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.