The cute-hoor party

I must be provincial. That was the first time I have ever come across the term “cute hoor.” I had to look it up.

Also, I would like to note that it becomes especially clear during times like these that there is not a sharp line to be drawn between the bezzle and the non-bezzle. It is more like a continuum. I would like to see the economists develop more precise bezzle measurements.

there’s a decent case to be made that it is more corrupt than other major Irish political parties, but those other parties too have had prominent members snuffling in the trough

What Henry is perhaps too modest in mentioning is the name of one Fine Gael, not least for the sake of non-Irish readers (I haven’t heard of Labour or Green members being accused of corruption in this respect, have you?). I say this because if Fianna Fáil is the face of ‘new’ money, then Fine Gael is surely the face of ‘old’ money in Ireland (certain more refined professions, big farmers and those who consider themselves ‘gentry’) – in other words, those for whom the system was rigged many generations ago.

(there was a 125,000 person protest march in Dublin yesterday)

Today, actually. I marched, myself (placard and all).

Now, the country is better seen as an advertisement of all the things that can go wrong when swift liberalization, lax regulation and cosy relationships between business and politics come together.

I would say merely that we have had a fuller dose of the free-market (c.f. the grotesque index of “Economic Freedom”) than the other Anglosphere countries. Due in no small part to the utter triumph of the ideologues (best represented by the Progressive Democrats) in completely rewiring our supine government, financial, academic, media and yes, academic institutions to embrace their Randian worldview. Would Fine Gael do any better? I doubt it.

Political corruption involving tax breaks, cosy relationships between banks and regulators, and differentiation between greenfield and urban renewal sites shows that market liberalisation fails?
Yep, Ireland was one of the more free-market economies in the world. Yet if they were giving tax breaks to property developers, sounds like a lot of intervention was going on in the property market.
Hopefully Ireland will show the advantages of democracy in dealing with political corruption, as opposed to a dictatorship.

dunno if this is apposite, but one factor that has fed corruption in some u.s. cities is popular complacence based on a reaction to previous racial oppression.
so, e.g., dc’s staggeringly corrupt marion barry was tolerated by many black voters because it’s about time that one of our own gets to work the system. after centuries of white people cheating, why get fastidious just now when the cheater is black?

is there any of that in the popular attitudes to corruption in ireland?

Tracey, this “our ideology has never truly been tried! We were against those corrupt types all along!” thing was pretty much destruction-tested by the Trotskyists.

pretty much destruction-tested by the Trotskyists.

Not sure how “tested” would work here.

And more importantly, how do we make it occur without libertarians bitching about how money is free speech

By not giving a stuff what a bunch of rich spoiled brats exercise their choice to whine about?

“Yep, Ireland was one of the more free-market economies in the world. Yet if they were giving tax breaks to property developers, sounds like a lot of intervention was going on in the property market.”

Everyone’s already picked on poor Tracy. But remember the wisdom of Ayn Rand: A=A. A “free-market economy” is the exact same thing, by observation, as a “lot of intervention going on in the property market”. You can’t criticize a tautology.

Which is a gibe, yes, but seriously what else would people expect? A free market is one in which people use whatever power(s) they have to better their market position. When ideologues cause governments to back off from principled regulation, the result is necessarily the private use of the government for personal gain, because there’s nothing to stop it. And the government can hardly not be involved, because the government defines property in the first place. (Arguing with that last point means that you’re not worth my time to argue with, so don’t take it the wrong way if you do so and I don’t reply.)

Does anyone know the parliamentary arithmetic – could FF continue with just the support of independents, ex-PDs, etc.?

The number of independents supporting the government on the way in, according to wiki, was 4. Plus the 2 ex-PDs, one of whom is a Minister and thus will pretty much be a guaranteed supporter of the government barring resignation, and Fianna Fáil, and you have a total of 83 TDs. I think this is one short of a majority. There are a total of five independents, and I don’t know what way the other independent lies, but I think the answer to your question is “depends”. It’s close enough to a majority that they could probably still carry on as a minority government.

I think Matthew Engel should be excused from the charge of Irishry. Here he is nearly a year ago, well off the standard tourist trail in Co. Cavan and getting some nice quotes from curate in a post-scandal Church. I’m guessing from the Meath and Cavan references in how he writes about Ireland that there must be a family connection there. Incidentally, the Times (UK) puts some names on those unnamed property developers.

Besides all the economic challenges facing Ireland, there’s also the challenge of looking in the mirror when it comes to figuring out how we got into this mess. I’d guess quite a few of the 120,000 marchers in Dublin on Saturday voted FF in the last election. Then there’s the Green voters who must be wondering how that vote got turned into a Green-sanctioned bailout for property developers.

The ordinary union members might also want to take a look at their own leadership, who were happy to sit around the table with Bertie Ahern (last seen hyping the Celtic Tiger in Honduras) to divide up what was then an expanding pie. “Social Partnership” was a co-option scheme and not much else.

Does anyone know the parliamentary arithmetic – could FF continue with just the support of independents, ex-PDs, etc.?

The four independents currently are, listed in decreasing order of likelihood to support the opposition:

Finian McGrath – leftish socialist republican type who did a deal with Fianna Fáil after the election but walked away from the deal after the old-age pensions debacle last October. Would be likely to support the opposition.

Michael Lowry – ex-Fine Gael cabinet minister who, having initially marketed himself as a “Steve Silvermint” cool clean hero determined to root out Fianna Fáil shenannigans in government, was forced to resign back in the 90s after his own “snuffling in the trough” came to light. (Like EWI, I’m not convinced – based on what I’ve seen at a local level – that Fine Gael would be significantly better on this front given the opportunity.) Has continued to be re-elected and somewhat surprisingly did a deal with Fianna Fáil after the last election. Likely to stay bought unless Fine Gael present him with a better offer.

Joe Behan – elected as a Fianna Fáil TD but resigned from the party after the pensions debacle but is emotionally still a Fianna Fáiler and has continued to vote with them on some other issues. Has the appearance of someone who is too fundamentally decent to prosper in Irish politics.

Jackie Healy-Rae – seventy-something walking bogman stereotype who plays up to the role. Fianna Fáiler who fell out with them in 1997 over his failure to get selected
as a general election candidate and has scraped home in subsequent elections and has obtained a number of deals with minority Fianna Fáil governments. Hopes to have his son/clone succeed him at the next election but likely to be stymied by his Fianna Fáil constituency colleague John O’Donoghue being Ceann Comhairle (Speaker) and thus reducing the number of available seats in the constituency to two. “Not as green as he’s cabbagey-looking.” Any deal would probably require the replacement of the Ceann Comhairle, which perversely would make forming a government harder for the opposition.

If Trotskyists had supported the general direction of Stalin’s policies, but moaned that he hadn’t gone far enough, then they might be considered to be in a somehow analogous situation to ‘libertarians’ with regard to the free-market policies of Reagan, Thatcher, etc which have been enacted over the last three decades and are now unravelling so spectacularly. As far as I am aware, that was not the case.

Interesting: the Irish government is flying kites in the press for a “government of national unity” with unspecified “exceptional powers.”

The Sunday Independent comes out fairly clearly against elections and against parliament, which it refers to in terms of “squabbling TDs.” (Read: “useless talking shop… firm hand of authority needed… no bloody nonsense…” etc.)

Adam Smith had it right when he suggested that businessmen should be allowed nowhere near the organs of government. It seems to be a necessity of any democracy, whether free-market or not. The question is, how do we make this occur? And more importantly, how do we make it occur without libertarians bitching about how money is free speech and heavy-handed regulations on lobbying and our political representatives are on a par with the Holodomor?

My theory – just a theory of course – is that there is a ratchet effect which drives these slides into corruption, cronyism, plutocracy as the faux aristocracy. That is, it is possible for a determined, well-financed minority to over time, advance it’s agenda in small increments which are greater than the sum of the parts. It is much, much harder to move the other way, or to reset these small slides. In fact, about the only way to do this is through virtual collapse of the existing order, at which point a sort of scary populism begins to make itself felt.

I don’t know if this is human nature, something intrinsic to all human institutions, or perhaps an effect that can be edited out with the right jiggery-pokery in the right spots at the right times (this seems to be a popular plot in fiction, especially science fiction.)

Here’s a specific, relatively innocuous example: Columbia, Missouri’s ‘Can Ban’. This was a five cent deposit municipal ordinance applying to beverage containers in order to encourage recycling. Passed in 1977, the law was not actually implemented until 1982, even though it had broad popular support (this is a college town, and the year that Carter was sworn into office.) In fact, for twenty years, up until it’s appeal in 2002, most citizens professed being quite happy with it, took pride in it as a symbol of progressivity.

Nevertheless, in 2002, the law was repealed. Why? Well, because this was not first, the second, nor even the third attempt to get the can ban off the books; it was the fifth. And this was done in the context of a certain political, um ‘atmosphere’, shall we say, what with the conservative party being ascendant during a time when the mood of the country was markedly conservative. Finally – the supporters of the repeal outspent their opponents ten to one, with much of the money coming from outside corporate donors, such as the National Soft Drink Association. I don’t suppose the fact that the repeal was deceptively packaged (again by an outside consulting firm) as a vote for recycling, rather than a referendum on effectiveness, cost, and fairness the way the first four recall attempts had been framed hurt its chances any either.

The odds of getting the original ordinance back on the books? Close to zero, unless there is another wave of populist disgust with curbside litter, the motivation for the original bill. And for very depressing, very obvious reasons.

And that is the ratchet mechanism at work. It tightens slowly but inexorably one way, never the other. The only thing that drives motion in the other direction is populist discontent. I really can’t see anything to be done about it.

perhaps the huldufolk and leprechauns didn’t get their bowls of milk.

Newfoundland managed to go bankrupt during the century when this was least fashionable. They’re ahead of the game already.

The Province of Newfoundland and Labrador has been the most successful province ever in terms of gaining world recognition for its two official dogs. The Alsatians are their only competition, and the Germans contest their ownership. Most of Old Europe is commemorated only by pastries and sausages, or in the case of Sweden, turnips.

I dunno about you, but when I hear the word ‘Swedish’, I don’t think of turnips :)

It’s heartening to see that somebody else thinks of ABBA too.

Well, it’s “Swede”.

You have to get to know Swedes for awhile before their turnipish nature becomes evident. Vodka sometimes helps.

Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman made strenuous efforts to keep their turnip nature hidden. E.G., Garbo’s “I vant to be alone”. Fortunately the LA press was mostly just interested in booty-related gossip, and some say that the sexual scandals were just diversionary ploys on the part of the Swedesses. In any case, they were able to take their secrets to the grave.

ABBA corporation.

The article is 27 years old, but the corporation still exists.

Now do something groundbreaking and try to put ‘ABBA’ in print, with the 2 B”s joined at their vertical backs! If you can do that, you receive honorary Swedesmanship, along the likes of Meryl Streep.

A swede is not a turnip.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that “the Irish boom was essentially construction-led” – this may be true of the 2002 – 2007 period but the true “Celtic Tiger” 1994 – 2001 period was export-driven (via FDI).

I would also question whether it’s true to say that Ireland “had a fuller dose of the free-market … than the other Anglosphere countries.” One of the most prominent features of our political economy since 1987 has after all been centralised wage bargaining, plus the proceeds of growth have been used to increase public spending as well as to reduce tax rates.

But certainly Ireland does appear as a particularly stark enditement of “light touch regulation” in the financial sector.

We call this “Friedman’s sign”.

There’ll probably turn out to be Tom Friedman equivalent of the “curse of Hello magazine”: if he’s bigged you up in one of those globalization bedtime stories, you’re doomed, on the fast-track to bankruptcy or worse.

The idea is that there is some ideal implementation of the ideology that one group would have correctly made real, while the other not-us group put into practice in a corrupt way. Trots say this about Stalin’s implementation of Russian socialism; free marketeers now say it about Ireland’s implementation of a free market. Before they went “bad,” both were more than happy to claim the fruits as their own.

…And liberals/social democrats presumably say this about welfare-state capitalism ‘before it went bad’ ie. was hijacked by neo-liberals in the 80s. I’m not sure why anyone would think this was a smackdown.

Thomas Friedman once complimented my house. Fell down two months later.

“Unlike anyone else’s, the Irish boom was essentially construction-led”

Spain? How ’bout Florida?

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/columnists/carl-hiaasen/story/903185.html

Belay that – I must apologise for misleading the good readers of Crooked Timber, for it appears that in 2009 the damned Aussies have stolen our third-place ranking in the Index.

(Great. First they take our best Gaelic footballers for this “Aussie Rules” abomination, then they take this…)

EWI – Oh god no, this is terrible news. I’m an Aussie – clearly the Heritage lot have gravely endangered our economy.

Can’t you get one of those FF politicians to bribe the Heritage lot to rank Ireland higher? In return we’ll give your footballers back with a nice suntan, I promise …

we travelled all over the south and saw lots of rows of half-finished houses just sitting in fields – were needed to house the huge number of construction workers who were needed to build this huge number of home units…. It seemed a little, er, odd.

You’ve just expressed the mystery of Dubai as well.

“pretty blatant tax competition”

Which, FYI, was not principally the lower corporation tax rate. The careful and deliberate avoidance of certain fundamental anti-avoidance measures explains most of Ireland’s attractiveness.

Wasn’t there something similar with Tom Peters?

yes – some astonishingly embarrassing proportion of the companies lauded in his “In Search of Excellence!!!11!” book ended up in insolvency a short while later.

Can’t you get one of those FF politicians to bribe the Heritage lot to rank Ireland higher? In return we’ll give your footballers back with a nice suntan, I promise …

Well, I’ll see what I can do. Certainly, the cailiní over here seem eager for the return of any and all Ó hÁilpín’s, from what they tell me ;)

Certainly, the cailiní over here seem eager for the return of any and all Ó hÁilpín’s, from what they tell me ;)

Are all the Ó hAilpíns bar one not back already?

It seems that the difference between Ireland and Spain is that while the Irish developers were getting themselves a helicopter, their Spanish equivalent had a private jet – or so my banker friend in aviation finance tells me …
… a typical celtic tiger tale, he joined an Irish start-up venture capital business, they were bought out by RBS so now he’s chasing down the cute hoors of Spain on behalf of her brittanic majesty’s loyal taxpayers

I await with bated breath your explanation of how giving out tax breaks to property developers, and making a distinction between greenfields and urban renewal (which I presume was happening for a legal reason) fits in with a traditional Austrian-style economic analysis of the pretence of knowledge, or a public-choice critique of government planning, or the standard neo-classical ECON 101 assumptions

I am afraid that your request is queued up behind an outstanding request from numerous Trotskyists of my acquaintance, for an explanation of how a totalitarian state capitalist imperialist Soviet society fits in with a traditional Marxist-Leninist analysis of the development of proletarian consciousness, and they’ve been waiting since 1989 so you might be out of luck.

Spain is looking like an interesting example of other ways to botch investigations of property market-politician linkages.

dsquared@70: you might be out of luck

Aw, c’mon. I gather that glibertarianism has been pounded to dust numerous times in the illustrious history of CT. But some of us are relative newcomers, and others just can’t get enough of the spectacle.

@Maria: meet the new government, same as the old government?

Well, okay – Fine Gaelers don’t especially have a historical liking for builders (though some councillors have been working on that). But you guys do rather seem to like your big financial movers and shakers…

I live about a two miles from Athlumney Wood, and was not aware of the sale. But the story is probably true.

Sad to say, most of the article is also true. Irish voters have been remarkably supine, particularly in the case of Bertie Ahern. Ahern followed (after a short interval) Charles J. Haughey, a man found (after he retired) to be living of the large monetary contributions of various businessmen with “no favours asked or given” (!).

There was also Ray Burke, another top Fianna Failer, who went to jail for accepting bribes. Ahern was thick-as-thieves with Haughey and Burke, yet even when it was obvious he was just as bad as they were, he still garnered votes and was probably the most personally popular Taoiseach since 1921. I am not sure of the general perception of him now that he has been shown up as a snake-oil salesman. There is even a fantasy “things would be ok if Bertie was still in charge” element in many newspapers.

You may guess that the country is still in a sort of denial, and industrial strife cannot be far off.

Story: Ahern, who is now on the international “elder statesman” conference was flying out to an exotic destination when he met a group of constituents at Dublin Airport. Being a man with the common touch, Bertie’s gambit was “Howr’ye, lads! Heading over to the Big Apple for bit of shoppin’?”. The reply “Bertie, we f**king emigratin’!”

Dsquared: I am afraid that your request is queued up behind an outstanding request from numerous Trotskyists of my acquaintance, for an explanation of how a totalitarian state capitalist imperialist Soviet society fits in with a traditional Marxist-Leninist analysis of the development of proletarian consciousness, and they’ve been waiting since 1989 so you might be out of luck.

Somehow I already suspected I would be. I will attempt to bear my disappointment as best I can.

Ejh – yes that is the ultra-free-market idea. The not-quite-ultra-free-market idea is to deal with pollution problems by either taxing the activity or a cap-and-trade. I don’t know the free-market reasoning is for differentiating between urban renewal and greenfields sights, judging by comments here I understand that the reasoning is that if it’s failed then it’s free-market by definition.

Roger – as for a link between corruption and lax regulation, if that is the point you are referring to, may I refer you to the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom (http://www.heritage.org/Index/), and Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Now we can’t do a direct comparison between the Index of Economic Freedom and the Corruptions Perception Index as the Economic Freedom Index incldues the corruption perceptions index, thus creating a bit of a multicollinearity problem, but luckily the Heritage Foundation publishes a breakdown of their index. If I compare Financial Freedom to the 2007 Corruption Index (where the higher the score the less the corruption, with Denmark, Finland and NZ tying for the least corrupt countries in the world) I get a correlation of 65%. If I do the same comparisons but with the Investment Freedom Index I get a correlation of 71%. The correlation is not perfect, Ireland and the USA are 17th and 20th in the world respectively in perceived lack of corruption, despite having financial freedom index ratings of 90 and 80 respectively, and the same for investment freedom index). And correlation does not show causation. It may be that a lack of corruption causes limited financial and investment regulation, it may be that some third factor causes both. But a lack of correlation does imply a lack of causation. If limited regulation causes corruption I would expect to see the less regulated countries being the more corrupt ones. (I repeat, I am not claiming here that a lack of regulation causes a lack of corruption, I suspect that the two are both caused by the interactions of other factors in society but I don’t have any proof.)

I didn’t bother discussing this before as Freshly Squeezed Cynic said that if I didn’t share their worldview, then they were doubtful that any discussion would be fruitful, the detail that Freshly Squeezed Cynic didn’t bother actually supplying any supporting evidence for their view made me inclined to agree that it would be a waste of time trying to change their mind, and I am trying to cut down on the length of the comments I write.