Much of the rioting in France has come down to anarchism, far-leftism and Islamism. Yet I am willing to concede that there were student protesters too —as well as trade unionists and we-want-more-money-ists. The latter groupings did indeed protest non-violently. But we shouldn’t let them off as “just being French”. Their demand for more money in nation which spends money for fun isn’t an innocent request; it’s a demand for bankruptcy. This is also apparent in Britain which, while less profligate than its neighbour (a low bar), aspires, in its prime-ministerial vision, to spend like a drunk, gallic chicken.
In this week’s budget, British Chancellor John Healey did nothing to end the historic levels of tax and borrowing. So it’s lucky that we have our Society and Culture Correspondent Richard Neat on hand to propose a solution: the West running out of money. The price may be high, but ultimately fruitful: we will be forced to return to individual freedom. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor, Guerre and Shalom)
“And behold, there was no money; and the committees ceased from their labours.”
— Revelation 23:11
I have come to the conclusion, somewhat reluctantly, that the West may not yet be poor enough to save itself from government malevolence.
This is not an argument against prosperity. I am a capitalist. I regard the extraordinary creation of wealth in the West as one of the great achievements of civilization, not to mention the concomitant political systems that allowed citizens to keep much of that money themselves to spend on occasionally sublime products. I’m thinking art, literature, architecture, real education, artisanal products, the good stuff, rather than Kanye’s Yeezy sneakers.
Nor do I particularly relish the prospect of impoverishment. I have lived long enough to know that economic catastrophe is only amusing when suffered by your adversaries; definitely not when it arrives at the front door of yourself or your friends. I understand there will be pain.
Nevertheless, a disturbing possibility presents itself. The progressive hyper-liberal administrative order will not voluntarily reform, nor uninvent itself. It has created too many institutions, careers, budgets and economic constituencies with a material interest in it’s continuation. Reform has been promised repeatedly, but asking an institution to reform itself means asking the people whose salaries, status and authority depend upon it to be turkeys for Christmas.
Asking whether genuinely working people can afford it, is not a polite question. In fact, reform-talk only produces another strategy document, another consultation, another committee, another invoice.
Therefore, if the profligates cannot reform themselves, then bankruptcy is the Pharmakon. It is also sublimely Alexandrian: faced with the Gordian knot, it doesn’t commission another report on how the knot might eventually be loosened. It takes out the sword … and swish.
Bankruptcy doesn’t make illegitimate power illegitimate. It merely makes it unaffordable.
And whilst my argument is deliberately provocative - its motivation sincerely vengeful - its underlying mechanism is painfully mundane. When taxpayers lose the ability to pay for latest progressive scheme, the animal onesie-wearers will be left flailing. Having no clue how to generate their own money, the game will be up. Common sense will become the season’s new black.
And common sense was never progressivism’s strong suit. We all know that government expenditure doesn’t merely purchase things. Sustained expenditure creates interests whose future welfare depends upon government continuing to purchase them.
The sequence is rather predictable. An idea becomes a policy. The policy requires a programme. The programme requires administrators. The administrators require offices, consultants, trainers, lawyers, auditors and compliance systems.
These require budgets. The budgets create employment. Employment creates constituencies. And the constituency acquires an entirely understandable interest in ensuring that the original problem is never considered completely solved. Kind of like my cat chasing his tail.
And for the bureaucratic six-decade Party Planners there is a truism that whilst an ideology needs believers to establish an institution, an institution needs only employees to perpetuate an ideology.
On a lazy, post-prandial Sunday afternoon, in a moment of incomprehensible empathy towards my adversaries, I’m even willing to doubt that anything approaching a majority of the people employed within the modern progressive administrative apparatus are ideological zealots. Why should they be? They want careers. They acquire qualifications (hahaha) appropriate to the employment market presented to them. Once an ideology acquires a payroll, its survival no longer depends solely upon the survival of belief.
It’s the despicable Yuppy Nuremberg Defense:I was just doing it to pay the mortgage?
Furthermore, I’ll even concede that this is not uniquely a pathology of the Left. The military-industrial complex provides an obvious example from the Right. A defence programme creates factories, contractors, subcontractors, military establishments and thousands of jobs.
Military Keynesianism made enormous government expenditure more politically acceptable to conservatives because the spending arrived dressed as national security rather than social welfare. Not to mention the flags, uniforms and pageantry are a wonderful spectacle. Bad people often get whacked too.
All said and done, it’s the mechanism and the practitioner’s belief in their indispensability that are universal.
The farmer defends his subsidy because food security depends upon it. The defence contractor defends his programme because national security depends upon it. The university defends its grant because knowledge depends upon it. The NGO defends its funding because vulnerable people depend upon it. The bureaucrat defends his department because effective government depends upon it.
Although each constituency possesses a vocabulary capable of translating its material interest into a public good, an awkward principle remains: the beneficiary of expenditure is not necessarily the best judge of whether that expenditure remains necessary.
The state does not merely redistribute money. It distributes reasons for people to want a larger state and much of the huge debt that governments have accumulated for our grandchildren has been built creating the hellscape that is the modern progressive society.
Now, tell me I’m selfish, reactionary, ignorant and causing you a microaggression, but do it fairly, without the institutional Sturmtruppen. With your power to compel gone; your compulsory funding gone; you will have to persuade me like everybody else — because if your argument cannot survive without mandatory training, institutional enforcement, compulsory taxation, professional sanctions or administrative privilege, then your difficulty isn’t that society has failed to fund your ideas adequately. It’s that you have failed to persuade enough people of the legitimacy of your ideas.
And perhaps it’s the return to ideas that can make the West free again.
The Official Guerre & Shalom Book Club
Today's Topic: Victorian England
* How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life by Ruth Goodman
* The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London by Judith Flanders
* High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain by Simon Heffer
* Queen Victoria: A Personal History by Christopher Hibbert
* Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
* The Complete Jack the Ripper by Donald Rumbelow
* Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery by Eric Metaxas
* Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
* Disraeli: A Biography by Stanley Weintraub
* Darwin: Portrait of a Genius by Paul Johnson
* Florence Nightingale: The Courageous Life of the Legendary Nurse by Catherine Reef
* Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle by Daniel Stashower
* Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 by David Cannadine
* The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy by David Cannadine
Chef Neat again hits upon an important theme and one I love to discuss, nuance! Chef Neat explains in this article why a prosperous society needs both a social safety net AND a vibrant free market! There is no question that nuance is key concept missing from today’s public discourse about political and societal issues today in the western world! So here are some examples in order to demonstrate the concept for Guerre & Shalom’s readers. I think Transgender people who have gender dysphoria or need surgery should be rejected from serving in the military on medical grounds. But Transgender people who fit into neither category should be allowed to enlist and serve their country. I think that Coca Cola is a great soda and is my favorite soda. But I also believe they need to get the high fructose corn syrup out of it and go back to using real cain sugar. I think big rig trucks should have separate lanes on the highway, but I also think more safety features on them to prevent accidents should be adopted too. I don’t care for this political influencers on the right who go to college campuses to stir up trouble. But I’m no fan of the left-wing students who attack them either. Both are in the wrong. I’m not for de-platforming people for their opinions. But I also wouldn’t want a perpetuator of the Great Genocide Blood Libel on my campus if I were a college student either. I am a liberal Zionist who is for co-existence and a two-state solution but I despise J Street. I’m for a Palestinian state, but not at this time because it would be ruled by Fatah or Hamas which would be a disaster. I believe in freedom of speech for all. But I also don’t believe that it should be unlimited. We shouldn’t allow for example women to run around naked, kids to drop f bombs, white racists to harass and yell the n-word at every black person who walks by, liberals to spit on conservatives for wearing a MAGA hat, people to dress up as Adolf Hitler for Halloween, theaters to show child porn, people to smoke crack in public, stores to sell condoms or cigarettes to teenagers, doctors to prescribe psychedelics to their patients, ICE agents to break down illegal immigrant’s doors in the middle of the night and arrest them, the police to beat you to a bloody pulp, or the government to quarter the Royal Marines in your home because they feel like it.
Let’s say I’m a British subject living in the British Isles in the 1940s. I would support Winston Churchill all the way, be a proud Brit, wave the Union Jack proudly, love the British Empire, hate the Nazis, despise Adolf Hitler, salute the heroes in the RAF who fought the Luftwaffe, volunteer to help lead British civilians to safety during the Blitz, sympathize with our French allies, be all for our alliances with the United States and the Soviet Union, help evacuate children to the countryside, revere Bernard Montgomery, help rescue soldiers trapped on the beach at Dunkirk, and revere King George VI. But at the same time, I would welcome American GIs and foreign volunteers, support Britain taking in German and Austrian Jewish refugees and combat discrimination against them, would oppose German and Austrian internment on the Isle of Man, would be appalled by the treatment of black soldiers in the United States military, would oppose the United States military practicing racial segregation in Britain, welcome black GIs into my home and business, be saddened by the Battle of Mers-El-Kabir, condemn the RAF’s bombing of Dresden in February 1945, tout the service of British colonial troops, be glad that Britain didn’t listen to Rudolf Hess and threw him in jail when he made his infamous flight to Scotland and despise the British Nazi sympathizers he came over to see, and welcome the 70,000 Irish and 38,000 Scots-Irish volunteers who arrived into the country to serve in the British Army.
Let’s say I’m a citizen of the Roman Empire back in Antiquity. I’m would be a proud citizen of the empire, join the Roman Army, be impressed by the empire’s conquests, support the Roman Republic, love our literature and poetry and admire Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, admire General Scipio Africanis and Julius Caesar, be blown away by our engineering achievements, be proud of our mosaic-like, cosmopolitan society, be glad to see Roman deities being mixed with the local deities of peoples we conquered, love the linguistic diversity of the empire, enjoy the Pax Romana, embrace foreign peoples we conquered, support the construction of roads and trade networks by the empire, celebrate our victory in the Punic Wars, would approve of the empire ruling through local elites and allowing local people to keep their local language, customs, and religion as long as they paid their taxes and respected Roman authority, visit the Coliseum with awe and wonder, and enjoy watching chariot races. At the same time, I would find gladiator fights and animal hunts distasteful, oppose slavery in the empire, be shocked by the massacres committed by the Roman Army, oppose the autocratic rule of the Emperor, speak out against the persecution of Jews and Early Christians, would be a proud Christian myself who would refuse to worship the official Roman gods, applaud Emperor Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus issuing the Constitutio Antoniniana which granted universal Roman citizenship to all free men and women, support independence for the Kingdom of Judea and the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt and Rome leaving them alone, and Rome and Egypt signing a peace treaty.
Let’s I’m a Cuban living in Cuba in the late 1890s and early 1900s. I would be a proud Cuban, be all for Cuban independence, oppose Spanish colonial rule, fight in the Cuban War of Independence, deeply admire Jose Marti, be appalled by the Spanish colonial authorities’ brutal reconcentration policy, while distrusting the United States, would welcome the Americans’ help in fighting the Spanish, celebrate our defeat of the Spanish in the Spanish-American War, and be glad to see the Spanish leave our country. All that being said, I would oppose the Platt Amendment, oppose the American occupation of Cuba, would admire the United States’ republican government, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, its freedoms, and its capitalist economy while also being appalled at how it treated African Americans and Native Americans, be glad when the Americans left in 1902, celebrate the birth of the Cuban Republic, would fight discrimination against Afro-Cubans, oppose attempts to whiten Cuba with European immigrants, and would fight for suffrage for Cuban women.