By D. J. Webb
I have just come back from holiday in the Ukraine, and this has spurred my thoughts on the “unfairness” of the difference in the lot in life experienced by members of different nations. Is it unfair that some people are born in Switzerland and others in Somalia? Is this just a variation on the different life chances of people born into different social classes in a single nation? Why are some nations doomed to poverty and others destined for prosperity? Whose “fault” is this? And should we feel uneasy about it?
It seems this question is very apt in terms of libertarian discussion. Clearly some people within a society are born into families that afford them advantages. Some whole nations may be said to be advantageously placed compared with other nations. If you read of people starving in a famine somewhere in Africa, one way of looking at it is that it could have been you: you did not deserve to be English; national identity is a product of chance. This is what Cecil Rhodes referred to when he said that to be born in England was to draw a winning ticket in the lottery of life. It is not quite the winning ticket nowadays, but it is still a decent outcome compared with most other alternative economies that we could have been born in.
There is a certain awkwardness discussing this issue with members of nations down on their luck. Clearly you wish to sympathize with decent people in such nations. Were we to trade places with them, we might find that they were able to make more of the opportunities in an economy like England, where many have grown effete and complacent, than many English people actually do. On a one-to-one basis, it does seem unfair that some countries are just poorer, which limits the life chances of all their inhabitants.
The Ukraine is a good example. It is difficult not to be sympathetic to individual Ukrainians, living in a country whose official GDP is smaller than in 1991, when the Ukraine became independent from the Soviet Union. Apparently, living standards are higher, as the black economy accounts for around half of the economy, and so GDP statistics do not capture all economic activity. Nevertheless, it is hard to argue that the Ukraine has recorded a creditable economic performance since 1991.
Individual Ukrainians did nothing to make this so; they can do nothing to make it no longer so. This is the case in all nations, of course: individual people lack the power to control the nation’s destiny. A Ukrainian I know lives on the fifth or sixth floor of a building of flats with no lift, and shares with friends. There is no living room; the kitchen is big enough for one person to stand in; the furniture is basically just firewood. Such flats have central heating, but turning it on is determined centrally by the city: there is no “on” switch to turn on the radiator yourself. In a cold snap in autumn, the temperature in the flat is the same as in the street outside.
Prices of most things are the same as in the West. This is particularly the case with imported items or technological goods. Locally produced milk and cheese would be cheaper than in the West, of course, but most consumer goods are no cheaper in the Ukraine, or even more expensive in the Ukraine, than in England. I think this reflects the purchasing power of Tesco and other large English shops.
Average wages in the Ukraine are around £130 a month. Clearly such Ukrainians are condemned to a wasted life compared with citizens of most other European nations. You can buy poorly decorated flats in buildings constructed of pre-fabricated panels for around £30,000, or more in Kiev. Many Ukrainians were, however, handed their Soviet-era flats for a small fee years ago, and some families are lucky enough to have acquired several such flats from expiring grandparents and the like. Consequently, people are often able to survive on little in a way that would not be the case in England.
While there is a tax system, it is disorganized and few people are asked to make returns. There are few services from the government. Healthcare is supposedly free, but hospitals generally require those they believe can pay to buy needles, food and other consumables for their loved ones in hospital, or even to tend to them themselves in hospital. Good care often requires cash bribes to the doctors. But in the end, in the Ukraine, your money is your money, and not the government’s, and this is one plus factor compared with countries such as the UK.
Clearly, on a one-to-one basis, one can only be understanding towards Ukrainians, given that a country sandwiched between the EU and Russia, not wanted by the EU and under economic siege from Russia in the past year or two, forms the backdrop to their lives.
However, the behaviour of the government reflects the national culture to a greater or lesser degree in all countries. The country is dominated by oligarchs, and at all levels of society people imitate the abusive behaviour of their overlords by demanding bribes. Encounters with the police often require bribes. All other encounters with the bureaucracy require cash inducements. Even on an individual level, Ukrainians seek to rip each other off. If you leave your ID card in a bar, they might hold it for you, but won’t give it back to you without charge. They know the money and time it would require to get a new one from the police, and so they will demand a “holding fee” from you, for having looked after it. In England, this is called “stealing by finding”.
Ukrainians are not easily admitted to the EU partly because of the behaviour of the population. If the Poles and Lithuanians have sponsored significant crime waves in England, then I must warn that those nations have nothing on the Ukrainians. Fraud, theft, blackmail, prostitution, pimping, drugs trafficking—all these crimes would see a large boost were Ukrainians present in large numbers in the UK.
The trouble is that, to a large extent, nations are their own worst enemies. The “tragedy” of developing nations is that culturally they inflict their situation on themselves. The situation is similar to the unprogressive culture that prevails on sink estates in the UK, where it is hard to unpick whether those communities are “victims” of a lack of social opportunity and the easy availability of welfare, or whether those communities are in fact problem estates who are visiting their own problems on themselves. To a certain extent, both at the estate level and at the national level, both explanations are true when the situation is seen from different angles.
I wouldn’t like to emphasize the point to Ukrainians, but England was poor once. Reading of the way children were treated in the factories of Lord Shaftesbury’s day, one cannot help but realize that England had to make its own way out of its plight. There were no World Banks or rich nations to offer assistance; just the long slog of finding appropriate economic policies to foster socioeconomic development.
Countries like the Ukraine may make little of their advantages, but they do live in a world where much of the conditions for rapid growth have been put in place for them by other countries. They did not invent the light bulb, or electricity, or railways, or motor cars, or computers, or the Internet; and yet they benefit from all of these. A world market exists: the Ukraine does not need to conquer India and go to war with Imperial China to enforce a global trading network. Appropriate policies would see rapid economic growth as the already existing technology of other nations was transferred quickly.
Ultimately, the world does not owe the Ukraine a living. IKEA pulled out of building a store in Odessa more than a decade ago, because the land prices were higher than in London or New York and it did not wish to pay bribes to local officials. Land has a manipulated price in all countries, and IKEA believed that corruption was at the heart of the high cost of investment. If the Ukraine wishes to receive investment, it must do something about corruption.
It is difficult for individual Ukrainians to influence the political process. The discussion in the Ukraine is of how much it costs to become an MP there. How much do you have to pay in bribes to get elected? Election results are not believed to be the genuine result of popular opinion. Most MPs in the Ukraine are resistant to reforms that would reduce opportunities for corruption.
Consequently, Ukrainians are left hoping the new government will do enough to clamp down on corruption and move the country into a more Western orbit, without really being able to force the government to do so. To that extent, the situation is “unfair”.
However, individual Ukrainians betray a mercenary and greedy approach to life that limits the ability of a Westerner to sympathize too deeply. Not all Ukrainians would invest the money they have in businesses or in English lessons or even in saving for a flat. Clearly there are many small businessmen in the country, but their ranks are dwarfed by the numbers of Ukrainians who spend all their income on clothes. They wish to show off Armani suits and Versace bags. They have detailed knowledge of the expensive perfumes that are in fashion at the moment. Women—and men—spend a fortune on hairspray and take an hour to get ready to go to the shops to buy a pint of milk. Everything in the country is for show: to show others you are fashionable and you have managed to keep up with the times and the latest brands.
Despite the fact they are the second-poorest country in Europe after Moldavia, the average Ukrainian would turn his nose up at an Android phone, such as I have. It has to be an iPhone for them. Why don’t they economize and put the extra money towards self-improvement of some type? They seem to want everything now, the same as it is in the West. Yet prosperity has been centuries in the making in the UK.
It is difficult to avoid the view that Ukrainians have added their contribution to a situation whereby they are towards the bottom of the economic rankings. They don’t seem to understand that you can be happy and poor: you can live in a small flat, and if you are with loved ones, you will manage one way or the other to be happy.
One can admire the tendency of Ukrainians to be aspirational, while deprecating their materialism. That libertarians admire aspiration is not the same thing as saying that libertarians believe material things are the only desirable things in life or even the central objects of desire in life. In the end, a country never gets to be a prosperous society until it has other values than materialism. Capitalism (and the Common Law) are ultimately founded on social trust, which implies that something other than material values must come first: it is this that Ukrainians lack. Until they understand this, unfortunately, Ukrainians will deserve to be less well-off.
Discover more from The Libertarian Alliance
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
My point in the last paragraph that there is a cultural underpinning of liberty (roughly, Englishness) is important. Libertarians often overlook this, and even claim complete absence of government (eg as in Somalia) is the goal. But Somalia is not founded on English culture, and lacks the interpersonal trust (based on the Christian notion of agape or charity) that has influenced Englishness. I should say that oil states like Kuwait are rich owing to their resources despite their culture. Countries without significant resources need to have a culture that supports liberty and thus trust in interactions in the economy.
I think it depends on whether you abide by a deontological or a utilitarian understanding of libertarianism. A deontologist would presumably support libertarianism everywhere because it is the right thing to do, irrespective of a particular country has a history of liberty.
Sean Gabb once said that being a libertarian in England is easy, given our history, and allows for strategic alliances with traditionalist conservatives (High Tories); libertarianism in Russia, on the other hand, would be completely revolutionary and would preclude such an alliance.
I would disagree that this aspect of the author’s argument – where he calls for a global adoption of basic liberty – should necessarily be characterised as deontological in nature (though I am open to correction on this, whether from the author or somebody else).
First, as the author rightly observes, libertarian values need to be explained ontologically, something that the deontological/utilitarian perspective cannot do justice to as it concerns itself only with justificatory rhetoric.
Second, it seems to me that the author is speculating on why Ukrainians and other cultures do not exhibit comparable libertarian values, and he (rightly or wrongly) argues from the position that they should adopt these, first because they are good (or efficacious) in themselves, and second, because of the desirable consequences of these values. So, the author’s position is not as detached or dogmatic as that of a strictly deontological liberarian (such as Stefan Molyneux). [Of course, there has to be some doubt about whether anyone can be deonolotigical in a pure sense, Molyneux and others being more akin to real-life caricatures in this respect, but I won’t go into that here].
My own question for the author, in addition to the others I have asked, is whether, if he thinks libertarianism should arise globally, does that also mean it would or must, under the natural order of things? And if so, then I’d be interested to know what the author thinks this natural order would be, how it would look?
Where did I ever say that other countries or even the whole globe ought to be libertarian? If the Ukraine remains as it is, corruption and all, that’s fine by me — but it explains the life chances of its people. I will try to bear in mind in interactions with Ukrainians that they can do little personally about the wider context of their lives.
I meant ‘globally’ in the sense of it being a universally desirable set of values. I took that as the essence of what you said. I’m not suggesting you said it should be implemented in every other country or worldwide, but your article did leave me with the impression that you think libertarian values would be better for Ukraine. But I can’t be bothered to go back and pull out quotes from your article. The purpose is simply to comment intelligibly on your article, not start a silly internet row over ‘he said’/’he didn’t say’. Thanks.
Excellent article. One needs to be reminded just how hard life is for most people, materially speaking. I’m left feeling on the one hand lucky to live in the UK and on the other aghast at the risks we are taking as a country with our peace and prosperity.
Yes, Colin, I was trying to balance a libertarian line supporting inequality with a recognition that for large numbers of people, even whole countries, the opportunities are not there and will never be there for them. In my experience, libertarianism suffers from an image problem as a movement of heartless people who appear to love inequality. Actually, we don’t. but the issues are more complex than simply calling for government intervention to resolve all problems. Libertarianism is for me not primarily greed, but rather a preference to be left alone by governments and to live in a society where people have a basic trust of strangers in a way that facilitates a free economy. This is not the same thing as rejoicing as others’ poverty, but many libertarians make it sound like that.
Is this trust dissipating in Britain as more people from outside north-western European cultures are allowed to come and settle here?
Possibly. Car insurance rates go up because of fraud in this area, including deliberate crashes by ethnic-minority gangs reported in the press, which weakens the case for whole areas of capitalism, including the insurance business.
Yes, obviously such problems would arise to some degree in a more homogenous society too, and do, but I would agree with you that mixing up cultures worsens such problems, and I would also agree (assuming this is also your position) that any attempt to impose a unified culture civically would also not remediate these problems well. Trust is an organic thing. It can’t be imposed with smiley faces and ‘hope’ campaigns, not matter how well-intentioned. We seem to have lost touch with the biological basis of society, and we are the poorer for it.
Actually that is another argument against government interventions: were insurance companies allowed to discriminate premiums would only go up for groups who’s members indulge in fraud.
Well, yes, insurance companies should be able to discriminate. If they believe men crash more often than women, why should women be required to pay equal premiums?
Interesting and informative article. The facts you give about Ukrainians’ spending priorities are depressing. It sounds like worst form of the shallow consumerist exhibitionism you see in Britain and Ireland.
Well, obviously we are talking of a nation of 44m people – not every single one is a “chav”, but you would be on the right lines to think of Ukrainian culture in connection with the “chav” phenomenon in England. Nearly all (all???) Ukrainian women dress like prostitutes for a trip to the supermarket. Ukrainian men wouldn’t be seen dead in the streets with a hair out of place… These people love brand names. There are even Ukrainian mothers who don’t feed their children properly so they can buy pink leather jackets for themselves. You get the picture!!! But we are talking of people who have highly circumscribed life chances compared with people in the West. People survive by relying on friends and helping each other out in a kind of libertarian way — in England, the state is everyone’s “best friend”…
The same can be said of Russian women. We are speaking, of course, through an English gaze. Many of these women, despite their garish and vulgar appearance, have values and beliefs that would be outdated for even our grandmothers.
Yes, that’s true. And of course, unlike in England, where a warmed-up microwave dinner would be considered good going, in the Ukraine everyone can cook from first ingredients.
David,
Thank you for this essay – particularly the first three paragraphs. They’re very good.
You say, individual people lack the power to control the nation’s destiny. Yo! That’s exactly the problem I have with “democracy.” And, if you think a little deeper, you’ll see why I disagree with nationalism.
Now, cue the brickbats.
I’ve been to Ukraine twice this year, both times as a teacher at Glenn Cripe’s Liberty English Camps. Once to L’viv in March, once to Yaremche in the south-west in August.
The Ukrainians I know have no more enthusiasm for clothes than I do. (Unless, perhaps, it’s a Liberty Camp T-shirt).
You say that prices in Ukraine are similar to Western prices. That might or might not be true in Kiev (I haven’t been there yet). But I and my friends took a taxi from Yaremche to L’viv airport for 1500 hrivnia – close to £50 for around 180 kilometres. Four of us went to the opera in L’viv; the tickets (box seats) cost the equivalent of £8! In Yaremche, I had a single room with evening meal and breakfast for £14 a night. And I well remember an excellent evening in “Pravda”, the beer hall in L’viv, where I survived all evening on four craft beers (8.5%) which, together, cost the equivalent of £2.40.
As to your last three paragraphs, I’d say, who are you to question Ukrainians’ religion?
I went to the opera in Kiev for 50p. I did say that locally produced things are cheaper. I was not articulate enough for you, it seems — or maybe you can’t read. I think maybe you are a lazy observer of people. If you think that people slum it in the streets as they do in England, then open your eyes!!
Western Christianity made a real difference to the personality of the people: we were called upon to “put on the new personality” as mentioned by St. Paul. In Orthodox Christian areas (as also in Islam), there was a nice ceremony in church, but no real changing of the people deep down. I would reject the idea that Orthodox Christianity is really of a piece with Protestantism/Christianity. If you believe that social trust in the Ukraine is on a par with England, then the country doesn’t have a problem with corruption at all. Yet all surveys show this country is worse than Nigeria for corruption. Open your eyes — and stop thinking in terms of Guardian memes (“all cultures are relative” and guff of that sort).
This article has been posted on the old blog also and makes me realise how much better the old blog was compared to the “paint-it-black” mess we now have. The old blog showed what was new –at the top–whereas this present one is all over the place. I suggest we return to the old format at once.
I mistakenly posted on the old blog, before realizing my mistake.
Let’s not derail this thread with a discussion of the blog cosmetics. All I will say is that you can easily see what’s knew so long as you can distinguish yellow from white.
Though the author might not have intended, does this article imply that “English” liberty, and, by extension, the philosophy of libertarianism, have a racial or ethnic basis? Are there any examples of indigenous libertarian traditions outside the Anglosphere and northern Europe?
I can see how the article could be read either way – that liberty seems to be biological in that only certain peoples seem to have expressed this culturally, or that libertarian values are something that all people have the capacity for, but only some have adopted to a degree. Also, the two positions are not mutually-exclusive.
Yes, of course. Libertarianism is fundamentally support for England’s traditional culture. The idea that all nations can become libertarian overnight is absurd.
[…] http://thelibertarianalliance.com/2015/10/17/an-unfair-lot-in-life/ […]
David,
To what extent is it not so much the peculiarities of a national culture that matter but the fact of having a national culture pure and simple? Ukrainian identity is a little weak, is it not (genuine question)? I’m not so pessimistic as you about the power of government to create such a culture: Australia, the US, to a certain extent England (thinking of the efforts of people like Arnold in Victorian Britain, or Dickens’ “creation of Christmas”; or, earlier, the men who wrote The Book of Common Prayer and, later, the King James Bible): these efforts were successful I think. PC people are always going on about how contrived national identities are and that’s why it’s all wrong when people feel “nationalistic”. So perhaps something can be done by wise government: going after criminals, educating children to see the enlightened self-interest of patriotism, sifting culture to create a canon to be proud of… It’s when the rot goes right to the top that things are hopeless, and admittedly this seems to be more and more the case as globalisation has made every elite rootless.
Really good article. Thank you.
There is no national culture. England is a foreign country now compared to the England I grew up in. Is the gun culture a national culture? I have more in common with guys I’ve never met but corresponded for years with on the intartubes than the people I work beside every day. I call bullshit.
I do not think the article is particularly insightful, Does poverty cause corruption or is corruption caused by poverty? When England was poor it was corrupt.
No, it wasn’t! When England was poor, it was a strongly believing Anglican society. Corruption was rarer then than it is today in England.
Would you agree with the h’white nationalist movement that only h’white people – western European h’whites to be exact, have developed capitalism in a large part due to our culture of mutual trust and social cohesion in all circumstances?
I am slightly disappointed the term ‘post-Soviet mentality’ wasn’t found anywhere in your article. The corruption inherent in Ukraine is in part an outgrowth of their soviet past, so I found it strange that you did not attempt to search for the origin of Ukrainian corruption in their immediate history.
Good article on the whole, energizing read on gloomy Wednesday mornings.