The free market is a system of cooperation for mutual benefit.

I just finished Virginia Postrel’s challenging The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress. It is an appeal to embrace the dynamism of life and overcome our fears for the future. It is about real progress, not state-driven, top-down control.

Consider for example this, from page 42:

Conserving only the underlying stable rules, while letting individual decision making drive change, is a concept that a century of technocracy has made foreign to most people. It does not fit neatly into the comfortable old left-right dichotomy and does not line up with technocratic assumptions about the powers and uses of government. It has a hard time making its case, because it promises only general patterns of improvement — spontaneous order and discovery — not specific results.

In the context of our present system of stifling technocratic control and horror of the future, it’s a fascinating read. In the context of having cared for the homeless this morning in Wycombe’s night shelter — something operated by local churches and volunteers, not the state — it raises a challenge: how shall we care for the disadvantaged in a world of spontaneous order and yet ensure we leave none behind?

The answer is as simple as it is difficult. Individuals must learn to enjoy their freedom responsibly, not choosing to make themselves slaves to others, but helping wherever they can.

Postrel is the editor of Reason magazine.

This post originally appeared on cobdencentre.org.

Via FT.com / US / Economy & Fed – Fed signals pullback in liquidity supports, we learn:

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday upgraded its assessment of the US economy and highlighted its intention to shut down most of its crisis-fighting liquidity facilities in early 2010.

And consequently:

Stocks eased slightly after the Fed statement, while the yield curve in the bond market steepened.

Which brings us on to Roger Koppl’s Big Players and the Economic Theory of Expectations.

I am indebted to Cobden Centre Supporter Bruno Prior for introducing me to Koppl’s work which extends the tradition of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and others, unusually, applying empirical methods to demonstrate the application of the theory.

Koppl demonstrates, with extensive reference to other scholars, that investment and all other economic actions depend on “subjective” expectations. He then presents a theory of expectations which assumes people interpret their situations in unpredictable ways. This theory includes a theory of “Big Players”:

Big Players are privileged actors who disrupt markets. A Big Player has three defining characteristics. He is big in the sense that his actions influence the market under study. He is insensitive to the discipline of profit and loss. He is arbitrary in the sense that his actions depend on discretion rather than any set of rules. Big Players have power and use it.

We learn that Big Players reduce the reliability of expectations, thereby disrupting markets. They encourage herding and produce perverse effects on entrepreneurship: traders must pay attention to the Big Player and not the fundamentals.

And so we find today, for example, the markets moving in response to the Fed not the realities of the economy…

After debating today with my pastor whether what the world needs is more or less government intervention in the cooperative actions of individuals (ie, the economy), I rediscovered the following from De Tocqueville (1835/1840). The passage paints his vision of a future democratic society, indicating how he foresaw people might live:

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

This does appear to be more or less where we are today. Thankfully, De Tocqueville ends with one option which is cause for optimism:

A constitution republican in its head and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts has always appeared to me to be a short-lived monster. The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.

Certainly we are close to ruin and certainly we are weary of our representatives: shall we create freer institutions or stretch at the feet of a single master? It should be obvious to even the most inconstant reader that I propose freer institutions and a life of responsible liberty under the rule of law.

A problem with this approach is that at least a significant minority insist on choosing actions which harm others or which produce in themselves harms which the compassionate seek to remedy. Perhaps wide-ranging freedom from government coercion can only survive if what is within us produces free choices which promote the well-being of ourselves and our fellows.

One source of this morality within is well-understood Christianity. What is to be offered to those and by those whose reason or disposition rules out Christ? Perhaps rational self-interest would do:

When one speaks of man’s right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, most people assume automatically that this means his right to sacrifice others. Such an assumption is a confession of their own belief that to injure, enslave, rob or murder others is in man’s self-interest—which he must selflessly renounce. The idea that man’s self-interest can be served only by a non-sacrificial relationship with others has never occurred to those humanitarian apostles of unselfishness, who proclaim their desire to achieve the brotherhood of men. And it will not occur to them, or to anyone, so long as the concept “rational” is omitted from the context of “values,” “desires,” “self-interest” and ethics.

So, we should live in freedom, but we should recognise for ourselves the boundaries to that freedom. For many of us, that requires a change within. For those who fail to recognise the boundaries of order, there must be law.

Read more of “What sort of despotism democratic nations have to fear” here.

Fleeced!

Via the Taxpayers’ Alliance:

On Monday, Matthew Elliott and David Craig released their new book Fleeced! How we’ve been betrayed by the politicians, bureaucrats and bankers… and how much they’ve cost us, published by Constable. Fleeced! is the very first book to analyse the financial, fiscal and political crisis resulting from a decade spent under the stewardship of Gordon Brown and is a devastating indictment of Brown’s time as Chancellor and Prime Minister. The authors, who were the first to reveal the shocking truth about Brown’s overspending since 1997 in their previous books, show that in 12 years of New Labour around £1.5 trillion of taxpayers’ money has been squandered on an acceleration in profligate government spending fuelled by the economic boom; and around another £1.5 trillion has evaporated in the bust.

Fleeced! was given a big preview in the Daily Mail who summarised the key chapters, explaining how the authors arrived at the eye-watering total of £3 trillion for Gordon Brown’s mishandling of the economy. The release of Fleeced! and Brown’s £3 trillion con were also reported in:

The Sun, Labour blunders cost taxpayers £3 trillion

Daily Express, Brown the bungler has cost every person in Britain £50,000

Daily Mail, Brown’s mishandling of the economy has cost £50,000 for every person in Britain, according to new book

Daily Star, Bungler Brown has bled Britain dry

Daily Telegraph, Gordon Brown ‘wasted three trillion’

The Guardian, Comment Is Free: I see no wisdom, Mandelson

This is Money, Brown ‘cost us £50,000 each’ in tax

Press Association, ‘Brown cost taxpayers £3 trillion’

Matthew Elliott was interviewed on Sky Sunrise on Monday morning and on John Gaunt’s Suntalk radio show on Tuesday.

Fleeced! RRP £8.99, is now available in all good bookshops and on Amazon here

Revised and updated: reconciling our conflicting views of the market through consistent principle and morality.

A Christian friend is an avowed socialist and another associate is determinedly left wing. I asked them recently what socialism meant to them. The answer was essentially “people being good to one another”: kindness, compassion, fairness and justice, even liberty. Who would oppose that?

But can force make it so?

Though I write with great affection for my friends, when I hear or read “socialism”, I understand a quite different thing: misery. Everywhere Marxist theory was determinedly put into practice, the result was tremendous suffering, not utopia, and yet Marxist ideas persist in our thinking.

Socialism, though formally hopeful, causes misery because a socialist society must force individuals to take particular courses of action for the good of all. For example, Lenin’s acclaimed Marxist philosopher Bukharin wrote:

For a long time yet, the working class will have to fight against, all its enemies, and in especial against the relics of the past, such as sloth, slackness, criminality, pride. All these will have to be stamped out. Two or three generations of persons will have to grow up under the new conditions before the need will pass for laws and punishments and for the use of repressive measures by the workers’ State.

And so socialist societies have justified sustained repression.

When the Soviet Union fell, it seemed we all accepted that public ownership of the means of production was a dead end. New Labour and the “Third Way” came to prominence, despite the third way being nothing new, merely the idea that government can successfully intervene in a market economy to bring about positive outcomes. The problem is, it does not work.

Today, we have a financial crisis, a credit crunch, but few reflect that for a long time we have laboured under the most pervasive price control of all: deliberate manipulation of the rate of interest. Around the world, millions have waited with trepidation for committees of wise men to announce the interest rate. We have had a combination of historically low levels of saving combined with historically high levels of borrowing. Where did this mismatch come from? The rate of interest has been deliberately suppressed, misleading people into saving less and borrowing more than would have been sustainable.

The phenomenon is rather like a gym in which the treadmills may be remote controlled. If just a few people slow down, the central controller does nothing. But imagine the controller sees “too many” people slowing down at once for a break. “This will not do!” he cries, “We must have higher levels of activity!” He turns up all the treadmills at once, and keeps turning them up as exhaustion builds. Eventually large numbers collapse at once. Do we take a break and rebuild ourselves? No! We must inject adrenalin, take sports drinks, anything to get back to peak activity immediately. Eventually, this must end in catastrophe for the participants, but with artificially-low interest rates and quantitative easing, this is what we do to individuals and corporations in the economy.

The consequence is social disaster: high levels of government debt, unemployment and the direct creation of new money, a phenomenon which can only widen wealth inequality because new money is given to the wealthy. Yet this is the consequence of just one intervention in the free market.

When people set out to intervene in the economy by force of authority, they usually fail to realise a simple point: you cannot control the economy without controlling people. The economy comprises the actions of thinking, purposeful human beings with their own ends and means. Socialism requires intervention in that striving, intervention that at best has unintended consequences because the information necessary to intervene successfully is simply not available. Jamie Whyte’s The kindness of geniuses explains charmingly.

Those of us of good faith all want the same thing: prosperity, kindness, compassion, fairness, justice, liberty. People being good to one another. The twentieth century teaches us that state planning of the economy does not deliver these things, so how should society be organised?

Views of the free market

I asked my friends how they reacted to the term free market. They understand this term to mean exploitation. I understand it to mean freely-chosen cooperation for mutual benefit.

As we were sitting in a bar, I asked “Where was the exploitation when you bought that last round?” We wanted a drink, we had earned it in our own ways and the barman was happy to serve it to us. Perhaps the barman was there against his will, but how are we to know? Are we all to approach every transaction with a questionnaire? Should the barman have asked us if we had been exploited before serving us? Are we to invent possible exploitation somewhere up the supply chain for beer? Is it intrinsically exploitative for one man to serve beer to another?

Of course, this is absurd, but people suppose the free market inherently exploits without demonstrating how. This is not to deny the existence of isolated exploitation, but to question how free exchange is inherently exploitative, or corrupting, or the cause of whatever harm is perceived by the commentator. This is Marxist thinking and we know where it leads.

Before me, I have four books which begin to reconcile these difficulties:

• Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes,
• David B Smith’s IEA Hobart Paper Living with Leviathan (download, buy),
• Moral Markets The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, a collection of articles edited by Paul J. Zak,
• Development of British Monetary Orthodoxy, 1797-1875 by Frank Whitson Fetter.

Read more

Via Police cannot be trusted with fines, magistrates warn – Telegraph:

Police cannot be trusted to hand out summary justice and will act as “judge and jury” if given powers to issue more on-the-spot fines, magistrates have warned.

In an extraordinary attack, the Magistrates’ Association said it is a “certainty” that officers will misuse powers because they cannot be “relied on” to handle them appropriately.

The comments have been made as part of the Magistrates’ Association response to the Government’s plans to allow police to issue £60 fixed penalties for careless driving.

Police have been accused of increasingly dealing with offences using on-the-spot fines as an easy way to hit the government’s crime targets.

Magistrates are worried that the number of offences now dealt with in this way is keeping some serious offenders out of the courts.

However, police leaders insisted that the use of the fines, which has risen sharply under Labour, helped to reduce paperwork and free up officers’ time.

It is a pity this story has been positioned as an attack on the police and a great pity if it is intended to be one. There is a legal and political principle at stake, a principle which was overturned when summary justice was first reintroduced in England and a principle which is hampered by an excessive reliance on a particular clause of Magna Carta:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

This principle is that the Rule of Law requires due process. As Hayek put it in The Constitution of Liberty (p191, emphasis mine):

We have now concluded the enumeration of the essential factors which together make up the rule of law, without considering those procedural safeguards such as habeas corpus, trial by jury, and so on, which, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, appear to most people as the foundation of their liberties. English and American readers will probably feel that I have put the cart before the horse and concentrated on minor features while leaving out what is fundamental. This has been quite deliberate.

I do not wish in any way to disparage the importance of these procedural safeguards. Their value for the preservation of liberty can hardly be overstated. … Judicial forms are intended to insure that decisions will be made according to rules and not according to the relative desirability of particular ends or values. All the rules of judicial procedure, all the principles intended to protect the individual and to secure impartiality of justice, presuppose that every dispute between individuals or between individuals and the state can be decided by the application of general law. They are designed to make the law prevail, but they are powerless to protect justice where the law deliberately leaves the decision to the discretion of authority. It is only where the law decides – and this means only where independent courts have the last word – that the procedural safeguards are safeguards of liberty.

And so we come to the heart of the matter: Labour governments — and the left generally — do not share with Hayek, with liberals and with Conservatives an understanding of the Rule of Law. Witness for example Labour’s class law which was celebrated by one cabinet minister as “socialism in one clause”¹. If I put my childhood in its context, it is clear that I would have benefitted from advantageous access to public services, coming from a working-class background. However, since I achieved social mobility, my children would now suffer for it. The absurdity of such a situation should be plain: socially-mobile individuals would disadvantage their children. The rational choice would be to make no attempt to advance oneself.

It would be too easy to rant and rave at the absence of procedural safeguards, particularly when justice in our country has been reduced to summary fines from council officials in this case for crumbs falling from a baby’s mouth², but there is a more fundamental problem: a battle of ideas which is barely understood — the battle over ideas such as liberty, justice and equality.

Those of us who believe a good society is built on responsibility face two groups of opponents, neither of which appreciate the secondary effects of their actions:

• Those well-intentioned but ill-informed people who would punish wrongdoing too expediently.
• Those well-intentioned but uncomprehending people who trust authority to solve society’s problems.

Certainly, people should not drive carelessly. Certainly, they should not litter. But the issue is not that the police cannot be trusted to issue summary fines, but that summary fines rely on an understanding of the Rule of Law, liberty and justice which can only serve to undo what social progress we have made.

There has been a cultural revolution which has produced an expectation that the state should use expedient coercion to extract good behaviour from a resentful and sullen population. We need a better way and it is well-known: opportunity, responsibility and security from others — a return to classic English liberty.

1. “Every public body will have to take class background into account when making decisions under radical new legislation unveiled by the Government today.” [↩]
2. Thankfully, this fine was overturned in court, but what a farce. If you think it isolated, look at this map of English liberty or read Raab’s The Assault on Liberty. [↩]

This past weekend, we visited the American Museum in Britain. It was thought-provoking: America was of course conceived in liberty but American history, like every nation’s, is filled with examples of man’s inhumanity to man.

The exhibition began with a wall of quotations from significant figures. These particularly stood out:

William Penn (1644-1718):

Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.

Albert Einstein¹:

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

Apache Chief Geronimo (1829-1909):

Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.

Thus, beside the lives of pioneers, the museum introduced the history of native Americans and of African-American slaves, terrible experiences which no person should ever know. I was reminded of Karl Popper’s lines in The Open Society and its Enemies:

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder (including it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as heroes.

Coincidentally, I am just finishing John O’Farrell’s An Utterly Impartial History of Britain: (or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge). Perhaps spotting the gathering dust on my scholarly history books, Beth gave me this book as a starting point. It is at least an entertaining read, but the author’s endless cynicism, though supported by events, combined with his wearisome ignorance of sound economics, produces a tiresome read. Compare O’Farrell’s history with that of, say, This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World or The Welfare State We’re in and we quickly find that history, as the record of acting people, deserves to be understood through sound theories of human action.

Enter one of my preferred writers — Ludwig von Mises — with Theory and History (online). From the back cover:

Theory and History deals with the theory of economics, i.e., the study of purposive human action, and with history, the record of the past actions of individuals. All actions are determined by ideas. Thoughts and ideas are “real things,” Mises writes. “Although intangible and immaterial, they are factors in bringing about changes in the realm of tangible and material things.” Rather than rejecting the study of historical change as a “useless pastime,” Mises considers it of the utmost practical importance. “History looks backward into the past, but the lesson it teaches concerns things to come.” History opens the mind to an understanding of human nature, increases wisdom, and distinguishes civilized man from the barbarian. Moreover, historical knowledge is of the utmost importance in helping to anticipate and plan for the future.

A major part of this book is a critique of Karl Marx and his fallacious view of theory and history. Marx attributes the creation of tools and machines, as well as the economic structure of society, to undefined “material productive forces”; Mises rejects this materialistic view and points out that tools and machines are actually created by individuals acting on the basis of non-materialistic ideas. Marx predicts that society is moving towards socialism “with the inexorability of a law of nature.” Mises responds: “The outstanding fact about history is that it is a succession of events that nobody anticipated before they ocurred.”

The book is a tour de force of the ideas that have shaped human history and their refutations. In particular, bearing in mind O’Farrell’s sneering treatment of the free market:

The history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has discredited the hopes and the prognostications of the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The peoples did not proceed on the road toward freedom, constitutional government, civil rights, free trade, peace, and good will among nations. Instead the trend is toward totalitarianism, toward socialism. And once more there are people who assert that this trend is the ultimate phase of history and that it will never give way to another trend.

And, closing the book, on attempts at predicting the future:

The fallacy inherent in predicting the course of history is that the prophets assume no ideas will ever possess the minds of men but those they themselves already know of. Hegel, Comte, and Marx, to name only the most popular of these soothsayers, never doubted their own omniscience. Each was fully convinced that he was the man whom the mysterious powers providently directing all human affairs had elected to consummate the evolution of historical change. Henceforth nothing of importance could ever happen. There was no longer any need for people to think. Only one task was left to coming generations-to arrange all things according to the precepts devised by the messenger of Providence. In this regard there was no difference between Mohammed and Marx, between the inquisitors and Auguste Comte.

Up to now in the West none of the apostles of stabilization and petrification has succeeded in wiping out the individual’s innate disposition to think and to apply to all problems the yardstick of reason. This alone, and no more, history and philosophy can assert in dealing with doctrines that claim to know exactly what the future has in store for mankind.

Museums and historians must remind us of the wrongs of the past, and do so through the histories of many aspects of human life, even political power. Let us be guided by them to a better and more open future in which people can be free of all kinds of oppression.

Above all, let us use our reason to reflect on our present circumstances and conclude with Karl Popper that,

even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous — from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.

The idea whose time has come, the idea which can carry us forward — from difficulties created by people who wished to better the lot of their fellows, by people who wish to better the lot of future generations — is liberty under the rule of law.

1. Also, “If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and Christianity as Jesus Christ taught it of all subsequent additions, especially those of the priests, one is left with a teaching which is capable of curing all the social ills of humanity. It is the duty of every man of good will to strive steadfastly in his own little world to make this teaching of pure humanity a living force, so far as he can. If he makes an honest attempt in this direction without being crushed and trampled under foot by his contemporaries, he may consider himself and the community to which he belongs lucky.” [↩]

This week, The Spectator writes Meet the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick:

James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book.

…

‘The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,’ says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you’re unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority. Where fellow sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg or Lord Lawson of Blaby are prepared cautiously to endorse the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) more modest predictions, Plimer will cede no ground whatsoever. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory, he argues, is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history.

And as it happens, I just finished Nigel Lawson’s An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming. From the Afterword:

Much has happened over the year that has elapsed since this book was first published, and all of it has served only to reinforce its main thesis. That thesis, in a nutshell, was and remains the proposition that, even if the current majority view of the science of global warming is correct, the policy response we are told we must urgently adopt, of drastic curbs on global carbon dioxide emissions, makes no sense: it is both economically damaging and politically unattainable.

Lawson explains that, far from denying the science, he thinks it prudent to act as if it were correct, planning for adaptation. He does, however, touch on the science, showing that:

• The science is neither certain nor settled.
• Global warming is not happening right now.
• Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

Now, I am not ready to take a position on climate science, nor to condemn climate alarmism as the new anti-capitalistic religion (as Lawson does), but it seems that a person concerned with the prosperity and well-being of humanity should take a critically rational look at the science and the suggested policy response. Lawson refers to a survey of climate scientists, two thirds of whom agreed that anthropogenic global warming is supported by the science, in which only 8% thought ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ was ‘the most pressing issue facing humanity today’. Whether we should accept the present policy response must therefore be a question worthy of debate, even among mainstream climate scientists.

For a critique of the science, I suggest Jo Nova’s The Skeptics Handbook and The Manhattan Declaration. For alternative perspectives on the associated environmental question of resource depletion, I recommend these videos on the arithmetic of growth and this essay on Oil and the Doomers’ Dire Predictions. You may also enjoy this Climate Quiz.

If we are serious about human progress, about promoting prosperity for the world’s poor, we must be rational. Reason shows that the route to social progress is unhampered cooperation between independent, interdependent people. It would be better if governments got out of the way, if poor nations industrialized and if we anticipated spontaneous adaptation if and when necessary.

Jamie Whyte’s book “Bad Thoughts” is a tremendous guide for those who are seriously interested in the welfare of everyone in society, and who are not prepared to separate moral and intellectual seriousness.

Whyte’s 152-page book is entertaining and relevant and I do recommend it. In the meantime, I offer a brief and possibly inadequate guide to the key points here.

I just finished Gowing’s 1885 biography of Richard Cobden, whose doctrine was that free trade would lead to world peace through interdependence and mutual cooperation.

Cobden was a leader of the Anti-Corn-Law League — a substantial feat of political agitation — which was established to oppose protectionist measures on corn and decrease the price of basic food products. Cobden viewed the task of the League as “instructing the nation.” We learn in the biography:

Only seven years before the total repeal of the Corn Laws the men who agitated for the Repeal were looked upon, by many of the most experienced statesmen of the country, as wild and reckless theorists — as, in fact, little better than madmen!

Cobden’s life was remarkable. For example, after Repeal and losing his former seat, Rochdale returned him to Parliament without a contest and in his absence. Fortunes were twice raised by subscription to assist Cobden out of difficulties arising from the sacrifice of his own business in the national interest.

Today, we do indeed need more Cobdens in politics.

The EU announced on 17 Oct 2008 that it would restore import customs duties on cereals on 30 Jun 2009. There are quotas too.

The TARIC database allows you to query duty rates. For example:

• Roasted coffee from Brazil: 7.50% (apparently less a “tariff preference” of 2.60%)
• Long grain, rough rice (of a length/width ratio greater than 2 but less than 3) from Vietnam: 211.00 EUR per 1000kg with a “non-preferential tariff quota” of 15.00%

You will find the EU has made available a full-featured online system for navigating the maze of tariffs and regulations, but haven’t they missed the point? Is this free trade?