There are those in America today who have come to depend absolutely on government for their security. And when government fails they seek to rectify that failure in the form of granting government more power. So, as government has failed to control crime and violence with the means given it by the Constitution, they seek to give it more power at the expense of the Constitution. But in doing so, in their willingness to give up their arms in the name of safety, they are really giving up their protection from what has always been the chief source of despotism — government. Lord Acton said power corrupts. Surely then, if this is true, the more power we give the government the more corrupt it will become. And if we give it the power to confiscate our arms we also give up the ultimate means to combat that corrupt power. In doing so we can only assure that we will eventually be totally subject to it. When dictators come to power, the first thing they do is take away the people’s weapons. It makes it so much easier for the secret police to operate, it makes it so much easier to force the will of the ruler upon the ruled.

Column published in Guns and Ammo, 1st September 1975.

A significant proportion of my favourite writings are profoundly negative reviews, such as the following. These are all great fun, but have serious points.

Sir Peter Medawar won a Nobel Prize for his work on organ transplantation and immunology. He wrote a review of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s book “The Phenomenon of Man”, (Mind, New Series, Vol. 70, No. 277 (January, 1961), pp. 99-106).

In “Unweaving the Rainbow”, Richard Dawkins writes “[The Phenomenon of Man] is, for Medawar (and for me now, although I confess that I was captivated when I read it as an over-romantic undergraduate), the quintessence of bad poetic science.”

Here are some choice quotes:

“French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.
…
Teilhard is for ever shouting at us: things or affairs are, in alphabetical order, astounding, colossal, endless, enormous, fantastic, giddy, hyper-, immense, implacable, indefinite, inexhaustible, extricable, infinite, infinitesimal, innumerable, irresistible, measureless, mega-, monstrous, mysterious, prodigious, relentless, super-, ultra-, unbelievable, unbridled or unparalleled. When something is described as merely huge we feel let down.
…
How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind, for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.
…
It is written in an all but totally unintelligible style, and this is construed as prima-facie evidence of profundity.
…
The Predicament of Man is all the rage now that people have sufficient leisure and are sufficiently well fed to contemplate it
…
I have read and studied The Phenomenon of Man with real distress, even with despair. Instead of wringing our hands over the Human Predicament, we should attend to those parts of it which are wholly remediable, above all to the gullibility which makes it possible for people to be taken in by such a bag of tricks as this. If it were an innocent, passive gullibility it would be excusable; but all too clearly, alas, it is an active willingness to be deceived.”

Richard Dawkins wrote a scathing review (”Sociobiology: the debate continues”, New Scientist, 24 January 1985) of a 1985 book called “Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature”. The book claimed that “Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology”, and that we need to replace it with “dialectical biology”.

Dawkins described the book as promoting a “bizarre conspiracy theory of science”, accused the authors of lies and idiocy, and concluded that it is a “silly, pretentious, obscurantist and mendacious book”.

Here are some quotes:

Rose et al have no clear idea of what they mean by biological determinism. “Determinist”, for them, is simply one half of a double-barrelled blunderbuss term, with much the same role and lack of content as “Mendelist-Morganist” had in the vocabulary of an earlier generation of comrades. Today’s other barrel, fired off with equal monotony and imprecision is “reductionist”.
…
Why do Rose et al find it necessary to reduce a perfectly sensible belief (that complex wholes should be explained in terms of their parts) to an idiotic travesty (that the properties of a complex whole are simply the sum of those same properties in the parts)? “In terms of” covers a multitude of highly sophisticated causal interactions, and mathematical relations of which summation is only the simplest. Reductionism, in the “sum of the parts” sense, is obviously daft, and is nowhere to be found in the writings of real biologists. Reductionism, in the “in terms of” sense, is, in the words of the Medawars, “the most successful research stratagem ever devised”.

He ends,

Cyril Burt went to the extreme length of faking numerical data, but it can be argued that what lay behind his crime was an eagerness to give ideology priority over truth. If this is so, who are the Cyril Burts of today?

Staying with Dawkins, he wrote an article criticising “postmodernism”, called “Postmodernism disrobed” (Nature, 9 July 1998, vol. 394, pp. 141-143). It is actually a review praising the excellent book Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, and also the excellent book “Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science” by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. I urge you to read both books, which go into detail.

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like [Félix Guattari]
…
We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don’t know anything about.

The feminist ‘philosopher’ Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton’s Principia (a “rape manual”), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a “sexed equation”. Why? Because “it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us” (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an ‘in’ word). Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray’s thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. “Masculine physics” privileges rigid, solid things.

Sean Gabb can be a caustic reviewer. In one review he describes post-modernism as “the last refuge of people who realise they have been wrong for most of their adult lives, but who for reasons of pride or career cannot make a full recantation.”

The author spends 125 pages arguing for these propositions; and, so far as I can tell, he fails to establish either of them.
…
All Mr Clarke does succeed in showing is a reason to cut off all public funding to the University of Essex, which employs him as a lecturer—and where I understand he is thought to be tremendously clever.

Indeed, his book is so opaque that even its intention would have escaped me without the back cover to act as a guide—a back cover that was probably written by somebody else.

Dr Gabb wrote a review of Danny Kruger’s On Fraternity, which I intend to review more favourably later. Gabb describes the book as “an intellectual fraud in its intention, and shabby in its execution”:

“The Conservatives have no intellectual basis that they dare honestly explain to us. They must at the same time convey the impression of one. They have, therefore, put Dr Kruger up to write a whole book about Conservative principle, but to do so in a way that will allow almost no one to understand him.

The language of his book is in all matters of importance pretentious and obscure.
…
There is page after page of this stuff. We have commonplaces dressed up to look profound. We have manifest nonsense. We have knowing references to Plato and Aristotle and Hobbes and Burke and Mill. We have untranslated words and phrases, or words that have been taken into English but never widely used. There is, of course, “Aufhebung”.
…
Look at this:

But the 1980s also saw the defoliation of the natural landscape. In The City of God Augustine quotes a Briton saying ‘the Romans make a desert and they call it peace’.[p.2]

Never mind that defoliation happens to trees, not natural landscapes. What matters here is that St Augustine did not say this, and could not have said it, bearing in mind the purpose of his City of God. The correct reference is to Tacitus in his biography of Agricola: “Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant”. Dr Kruger went, I believe, to an expensive public school, I to a comprehensive school in South London. Perhaps the classical languages are not so well studied in these former places as they once were. But anyone who wants to quote the ancients should make at least some effort to do it properly.

Is this pedantry? I do not think so. The quotation should be familiar to everyone of moderate education—even to people who do not know Latin. Its use is not absolutely required for the meaning of what Dr Kruger is trying to say. Like much else, it is there to impress. And he gets it wrong. And the fault is not confined to him. This book has gone through many drafts. Remember that it has been read and discussed by every intellectual close to the Conservative leadership. Even so, this glaring error on the second page was not picked up and corrected. This says more about the intellectual quality of modern Conservatives than anything else in the book.

Roger Ebert is a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and his reviews are always the first I turn to after watching a film.

He ranks movies from zero to four stars, and has published books of his no-star reviews with titles like “Your Movie Sucks”. He once described the movie “The Brown Bunny” as the worst film in the history of the Cannes. The director responded by calling Ebert a “fat pig with the physique of a slave trader… The only thing I’m sorry for is putting a curse of Roger Ebert’s colon.” Ebert replied “one day I will be thin, but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny” and said that watching his colonosopy was more entertaining than watching The Brown Bunny.

However, my favourite review by Ebert is for a movie that he did not give “no stars”: Constantine.

No, “Constantine” is not part of a trilogy including “Troy” and “Alexander.” It’s not about the emperor at all, but about a man who can see the world behind the world, and is waging war against the scavengers of the damned. There was a nice documentary about emperor penguins, however, at Sundance this year. The males sit on the eggs all winter long in like 60 degrees below zero.

Keanu Reeves plays Constantine as a chain-smoking, depressed demon-hunter who lives above a bowling alley in Los Angeles. Since he was a child, he has been able to see that not all who walk among us are human. Some are penguins. Sorry about that. Some are half-angels and half-devils. Constantine knows he is doomed to hell because he once tried to kill himself, and is trying to rack up enough frames against the demons to earn his way into heaven.

There is a scene early in the movie where Constantine and his doctor look at his X-rays, never a good sign in a superhero movie. He has lung cancer. The angel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton) tells him, “You are going to die young because you’ve smoked 30 cigarettes a day since you were 13.” Gabriel has made more interesting announcements. Constantine has already spent some time in hell, which looks like a post-nuclear Los Angeles created by animators with a hangover. No doubt it is filled with carcinogens.

…

Strange that there is a priest, since that opens the door to Catholicism and therefore to the news that Constantine is not doomed unless he wages a lifelong war against demons, but need merely go to confession; three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and he’s outta there. Strange, that movies about Satan always require Catholics. You never see your Presbyterians or Episcopalians hurling down demons.

The forces of hell manifest themselves in many ways. One victim is eaten by flies. A young girl is possessed by a devil, and Constantine shouts, “I need a mirror! Now! At least three feet high!” He can capture the demon in the mirror and throw it out the window, see, although you wonder why supernatural beings would have such low-tech security holes.

Reeves has a deliberately morose energy level in the movie, as befits one who has seen hell, walks among half-demons, and is dying. He keeps on smoking. Eventually he confronts Satan (Peter Stormare), who wears a white suit. (Satan to tailor: “I want a suit just like God’s.”) Oh, and the plot also involves the Spear of Destiny, which is the spear that killed Christ, and which has been missing since World War II, which seems to open a window to the possibility of Nazi villains, but no.

David Stove (1927-1994) was an Australian philosopher. His essay, “What is Wrong with Our Thoughts? A Neo-Positivist Credo”, which I highly recommend, is not a review, but it does contain a hilarious put-down.

“Any student of the history of thought is soon able to say, with Macbeth, `I have supp’d full with horrors.’ To read a book of magic, say, or astrology, is horrible, because the spectacle of steady and systematic irrationality induces depression and nausea. Yet the most horrible book, in this way, that I have ever read, does not come from the underworld of thought. On the contrary, it comes from the dizziest heights of contemporary academic respectability.

The book is the second volume of Hegel’s Development, by H.S.Harris, of York University, Toronto. It is subtitled Night Thoughts (Jena 1801-1806). It was published in 1983, by Oxford University Press at the Clarendon Press; which is to say, by the best. The book is a colossal monument to the scholarly industry of its author. It is over 700 pages long, and the work of which it is only the second volume must inevitably run into many more volumes. In 1806, after all, most of the publications on which Hegel’s fame rests still lay in the future. For Professor Harris, however, no manuscript, no scrap of paper, quite literally no doodle even, lacks profound significance, as long as it is Hegel’s.

Indeed, all previous instances of philosopholatry, even the one which had Plato as its object and perhaps as its founder, are thrown entirely into the shade by Professor Harris. He does not actually say that Hegel’s philosophy can cure wooden legs, but I do not think he would like to hear it denied.”

I’m thinking of compiling a short volume of them, entitled “Great Destructive Reviews”.

What are your favourite destructive reviews?

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children what it was once like in the United States when men were free.

Address to the annual meeting of the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, 30th March 1961.

I have an article in this term’s Berry:

When people think ‘BNP’, they think ‘right-wing’. Whenever the BNP is heard on the television or written in a newspaper, it is inevitably accompanied by the words ‘the far-right party’. Why is this a problem? Of course the BNP is right-wing. Nationalism is right-wing, and so the BNP is right-wing. This is, however, illogical. The term ‘right-wing’ is loaded with so many contradictory political positions and ideas that it is wrong to characterise the BNP as a right-wing party. Rather, the example of the BNP should demonstrate to us that it is time to move on from the old left-/right-wing dichotomy in favour of a new means of political division.

If we look at the political division along economic lines, we all know that free markets are right, and protectionism is left. By this definition, the BNP is avowedly left. It adheres to a socialist economic policy to nationalise state industries, gain full employment for British citizens, and significantly redistribute wealth. These are all positions commonly believed to be on the left. And, more interestingly, they are all nationalistic in skew. Indeed, the nature of free market economics is such that, logically, this economic system is most compatible with internationalism, a political ideology monopolised by the left.

This is designed to illustrate the huge problems we encounter when we define political parties solely in terms of left and right. The privilege we give to labels rather than to definitions means that we misclassify certain positions. Ultimately, we use the terms left- or right-wing inaccurately, and therefore make them redundant. Because the BNP calls itself the British Nationalist Party, the media have automatically defined the party as right-wing, even when, on closer inspection, there are significant exceptions to be made with regards to this label. Instead of looking into the substance of BNP policy, the mere use of the term ‘nationalist’ is enough to make it right-wing.

Indeed, it is interesting to speculate on the extent to which the BNP is actually right-wing socially. The intellectual foundations of free market economics is liberty, and liberty in the (albeit simplistic) sense that one should be able to do anything as long as it does not cause harm to another person. As such, it is perfectly reasonable to argue that someone who is truly right-wing will be as against social conservatism as anyone who, on such social issues, defines themselves as left-wing.

It is undeniable that the BNP wishes to introduce legislation to discriminate against non-Britons, homosexuals, and, to a lesser extent, women. But, in the same way, it is those who define themselves as left-wing who wish to introduce similar discriminatory laws, even though these are affixed with the term ‘positive’. Regardless of motive, the respective results of such legislation are the same: discrimination based on race, sexual orientation, or gender. As such, on social issues, by this principle, it is more accurate to describe the BNP as a party of the left.

Of course, some may argue that the motive behind policy is a significant factor in placing a party along the political spectrum. But, if this were true, and the BNP were placed firmly on the right, it would mean that anyone with political motives non-racist, non-chauvinistic, and non-prudish would have to be left-wing, regardless of policy political views. This would mean that something like libertarianism would have to be put dead centre. This will obviously not do.

This is not an attempt to demonstrate that the BNP is actually left-wing rather than right-wing. Rather it is to demonstrate the problem of using such labels. Ultimately, the ideology of the BNP is so exceptional that it has no place on the political spectrum. Nevertheless, the spectrum still deals with a range of rational political positions, as well as those developed thanks solely to bigotry. This is highly problematic.

After all, why do we include fascism and communism on the same spectrum? They were both collectivist and totalitarian, and yet are labelled as polar opposites. The description of such ideologies as left or right does not tell us anything about the substance of fascism and communism; it merely seeks to discredit alternative legitimate political positions like socialism and libertarianism that are described using the same language.

Unfortunately, the left-/right-wing dichotomy has such a hold over our political discourse that it is almost impossible to abandon it. But abandon it we must. Otherwise, we shall remain enslaved to the emptiness of the language employed in the political spectrum. People have forgotten the definition of words like ‘oblivious’. Most now seem to think it means unaware, but ‘oblivious’ actually means that you once knew someone, and now you do not. In the same way, people now use the term ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ often to define anything other than what they actually mean in terms of rational political choices. It is time for definitions rather than words to reassert themselves.

I have an article in this term’s Berry.

Many people see the current financial crisis as demonstrating the failure of free markets, and the need for increased government regulation. However, as I show, we do not have anything like a free market, and that economic crises are caused by past and current government intervention. To fix things, we don’t need more government intervention, but less. We need to return to free banking. We need what we don’t have: a truly free market.

Here’s the article:

The banking crisis is not a result of market failure. It is the result of two things: the ownership structures of investment banks, and government intervention in the money market.

Most investment banks are owned by dispersed shareholders, and their shares are traded on the stock market. Management is divorced from ownership, with the result that the shareholders can exert little control over fund managers. This separation of ownership from control means that traders are free to gamble with other people’s money. In a growing economy, everyone does well on average and traders enjoy large bonuses. But if investments turn out to be bad, traders face almost no sanction. It is not their money that is lost; the most a trader loses is his job. This leads to excessive risk taking.

Three of the big five Wall Street investment banks have gone under. Yet hedge funds, which before the crisis were thought to be much riskier, have not been hit nearly as hard. This shows that the problem is not with markets, but with the structure of investment banks.

Hedge funds are privately owned, often as partnerships. Fund managers usually invest their own money as well as others’, so they have incentives not to take huge risks. The small size of hedge funds allows managers to assess fund manager performance more closely. It also means that if bad decisions are made, they cannot have such large effects. If a hedge fund goes bust, the effect on the economy is less significant.

Big banks are therefore looking at changing their business structures. UBS is considering splitting its asset-management and investment banking businesses.

The second, bigger problem is government intervention in the lending market.

A simple example is legislation in America which discourages lenders from denying mortgage applications from fear of being accused of racism. The Community Reinvestment Act has coerced lenders into allowing riskier mortgages, ultimately leading to more repossessions when borrowers couldn’t make their repayments.

But the central banking system is a more systemic problem. Governments keep the interest rate artificially low by lending money at a lower rate than the going market rate. A small player wouldn’t have much effect, but because governments can print money, they exert a large enough influence on the market to change the interest rate. After years of inflating the money supply, most of the pounds and dollars in circulation are lent by the central banks. As well as being the cause of inflation, this allows investments in riskier activities which wouldn’t be allocated resources by a free market. It creates bubbles or inflates certain markets, such as the housing market.

The debt bubble that has been built up over the last decade or so is the real cause of the current economic crisis, and central banks are to blame. They provided the cheap money which underpinned the growth of debt. The so-called “Greenspan put” refers to twenty years of US Federal Reserve policy to cut government interest rates aggressively every time drops in market confidence threatened the long economic boom. The 1987 stock market crash; the Gulf War; the Mexican crisis; the Asian crisis; the LTCM debacle; Y2K; the internet bubble burst; 9/11; and now: every time, US rates were slashed. Often, US government interest rates were actually lower than the inflation rate: real interest rates were negative. That is really cheap money.

Investors in the UK and US increasingly believe that when things go bad, the government will inject liquidity until the problem got better. Governments do so every time, and the perception has become firmly embedded in asset pricing in the form of higher valuation, narrower credit spreads, and excess risk taking. The end result has been moral hazard in risk taking and has caused bubbles in equities, credit, real estate, and commodities.

The knowledge that the government will bail out any business distorts the market: it encourages rash decisions in the short term, and in the long term stupefies the market from adjusting to changes in demand and technology.

Ultimately, “capital injections” do not prevent credit crunches. They exacerbate business cycles and makes the crunches bigger when they inevitably do come.

Bad ownership structures are not a long term problem. As long as their shareholders are not bailed out, banks will fix themselves.

But government intervention is a long term problem. Central banks should be abolished. Government should not interfere with the market interest rate. The only way to long-term economic health is to trust the markets.

Religion in general has come under a lot of criticism in recent years. It is becoming more and more common-place to claim that religion is not only misguided but the root of much evil in the world. However, it is far too simplistic to claim that it is an institutional belief in God which has caused so many of the world’s problems. Rather it is a belief in something (anything) which claims to have a have a monopoly on truth that causes most of the evil in society. As such, we should all fear it when any ideology is accepted by a society as a given.

Derived from attacks against religion, secularism has become the watch-word for state action. Lip service is still paid to the union between church and state in the British constitution, but when it comes to government action, religion must take a back seat. Indeed, it must be pulled along clinging onto the back bumper. Of course, most people do not have a problem with this. As we all know, the Bible does teach us that homosexuality is wrong, and adulteresses should be stoned to death, and implicitly that the earth is only 6,000 years old. But for society to accept uncompromisingly the default position is equally unfortunate.

An example of the default position to creationism is Darwinian evolution. Although it is ridiculous to claim that an adherence to Darwinian evolution leads inevitably to eugenics – the evolution of the emotion of self-sacrifice discredits the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ in every case – any idea is necessarily debased for wider consumption. This is why the inaccurate belief that evolution means ‘survival of the fittest’ has gained currency. When a state accepts this position uncompromisingly, allowing simplistic generalisations to take hold, it is not ludicrous to see how it could lead to a policy of eugenics. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is the problem when one idea holds a monopoly on truth in a society. If an idea is taken as read, it can be moulded to suit the will of those in power. It is now accepted in the West that democracy is absolutely right. The underlying principle behind the Iraq War for neo-conservatives was the unwavering belief that it was right to bring democracy to a country otherwise in the grips of dictatorship. It is perfectly acceptable for individuals to accept this position, but when a society’s assumption becomes a policy of its state, alternate ideas cannot be voiced. Opposition to the Iraq War was based on the idea that it was not a war that should be fought, not that it may be wrong in principle to bring democracy to a country that had never known it.

The solution is to avoid state ideology, even if it is secular or democratic. A state needs to adopt one principle over another to function (after all, the state needs a political ideology in order to form a government), but it should not adopt such an ideology as a given in the execution of policy. For example, the argument that Britain is a ‘secular country’ should not rear its ugly head in the debate on faith schools. This argument necessarily makes religion something alien to British society in principle, thereby allowing the state to take actions without recognising the alternate position. As such, the state can take unilateral action without debate: maybe there is a God; perhaps democracy is not an end in itself for every country; conceivably nationalised industries are bad. The state must not be allowed to hold a monopoly on truth.

This is not to say that individual people cannot hold monopolistic ideas. It is impossible for someone to both believe in God and at the same time not believe in God. Either they believe, do not believe, or have yet to make up their mind. But the state cannot and should not make the same judgment. Otherwise individual liberty to believe something different is trampled and cannot be debated in society.

With monopoly comes exploitation and abuse. And a good way to prevent monopoly is individualism.

An Englishman's Home

An Englishman’s home ceased to be his castle a long time ago. The state has 1000 laws allowing it to break into your home. It is not enough to streamline the law. We need wholesale repeal of much legislation.

It’s not just entering your home, though. Rafts of legislation prevent us doing what we want to or in our home,whether it’s minor building works or lighting a coal fire. The state intrudes even when you buy or sell your home.

Last year I read an article by Boris Johnson on government plans to put health warnings on alcoholic drinks.

“In all that time, no government in history has yet thought the people so moronic that they needed to be told, on the bottle, that wine could go to your head; and Flint’s proposed act of desecration is all the more shameful and baffling when you consider - in your state of agreeable post-prandial rapture - that a bottle of wine is really a thing of quiet beauty.

For hundreds of years, the play of light on the glass and the liquid has entranced the eye of our greatest painters, from Caravaggio to Manet. Think of all those bottles twinkling away behind the bar girl in the Folies-Bergeres; think of that Van Gogh still life - the bottle, the bread, the cheese.”

No one would possibly argue that we need the state because without it we wouldn’t have these warnings. They are philistinistic: a bottle of wine should indeed be a thing of beauty, not a reminder of the power the government has over the minutiae our lives.

But worse, it represents an intrusion of the government into an Englishman’s home. My home is largely free of the government. I do not want government icons looking down at me from my drinks cupboard.

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.”

A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (1965)

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

Hayek explains in “The Constitution of Liberty” that if people have freedom to do what they want without restriction by government, as long as they do not harm others, people can try things out. People can make mistakes, but better ways of doing things will be discovered, and copied. By a process of natural selection of ideas, we will all gradually make more efficient use of resources, and technology, and we will become richer. Government involvement in production will slow this process down.

Transcript: Reagan’s first Inaugural Address, 1981.

Margot James, Conservative candidate for Stourbridge:

“Gay people are net contributors to public services through their taxes, because very few of them have children.

I think gay people have got more angst on this issue than anybody else because gay people are paying in, through their taxes and actually using far less of the NHS because they tend not to have families, less of the education system for the same reason and all the more reason to be angry with this government for the waste of their taxes.”

“There is so much wrong with this government’s policy, gay people should not just vote Conservative, they have a duty to vote Conservative.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7644851.stm

The financial sector is in crisis. Lehman Brothers has collapsed, Merrill Lynch sold, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nationalised, and AIG looks like it may well go the same way. In the face of such market turmoil, it is to be expected that the old doomsayers are out in force, bemoaning the folly of the free market, and wallowing in the glories of nationalisation as our collective saviour. But such joy is misplaced. The free market is still only partial, and indeed too young to be blamed for the current economic woes.

To use an analogy, imagine that person A and person B have been given a chain saw. Person A has been given an instruction book, reads it, and follows it to the letter. As such they immediately and quickly get started trimming a few bushes.

Person B, on the other hand, has not been given an instruction book. Instead he must work out how to use the chain saw for himself. Because he is an intelligent person (and can learn from the work performed by A) B quickly works out how to use the chain saw. However, because B does not have an instruction book, he is quite happy to cut everything in site, while A checks each section to ensure that he does not attempt to cut something that is too thick for the chain saw.

Very quickly, B is able to take over A, and produces, because he is not stopping and starting, produces a cleaner and more even cut. Unfortunately, B is suddenly stopped in his tracks when he tries to cut something too thick. The chain saw jams; indeed, the chain saw backfires and B loses his grip. B is shaken for a few minutes, but he quickly recovers and starts again. This time he avoids the thick branch.

Soon, A and B find a poll in the bush made of a material neither has come across before. A can find no reference to the poll in his instructions. As such, both A and B decide to try and cut it. They both fail and the chain saws backfire. Afterwards, A is given a new instruction book, listing iron polls as another thing that the chain saw cannot cut through. B is not given any regulation.

Later, A and B come across a poll made of another material neither have come across. With his new instructions, A is told not to cut through anything that he does not recognise. As such, he does not cut it. In contrast, A tries to cut the poll and finds that it is made of rubber and cuts easily. He can then continue, ending up with a clean shaven bush with only a couple of thick branches and iron polls protruding.

What this is trying to show is that a regulated market is retrospective. With deregulation, banks have been able to make investments they have never been able to try before. Some of these investments, like the metal poll, have proved to be bad. But it is only after the investment was tried that this proved to be the case. As such, the free market has also learnt the lesson.

Nevertheless, some investments, like the graphite poll, were successful. In an ever changing world where regulations are often years behind progress, such investments would not have been realised had it not been for the free market.

Undoubtedly, the current economic crisis derives from banks lending to people who cannot pay them back. The fall-out from this has meant that the liquidity upon which banks depend has contracted. But what should be emphasised is that the free market can now learn from this mistake. As such, person B will not try and cut the thick branch with the chain saw again.

A deregulated market is in its infancy, and people are still learning how to use the freedom it affords. To finish with a final analogy, a child who has been playing virtual rugby for years is finally allowed to play it for real. During his first match he breaks his leg, and mother prevents him from ever playing again. So, he returns to his virtual game. Just imagine the opportunities lost by that child had he been able to learn rugby properly, especially now that he is an overweight couch potato in front of a television screen.