Explaining Capitalism Harder

Holy shit, the Trafigura case is amazingly horrifying! Also scary: had never heard about this!! 

(NOTE: the first draft of this started as above, and I've left the line, which I wrote after reading the wikileaks link but before gather additional data.)

This was before Brexit... so... was this legal inside of Britain even despite Britain mostly not having sovereignty over itself back then? Couldn't at least the EU have intervened to insist on freedom of the press??

In 2009, the Guardian wrote:

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The thing I think is so amazing is that this didn't trigger more of an uproar. 

Isn't this basically the sort of thing that should cause good people to like... gather arms and prepare for a revolution if a revolution is what's required to restore their own freedom?

ALSO: WTF, Guardian? How did that paper not just say "molon labe" about "their own freedom to publish whatever they like"?

KEY PREDICTION: It seems quite likely to me that "newspaper vs government" tends to end with a victory for the newspaper if the newspaper is standing on even minimally coherent political principles? (Like personally, the more common danger is often the other way, with papers winning even when maybe they shouldn't.)

It seems like a paper here could just report on the hypothetical badness of gag laws in general, then put a teaser on the frontpage "N days till we violate a gag law you're not allowed to even know the existence of", then (intentionally violating the law) report on the thing they're outlawed from reporting on, then report (illegally again?) on the legal attempts to suppress them, then report (illegally?) on the legal attempts to jail their reporters, and so on...

It seems like it would be a bonanza for their sales figures :-)

Maybe they would have to start paying salaries and so on in metal coins instead of using electronic banks where their accounts can be frozen by The Evil Powers That Be? 

Maybe they are already the slaves of a system they didn't notice until it was too late, and then they needed to generate some "emotional cope" and so they became "petulant whiners about their own cowardly submission to a system of evil" rather than EITHER (1) fighting for freedom or (2) silently submitting?

These kind of things make me so confused.

Normally I find myself defending systems that seem "mostly good enough, because you don't even know how bad it COULD be without the systems we do have"...

...but then every so often I find a system doing something that seems totally perverted and monstrous, and if I don't see evidence then of a coherent principled reaction, of the sort that would cause me to believe that bad systems regularly are noticed and fixed, when they are actually bad, then... it makes me think the system could be enduringly bad, but secretly so.

In this case I refused to leave it at this. Confusion like this should not be tolerated in a soul if at all possible so...

<pause to search, discover some stuff... then re-edit the whole comment>

...so... I normally avoid the NYT like a plague, but after much googling I this NYT article was a happy thing to find and I have to give them props for it.

The practical upshot here seems to be that there was a ruckus, centered on good places like (1) twitter and (2) wikileaks, with then also some high prestige wielders of formal power participating in the tweet storm in relatively weak ways that were plausibly theoretically legal and eventually the government capitulated (as per my KEY PREDICTION above).  

Also, there was a government URL with the key data where the link to it could be spread by relatively easy word of mouth.

Something bad is that it doesn't seem that the government capitulated by denouncing the machinery that the relevant "evil law firm" used to try to get away with this. Maybe it was changed? But I'm not currently sure. If ensuring a good british governing system was my job, I might do another ply or three of root cause analysis.

But right now my "rabbithole detector" is tingling, and so I'm hereafter explicitly trying to close it down with at least some minimal sense of "resolution that at least gives hope".

In this case, I found a way to conclude that isn't perfectly clean, but at least suggests that all is not completely lose: the government URL above (that may have been a KEY part of "getting this right") is part of a system that has been re-engineered since 2009 without really maintaining the old links, but the new system still exists, so a similar kind of virtue is potentially feasible up to the present so far as I can tell.

Also, using this new system, I can find proceeds of debates that happened in the aftermath of all this. I did not read them all, but this transcript has a rip-roarer of a speech by someone named Paul Farrelly that I particularly admired (text not in bold in originals):

What this affair shows, too, is that aggressive lawyers such as Carter-Ruck are given too much freedom of manoeuvre by the courts. They draft the injunctions themselves, and that says almost all I need to say. They are out of control—in this case, so much so that they overreached themselves by trying to put themselves above freedoms that have been time-honoured since the 1688 Bill of Rights, and, indeed, above the law. They are unquestioned and unfettered, and in instances such as this we would have not the rule of law but the rule of lawyers, backed up by expensive legal threats that are as predictable as clockwork

Then a bit further down...

This case highlights one other important issue for the House. Parliamentary privilege cannot be seen to be something that just lies in textbooks and is taken for granted, and yet is eaten away at all the time by over-confident lawyers such as Carter-Ruck. Our time-honoured rights are only as strong as their assertion

Hearing about a total absence of people being appropriately assertive when true systemic outrage occurs bothers me a lot.

Hearing about a resolution that included assertive people setting things at least somewhat right (and knowing how and why it was critical to maintain certain lines in the sand) feels a lot better better.

"Capitalism" isn't good or bad, it's a tool in the societal design kit.

I often think of markets in that way and think the broad concept of "Capitalism" (and many other isms) fit well.

I think this applies to the OP about explaining harder. While also very market and capital friendly in thought (and action) I do often find the advocates seem to hold (generally implicitly) that somehow capitalism/price markets must be universal and nothing else could displace them. I think that goes too far.

I think framing the subject in that social tool allows for some better discussion. Just as we can talk about building tools, or just carpentry tools, tools serve to resolve a specific type of problem and can be used properly and improperly.  Social level tools like markets or capitalism or law are much more complicated than hammers and saws, or even backhoes or cement trucks, or computer systems controlling a large assembly line but still fit into that model well I think.

So when having those interactions about "Yes, I get that but it shouldn't be that way." I think the tool framework can help get into the discussion about just what it means to "be that way". What shouldn't be that way -- the problem to be solved or the tool being used for the problem?

But it's not like, oh we banned heroin and child labour and now everyone in our society is growing an extra head due to a hilarious Rube Goldberg series of events.

It's interesting that you mention banned heroin, because it's clear today that drug prohibition has caused tens of thousands of casualties (but probably more). 

Part of the reluctance to implement new regulation is awareness that given society's complexities it's very dangerous, and it's effect might be unknown even ex-post! You seem to acknowledge that, and then just ignore it.

It is very reasonable to have a prior of "yeah let's better not interfere". If we had that prior for decades with regards to housing policies, we wouldn't have housing shortages today.

I don't disagree? I'm strongly in favor of government redistribution, to the extent that we can do it without breaking this cycle of improvement.