united country with an unprecedented homogeneity of language ethnicity and
culture. Over a relatively brief time North Korea has become impoverished,
a country where probably millions of its citizens have starved to death, whilst
the south has become prosperous with a remarkable degree of personal freedom.
The North is a communist military dictatorship where wealth and power are
concentrated in narrow elite under the late Kim Jong-Il and now his podgy
vertically challenged third son Kim Jong-Un who was recently proclaimed the
Eternal General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea and Eternal Chairman
of the National Defence Commission in 2012. Eternal - that’s forever
in North Korea.
South Korea is now relatively democratic; with free and uncorrupted elections,
although there is no doubt that its early governments after the Korean War
were highly authoritarian. Private property is recognised and there is a relatively
impartial judicial system, although one strangely lenient towards billionaires
and over-zealous in suppressing dissent.
South Korea has inclusive political institutions, the North highly exclusive.
One encourages growth, an excellent education system and distributes the country’s
wealth; the other keeps whatever wealth there is for a narrow political elite
- one whose leader’s Cognac budget alone was $800,000 a year when the
average North Korean’s living standards are akin to those in sub-Saharan
Africa. South Korea is not perfect but it is infinitely preferable to North
Korea.
All these thoughts and a lot more come from reading the book ‘Why Nations
Fail – The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty’ by Daron
Acemoglo and James A Robinson which, weighing a fraction under a kilogram,
does not come under the heading of light reading. I was recommended the book
by one of my old work colleagues, a man of vast intelligence and knowledge,
whom we shall call Malcolm Douglas because that is actually his name. The
authors of the book are Professors of Economics and Government at MIT and
Harvard respectively. It is a book of some moment, maybe the book of the moment.
There is no way to do justice to the complexity of the book in a thousand
words or so, although its overall premise once stated seems, like most great
ideas, almost obvious.
The book it is not an apologia for the United States, its way of life or politics.
Indeed were not for the gradual and evolution towards social and economic
freedoms in England, a process which was not without luck, happenstance and
spilt blood, the world might be a different place.
The turmoil that shook England during the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution
overthrew a long history of absolutist rule which Australia, despite what
you might think of Bob Menzies, was spared. Whilst there was strong opposition
in the early days of the colony to the granting of the freedoms which we now
take for granted, people like John Macarthur did not have sufficient power
to prevent it happening. As in The United States, the Industrial Revolution
quickly spread and people began to get richer even while only riding the sheep’s
back.
‘World inequality exists today because during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries some nations were able to take advantage of the Industrial Revolution
and the technologies and methods of organisation that it brought about whilst
others were unable to do so. Technological change is only one of the engines
of prosperity but it is perhaps the most important one, and the failure to
adopt a mechanism of creative destruction, is the result of institutions that
exist to extract resources from the rest of society either as a consequence
of absolutist regimes or the lack of some form of state centralisation.’
It would seem that it is part of a human nature, an element that is very difficult
to break, that a narrow band of people will grasp and maintain power no matter
what the cost to others. A narrow absolutist regime will, as shown by North
Korea, even destroy their own country in order to maintain their own power
and privileges. There are countless other examples – all replete with
stories of unimaginable horror – that bear this out. In fact those who
have experienced any largish organisation will see the same thing writ large
often in a way that would be funny if it were not pathetic. But in general
we have in place structures that prevent the worst excesses.
The desire for absolutist power is tendency that will not go away; there are
forces that constantly seek to undo the freedoms that we have by means devious,
fiendish and clever. Wealthy people like to be wealthy and obscenely powerful
people generally bear out the maxim that power corrupts – and of course
absolute power corrupts absolutely.
This, amongst other things, means that we have to face the long walk across
the arid intellectual plains towards the next election with some semblance
of good grace. No matter how you despair of the persiflage and idiocy over
the next long months what it ultimately represents is of the highest importance
to protect.