Fear is the the psychological root of collectivism; fear of insignificance; fear of the disapprobation of others; fear of the success of others; fear that the disasters of the natural world will affect other families less than our own; fear of failure; fear of wasted effort; fear of the world's vicissitudes. Against all these things men and women are inclined to seek insurance, and this terror is a powerful motivation in many of our actions and inactions, indeed it is the only force that can be identified beneath popular support for socialising legislation. Conversely, those unwilling to to support socialising policies are simply stating their own relative lack of fear – or to put in quotes: "I'm all right, Jack". The competent have less to fear and more to gain from even the greatest hazards of the highest of risk. Consequently, hostility to socialising policy arises not only from the fear of sequestration of assets, but from the correct judgment that such policies vastly reduce the potential gains, and not only for the individuals concerned.

Politically, the collectivism arising from fear manifests itself as socialism, which as an institutional movement is driven by the interests of the state's executive personnel, who are generally speaking capable, and can be said to exploit the timidity of the weak as well as, to some degree, addressing their fears. The resulting policies are dangerous since they weaken the aggregate society, by foregoing wealth that would make society stronger in the face of external shock. On this view, socialising policies are, and this will inevitably seem paradoxical, both short-sighted and selfish.

This problem is deeply intractable because the weaker are not wrong; they would indeed be disadvantaged by a distribution of wealth and power that optimised the generation of aggregate societal wealth, and it is impossible to see how to deal with this without force or subterfuge; the weak would either have to be deceived or discarded, neither option being attractive, and the optimal method would be the latter since deceit is likely to be so very expensive, as we know from the costs of the Church when it provided this and certain other services.

If this is correct, then societies that devote what is necessarily a very large proportion of their energies to reducing to nothing the disadvantages of incompetence and misfortune, will themselves ultimately fail. Only unequal societies, which are, correctly, perceived as unfair can prosper.
Is this shocking? Yes? Then history and its product is shocking too.

Market failures are over-diagnosed. Since there is no principled way of limiting the consequences of an action, negative and positive externalities, to use the economist's term, stretch out on every side, in effect cancelling each other. Indeed, in everyday moral life we recognise this. I choose to sit at a table, or not to suit my sense of convenience. But this choice may, perhaps, on the one hand cause a war two-hundred years hence, or, on the other, the discovery of a wonder cure that saves the lives of countless millions. On balance these speculative costs and benefits are neither held against me nor counted to my credit. The fact that such externalities are indeterminable because the causal chains are so long is of course important, and does mark them out as different from those with clearer ancestry, the pollution of a water course by a manufacturing plant for example. But the distinction fades in significance when we recall that beyond the readily identifiable varieties of consequences stretch the infinity of effects already noted, dwarfing even those cases where effects are in fact determinable. In the extreme case, choosing to sit at a table or not, we balance them out, reasoning that the indeterminable negative externalities are, in all probability, balanced by an equal quantity of indeterminable positives. Perhaps we should do the same even with situations where the externality seems more manifestly identifiable.

Indeed, there must be a strong suspicion that the discussion of externalities has become polluted by normative ethics. It is the indeterminable externalities that cause the confusion and resentment. The impacts of climate change strike some as manifestly determinable; others as equally clearly quite otherwise. And there is a reasonable suspicion that the positive internalities may have been understated, let alone the positive externalities.

Furthermore, we might ask whether externalities are even an economic consideration. Aren't they a legal matter. Or to put it another way, the concept of market failure is quite artificial and results from extruding the economic domain beyond its field of competence, and into the legal zone (i.e. the field of normative behavioural morals), where it has no power and can hardly be expected to succeed. Does this result from the ambition of economists in their professional capacity? We can see from Freakonomics and the Undercover Economist that the will to expansion is certainly there.

If my point is sound, and I am at this writing prepared to defend it with vigour, then we should be very suspicious of attempts to resolve 'market failures' through economic policy. Since that failure is an artefact of over-extending the field of economic competence it is very unlikely that an economic solution will be viable. It is law that is required, not factitious pricing in of externalities.

Support for this view can be found in the fact that in some cases it is the victim of the pollution who is forced to pay the polluter to stop. This is may seem morally and even economically bizarre. However, in relation to simple criminal and many civil cases this point does not arise, and we accept without question that the victim, or prospective victim, pays taxes to support the rule of law that stops or deters the offender. Pollution is no different, and is obviously, on this reasoning, an area best handled by law, not economic measures.

Property rights have no foundation, any more than morals. All are nailed down in the air for reasons related to practical outcomes. In other words, rules that produce favourable outcomes for people, statistically over time, tend to stabilise, while those that do not produce such outcomes disappear. Indeed, property rights are little different in any respect from moral rules, however surprising that may seem at first blush; a tedious explanation might be possible, but to cut a long story short, property rights are just a set of domain specific moral rules, and traditional wisdom categorises them in this way (as witness the Decalogue).

Putting aside factitious doubts and being honest with ourselves, we know why property rights have stabilised: they are advantageous, statistically, for individuals in those societies. It is as simple as that, but of course there is no reason to suppose that they are optimal for all or any individuals at any one time, any more than there a straightforward physical adaptation will be optimal for any or all possessing that trait at any particular time.
The utility of a moral rule may on average be general, but at any observed instant it may happen to be exploited by a minority or an individual for sectarian or personal advantage.

Property rights have stabilised all over the world because, for the most part, they secure, however indirectly, individual reproduction. But, as ever, there is a tension between the interest of the individual in maximising their own property and restraining others in their exercise of this freedom, and the efficiency of the system at maximising aggregate wealth (and resilience to external shock) is a principal feature of individualist societies; but in fact individuals prefer collectivist societies with low levels of variation in wealth even if this produces (as it does) low levels of aggregate wealth and less resilient societies. Fortunately they cheat as much as they possibly can; private vices bring forth public benefits.

Some say that 'value' may be quantified by the money paid by the requirer for the means of satisfaction. I'm less certain that we need bother with the term at all. Money certainly establishes the scale of one requirement relative to another, but it seems to me that its great merit is that makes needless a further multiplication of terms, to include value (for example).

This is useful since it is possible to focus on the requirements of the subject while excluding discussion of psychological states of valuation, which are, I suggest, not one state but either; a) the relative weight placed on, and effort directed towards satisfying, the requirement or; b) The state of calm and relaxation of effort succeeding the successful satisfaction of a requirement, in other words the absence of a). The great error is to think that b) causes a), which is obviously nonsense in my terms, or that both a) and b) are positive and that 'value' overall is the sum of these two elements, an error that results in an illusory discrepancy between the money metric and the apparent psychological state. The state of satisfaction is irrelevant; the relative strength of the requirement is all that one need consider.

Sitting and waiting for a train of the Eizan-Denshya at Mototanaka, on the raised platform that was not a station with no ticket machine and not even a clock, just wooden benches, wooden walls and a metal roof, all very solid and proper, I looked into the launderette and the Lunch-Ya opposite. Three minutes before time a train came in, empty, and though it stopped the doors remained closed. The carriages, two of them, were from a previous generation: green and cream outside; the interior fitted out in wood and brass. A yellow light illuminated the carriage from end to end. Two men were riding the train; a guard and the driver. Both stood at the forward end until the automatic crossing gates swung down, then the guard turned and started to walk to the rear. And at that moment or very shortly afterwards the train began to move, and on the instant he began to run, though to me he was stationary in his motion. In a fraction of a second he exhausted the possibility and was hauled off into the night, standing with his white gloves clenched over the rail, looking back down the wake of darkness to the station where I was sitting and waiting for a train.

When in government politicians become deeply concerned with relatively small details of policy, such as the money supply and whether it is too generous or has been squeezed too much, and these strike voters as a long way from the strategic visions of party election speeches and manifestos. Politicians are inclined to defend themselves by suggesting that the public simply doesn't understand the realities and responsibilities or power. Both sides have a point, but the lay perspective is perhaps more persuasive. There is no doubt that the finer points of government can be very important, for example in maintaining stability, but they are, all things considered, mere driving, minor corrections to the direction and speed of progress, rather than navigating, the selection of a route through congested traffic to a chosen destination, or, perhaps a better analogy, avoiding certain locations while touring many others.

The driving certainly matters, but it is a means to navigation rather than an end in itself. Government ministers and their civil servants drive more than they should, largely because they can, and because there is in any public business, commercial or otherwise, a tendency to become harried by circumstances and so merely reactive. Some driving is absolutely necessary, but how can this be minimised so as to leave time for navigating? What, in any case, is the minimum? Managing the money supply? Interest rates? The prohibition of dangerous substances? Taxes on luxury items? Individually, each may seem to be justifiable, yet conceding such points incrementally leads us back to the current situation where government is so concerned with staying on the road or avoiding a collision with another vehicle that it loses its way. Staying out of the ditch is good, but ending up in the middle of Death Valley with no fuel and precious little water is foolish.

It is perhaps more useful to ask why Government has been pushed into this degree of neurotic driving (and back-seat driving, which is what the sinister 'nudge' campaigns really are). The answer is not far to seek; because of the very substantial public sector expenditure for which they are responsible, governmental exposure to criticism is broad, and hence its focus is increasingly on small details related to the disposal and management of expenditure and the raising of revenue. Energy is thus dissipated and strategic direction lost. For government to do less driving and more navigating the public sector simply has to be smaller. If the public wants more long range leadership and less fiddling about with details, which they genuinely do, they will have to accept a much smaller field of state action. We are some way from this.

Because money circulates and is only withdrawn when it becomes unrecognisable in numerical value, it seems to some that wealth circulates in the same way, that is that it circulates without loss. However this is false since money indicates a flow of resources, in part notional or potential or in title only, in part real, and these resources are consumed and exhausted as waste, while while money flows on undiminished.

For example, money passes from taxpayer to government and from government to service providers, and the service is provided to the taxpayer, and the money flows on from the service provider to their own suppliers. It might appear that no loss has taken place, adn that all are benefitting. However, the resource flows involve consumption and exhaustion as waste at every stage. The tax collectors must be housed, fed and transported and otherwise supported, for example through health care, all involving the absolute consumption of resources. The civil service in the various departments administering the service or regulating activities, must be similarly catered for, all implying losses as waste. The service providers likewise. Furthermore, the service itself is obviously consumption.

The question, then, is why should we tolerate the waste of resources implicit in and certain in the intermediate and unnecessary stages of tax collection and state administration, let alone that destroyed by the inefficiency of state commissioning of services where poor bargains will be struck and the services themselves poorly targeted because they are commissioned by uninterested parties.

The Church of England made a significant error in not only attempting to retain those that there were abandoning its services, but to reach out still further to those already outside the church and losing interest altogether in the consolations of religion. Outreach proved to be over-reach, and counterproductive in that it accelerated the decline in its existing support without attracting many if any of the target audience. The Conservative party made similar errors when faced with similar problems.

The reasons for this failure are: a) Those who believe themselves to be in no need of mystical support are unlikely to turn to you if your Church cheerfully agrees, but offers nothing else of interest; and b) you persuade no one to remain a member of a Church by reflecting the irresolution and uncertainty of members already heading for the door; and c) those looking for firm assurance in their uncertainty are hardly to be persuaded by a body that confesses that it is as weak as any.

It is only by offering consistent principles and stable traditions of incrementally developing thought (as the sciences in fact do) that institutions can survive. Big leaps are nearly always a mistake. The Church would have done well to stick to its guns and advertise the fact very loudly, while gradually moving on to another footing. The Conservative Party too perhaps. But this is not without its problems, so dense is the non-extensional network of propositions in both Anglican and Conservative thought, that even small changes can cause cascade failures. Shinto was very lucky in having no texts.

There is a close relationship between the interests of the individual and the family, so much so in fact that when one is weakened the other is also weakened. Hence the fundamental hostility of the collectivist state to the family, as well as its principal target, the individual.
How can this be? To such a question an a-biological political philosophy has no real answer, but an evolutionary perspective tells us all we need to know. The family is the output of the individual, since, as noted elsewhere here, as a statistical generalisation it is consistent with the evidence to assert that human behaviour is the gathering of resources to secure reproduction. Thus, individuals have a strong interest in preserving their own families and restraining the success of others, a complex agenda they can pursue via an ambivalent, or as one might say a 'moderate' attitude towards the collectivist state. Apparent inconsistency or timidity in politics need not reflect a lack of fundamental purpose.

A thunderbolt, the jostling of silicates,
Or as religions, mumbling, say,
The divine spark, the manipulation of eternal clay,
Perhaps arranged, not us but our ancestral particles.

These primitive geometries, atomic clots with
Special properties, arose like involutions in a bowl of soup,
And tumbling through adjacent matter
In deterministic free-fall made skydiving crystals

Disposed to propagate, marry, divorce, and propagate
Until dissolved. Life is a consequence, if p then q,
And existence conditioned by the turbulence of things,
Whose movements we describe, and in some small part predict.

Formed by shapes that were formed by shapes,
And forming shapes in turn, our forebears danced
In a brownian kaleidoscopic space, where variety
Was infinite, but survival differential.

No pattern book remains and demolished molecules
Have scant memorial and less history. No Kipling writes
“Known unto God” on the empty and exholating tomb of
An exholated crystal, whose vanished whole, its parts unvanquished,

Has consequences, truly, in the stream of history,
But perturbations, vorteces; a widow's mite of influence,
Shuffled and dissipated, haunts the descendants
Of ancient contemporaries as null indifference.

Imagine the sea, for only in the fluid sea could so much
Motion and experiment be found, the air too thin, too poor in
Matter to fund the waste of evolution, and the earth so thick
Inert, resistant, and unmixed, its substance lacking opportunity.

Imagine the sea, its grosser tides concealing from the eye
The flux and reflux of successful replicators, joining and
Dividing as determined by their chemistry, the stepwise creation
Of effective complexity, the tireless endurance of effective simplicity.

Rolling crystals, each with special tricks, agglomerate a case,
Taking, as the caddis worm chooses, off the rack of circumstance
Material to be clipped and tucked and bolted on,
Creative tailors, modestly adventurous not sharp and fanciful,

For light headed crystals leave few descendants, so couture
In the school of Darwin tends to be flounceless and practical,
Of broad application; but from time to time, the genome finds itself
Improperly dressed for an important function.

A god might arise in such a system. If a conscious ape,
Or lion then why not an immortal, thrown up by the twining
World lines of all matter, the glorious crown of the material
Universe? But immortal must be invulnerable,

And the numbers are against a surface so sleek or a structure so
Firm, proof against all the enemies that might arise
Within and around its body for the termless course of its
Existence. As individuals we ourselves might be immortal

Were it not for the rapacious nibbling of other forms,
Who erode us that they may live, as we erode others; and if
We could cleanse our organs of all the toxic sludge accumulating
There like fluff and dust in the workings of a harvester,

Perhaps we would persist, until destroyed or starved by our own
Offspring, then everywhere and everything. A god not liable
To these diseases, a structure insusceptible to change,
Would be inert, an island in stable configuration, and hence

As dead as any stone, and quite as mindless; Let us not respect
Or venerate such idols. And if alive, then much more like to us
Than the doctrines of the churches find it pleasant to admit,
Ourselves or some other creature magnified, its qualities enlarged

Until enormous, not abstracted like the deity of myth, whose life
We imagine by thinking of ourselves quite bowdlerized of need and
Consequence, by wishing away our vulnerabilities, and leaving
A glassy death mask which forever simpers with parental love.

Casting such vanities aside enter the desert like a prophet,
The glorious desert, not dead, not desert, a jungle of matter,
A surge of breaking forms. The world is in a grain of sand, that’s partly true
And you, though round and complicated, full of blood, have facets too.

The path of aggregation and the path of dissolution are equally
Material. Cohering particles produce no spirit - every mineral
Would have a soul on such a view - but intricate arrangements,
Like ourselves or trees, the mites on one and the birds on the other

Are capable and self-defensive structures, armed and equipped:
Consciousness is one more property of matter; as lead is opaque
To radiation, so the jumble of particles suspended in an animal's
Tender, pulsating and reiterative frame has the property of thought,

A rich device for sowing seeds, as wantonly profuse
With machiavellian stratagems as male forms are with sperm,
But, more machiavellian still, quite unaware of its designs
In nine cases out of ten, the better to deceive its observant victims.

And yet this purpose too is inherent in the network of its form,
And the network of its form is the result of reproduction,
And hence evolved complexity precedes and makes all purpose:
And thus rocks sink while animals swim in a sea that drifts.