A Truly Stupid Move

 Suppose it was drawn to your attention that something you had done had adversely affected a large number of people.   It had not affected them all in the same way and to the same degree however.   Some of the people had been merely inconvenienced, others had been seriously injured.   Would it make sense to try to rectify this situation by taking further action to injure those who had merely been inconvenienced?

I would hope that your answer was no.   This is the sort of crazy move that ought to make sense only to socialists, egalitarians in general, or, to be somewhat redundant, madmen.   It appears, however, that it also makes sense to Brian Pallister, Premier of the province of Manitoba and to his Public Health Commissar Brent Roussin.   I don't know what, if any, political views Roussin holds, but Pallister is the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, which, should anyone think I have a partisan  motive in the strong criticism I have sent his way this year, is the closest thing that exists in Manitoba to something I would affirm as my own party.   This is not very close since my party would be fully and genuinely Tory rather than watered-down conservative and would be reactionary or anti-progressive rather than progressive.    Margaret Thatcher once told Brian Mulroney that he put too much emphasis on the adjective and not enough on the noun in his party's name.   While I agree with what the Iron Lady was saying, much as I hate to correct her this is an instance where her grammar was off.  In the name of the party both Progressive and Conservative are adjectives.  Party is the noun.   My point in bringing all of this up, however, is to say that this famous line also seems to apply to Pallister.   Perhaps it has something to do with the name Brian.   It is also true of Winnipeg city mayor Brian Bowman.

To properly explain what I mean by that we need to think back a month or two to when the cases of Chinese bat flu (Wuhan flu or Wuflu are also acceptable) started to rise in the province.   At the time Brent Roussin said that he would not impose another lockdown on the province.  He acknowledged, as even some officials of the Communist-dominated World Health Organization that first advised the lockdowns have done, that lockdowns do too much positive harm to be a viable strategy in combatting the spread of infectious disease.   As he has done many times in the past, however, Roussin has flip-flopped.   When the media began to hype the rise in case numbers, he began imposing restrictions, then piling restrictions upon the previous restrictions, each more ineffective than the last, until finally we were back under full provincial lockdown and a more severe one than the earlier to boot.   He has tried to disguise this by calling it other things than a lockdown.   While the rose of Shakespeare's Juliet may smell as sweet under any other name, the pungent stink of lockdown remains attached to Roussin's public health orders whatever he chooses to call them.

When he placed us back into lockdown, restaurants were forced to close their dining rooms again - the rapid approach of winter makes patios impractical - bars, theaters and gyms had to close, and small retailers of goods deemed "non-essential", except to the extent that they could provide curbside pickup and/or delivery, were ordered to close as well.

When this happened a number of small businesses complained -and rightly so - that this would drive them out of business.  They had not been able to fully recuperate from the previous lockdown, especially since, to be allowed to re-open, they had to strictly limit the number of people allowed inside and make all sorts of other changes, sometimes rather expensive ones.   These business owners drew attention to the fact that the big box stores which are part of large chains owned by mega-corporations, were allowed to remain open because they sold groceries and medicine and other "essentials" but they also sold the sort of things the small retailers that were ordered to close specialized in.   This, the small businesses argued, gave an unfair advantage to the larger stores which, unlike themselves, have the resources to survive a lockdown.   It has also been pointed out that Roussin's orders made no sense because someone is far more likely to catch the virus in a large supermarket than in a small store that in compliance with the previous, crippling, public health orders, could only allow a few people in at a time.

All of this was perfectly fair, reasonable and legitimate.   The government led by the phony Conservative Brian Pallister, however, decided to redress the situation, not by doing anything that would help the small stores, such as allowing them to remain open, but by taking a page from the book of Gretchen Whitmer, liberal Democrat Governor of Michigan, by telling the big stores that they could no longer sell "non-essential" goods.

There are two things wrong with this approach.

The first, which has already been stated but is worth repeating, is that this does nothing, absolutely nothing, to help the small stores which Roussin's evil public health orders - yes, they are evil - has so grievously injured by placing their solvency in jeopardy. Preventing other people from selling what they would  have sold if they were allowed to be open will not help them in any way to survive the month of forced closure.

The second problem with this whole approach is that the distinction between "essential" and "non-essential" is just as wrong and nonsensical when applied to goods and services as it is when applied to the businesses that sell them.   Government is not competent to decide for everybody what is "essential" and what is "non-essential".   While there are some basic needs that are common to all  people, the sum total of any given person's needs will differ from the sum total of the next person's needs, because people are different and have different needs.   Government is capable of identifying the common needs of all people, but not the specific needs of each and every person whom they govern.   Even a city's government would be incapable of this, much less the government of a province the size of Manitoba.   Ludwig von Mises' argument that centrally planned socialist economies cannot arrive at just prices for goods because they lack any mechanism, such as exists in the market, for accurately processing consumers' subjective preferences applies as much here as in its original context. (1)  All "one size fits all" decisions made by government and imposed on everyone are bad.   This is the lesson of the myth of Procrustes.   Pallister and Roussin would do well to study that ancient story and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s modern update, Harrison Bergeron, until they understand it.   

Pallister was interviewed on television a few days before the ban on "non-essential goods" which, coming as it does at this time of year, translates into a ban on Christmas shopping, perhaps as a prelude to an even Grinchier move, was announced.   In the snotty, arrogant, bullying tone of voice that has become all too common with him as of late, he lectured Manitobans that stores had been allowed to remain open so they could buy their groceries, not a new stereo system.   As grating as his hubris is - his whole stinking attitude of I am allowing these stores, which I am perfectly in my right closing, to stay open, so do as I say, you ingrates - there are those, probably many, who would be inclined to think that he has correctly distinguished between "essential" and "non-essential" here.   People cannot live without food - they can get by without stereos and other entertainment technology.   Such people, however, have not thought the matter through as thoroughly as it warrants.

The reasoning that groceries are "essential" because people cannot live without food, but entertainment technology is "non-essential" because we can survive without it, while it might be true under ordinary circumstances is invalidated by those of the lockdown.   Pallister has ordered everyone to stay home for a month.   He does not want them  socializing during that month.   Socializing outside of the immediate household has been forbidden.   All of the "third places" as Ray Oldenburg used the term - places other than home or work such as churches, coffee shops, libraries, etc. where people meet and socialize in a more relaxed, neutral atmosphere - have been closed.   There are many more people now than in previous times who live by themselves.    Under this combination of circumstances entertainment technology no longer seems so "non-essential".   Imagine someone who lives by himself, whose job has been deemed non-essential, who can no longer go to any of his regular haunts, and whose television breaks down the first day of lockdown.   With a month of lockdown ahead of him, he cannot replace the television because Pallister and Roussin, the people imposing these conditions on him, consider it to be "non-essential".

Rather than helping small businesses, all that Pallister's ban on the in-person selling of "non-essential" goods will accomplish will be to drive the entire market for such goods online.   If we think that saving small, family-owned, local businesses is a good things, which is one of the rare times when communitarians of the right, such as myself, and communitarians of the left, agree, this as a further step down the same wrong road in which huge, corporate owned, and unrooted chain retailers  represent an earlier step.   

The bottom line is that governments are not competent at deciding for each and every person what is "essential" and "non-essential" and ought not to try.   Socialists may think otherwise, but we have a socialist party in Manitoba already, the NDP, and we don't need the Conservatives following their example.   

If they really want to help the small stores they will lift this Satanic lockdown and allow those stores to re-open.

(1) See Mises' Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949) and Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922, English 1936).

A Question of Style and Substance

When William F. Buckley Jr., having assembled an impressive team of right-of-centre men of letters such as his eccentric Yale mentor Willmoore Kendall, ex-Trotskyist Machiavellian Cold War analyst James Burnham, and Austrian Catholic royalist aristocrat Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, launched his journal National Review in 1955, he declared in its statement of purpose that it “stands athwart history, yelling Stop”. Many, impressed by Buckley’s rhetoric but not by the magazine’s subsequent performance, especially since it has reversed itself on many of the positions it took in the 1950s and 1960s, have suggested that this should read “stands athwart history, yelling ‘slow down’”. Personally, I think that Buckley was somewhat misguided from the beginning and that a nobler purpose would have been to “stand athwart history, yelling ‘turn this sucker around, its heading in the wrong direction.’”

National Review quickly became the flagship publication of the intellectual wing of the American conservative movement which at the time was a loose, “big tent”, coalition of disparate groups and individuals united by their common foes: welfare socialism, International Communism at home and abroad, and the forces of social, moral, cultural, and civilization decay that had begun to manifest themselves in such forms as the sexual revolution and feminism. Many of the elements of this movement were actually liberals in the older, nineteenth century sense of the term, such as the economists of the Chicago and Austrian schools respectively, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises. Others were conservative in the traditional sense of the term, including the aforementioned Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and the other Catholic monarchists who had fled the Nazi and Communist occupations of Europe. There were also American born traditionalists who combined elements of traditional conservatism and classical liberalism. In the eighteenth century, the classical liberal or Whig statesman, Edmund Burke, had borrowed the arguments of the Tories, or classical conservatives, for tradition, order, and prescriptive institutions such as the British monarchy and established church, to defend these against the kind of fanaticism that had spawned the violence and destruction of the French Revolution. Russell Kirk, an American disciple of Burke’s, adapted these arguments into a defence of the liberal, republican, institutions of his own country, the United States.

Realizing that a movement needs to be united around something positive rather than merely a common set of enemies, National Review promoted an idea called fusionism, developed by one of its original editorial staff Frank S. Meyer as a synthesis of classical conservatism and classical liberalism that would defend tradition and freedom at the same time. At this point, lest anyone think that the title of my website is a nod to this idea, I should say that I chose “Throne, Altar, Liberty” as a title to advance a different idea – the idea that it is the traditional institutions of monarchy and established religion which provide the necessary foundation and context for personal freedom and that therefore it is and always has been the Tory, the champion of these institutions, who is the true friend of freedom and that he does not need to borrow from the vain philosophies of John Locke and J. S. Mill in order to be such.

Initially, National Review took bold and daring stands against the progressive liberal consensus that the rest of the media was trying to build on a number of hot button issues. It stood up for the Southern states when everyone else was seeking to pillory them, refused to jump on the Martin Luther King Jr. bandwagon, challenged the wisdom and justice of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, defended scientists and academics who did not doctor the facts about matters such as IQ to conform to the neo-Lysenkoism that had become official dogma, and poured contempt on international efforts to bully Rhodesia and Southern Africa into accepting black majoritarian rule. Over the years however, it seems to have toned down its rhetoric, watered down its message, and even reversed its position on a number of issues. On a number of occasions it has jettisoned writers and editors over controversial positions they have taken – examples include Joe Sobran on Israel and the Middle East in the early 1990s and Peter Brimelow and John O’Sullivan on mass Third World immigration in the late 1990s.

Sometimes the magazine supports a candidate in the primaries for an American presidential election – Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan as examples – and sometimes it does not. This year it has chosen to go the route of waging a campaign of opposition against a candidate, the candidate in question being Donald Trump. Last week it posted to its website an official statement from the magazine’s editors entitled “Against Trump”, giving reasons why they feel that conservatives should not support the Donald, as well as a symposium of several conservative figures, who for one reason or another are not in favour of Donald Trump.

Now, as a patriotic Canadian and a firm royalist who does not approve of republics and presidents, I do not, of course, have a proverbial dog in the fight that is the American presidential election. I do confess, however, to having greatly enjoyed watching from up north as Donald Trump has enraged the feminists, open borders liberals, anti-racists, and all the other more-enlightened-than-thou, politically correct, killjoys who are the bane of post-modern existence. Perhaps it is because of this that I am inclined to see National Review’s anti-Trump campaign as yet another example of the magazine’s lamentable decline from the cutting edge challenger of the progressive zeitgeist that it once was.

The editors’ argument against Trump could be summarized in the complaint that he is a populist rather than a conservative. This is true in itself, and the distinction is an important one, but it does not follow from this that conservatives ought not to support Trump. Conservatism seeks to preserve, protect, and pass on the valuable institutions and traditions that have been passed on from the past, whereas populism seeks to mobilize and harness discontent on the part of the populace with the powers that be. It is difficult to reconcile these two projects, and historically the conservative has wisely viewed populism with suspicion because of the great destructive potential of the forces it wishes to unleash. Nevertheless, the reconciliation of the protection of heritage with the giving voice to popular outrage is not impossible, and National Review need look no further than their late former publisher, William Rusher, for a man who successfully combined traditionalism and populist activism. Up here, the last decent man to serve as Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, was another example. He was on the one hand a prairie populist, who spoke out on behalf of rural, small town and farming, communities and regions against the arrogance of the money and business interests in central Canada and on the other hand a Tory firmly committed to Canada and her traditional institutions, such as Parliament and the monarchy. Indeed, when a powerful elite makes itself the enemy of the traditions and institutions the conservative cherishes, he is forced into the position where he must join forces to some extent with populism.

Interestingly, the editors of National Review themselves provide, albeit unintentionally, evidence that this is in fact the present situation. They refer, in one paragraph, to the “permanent things”, an expression from T. S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society that Russell Kirk had borrowed to indicate the things which the conservative cherishes and guards. As examples of the permanent things they give “constitutional government, marriage and the right to life.” Leaving aside the fact that in recent years National Review has often seemed to treat these things as expendable rather than permanent, having posted less than a year ago a screed arguing for capitulation to liberalism on a major point touching the second of them, is there any serious doubt that the predominate elites in the United States and the rest of the Western world have aligned themselves against marriage and the right to life?

Now to the preceding argument it may be objected that Donald Trump is not campaigning on a pro-life, pro-marriage platform but on a nativist, anti-immigration, platform. This is true, but in answer to this objection I would respond, first of all, by observing that it is the same elites who have set themselves against marriage and the right to life who are the ones who believe in a world without borders, in exporting jobs to the Third World and importing workers from the Third World, and who cannot stand the thought of closing the borders to any group of people even if doing so is an eminently sensible and obvious thing to do from the perspective of national security. Secondly, I would argue that immigration is obviously another matter on which conservatives should join forces with populism.

As recently as one hundred years ago, there was broad agreement across the political spectrum that it was countries who let immigrants in rather than deciding after the fact what to do with immigrants who let themselves in and however many immigrants a country let in to meet her needs at the time immigration should not fundamentally change the character of the country. A little over half a century ago, when liberals across the Western world began to push for more relaxed immigration policies, they still gave lip service to the old consensus, arguing that their policies would not drastically change the character of their countries, while conservatives, most notably those who were the farthest thing from populist rabble-rousers such as classical scholar-turned-High Tory statesman Enoch Powell in the UK and award-winning Catholic legitimist novelist Jean Raspail in France, argued that it would, and that it should not be allowed to happen. Now that liberal immigration is so changing the character of our countries that it is too obvious to pretend that it is not taking place, the new liberal line of argument is “so what, you are a racist if you have a problem with it.”

That conservatives, of all people, should be opposed to policies that are radically changing the character of our countries, is something of which the present editors of National Review are clearly aware. They therefore do not argue for an outright open-borders position but instead complain that Donald Trump’s proposals are unworkable, his position irresponsible, and his rhetoric vulgar. Whether his proposals would work or not are a matter for discussion and debate, although I think the arguments that they would not are incredibly weak.

The question that remains is do the editors of National Review, agree in substance with the old consensus that it is countries who will decide who they let in, that they will decide according to their own needs, and however many they decide they will not allow the fundamental character of their countries to be changed by immigration, and merely object to the vulgarity of Donald Trump’s populist style? Or is it rather that they disagree with the old consensus, and are really open-borders, one-world, liberals who are using Trump’s vulgar style as a pretext in a desperate campaign against the first man in decades who seems capable of shattering the new, liberal, consensus?

The Free Trade Cult

I started Throne, Altar, Liberty in May of 2010, but I had been writing essays on political, theological, and cultural topics for at least a year before then. I distributed these to friends through e-mail and Facebook. Since starting Throne, Altar, Liberty I have reposted several of these earlier essays here. Last year in April and May, for example, I posted nine of them, with new introductions, as a series entitled “GTN Tory Classics”. My main reason for doing this is that I did not want Throne, Altar, Liberty to sit dormant while I researched a couple of topics that I wished to write new essays on.

Among the essays reposted last year, were several from an eight-part series on economic subjects that I had written in 2009. I had intended to include the final essay in that series, “The Free Trade Cult”, but for some reason or another neglected to so. Since I once again wish to buy myself time to complete some new essays, I will make up for that neglect by posting it now.

My argument against free trade in this essay, is built upon the fact that history has demonstrated that free trade does not work the way it is supposed to. Liberalism – and free trade is the cornerstone of economic liberalism – predicts that the more countries reduce barriers to trade the more they will prosper. History, however, shows the opposite. Countries that are industrialized or are undergoing industrialization, become economically strong under protection and decline under free trade. I pointed to two elements of liberal theory as the explanation for why free trade does not work – liberalism’s placing the individual over the family, community, and nation and placing consumption over production.

Liberalism’s exaltation of consumption over production is derived from liberalism’s desire to be fair. Protectionism is not fair. I don’t think anybody ever claimed that it was. A tariff on milk benefits domestic dairy producers at the expense of foreign dairy producers and all domestic consumers of dairy products. A tariff on grain benefits domestic grain producers at the expense of foreign grain producers and all domestic consumers of grain. The same can be said for any tariff on any product. The unfairness of this is manifest for anyone to see.

Free trade, liberalism claims, is fair. Under free trade domestic and foreign producers compete in the market, with no unfair advantage given to either. The advantage is rather to the consumer, who is able to buy goods at a lower price. Since the consumers of any particular good will always outnumber the producers of that same good, free trade is the fairest system possible.

There is a certain logic to this, and even a certain truth. No false doctrine is ever entirely false – otherwise, nobody would ever be deceived, by it. The problem is that this kind of reasoning leads inevitably to the conclusion that the economy should favour consumption over production. It is true in one sense, that the producer must be the servant of the consumer. If a producer were to decide that he was going to produce whatever he wanted regardless of whether anyone else wanted it, and so begin manufacturing such things as manure-flavoured licorice, pills that do nothing but enhance the pain from which one is already suffering, and record albums such as “Chalkboard Scratching: the Greatest Hits”, he would not remain in business very long. The only exception to this rule that comes immediately to mind is the contemporary artist, who is subsidized at the taxpayer’s expense by an arts council that believes that artists are entitled to public support and that restrictions on the artist’s output, such as that it should be something people want to see or hear, squelch creativity.

If it is true that production should and must be the servant of consumption, it is only true, as Evelyn Waugh’s Mr. Milner said to Lord Copper, “up to a point”. Looked at from a different angle, production must take precedence over consumption. Some forms of consumption, such as that of food and drink, are necessary to sustain our existence, whereas other forms of consumption, such as that of the products of the entertainment industry, are not. Whether necessary or not, however, consumption cannot take place without production. If we encounter a person who consumes without producing anything by living off of what he has previously accumulated or by borrowing from others we know that that person will not be able to do so indefinitely. Eventually, he will run out of accumulated resources, credit, or both. Then he must become productive or die.

That this is true of individual persons is not disputed. It is also true of countries. A country cannot survive long with an economy that consists primarily of moving existing wealth around and consuming goods that are produced elsewhere. Only production can increase wealth – consumption always decreases it. The liberal, who seems only the individual as being real and not the country, does not appear to recognize this. He also, and for the same reason, is blind to the fact that in practice, his doctrine, like that of the protectionist he so despises, does actually work to the benefit of one group of producers against another. Large, multinational or transnational companies, that answer to the laws of no one country in particular, are given an advantage over the smaller domestic producers of any country, by free trade.

At some point in the future I will likely compose an essay exploring the reasons why the classical liberal concept of the free market works better within the context of a national economy than when it is extended internationally. For now, I give you "The Free Trade Cult". - GTN

The Free Trade Cult


By Gerry T. Neal
June 30, 2009

Although there is much that economists disagree on, one thing that unites most if not all mainstream schools of economic thought is a belief in free trade. Free trade is one of the earliest concepts of modern economics. Adam Smith argued in the 18th Century that a country would be foolish to produce at home what it is cheaper to import from abroad. David Ricardo built on this theory in the 19th Century and Richard Cobden made it his life’s goal to see free trade implemented.

Libertarian schools of economics like the Chicago School of the late Milton Friedman and the Austrian School of Mises, Hayek and Rothbard believe devoutly in free trade. But so does Paul Krugman, the most prominent contemporary exponent of Keynesianism. Free trade, we find, gets a lot of support from people who are otherwise not big fans of laissez faire. Liberal columnist for the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, is a noted advocate of globalization. American Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and William J. Clinton all devoutly believed in international free trade while supporting massive state intervention in the domestic economy.

Free trade’s wide, cross-spectrum support base, among political and economical theorists may suggest to many that it is a basic concept, obviously true, that only a fool would question.

But is it? What is free trade, how is it supposed to work, and where is the evidence that it does work?

Free trade is the expansion of the concept of the free market across international borders. At the time free trade was first being proposed as a theory the Western nations practiced an economic policy known as mercantilism. Mercantilism was the idea that to become wealthy a nation needed to amass gold and silver, and that the way to do so was to have a trade surplus, i.e., to have more products flowing out of your country than flow in. The powers of Europe sought to accomplish this by subsidizing exports and restricting imports by quotas, tariffs, and other measures that today are known as protectionism.

Adam Smith, in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, challenged mercantilist thought. Wealth, he argued, was the result of production and production was enhanced by the division of labor and specialization. These, in turn, were made possible by trade, which allowed the specialist to concentrate on producing one thing and trading his surplus for everything else he needed. Trade, operates best when buyers and sellers are allowed to come to their own agreements as to price rather than having them set by government.

This was the case for the free market and Smith argued that it applied to nations as well as to individuals within a nation. Tariffs, quotas, etc., Smith argued, only prevent a country from obtaining what they need at the lowest price possible, and so rather than enriching a country, impoverished it.

The argument seems impeccable on paper. If it is true then observing the results of free trade versus protection in practice should bear the theory out. After all, all other predictions of laissez faire theory can be demonstrated to be correct. Laissez faire theory says that minimum wage laws do nothing but eliminate jobs that are not worth minimum wage to the employer, usually starter jobs. It says that price controls cause shortages. It says that rent controls lead to housing shortages and neighborhoods decaying into slums. We can point to case after case where these interventionist measures have had exactly these outcomes.

What have been the results of free trade?

The United Kingdom was the first country to put the theory into practice. This began with the repeal of the Corn Laws, which protected British agriculture from imports, in 1846. This was accomplished by the government of Sir Robert Peel after relentless campaigning by Richard Cobden, “The Apostle of Free Trade” and a league of Manchester manufacturers he led. Over the next two decades the UK would lower its tariffs to the point where the average import duty on the vast majority of goods was 0. This would remain UK policy until the first World War.

Did this help or harm Britain?

The UK was the home of the Industrial Revolution, which had started there in the late 18th Century. At the time Britain began her experiment in free trade she dominated the world of manufacturing. Her steel and textile industries were surpassed by none. By the time her long experiment in free trade came to an end she had been eclipsed by another industrial power – the United States of America.

What was America’s trade policy?

The USA had always been protectionist, but during the period when the UK was practicing unilateral free trade it was taking protectionism to an all time high. The 1860’s had seen the rise of the Republican Party, which succeeded in putting into practice the “American system” of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay. The main feature of the “American system” was a tariff wall protecting American industry. Following the Republican institution of this system the average tariff on manufactured goods was around 45%.

Did this help or hurt America?

The century from 1870 to 1970 is often called America’s “Golden Age”. As America became the world’s leading industrial power, profits and wages rose simultaneously as did the average American standard of living. When the War came, and the UK was no longer producing enough to meet her own needs, it was to the USA that she looked for help – help the USA was able to provide.

How does the free trader explain that?

“Other factors were involved”. “That is a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument”.

Perhaps. But the USA wasn’t the only country that fared well under protection in that era. In 1879 Otto von Bismark introduced economic nationalism based upon the American system to Germany. The same year the Conservatives brought in protectionism here in Canada. Both countries did very well under high tariffs.

What happened when America abandoned protection?

FDR, the author of American socialism, obtained for the American president the right to lower tariffs in negotiating treaties with other countries. This set the stage for America’s post-WWII retreat from protectionism. During this period of increased free trade America’s GNP and GDP have continued to rise but the average real wage (wages adjusted for inflation) has gone down as America’s manufacturing base has shrunk and her domestic economy has increasingly come to be based on services.

This era has seen the rise of new industrial giants – most notably Japan. Japan practices protection.

What have the free traders missed? What is wrong with their theory? Why are the results so different from what laissez faire would predict here when elsewhere laissez faire theory is so accurate?

The basic problem with free trade is that it is derived from classical liberal ideology. To classical liberalism individuals are all that matters – families, communities, and nations don’t count. Especially nations.

With the exception of Adam Smith (who made numerous exceptions to his theory of free trade) the classical free traders were contemptuous of nations. They believed in an enlightened age to come in which international trade would foster international friendship, war would disappear, there would be world peace, and we would all be one.

In the real world, however, nations matter. And it matters very much, to a nation, who produces the goods that it consumes. Remember that production creates wealth, consumption uses it up. Consuming more than you produce is not the path to prosperity, for individuals or for nations. It is the path to bankruptcy.

Free trade ideology insists that free trade is superior because it favors the consumer with low prices, whereas protection favors the producer with high prices. Everybody is a consumer, the free trader’s argue, but not everybody is a producer, so it is best to do what is in the interests of the consumer. Free traders are nothing if they are not utilitarian.

But how is the consumer going to pay for what he consumes? The answer for the last few decades has been cheap credit. That cannot last forever, however – or much longer, for that matter, if the recent economic crisis is any indication.

A policy that favors consumption over production is a policy that will doom your country to poverty.

A country that wishes to survive, that does not want to bring its people down into poverty, must encourage production, and it must produce more than it consumes. Socialists have attempted to do this by having their government’s seize control of the economy and try to plan it from the top down to be more efficient. All such experiments have been radical failures.

Protection, on the other hand, is historically associated with high productivity.

Today our government’s have got it backwards. They are removing barriers to international trade while doing everything in their power to intervene in their domestic markets with restrictions, and legislation, and red tape. They should be doing the exact opposite – protecting domestic producers while otherwise practicing laissez faire.

But our government’s no longer care about their countries. In lowering tariffs and other protective measures so as to free up international trade, they have surrendered part of their sovereignty to international institutions. The most complete form of this surrender of national sovereignty can be seen in the European Union. But NAFTA provides the basis for a future North American equivalent. On a global basis the long series of GATT talks resulted in the creation of the World Trade Organization. The path down which the free traders are taking us is clear: one market, one currency, one government.

Libertarian free traders will argue that what we are seeing in these developments is not true “free trade” as described in theory, but governments colluding to grant special trade privileges to favored corporations. That is certainly true but it may not be relevant. A one world system – dare I say “New World Order” - is exactly what David Ricardo, Richard Cobden, and the other formulators of classical free trade theory were hoping for.

It will not be the rosy paradise they had in mind however.

Those who do not want to live under the global regime of a global government, who prefer living in their own sovereign countries, and wish to see those countries prosper, should not support a global economy.

GTN Tory Classics No. 6: Boom and Bust

The following essay, “Boom and Bust”, was the second in the seven-part series on economics I wrote in 2009. The year previously the American subprime mortgage crisis which had been brought on by the bursting of the real estate bubble had escalated into a much larger financial collapse. The American economy had begun to tank and it was dragging the global economy down with it. What caused this? Has it happened before? Is there a way out of this crisis? Can this sort of thing be prevented in the future?

These were the questions that were foremost in people’s minds at the time. In February of 2009, Regnery Publishing released a book by Dr. Thomas E. Woods Jr., a paleolibertarian (1) historian on the faculty of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, entitled Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. I had read this book about a month and a half before writing this essay. I thought – and still think – it was the most sensible thing I had read on the subject. I lent my copy out a number of times and bought another copy as a Christmas gift for a relative later that year.

This essay was written not as a review but as a recommendation of Woods book and of the Austrian School’s explanation of the business cycle. I do not agree with the Austrian School about everything, not being a philosophical liberal (2), but of all the free-market economic schools I find myself agreeing the Austrians most often.

(1) A paleolibertarian is someone who is culturally conservative and politically/economically a classical liberal or anarcho-capitalist.

(2) A philosophical liberal believes that human beings are first and fundamentally individuals and that all social institutions and groups are created by individuals for individuals and should operate on a voluntarily contractual basis. A philosophical conservative believes that society is organic, that the family comes before the individual, that the most important social relationships are permanent rather than voluntary and contractual, and that many if not most social institutions should be modeled after the family rather than the business deal.


Boom and Bust


By Gerry T. Neal
June 2, 2009

Once upon a time, in a land far away, some people discovered the secret to getting rich fast. Their houses, they discovered, had gone up in value since the day they bought them, so they sold them off at a profit, bought a new house, and started the process over again. The idea caught on and pretty soon people had forgotten that the purpose of houses was not to generate money but to provide homes for them and their families.

Not everyone was happy in this land, however. Some people were shut out of the action because they could not afford to buy a house. Furthermore they were not good candidates for bank loans – they had no collateral, worked low-paying jobs at best, and did not have enough for a down payment even if they were granted a mortgage. With the prices of real estate going up, their situation appeared hopeless.

But then someone got the idea that the ruler of their country ought to do something about this. Appointing himself the representative of the poor people he went to the ruler and complained. “Its not fair!” he said. “These people are being discriminated against because they are poor and because of the color of their skin. Everybody has the right to own their own house. You need to make sure these people get their houses – if you don’t I’ll throw a big stink and call you racist. Now what are you going to do about it?”

This threat terrified the ruler who promised to do something about it immediately. So he sat down and thought about what he could do. Then he called a press conference and announced that he was starting a program which would enable the poor to own their own homes. He ordered the banks to give mortgages to poor people from “disadvantaged minority groups” without demanding a down payment. To ensure the banks cooperation he asked his friends Fanny and Freddie to help him out.

Fanny and Freddie had an interesting business. They went to the banks and bought out their mortgages, i.e., they paid the banks the equivalent of the money they had loaned out in mortgages so that the mortgage payments would come to them instead of the banks. They then put all these mortgages together into large funds and sold off shares in these funds on the securities market.

Everybody lived happily ever after, right?

Well, not exactly. One day the prices of houses stopped going up. This not only threw a monkey wrench into people’s get rich schemes, it left many of them with mortgages that were worth more than their house. And so the defaults began. It got so bad that Fanny and Freddie went broke and asked their friend the ruler to help them out. The ruler decided that the best way to help them out was to buy their business from them and cover their losses with tax money.

Then several of Fanny and Freddie’s friends in the financial industry asked for the same consideration.

And after the ruler had bailed them out, everyone else came asking for a handout too.

At this point, the people were so fed up with way the ruler was mishandling things they got rid of him and chose a new leader. They chose a young, charismatic, new leader, who promised that he would give them “change”. And when that young man was secure in office he did exactly the same thing as the old ruler.

So what can we learn from this story?

It was the involvement of government that turned this situation into a major fiasco. It would seem then the obvious lesson to take from this is that government “solutions” to economic problems only make the situation worse.

This is exactly what economists of the Austrian School have been telling us for over a century now. These economists saw the not-so-fictional crisis described above coming in advance. They also saw the Great Depression coming. Perhaps its time we paid more attention to what they are saying.

The Austrian School of Economics began at the University of Vienna in the late 19th Century with economics professor Carl Menger. Its most famous representatives, however, would be 20th Century economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrick August von Hayek. Mises is the author of, among other books, Human Action the most exhaustive treatise on Austrian economic theory available. Hayek is the Nobel Prize winning author of the best selling and much more readable The Road to Serfdom. In North America their theories have been promoted primarily by libertarians like the late Murray N. Rothbard and Lew Rockwell.

Austrian economists consider themselves to be liberals in the classical (19th Century) sense of the term. Their thinking displays both the strengths and the weaknesses of classical liberal thought. Foremost among those weaknesses is their tendency towards the belief that people matter only as individuals, that the interests of families, communities, and any other “groups” should be subservient to the interests of individuals. Foremost among their strengths is their belief in small, limited, government and maximum personal freedom.

The Austrians developed the best theoretical defense of the free market against state economic planning in all of its various forms that we have. This defense is based on the subjective theory of value, the idea that in a market situation the value of a good or service to both seller and buyer, is not something that can be objectively determined based on the intrinsic quality of the good or service but is based entirely on how much the seller and buyer value the good or service in relation to what they are willing to accept/give up in exchange for it.

But the Austrians’ uncanny ability to predict economic crises like the Great Depression and the current situation is due to their theory of the business cycle.

The conventional explanation of the business cycle, in which a boom period of economic expansion is followed by a bust period of economic contraction, is that it is an inevitable product of the free market.

The Austrians say otherwise. The business cycle, they say, is caused by banks, especially government chartered central banks. Banks lend money to investors and entrepreneurs out of the money people place in savings accounts. The interest rate on these loans is supposed to be an indication of how much people are saving as opposed to spending at a given time, giving investors/entrepreneurs an indication of what kind of ventures are likely to succeed. But when a bank starts lending out of its pay-on-demand reserves, what is known as fractional reserve banking takes place. This artificially lowers the interest rate giving the impression that people are saving more than they are, tricking investors into putting their money into projects appropriate for a period of savings. This leads to economic booms in the areas this money is being invested in – booms that must inevitably give way to busts.

Non-Austrian economists, especially Keynesians, scoff at this theory.

But none of them ever saw an economic disaster coming in advance.

For more on this subject I recommend Dr. Thomas E. Woods Jr.’s excellent book Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse (Regnery Publishing: Washington D.C., 2009). It is a small book, brief and written for the economic layman. It is must reading for anyone wishing to understand what is going on in the current economic crisis.

The Testimony of a Tory – A Brief Memoir

Charley Reese, who was an op-ed writer for the Orlando Sentinel whose thrice-weekly column was syndicated by King Features until his retirement a few years ago, was a conservative writer full of old fashioned “horse sense”. He believed that writers owed it to their readers to make a statement of where they stood once a year, and regularly did so in a column at the beginning of every year. Very few writers seem to have picked up on the concept – Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist pastor who has run for US President on the Constitution Party ticket is one who has – but I think it is a good idea. Last year, I began the year with an essay entitled “Here I Stand” in which I stated my basic political, religious and cultural beliefs. I thought that this year I would do it a bit differently, with an autobiographical essay explaining how I arrived at my beliefs.

I do not remember a time in my life when I was not a conservative or reactionary of one sort or another. Sir Winston Churchill would probably say that that means I have no heart. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about that. A conservative is someone who opposes unnecessary change – poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman once said that he was a conservative in the truest sense because he believed all change was for the worst. A reactionary is the opposite of a progressive. A progressive believes that the wave of changes – educational, social, cultural, scientific, technological – that we associate with the concept of the “Modern” are advancements, are for the better, and are gradually leading mankind onward and upward, to bigger and better things, in a future paradise to be attained by human achievement. A reactionary believes the exact opposite of that – that this wave of changes has often been for the worse, that even things which are unquestionably improvements have come to us at a heavy cost which we do not fully realize and that what we have gained may not have been worth the price. I must be both of these things by instinct because I have been both for as long as I can remember, long before I was able to formulate it in that way.

I grew up on a farm in southwestern Manitoba, near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers. This undoubtedly contributed to my conservatism although not in the way a progressive would think. I very early developed a prejudice in favour of rural life and against urban life, that has stuck with me to this very day, although I have lived in Winnipeg, the capital city of Manitoba, for eleven and a half years now. To prefer the agricultural over the industrial, the rural over the urban, the farm and village over the big city, is a basic conservative prejudice. I use the word prejudice quite deliberately. Progressives object to prejudice, regarding it as being intrinsically bad and ignoring the many prejudices that underlie their own way of thinking. A conservative, while acknowledging that there are bad prejudices as well as good prejudices, embraces prejudice as an essential component of human nature that serves a necessary purpose – to provide man with access to the information necessary to make a quick judgement when there is no time to collect facts and calculate the most rational decision. Prejudice can err, but so can reason, and prejudice informed by the traditions which convey the accumulated wisdom and experience of the ages from generation to generation will err less often then reason when reason is directed by the arrogant notion that logic can find the solution to all problems, when allowed to operate free of the influence of the wisdom of man contained in common sense, customs and habits, traditions and mores, legends and myths and folklore.

Prejudice and right reason need not be in conflict, however, and there are plenty of rational reasons for preferring the country over the city. There is a far greater amount of social capital in rural neighborhoods, where people can safely leave their houses and cars unlocked, and where everybody knows everybody else and all their relatives too. Not everybody who grows up in such a setting comes to love the country over the city, and many have developed the reverse prejudice for some reason or another. The city is not all bad, and I have come to develop an affection of sorts for Winnipeg, although I will probably regard my living here as a sort of Babylonian captivity for the rest of my life.

Manitoba is located in Canada and I also developed a strong Canadian patriotism very early. This does not mean that I necessary like everything about Canada, or agree with everything her government does. Far from it. The things I have come to dislike about my country however – the welfarism, the socialism of marketing board monopolies, the draconian human rights laws, the asinine gun control laws which target farmers and hunters and do nothing to prevent criminal violence – I regard as blemishes on the best country in the world, and despise them for that very reason. These things are not the essence of Canada, they do not define Canada, and nothing infuriates me more than to hear a so-called “conservative” in Canada, express his animosity towards these things in terms of hatred towards Canada herself.

The Canada I grew to love in my early years, was a basically conservative country. I came to love the Canada of the United Empire Loyalists, who remained loyal to a good king when some of his other North American subjects, misled by deism and freemasonry, revolted. Loyalty is a conservative virtue, and revolutions, conservatives since Aristotle have understood, nearly always make things worse. I came to love the Canada who, no longer automatically at war whenever Great Britain was since the 1931 Statute of Westminster, nevertheless declared war on Nazi Germany on September 10, 1939, out of loyalty to her king and mother country. Some might say that the Canada I love no longer exists and indeed, that it passed out of existence before I was even born. I disagree. One could still see that Canada in the rural areas in which I grew up and I am not convinced that it is completely gone even today.

I went to school in Oak River up until grade nine, and from grade ten to twelve went to the high school in Rivers. I remember my earliest years in school, when we began the day with O Canada and the Lord’s Prayer, and ended the day with God Save the Queen. At the time O Canada had only recently been officially declared the national anthem and the Maple Leaf Forever would have been a better choice, but these are quibbles. We had Bible stories read to us in the morning in the early grades – something which would presumably be considered a “hate crime” today and probably was in urban areas even then. My point is that in all of this we see that the old Canada was still alive in the rural Canada of the early ‘80’s.

It was not until after college that I read Aristotle’s Politics and Polybius’ Histories and discovered Aristotle’s hypothesis, enthusiastically endorsed by Polybius, that the best possible constitution for a state would be a mixed constitution which combined a king, an aristocracy, and a democracy. Such a constitution was theoretical in Aristotle’s day, but it is the exact form of government which had evolved in the United Kingdom and which the Fathers of Confederation adapted from Britain for Canada. Since my childhood I have regarded the British and Canadian constitution of parliamentary monarchy as the best form of government the world has ever known. This began as a prejudice because it was the government of my own country, the country I loved. When I read Aristotle and Polybius, however, I realized that this was one more instance in which prejudice and reason need not be in conflict.

I have of course, been a monarchist, both in the sense of preferring a constitution with a royal head of state, and in the sense of loyalty to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, all my life. I would be ashamed to call myself a conservative were it otherwise. While on Christmas vacation this last week, I visited a great aunt, the sister of my maternal grandmother, in Brandon. Prince Philip had been hospitalized over Christmas and this got us talking about the royal family, about the Queen, Prince Charles and Di, Kate and William. My aunt asked me if I thought the British would ever get rid of the monarchy. My answer was “I hope not, and hope the fools in this country who want to separate Canada from the Crown and make us a republic never get their way as well”. She lighted up and said “good for you, I feel the same way”. This is an aunt who regularly votes NDP. This conversation reminded me of something the great British Tory statesman Enoch Powell once said: “there are many good Tories in the Labour Party”.

Do not make the mistake of concluding from all of this that I am a “Red Tory”. As I have said in the past, the colour of Toryism is not Revolutionary Red, but Royal Blue. I despise socialism and welfarism, and if I have been critical of industrial capitalism in my essays it has not been out of sympathy for some kind of socialist alternative. I admire the writings of George Grant, Canada’s greatest conservative philosopher, and agree with much of his philosophy, but I do not agree with his idea that socialism is more conservative than capitalism. Grant was correct in regarding capitalism as a progressive force – he was wrong in rejecting the Marxist’s claim that socialism is more progressive than capitalism.

I will now discuss how my economic views developed. Hopefully I will be able to do so without boring everyone to death.

I was born in 1976 and grew up in a farming community in the 1980’s. At the time, a subsidy war between the European Common Market and the United States was depressing the world price of grain. This may very well be the first factor to contribute to my lifelong dislike for government subsidies and intervention in the market. One of my earliest economic realizations was that labour strikes affect more than just workers and management within a company. They have consequences for third parties as well. If railroad workers strike at the wrong time it can have devastating consequences for farmers. If nurses strike your loved ones can die. Out of this realization my hatred for labour unions was born.

When Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan were negotiating the Canada-US Free Trade agreement I was in favour of it at the time, although I was vaguely aware that this was a reversal of traditional conservative policy. When the talks to turn this agreement into NAFTA began I was suspicious of them, but I did not come to reject free trade on principle until much later. I will explain the reasons for that rejection shortly.

When I graduated high school, I knew that I was in favour of “capitalism”, opposed to “socialism”, and that I despised “communism”. This is basically true to this day, although I would now say that I am in favour of “private enterprise” and “private property” rather than “capitalism” which includes those things but has other connotations as well. I have done much more serious reading on economics since then and as I have done so my reasons for favouring private enterprise and opposing socialism have developed, and hopefully become deeper.

The capitalism I was in favour of in college in the 1990’s was basically the supply-side capitalism of the Reagan and Thatcher years. High taxes and heavy regulations discourage enterprise and productivity, whereas low taxes and low regulations encourage enterprise, productivity, and bring about a broader prosperity. By the end of my college years I had also come to see that for money to be sound, it cannot be fiat money, but must be backed by something like gold, and had come to believe in a flat tax, one rate for everybody. My views on money haven't changed since then but I would now prefer that income tax be replaced altogether by some form of indirect taxation.

After college I did more serious reading in economics. In Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom I found the argument that political freedom requires economic freedom. In Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson I read about how government, which does not produce anything but must pay for its operations by taxes in doing so takes money out of the hands of private people who would put it to other use, therefore, government spending does not contribute anything to the economy (this is an expansion of Bastiat’s “broken window fallacy” argument). In the writings of Ludwig von Mises I learned that governments and other planning bodies cannot devise an economy superior to that produced by private persons, freely contracting with each other in an open market, because they have no way of obtaining all the information necessary to calculate a superior economy or a means to make such a calculation, and that market exchanges are non-zero sum affairs, because each side is trading something they want less for something they want more, therefore both come out ahead. Through my reading I gradually evolved from a supply-side, to a Chicago neo-classical, to an Austrian view of economics.

My economic views remain Austrian with two major exceptions.

The first is the doctrine of free trade which the Austrian school is firmly committed to. What ultimately convinced me that something was wrong with free trade doctrine was a consideration of the history of the practice. The United Kingdom adopted free trade in the middle of the 19th Century when it was the leading manufacturing country in the world. At the same time the United States of America adopted an economic nationalist policy of protective tariffs. In the decades in which these countries held these respective practices the United States overtook the UK as the leading manufacturing power. While this was happening, the UK had convinced several continental European countries to adopt free trade, but Otto von Bismarck chose to follow the American example in the newly unified Germany. Soon the other continental countries were abandoning free trade to follow Germany’s example. In the 20th Century, the United States began to adopt free trade in the presidencies of FDR and JFK. As the USA has moved further in the direction of free trade its manufacturing base has shrunk. Meanwhile Japan came to dominate new high tech industries from behind a protective tariff wall.

Of course free traders will come back and say that it would be committing the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy to conclude that free trade doesn’t work because of all this and that other factors explain these things. This would be more convincing if the pattern were not so consistent.

The second exception is that Austrian school economists are classical liberals. Their liberal worldview is the framework within which they developed their economic views. Classical liberalism is not wrong about everything, but it is wrong on very important matters.

Classical liberalism regards the individual as the basic unit of society, and holds to a contractual view of society in which individuals are prior to all social groups and institutions, and voluntarily agree to form social groups and institutions for their mutual advantage in pursuing their individual good. This is all wrong. The family, not the individual, is the basic unit of society. The family is prior to the individual and the individual is born into the pre-existing family. The most important associations and relationships between people are not voluntary, contractual associations, but permanent relationships based upon blood.

It is the fact that Austrian and other laissez faire economics are derived from liberalism which explains why free trade doctrine works on paper but fails in practice. Liberalism subordinates the family, community, society, and country to the individual and therefore regards the “right” of individuals to enter into voluntary exchanges on their own terms, even across national boundaries, as more important than a country’s need to have a base of domestic producers of essential goods.

If liberalism’s erroneous doctrine of the primacy of the individual is the reason free trade doesn’t work in practice, then why do I argue that Austrian economics is otherwise sound?

The answer is to be found in the nature of liberalism. Liberalism was not, as its proponents purport it to be, the source of the rights and freedoms enjoyed in the English speaking world. Rather it was an attempt to explain those rights and freedoms to a modern world, which under the influence of the so-called “Enlightenment”, had come to reject the religious and cultural framework within which those rights and freedoms had developed. The rights and freedoms of the English speaking world, which protect the individual person from the abuse of state power, arose out of a tradition which began to develop a thousand years prior to the so-called “Enlightenment” and which indeed, draws upon Greco-Roman and Christian influences which are even older. It can be seen in an early stage in the constitution of Alfred the Great of Wessex in the 9th Century, in the pledges by the early Norman kings to govern in accordance with that constitution, in the Magna Carta which reminded their descendants of those pledges and which spelled out some of the basic rights of Englishmen.

The problem with classical liberalism does not lie in its support for these legal protections and freedoms which are among the things I most admire about the English tradition. Its errors are to be found in the secularist theory by which it explains the genesis of these rights and freedoms and of society itself. The truth in economic liberalism (free market capitalism), like these rights and freedoms, comes from the older tradition of freedom . The error in economic liberalism arises out the false theory of liberalism itself.

The economist with whose ideas I am in most sympathy today is Wilhelm Roepke, the German born, Swiss economist, who accepted the free market arguments of his friend and mentor Mises, but argued that they only work within a traditional, moral and social context.

This brings me to the subject of religion. My family, as I grew up, was affiliated with the United Church in Oak River, but except for my mother we seldom attended services. We celebrated the Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter, I was read Bible stories as a child at home and in school, and from this early basic religious education I became familiar with the basic people and events of the Old and New Testament narratives. I was not taught the significance of these events however, and I gradually came to learn this as I entered my teenage years.

I was given a Gideon’s New Testament in school and read many of the books in the religion section of the local public library. These were not all orthodox books, or even all Christian books, but from my reading I came to understand the significance Christianity attached to the person, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I came to understand that Christianity taught that in Jesus Christ, God Himself had become a man, in order to rescue mankind. We needed rescuing because we had rebelled against God and so entered a condition of being lost in sin from which we could not save ourselves. God was able to save us in Christ, however, because Christ, Who was without sin, took our sin upon Himself when He died on the cross, bearing our guilt and our punishment for us, thereby turning man’s lowest act, the murder of the Creator, into the highest act of divine love and mercy whereby we were pardoned of our sins and restored to God’s favour. In Christ’s resurrection, a new life, of freedom and righteousness, was made available for us to share.

When you understand something, you do not necessarily believe it, however. By the time I came to understand the Gospel message, I had developed a sort of skepticism, based upon the idea that science had demonstrated that the Bible could not be taken as being a trustworthy record of events, and I was unable to adopt the mindset which says “well, the Bible might not be factually true, but it is figuratively true” because I realized that such an attitude robbed religion of all authority and simply meant that a person could make up for himself whatever belief he wanted. I could see that happening all around me. My friends and relatives who were regular church attendees seemed to believe whatever they liked and to throw away whatever historical and traditional Christian teachings they didn’t like. This was in the late 80’s and early 90’s and at the time there was a huge debate going on in the United Church of Canada over the ordination of homosexuals. I saw this debate as simply the outward manifestation of a far more important debate, over whether or not the church would submit to the authority of the Christian faith it purported to teach and the God it purported to believe in as the author of that faith. While I was still skeptical myself, about whether the Bible could still be believed, I found this attitude of “I will pick for myself what I like out of the faith, and reject what I don’t like” repugnant. I knew that if I ever did become a believer I would accept the teachings of the faith, as found in Scripture, and historically taught by the church, and champion those teachings against those who believed in a faith which changes with the times.

This all came to a head in 1991.

The year began with Operation Desert Storm, in which an American led coalition drove the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The potential for this conflict to escalate into something much worse – present to a certain degree in all Middle East conflicts – kept our eyes glued to the news, and brought back to my mind the Biblical passages which speak of the final battle of Armageddon. I re-read books I had read on that subject, but international events soon came to be eclipsed by tragedy in the family, as my mother was diagnosed with liver cancer, underwent chemotherapy, then was finally brought home where she died in April, a couple of weeks after my 15th birthday.

That summer I read the entire Bible through, from Genesis to Revelation, for the first time.

In my heart and mind, skepticism still waged war with the inner voice that told me that Jesus was real, the Gospel true, and that I should turn to Christ in faith. Finally, towards the middle of August, I was listening to the radio when a religious program came on. The speaker turned the intellectual weapons which materialists use to cast doubt upon religion against their own claims. I realized for the first time, that the materialistic humanists who ridiculed the Christian faith as primitive superstition, frequently expected people to accept their views upon the authority of scientists whose claims far exceed what they can support by actual substantial evidence. Then the speaker said “in the end, the person who takes God at His word, will not be found a fool for having done so”.

That was enough. The battle was over. Skepticism lost. I knelt by my bed, got out my Gideon’s New Testament, read the verses explaining how all had sinned, how Christ had come and died to save us from sin, and how everlasting life was promised to all who believed, and then prayed to God, telling Him that I would take Him at His word by faith, and accept Jesus Christ as my Saviour and Lord.

In evangelical and fundamentalist circles this is called “getting saved”. I no longer like to use those words to refer to my conversion because as my Christian faith has developed, I have come to regard this practice as detracting from the events of the Gospel, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When a believer is asked “when were you saved” the best response is to say “almost two thousand years ago when Jesus died for my sins on the cross and rose again from the dead”. The benefits of Christ’s atoning death come to us through faith, but faith is not an act which we do once then look back upon for the rest of our lives. It is personal trust in God our Father as revealed to us in the Person and Work of the Saviour He has given us, our Lord Jesus Christ. Such a personal trust is an ongoing attitude through which God pours out His grace upon us, establishes a relationship with us, and produces the new life in us. It looks outward to God and the promises He has made to us in the Gospel, and not inward at itself.

Which is not to undersell the importance of conversion. My conversion pointed me in a direction that I would never have gone without it and has thus shaped all the subsequent events of my life.

My determination that I would not be a “pick and choose” Christian grew stronger after my conversion and this led me out of the United Church of Canada. Initially that left me unconnected with a church for a few months, but a Christian neighbor, who had herself left the UCC in the homosexual ordination controversy, graciously offered to drive me to her church, which was evangelical and Bible-believing. This was the Baptist church in Virden, where I was baptized by immersion in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in January of 1993. My pastor there was a graduate of Providence College (originally Winnipeg Bible College) in Otterburne. One day he had to go out to Providence to meet with some people, and invited me to come along to see the school. I remember entering the college library, finding myself among more volumes of theology than I had ever seen before in my life, and sitting down to read from the writings of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Lewis Sperry Chafer. It was like coming home after a long journey and early in my grade 12 year I sent in my application to study theology at Providence.

I entered Providence College in the fall of 1994 and was a student there until April 1999 (in the fifth year I studied in the Seminary). I majored in theology and my favorite classes were the Systematic Theology and New Testament Greek classes. Many of my strongest interests today go back to Providence. My Koine classes led to an interest in the classical languages, and after Providence I studied basic Latin and Attic and Homeric Greek independently. I make no claim to have mastered any of these tongues but in studying them I developed an interest in classical literature and, began reading the Greco-Roman classics in English translation. In my first semester at Providence I went to the Christmas production of Handel’s Messiah at Calvary Temple in Winnipeg. In my fourth year I attended the spring 1998 Manitoba Opera production of La Boheme. It was at Providence that I first saw a Gilbert and Sullivan production – the Mikado which one of the school’s theatrical groups put on that year. This was the beginning of my love for classical music.

My thinking about Christian orthodoxy and unity began to change after my years at Providence. I disliked the kind of liberal ecumenism which strives for unity among all churches at the expense of doctrine and truth and I continue to dislike this kind of ecumenism today. It has proven itself willing to jettison doctrines without which there can be no Christianity in its pursuit of a lowest common denominator. In response to this, two large movements developed among North American conservative Protestants. Fundamentalism, opposed both liberal theology and liberal ecumenism and neo-evangelicalism which began in the 1950’s, rejected liberal theology but was more sympathetic to liberal ecumenism.

Often overlooked was a third kind of conservative Protestant. There were also conservative Protestants, who continued to adhere to their historical confessions of faith (the 39 Articles, the Westminster Confession of Faith, etc.) and to the authority of the Bible, and rejected both liberal theology and ecumenism, but also rejected the fundamentalist approach of focusing on a few “fundamentals” as being too minimalist. The essential doctrines of Christianity need to be understood in the context of the Christian faith regarded as a whole. This was not an organized movement, like fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism, just traditionalist Protestant Christians continuing to believe what they had always believed.

I gradually moved from the “fundamentalist” to the “traditionalist” viewpoint. I came to see that the interpretation of church history popular in many evangelical and fundamentalist churches, in which Constantine the Great is said to have created the false “Catholic Church”, while the true faith continued to exist as a kind of underground movement until the Reformation, was essentially the same view of church history held by the anti-Trinitarian cults which have been popping up over the last century and a half and reviving ancient heresies. When I realized this I rejected this interpretation. This affected my theological understanding in a number of significant ways.

I developed a greater respect for the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, drawn up and accepted by the church in its undivided state, before the schisms that divided it into Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant, as authoritative statements of the “doctrine of Christ”, drawn up by the leaders of the orthodox, Apostolic church in response to centuries of conflict with the “antichrists” the Apostle John warned about in his epistles.

My view of the sacraments changed. In the medieval church some people had come to treat the sacraments as steps which a repentant sinner must climb to come to Christ and salvation. In response to this abuse, some Protestants had come to regard the sacraments as a wall or barrier erected by the church to prevent the repentant sinner from directly trusting in Christ, and therefore rejected the idea of sacraments as “means of grace” altogether. The sacraments could also be regarded as vessels, however, as physical containers which, carry the word, which produces and strengthens faith, to the believer. As such, they perform the same role as preaching, but in a more visual and therefore more concrete fashion. This is what I understand St. Augustine and Dr. Martin Luther to have said, and I have come to accept this view myself.

I came to see that those parts of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, which had adopted the attitude of the English Puritans, that everything in church tradition which could not be explicitly justified from Scripture should be rejected as “Catholic” had done themselves a disservice. I came to accept the attitude of Luther and the English reformers – that everything in the Catholic tradition which is not condemned in Scripture, should be retained or at least allowed.

My theology developed in this direction over the decade after I had left Providence to work and live in Winnipeg. I had been actively involved in a small church that I had started attending in my last year in Providence. Differences in theology between the pastor and elders had led to a church split in the early 2000’s. After this, for many years I attended large evangelical churches, where I could come, worship, and leave with a minimal degree of involvement and commitment. It was during these years that my theology developed in the way I have described above. When the time finally came that I knew I should become a more active church member again, I joined an Anglican parish, which I knew respected the authority of the Word of God, taught orthodox doctrine, and preached the Gospel. It uses the liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer, which I used to read in the guest room of my paternal grandmother’s house whenever I spent the night there. This liturgy, is derived from that used by the Latin-speaking Christian church for centuries, beautifully translated into English by Thomas Cranmer, and with an emphasis upon our need for a humble attitude of penitence, which trusts to God’s mercy rather than our own righteousness.

It would be nice to bring this essay to a conclusion on the happy note with which I ended the last paragraph. My most read essay by far, however, is “The Suicide Cult”, and it would be a disservice to my readers not to include an account of how I came to the views expressed in that essay.

A friend asked me, a few months ago, “do not the two antis in anti-anti-racist cancel each other out to make racist?” When I described myself as an “anti-anti-racist” I was consciously reflecting upon the way another reactionary, the historical writer John Lukacs, describes himself as an anti-anti-communist. Lukacs, a Hungarian born Catholic, saw his homeland overrun by the Nazis and then by the Communists. He fled these oppressive regimes to the United States. When he called himself an “anti-anti-communist” he did not mean that he sympathized with the Communism he had escaped from, but that within the United States he saw anti-communist populism as being the greater threat to civilization and decency. Note that while I have learned much from Lukacs’ writings, and share his distaste for populism, I do not agree with him about anti-communism as my main criticism of the John Birch Society is that it was too soft on the reds. Nevertheless, his “anti-anti-communism”, demonstrates how a person can be opposed to one thing, which is itself defined by opposition to a third thing, without being in favour of that third thing.

I believe that anti-racism is a far greater problem in Canada and other Western countries than racism. If by racism we mean a version of the idea that we are entitled to be unjust towards other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity than us, then of course racism is an evil way of thinking. In the 30’s and 40’s of the last century, the Nazi Party in Germany took racism to its ultimate extreme and demonstrated in their actions just how evil it could be. One of the chief motivations of anti-racism is the wish to make sure that what happened in Nazi-occupied Europe in WWII never happens again. This is a laudable desire but the problem is that the anti-racist movement appears to believe that that end justifies any means taken in its pursuit. Therefore, in order to prevent a hypothetical – and unlikely – future threat of a revived Nazism recreating the horrors of the Third Reich, anti-racism has committed actual injustices and become more of a menace than the racism it purports to be fighting.

I realize that by referring to an “anti-racist movement” I may give the impression of attributing to anti-racism a higher degree of organized structure than it actually possesses. There are organizations which are entirely devoted to anti-racism but the ideology of anti-racism is also promoted by governments, schools, churches, and the information and news media, both electronic and print.

I do not recall exactly when I first became aware that an inordinate amount of time and effort was being spent by our government, schools, and media in telling us that “race is only skin deep” and that we should not be racists, just that it was sometime before I graduated high school. The message was ubiquitous, in government sponsored ads on radio and television, in the opinions page of the newspaper, and in the classroom. In the classroom it was not limited to history, current events, and other “social studies” classes where one might expect it. The books assigned to be read for English class often seemed to be selected to teach the anti-racist message as well.

What initially bothered me about this was that it appeared to be an attempt to artificially engineer a new moral code. Traditional morality, drawn from the teachings of the Christian Scriptures, warned against such sins as idolatry, disrespect and disobedience to parents and ancestors, murder, theft, infidelity to one’s spouse, and dishonesty. The new morality seemed to sweep all that away as being trivial and replace it with one new sin, bigger and worse than all others, the sin of racism.

This did not sit well with me because I am fundamentally disposed to suspicion towards all attempts to replace the tried and true, the old and proven, with the “new and improved”.

I gradually came to realize that the problem with anti-racism was even deeper than that. In high school, in a current history class, we discussed the trials of James Keegstra and Ernst Zündel which had been widely publicized in the 1980’s. These men were prosecuted under criminal law, not for murdering, robbing, raping, defrauding or assaulting anyone. They were prosecuted for things they said and wrote.

This bothered me for two reasons. Earlier in this essay I pointed out that the basic theory of classical liberalism – that individuals are prior to and more important than all social groups, that individuals are the basic unit of society, and that legitimate societies are built on a voluntary contractual basis – is false, but that the English rights and freedoms which it championed were older than liberalism and that liberalism was started as a way of justifying these rights and freedoms in a modern age which had begun to reject the traditional worldview within which those rights and liberties had evolved in England. These rights and freedoms are not the creation of liberalism but are one of the most admirable aspects of the tradition of the English world which we inherited in Canada and I was not pleased to see that we were casting some of them aside in cause of anti-racism.
The second reason these prosecutions bothered me was that I realized, that the kind of laws being used against Keegstra and Zündel, could one day be turned against orthodox Christians who refused to change the teachings of the faith to accommodate the spirit of the age, and that they would be so turned once the supply of Keegstras and Zündels ran out.

There are reasonable limitations on freedom of speech of course. Laws against shouting “fire” in a theatre forbid an act of mischief which can directly result in people being trampled to death. Laws against incitement are reasonable because egging other people on to commit crimes is a form of complicity in the crime itself.

The same cannot be said about laws which forbid “hate speech”. Keegstra and Zündel were charged because they said the account of the holocaust was exaggerated by wartime propaganda and that the death count of six million with which we are familiar was way too high. It is easy to see why many people would take offence at these kind of statements but that is hardly a reason to criminally prosecute the people who make them.

Keegstra had been charged under the hate speech provisions which had been added to the Criminal Code in the Trudeau premiership. Zündel was tried under a different law, an obscure law against “spreading false news” that was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court. Towards the end of my studies in Providence I learned that there was another “hate speech” law which had been introduced in the Trudeau era, the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. This was the law under which government prosecuted Zündel for the content of his website in a case that began in my last years at Providence and ended early in the new millennium.

Section 13 forbids the electronic communication of material that is “that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt” on the basis of identifiable membership in a group protected by the CHRA against discrimination. It is considered civil law rather than criminal law, remediative rather than punitive, for which reason defendants do not have the protections and defences available to those charged under criminal law. The taxpayer pays for investigation of complaints filed but the defendants must pay for their own lawyer, if they can afford one and are not entitled to compensation from the complainant if they win. The likelihood of a defendant winning is next to nothing because even if he could demonstrate that he spoke nothing but the truth, the courts ruled that truth is not an absolute defence. Until the decision in the Marc Lemire case in 2009, no defendant ever won.

Until the last years of the Lemire trial, section 13 cases were not as widely publicized as the earlier trials of Keegstra and Zündel. I found, when I tried to discuss the matter with people, that most people did not know about what was going on, and worse, did not want to know. All that effort by the government, schools, and media to indoctrinate us in anti-racism had paid off. As soon as people understood that it was “racists”, “bigots”, or “nazis” that were being prosecuted they no longer seemed to care that people were being prosecuted not for violent, harmful, acts, but for words and ideas.

This discovery brought the famous words of Martin Niemöller to my mind: “First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist…”

I realized that if the spirit of the Third Reich still lived today, it was in the anti-racist movement itself and not in the people they targeted for persecution. Anti-racism had led to books being banned at the border and burned by customs, to people being given life-time gag orders and stiff fines for speaking their mind, to a professor at the University of Western Ontario being investigated by the police because of the content of a speech he gave to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which he proposed an evolutionary explanation for the origins of race differences, and to many similar outrages.

I realized that if anti-racism had convinced people not to care if this sort of thing went on as long as the victims were “racists” then anti-racism had a deleterious effect upon people’s ability to make basic moral judgements. Evidence that this is in fact the case is abundant. Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned for conspiracy to blow up the public utilities buildings in South Africa is said to have been a prisoner of conscience, whereas Ernst Zündel, who was incarcerated here in Canada and sentenced to prison in Germany, for nothing more than his ideas and words, is not. The North, which waged total war including a scorched earth policy against the South in the American “Civil” War, is regarded as being more just than the South which fought to protect its homes and families against this destruction. These are the kind of judgements that a moral imbecile would make and this speaks very poorly of the ideology which has caused them to become so widespread.

I finally realized that the reason anti-racism eroded people’s ability to reason morally was because at its core, anti-racism was an attack on a fundamental moral virtue, and only in its outwards guise was it an attack on a vice.

The virtue of piety is the reverence and obedience one owes to deity and to ancestors. In some pagan religions the spirits of ancestors are themselves considered to be divine and are worshipped as such. In Plato’s Euthyphro, a discussion of piety breaks out between Socrates and the title character when Euthyphro maintains that he must, out of reverence to the gods, bring a criminal accusation against his father. In the Old Testament, the ten commandments list duties to God alone first, then duties to one’s fellow man, with the commandment to honour father and mother placed in between, suggesting a close relationship between the piety one owes one’s parents and ancestors, and that which one owes God.

Piety towards our ancestors includes the duty to ensure, to the best of our ability, the happiness of their descendents in generations yet to come. Thus the virtue of piety binds past and future generations together with the present and with God.

Anti-racism is an attack on the virtue of piety. It teaches us to dishonour our ancestors by calling them “racists” and being ashamed of their “racism” and to shirk our duty of seeing to the happiness of their descendants in future generations.
Anti-racism does not teach impiety to everybody, only to members of people groups which are “white”, especially Germans, American southerners, and Afrikaners. Anti-racists have no problem with members of other ethnic groups asserting pride in their ancestry and a consciousness of group identity. Indeed, they encourage it. Yet they condemn the same thing as “racism” among white people.

Anti-racism displays a similar inconsistency when it comes to actual racism. It pays little to no attention to the violent hatred towards white people that is often expressed in the lyrics of rap music or to the demonization of white people that is common in the conversation of many North American aboriginals but will jump over the smallest statement by a white person which can be construed as “racist”. The high levels of interracial crime committed against white people on a regular basis are seldom discussed as such in the news which instead chooses to blame the “racism” of the police for the fact that certain groups are disproportionately represented in the prison population.

The reality is that anti-racism is itself a form of racism – racism against white people. The realization of this was the final stage in the development of my anti-anti-racism.

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen