On the anniversary of Imjin River

Today is the anniversary of one of the most extraordinary battles fought during the Cold War.

The battle by the (Glorious) Gloucester Regiment against an entire Chinese army at the Imjin River was one of the most exceptional moments of the war against totalitarian socialism. So, please, if you are minded, do join me to remember what price people paid on all sides in the battle between freedom and state control.

You can find a related video here. I will be helping in another constituency today, while reflecting on this quote:

I see now more clearly than ever before 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.

– Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 1 (Volume 2).

Soviet Britain

Via the Institute for Economic Affairs, we discover the state devouring the economy – ie, the cooperative actions of free people – for over a century:

See also The Times Online, ‘Soviet’ Britain swells amid the recession:

The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies.

And Mises in Planning for Freedom:

The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments.

And so it is coming to pass: a pity socialism means despotism and ruin, not utopia. There is another way.

See also

Credit – Frederic Bastiat – Mises Institute

Via the Mises Institute, a little Bastiat demonstrating how little is new under the sun:

In all times, but more especially of late years, attempts have been made to extend wealth by the extension of credit.

I believe it is no exaggeration to say, that since the revolution of February, the Parisian presses have issued more than 10,000 pamphlets, crying up this solution of the social problem.

The only basis, alas, of this solution, is an optical delusion — if, indeed, an optical delusion can be called a basis at all.

The first thing done is to confuse cash with produce, then paper money with cash; and from these two confusions it is pretended that a reality can be drawn.

Read on…

“Sex and drug lessons from age 5″

Via Sex and drug lessons from age 5 – Telegraph, another forcible attempt to reengineer society, irrespective of the wishes of responsible parents:

Under the new curriculum, pupils as young as seven will learn about puberty and the facts of life and five-year-olds will be taught about parts of the body, relationships and the effects of drugs on the body.

Once they reach secondary school, pupils will learn about contraception, HIV and Aids, pregnancy and different kinds of relationships – including same sex unions and civil partnerships.

So-called Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education is to become compulsory in both primary and secondary schools from September 2011, and will be enshrined in new legislation.

Faith schools will not be able to opt out of any part of the new statutory curriculum, Ed Balls also confirmed today, although they will be able to teach topics within the ”tenets of their faith”.

Is it any wonder responsibility is passing away when parents are not even to be allowed to control when their children are educated about sex and drugs?


From Socialism, by Ludwig von Mises:

Proposals to transform the relations between the sexes have long gone hand in hand with plans for the socialization of the means of production. Marriage is to disappear along with private property, giving place to an arrangement more in harmony with the fundamental facts of sex. When man is liberated from the yoke of economic labour, love is to be liberated from all the economic trammels which have profaned it. Socialism promises not only welfare—wealth for all—but universal happiness in love as well. This part of its programme has been the source of much of its popularity. It is significant that no other German socialist book was more widely read or more effective as propaganda than Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, which is dedicated above all to the message of free love.

Labour have got to go.

Further reading

bella gerens: That’s right, whip the libertarian

From bella gerens, an excellent explanation and defence of libertarianism:

The truth is that advocates of freedom are found all over the political spectrum, but the only true libertarians are the ones who advocate it at all times in all circumstances, from the bedroom to the wallet – who believe that ‘freedom from’ is the only state of being consistent with the dignity and majesty of humankind.

‘Freedom from’ is the most important part of that ideology. Freedom from coercion. Freedom from interference. Freedom from oppression.

‘Freedom to’ is where the misunderstandings enter. People on the right think libertarians are advocating freedom to burgle, rob, rape, murder – because they read ‘freedom’ to mean ‘freedom to do whatever you please.’

People on the left think libertarians are advocating exploitation, pollution, callousness, and the primacy of making (and keeping) money above all else – because they read ‘freedom’ to mean ‘freedom to do whatever you please.’

And both sides think libertarians consider the laws we have prohibiting these activities to be a restriction on freedom.

When will they realise that they don’t understand?

It is now undeniable that a century or so of managerialism — of thinking the state knows best and is entitled to trespass on your private property for your own good and for that of your fellows — has succeeded in creating a segment of society within which anything goes and from which it is increasingly hard to escape: a segment populated by libertines who torment themselves and others despite a state which tries desperately to care for them at vast expense, an expense it forces on everyone, including those of meagre means.

Of course, the approach has now also succeeded in ruining us all, though not all have yet realised it, while delivering a state with tremendous power over our lives, and virtually every aspect of our lives too. Consider:

The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies.

The question now is not how state power should be used to save us, but how state power can be gracefully dismantled so that we can save ourselves and one another from a system which plainly does not work.

What should now follow is a social system of mutual cooperation based on private property and the rule of law. Whether such a system comes to pass is up to us.

Moral Markets and Honest Money

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:

Read more

Political power and democratic control in Britain

With all the debate about quangos, I wondered whether anyone had made the case against them based on the Rule of Law.

And so I found and added to my reading list Political power and democratic … – Google Books:

There is a sense in which quasi-government diminishes the role and authority of Parliament as well as its more obvious erosion of local government. In practice, the quango state removes layers and ares of policy-making and action from the parliamentary — and public — gaze. The absence of a constitutional framework and the informal and secretive nature of its policy processes blocks scrutiny and parliamentary and public debate about policy goals and outcomes. The government can co-opt and mobilise all manner of bodies, including private companies, consultants and advisers within the domain of quasi-government to carry out major tasks, such as industrial re-structuring, training and employment policies. Parliament has no oversight over the government’s creatures, their interests and processes, as they operate under cover of ministerial discretion. Indeed, even the government itself often has no direct control over them.

I am reminded of a quote attributed to Harold MacMillan:

We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts.

And of the following campaign poster from the Conservative Party Archive (shelfmark 1929-31):

Inspectors all around

“Britain’s Road to Socialism”

From some people who need to read, as Hayek did, von Mises with a critical but open mind:

The peoples of the world are confronted today with problems of enormous magnitude. These include the ever-growing poverty and widespread malnutrition and disease which afflict billions of the world’s six billion population; war and the threat of nuclear catastrophe; and the environmental and ecological time-bomb which adds a new threat to human survival.

This need not be so. Never before in history have the rapid advances in science and technology provided such opportunities for the all-round development of every human being. But in Britain, as in other capitalist countries, a deep-seated crisis of the whole economic, social and political system adversely affects every aspect of life.

The wealth, effort and ingenuity which could be used to improve the living conditions of working people are, instead, wasted in war preparations or otherwise used to expand the profits of the giant corporations and banks that dominate the economy and society. The Communist Party aims to replace the crisis, insecurity, profiteering, inequality and social conflict of capitalist society with socialism. A socialist Britain would be run by and for the people, not for private capitalist profit.

via Communist Party | Britain’s Road to Socialism Introduction – Britain’s Road to Socialism Introduction The pe… | Socialism, Br | Communist Party.

Like so many do, the authors of this piece forget that the advances they wish to exploit are the product of private enterprise, the system of social cooperation which does most to promote the interests of everyone. Socialism is available free here.

Banks, economic interventionism and the cause of the credit crisis

(This post is a precis of Huerta de Soto’s Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles pp650-653, presenting an argument which was famously expounded by von Mises in Socialism.

Among the young idealists who were attracted to socialism after the Great War, who came through these arguments expressed in full to understand that they “had been looking for improvement in the wrong direction”, was F A Hayek, Author of The Road to Serfdom, Nobel Prize winner and proponent of the denationalization of money.)


To attempt to coordinate society through coercion is an intellectual error: it is impossible for an institution to obtain the information needed to establish social coordination by decree. There are four reasons:

  • It is impossible to obtain, store and process the vast amount of practical information in the minds of different people.
  • Most of the necessary information is subjective, practical, tacit and non-verbal: it cannot be transmitted.
  • Information which people have not yet discovered or created and which arises from the market process cannot be transmitted.
  • Coercion — that is, regulation — prevents the discovery or creation of the necessary information.

These are the arguments developed at length by von Mises in Socialism. Von Mises demonstrates the impossibility of socialism and of effective state intervention in the economy. His thesis explains theoretically why the socialist economies of the Eastern Bloc failed. It also explains the growth of the tensions, maladjustments and inefficiencies in western economies which have led to our present crisis.

Crisis is the inevitable outcome of the application of coercion and privilege by government, which systematically worsens social maladjustments, hinders the creativity of entrepreneurs, distorts economic information, encourages irresponsibility, corrupts individuals and encourages the underground economy.
Read more

Reconciling ourselves to capitalism

Reflecting on aspects of the debate about capitalism, I picked this out of Liberalism, the Classical Tradition:

To advocate private ownership of the means of production is by no means to maintain that the capitalist social system, based on private property, is perfect. There is no such thing as earthly perfection. Even in the capitalist system something or other, many things, or even everything may not be exactly to the liking of this or that individual. But it is the only possible social system. One may undertake to modify one or another of its features as long as in doing so one does not affect the essence and foundation of the whole social order, viz., private property. But by and large we must reconcile ourselves to this system because there simply cannot be any other.

In Nature too, much may exist that we do not like. But we cannot change the essential character of natural events. If, for example, someone thinks — and there are some who have maintained as much — that the way in which man ingests his food, digests it, and incorporates it into his body is disgusting, one cannot argue the point with him. One must say to him: There is only this way or starvation. There is no third way. The same is true of property: either-or — either private ownership of the means of production, or hunger and misery for everyone.

By this point, Mises has considered — bullets my own — “five different conceivable systems of organizing the cooperation of individuals in a society based on the division of labor [sic]:

  • The system of private ownership of the means of production, which in its developed form, we call capitalism;
  • The system of private ownership of the means of production with periodic confiscation of all wealth and its subsequent redistribution;
  • The system of syndicalism;
  • The system of public ownership of the means of production, which is known as socialism or communism;
  • and, finally, the system of interventionism.”

Also, the point is explored that socialism can be brought about by retaining private ownership of property but so tightly controlling its use through rules and regulations that the fact of private ownership is of no consequence.

I won’t quote the book all day: I do recommend it.

Labour’s Class Law

An end to equality before the law?

Every public body will have to take class background into account when making decisions under radical new legislation unveiled by the Government today.

The law means that all public authorities – from Whitehall to local councils – will be subject to an over-arching legal duty to bridge the divide between rich and poor.

The new duty, which is to be tacked onto the Equalities Bill, has been described by one Cabinet minister as ’socialism in one clause’.

But the Tories today released a report which they said undermined Labour’s claims that it was tackling a lack of social mobility.

Shadow work and pensions secretary Chris Grayling said: ‘Labour has had ten years to make a difference to social mobility but have failed.’

via Labour’s Class Law: Legislation to order every public body to tackle divide between rich and poor | Mail Online.

Cheer from Noel Coward

Independence from the state

From 1968:

To return to the personal theme, if we accept the need for increasing responsibility for self and family it means that we must stop approaching things in an atmosphere of restriction. There is nothing wrong in people wanting larger incomes. It would seem a worthy objective for men and women to wish to raise the standard of living for their families and to give them greater opportunities than they themselves had. I wish more people would do it. We should then have fewer saying ‘the state must do it.’ What is wrong is that people should want more without giving anything in return. The condition precedent to high wages and high salaries is hard work. This is a quite different and much more stimulating approach than one of keeping down incomes.

Doubtless there will be accusers that we are only interested in more money. This just is not so. Money is not an end in itself. It enables one to live the kind of life of one’s own choosing. Some will prefer to put a large amount to raising material standards, others will pursue music, the arts, the cultures, others will use their money to help those here and overseas about whose needs they feel strongly and do not let us underestimate the amount of hard earned cash that this nation gives voluntarily to worthy causes. The point is that even the Good Samaritan had to have the money to help, otherwise he too would have had to pass on the other side. In choice of way of life J. S. Mill’s views are as relevant as ever.

‘The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way so long as we do not deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it … Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.’

These policies have one further important implication. Together they succeed at the same time in giving people a measure of independence from the state—and who wants a people dependent on the state and turning to the state for their every need—also they succeed in drawing power away from governments and diffusing it more widely among people and non-governmented institutions.

– Margaret Thatcher, “What’s wrong with politics?”.

Who wants a people dependent on the state for their every need? New Labour.

It appears New Labour have supported people in their struggle for larger incomes only so that the state can have more extensive and intrusive programmes. They have not encouraged people to earn more so that they can personally give more; they have encouraged people to earn more and think only of themselves, carelessly transferring altruism to the state. And yet the left have the bare-faced audacity to hate a woman who believes we should be altruists and who remains generous about her opponents.

In 1968, Mrs Thatcher concluded:

A short time ago when speaking to a university audience and stressing the theme of second responsibility and independence a young undergraduate came to me and said ‘I had no idea there was such a clear alternative.’ He found the idea challenging and infinitely more effective than one in which everyone virtually expects their MP or the government to solve their problems. The Conservative creed has never offered a life of ease without effort. Democracy is not for such people. Self-government is for those men and women who have learned to govern themselves.

No great party can survive except on the basis of firm beliefs about what it wants to do. It is not enough to have reluctant support. We want people’s enthusiasm as well.

Noel Coward – “There are Bad Times Just Around The Corner”

Sarah Kennedy cheered us this morning with Noel Coward’s “There are Bad Times Just Around The Corner“:

There are bad times just around the corner
And the outlook’s absolutely vile,
You can take this from us
That when they Atom bomb us
We are NOT going to tighten our belts and smile smile smile,
We are in such a mess
It couldn’t matter less
If a world revolution is just ahead,
We’d better all learn the lyrics of the old ‘Red Flag’
And wait until we drop down dead.
A likely story
Land of Hope and Glory,
Wait until we drop down dead.

Still it could be worse: at least today we know socialism is dead.

“Thought for to-day”: stand firm for freedom

From the Conservative Party Archive, poster 1950-11:

Thought for TO-DAY

The poster archive is an engaging place to spend a half hour, particularly when you realise that Labour are still socialists.