Russia has been much in the news lately as left-wing wackos have been trying to paint US President Donald Trump’s attempts to get along with Russian President Vladimir Putin and allow the two countries to peacefully co-exist as some sort of treason. In my childhood, Russia was still in the grips of the murderous, totalitarian, ideological, regime bent on global conquest that had seized power in the fall of 1917. How well I remember that at that time, the same people who are crying “the Russians are coming” today, labelled anyone who warned about the Communist Kremlin’s evil designs a “McCarthyite.” The term alluded to Joseph McCarthy, the American Senator from Wisconsin in the 1950s who warned about Communist infiltration of the State Department. “McCarthyite”, as the left used the term, was more or less synonymous with “witch hunter”, although McCarthy has been mostly vindicated by the facts of history. (1) For the left, Russia could do no wrong as long as the Bolsheviks were in power, but once the Soviet regime collapsed, she can do no right. What an absurd and insane way of looking at things.
We have just reached the hundredth anniversary of one of the first in the very long list of monstrous crimes that can be charged to the Bolshevik account. On July 17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife Empress Alexandra, and their children the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the Tsesarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, as well as their household servants and the court physician, were shot, stabbed, and clubbed to death in Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where they had been moved shortly before the murders. They had been prisoners for over a year, at first a mild house arrest under Keresnky’s Provisional Government, then a much harsher imprisonment following the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks’ rise to power.
The murder of the Romanovs had been foreshadowed by the beheadings of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette on January 21st and October 16th respectively in 1793, and before that by the beheading of Charles I on January 30th, 1649. There are a number of parallels between these murders. The victims, in each case, included the legitimate Royal Sovereign of the country in which the revolution was being perpetrated. He was also, in each case, the Royal Protector of a Church which claimed descent from the early, undivided, Apostolic Church and which was under attack by the revolutionaries. Charles I was the Protector of the Church of England which was under attack by the Puritan Calvinists. Louis XVI was Protector of the Roman Catholic Church in France which was a target of the Revolutionaries who were disciples of the rationalist Rousseau. Nicholas II was Protector of the Russian Orthodox Church against the atheistic, Marxist, Bolsheviks. In England and France, the revolutionaries tried to give a façade of legality to the murders by holding show trials in which the kings were condemned by kangaroo courts. In Russia, the Bolsheviks didn’t bother with this, they simply declared the Tsar to be guilty of crimes against the Russian people and had him shot. In each case the royal murders failed to satisfy the bloodlust of the revolutionaries, but rather merely whetted their appetite for the mass murders that were to come. (2)
There is a sense in which all three crimes were committed by the same perpetrators. While the term “left” did not develop its political connotations until the French Revolution, when it was applied to the enemies of the Crown, aristocracy, and Church because of where they stood in relation to the speaker in the French assembly, the Puritans were definitely historical antecedents of the French Revolutionaries, just as the Bolsheviks were their ideological descendants. The Puritans, like the Anabaptists of continental Europe, were the “left-wing” of the Reformation, those who thought the Magisterial Reformers had not gone far enough. They were also the first classical liberals, or, as liberals were called at the time, Whigs. In their thinking, and especially the secularized version of it offered in the writings of John Locke, the foundation was laid for the much more radical thought of Rousseau, which inspired the French Revolutionaries, and in turn laid the foundation for Marx, the father of Communism. In this lineage can be seen one explanation for the fact that “left-wing extremism” is a far less commonly heard expression than “right-wing extremism.” The latter expression is, of course, never used in good faith. It is employed by the left, to smear those who hold views that the left has decided are to be considered to be outside the pale of acceptable discourse, by association with the regime that governed Germany from 1933 to 1945, of which regime “right wing extremism” has connotations despite the fact that it was a revolutionary rather than a reactionary regime, that despised the old order of “throne and altar” that “right wing” was historically and traditionally associated with, and even called itself “socialist.” The reason “left-wing extremism” has not caught on is that it is redundant. The essence of the left, its very nature, is the relentless desire for the complete overthrow of all time-honoured institutions, traditions, and order. From royalty, nobility and the Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the middle classes and private property and enterprise in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, to marriage, the family, the nation and even the biological realities of race and sex in the twentieth and twenty-first, the left has moved on from one target to another, seeking only to destroy in its hatred and rage, with its ultimate targets being the Good, the True, and the Beautiful and indeed, God Himself, for, as Dr. Johnson observed centuries ago, the first Whig was the devil. The left is extremism, and extremism is the left.
In the Restoration, the Anglican Church at the 1660 Convocations of the provinces of York and Canterbury, canonized Charles I as a saint and martyr. Similarly, eighteen years ago the Russian Orthodox Church canonized its royal martyrs, all of the murdered Romanovs, as passion bearers. In both cases the honour was far more worthily bestowed than is the “cheap martyrdom” that contemporary evangelicals award to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, let alone the spurious pseudo-sainthood conveyed by the same upon Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi. While their faith was not the sole reason that Charles I and Nicholas II and his family were put to death, it was part of the reason, and in murdering them, their revolutionary enemies sought to kill that which they symbolically represented – the old order of Christendom, with its alliance of throne and altar, church and state. Bonhoeffer, while a clergyman – albeit one who should have been defrocked for his heretical theology which bordered upon atheism at the very end of his life – was executed for taking part in a political conspiracy. The Roman Catholic Church has never canonized Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, perhaps because its canonization process is more elaborate and requires more than mere martyrdom. It is not likely ever to do so as long as the usurper Jorge Bergoglio has his claws all over St. Peter’s vacant throne.
I wouldn’t hold my breathe waiting for Rome to develop enough sense to kick Jorge to the curb, bring back Benedict, and canonize Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Whatever Rome does or does not do, however, we can and ought to honour and remember them, alongside our Anglican Royal Martyr Charles, and the Imperial Family of Russia, and the sacred witness they bear to the truth of the old order, against the bloody, violent, and revolutionary hatred of the progressive left.
(1) For a thorough substantiation of this claim see M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, (New York: Random House, 2007). See also Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, (New York: Free Press, 1999). McCarthy’s famous crusade against Communism began four years into the Cold War, which followed immediately after a lengthy period, which began with the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, in which the American government was incredibly pro-Communist. One of FDR’s first acts as President was to recognize the Bolshevik regime in Russia, to which he sent an ambassador, William C. Bullitt Jr., whom he recalled when Bullitt refused to whitewash the Stalin regime which, just prior to his arrival, had committed the Holodomor (the man-made famine that starved over ten million Ukrainians). In Bullitt’s place he sent Joseph E. Davies, who painted the Stalin regime with roses, even as it was conducting the infamous show trials known as the “Great Purge” under his nose. In 1943 FDR ordered Davies’ odious, pro-Soviet memoir, Mission to Moscow, made into a pro-Stalin propaganda film. While some might argue that FDR was forced into this relationship with Stalin by the necessities of WWII – an argument that would be true in the case of Sir Winston Churchill who knew Bolshevism for what it was and had been speaking against it for decades – FDR was, in fact, a naïve, egotist with a messiah complex, who saw himself and Stalin as brothers in progress, the leaders of two nations founded on modern ideological principles. The records of the Tehran Conference demonstrate how much closer in spirit to Stalin than to Churchill, FDR really was, making it less surprising that the outcome of FDR’s wartime negotiations with Stalin included the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe up to the eastern half of Germany, including Poland, for whose sake Britain and France had gone to war with Hitler in the first place after Hitler and Stalin had made a pact to invade and divide her between themselves. Needless to say, Roosevelt’s administration was overrun with Soviet agents and Communist sympathizers, such as Harry Dexter White. When the Cold War began, shortly after WWII ended, a number of highly placed Soviet spies, such as Alger Hiss, were exposed through the defections of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, and attempts were made in most branches of the American government to remove Soviet agents and other security risks, but the State Department resisted these attempts. Enter Joseph McCarthy, who in early 1950 gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he declared the State Department to be “infested with Communists” and waved a paper which he claimed contained the names of a large number of individuals within the Department known to the Secretary to be members of the Communist Party. The US Senate appointed a subcommittee, headed by the hostile Millard Tydings, to investigate McCarthy’s charges. When the Republicans gained control of the Senate after the 1952 Congressional election, McCarthy himself was named chair of the Senate Permanent Investigations Committee. In 1954, William F. Buckley Jr and L. Brent Bozell went person by person, through the list of those McCarthy had either named before the Tydings Committee or investigated with his own, demonstrating that whether or not they could be shown to be “card-carrying members of the Communist Party” they represented real security risks. McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning, (Chicago: Henry Regnery). Indeed, the majority of those about whom McCarthy raised concerns were later investigated, found to indeed be security risks, and removed from sensitive positions in the State Department. After the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, information from two newly available sources, the Soviet archives, and the declassified-as-of-1995 Venona Project (a counterespionage project that intercepted coded messages between the Soviets and their spies in the West) firmly established the guilt of many individuals such as Hiss, whose innocence the liberal left had loudly maintained for decades, and showed that indeed, the Communist Party USA had been acting as subversive arm of the Soviet Union, and that Soviet penetration of the American government in this era was far more extensive than McCarthy had suggested. See John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1999).
(2) As revolutionary modernity developed from the fanatical Calvinism of the Puritans to the rationalistic democratic egalitarianism of the Jacobins to the dialectic materialism of the Marxist-Leninist Bolsheviks the scale of the atrocities committed by its regimes increased, exponentially so in the final stage with Communism murdering over one hundred million people in the twentieth century. Those who, unlike David in 1 Samuel 24 and 26, are willing to lay their hands on the Lord’s anointed and commit the crime of regicide, will have no greater regard for the lives of those of lesser rank.
Showing posts with label Marie Antoinette. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marie Antoinette. Show all posts
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Saturday, April 28, 2012
GTN Tory Classics 4: The Economic Age
One of the things I dislike the most about contemporary politics is the exaggerated importance it attaches to economics. This is true both of those who favour economic freedom and private property on the one hand and those who believe in a state-planned economy and/or collective ownership of property on the other.
This does not mean I attach no importance to these matters. I believe in private property and in laws protecting private property. I believe that economic decisions are best made by those who will be most affected by the outcome of those decisions. For most economic decisions this amounts to the free market position - that people are themselves the best judges of what to buy and what to sell, how much to spend or ask for in a market exchange. Some economic decisions, however, must be made by the leaders of communities or the governments of countries. These are decisions whose outcome affects the entire community or country.
Examples of the first kind of economic decision include decisions as to what kind of career to train for, whether to stay in a job or look for a new one, whether to open a new business or seek employment, whether to save, invest,or spend one's income, and, if one has this option, what other than essentials to buy with one's income.
Examples of the second kind of economic decision include decisions as to whether a country needs domestic production of a particular commodity or whether it is better to rely upon foreign imports and decisions as to how much and what kind of infrastructure to build and maintain out of the public purse.
These decisions cannot be made in isolation from each other, of course. The decision a government takes, to protect its domestic iron industry, because a consistent supply of foreign iron is threatened by war, will affect the choices of those buying and selling iron and deciding whether to go into an iron-related line of work. Likewise, economic decisions at the level of a community or country, cannot properly be made without taking people's personal economic choices into consideration.
In 2009 I wrote a series of economic essays, most of which
were arguments for economic liberty and against socialism. It ended with "The Free Trade Cult", which argues that history demonstrates that free trade doesn't work the way economic liberals say it does. I intend to post several of the essays from this series including "The Free Trade Cult". The first essay in the series, the one which follows, was "The Economic Age". This essay came first, because it contained the most important thing I wished to say about economics - that we, whether we be capitalists or socialists, place too much importance on economics.
The Economic Age
By Gerry T. Neal
June 2, 2009
“The age of chivalry is gone. -- That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”
Those famous words were spoken by Edmund Burke in 1793, in response to the murder of Marie Antoinette by the revolutionaries in France. 2 years previously the 18th Century Whig statesman had written Reflections on the Revolution in France in which he rejected the abstract, rationalist, planning that led to the horrors of the French Revolution which had only just begun, and embraced the Tory view of traditional, organic society in which authority, rights, and liberty were firmly established by prescription. He had seen, even then, where the Revolution was headed.
Clearly, Burke did not think very highly of economists. What did he mean by the word “economist”? The context of Burke’s remarks would suggest that “economist” like “sophister” and “calculator” was being used to describe a class of people who rejected the noble sentiments of the age of chivalry – the gallantry and honor that, as Burke had just remarked, should have caused “ten thousand swords” to leap to Marie Antoinette’s defense. These people replaced these sentiments, with numbers, cold reason, and pragmatic materialistic calculations of their own self-interest.
Burke’s lament, was over seeing the day when such people would become dominant, when society would be rationally planned from the top down, and when people would be primarily guided by cold, rational, materialistic, pragmatic motivations in their everyday decisions rather than by noble sentiments and loyalties. He believed, that much of what made life worth living, which he summed up in the phrase “the unbought grace of life”, would fall by the wayside and perhaps be lost in such a society.
Burke was correct in his beliefs and his predictions. We see the evidence all around us. Far too many people identify “the good life” with obtaining material possessions and dismiss concepts like honor, loyalty, virtue, and character. The concept that true happiness is not related to how much you have compared to other people but to being satisfied with what you have and where you are, while familiar to the ancients and the great Christian ethicists, is alien to such people. This is true regardless of whether the rational materialist favors “capitalism” or socialism.
That does not mean that economic questions are unimportant or that “capitalism” and socialism should be regarded as equally good or equally bad.
Economics, a term derived from the Greek word for the management of a household, is today used to describe the discipline which studies the mechanics of the production, trade, and consumption of material goods and services. Thought on these subjects has been recorded for millennia, of course, but as a distinct formal discipline economics was only in its infancy stage in the 18th Century. While the nature of the discipline is such as to make it especially attractive to people with the rationalist, materialistic mindset Burke decried, it is by no means necessary for one to be a rationalist, materialist to form an educated opinion on these subjects.
Edmund Burke’s own views on economics are known to us. He was a friend of Adam Smith who published his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. Smith, who died in 1790, once remarked that Burke was the only man he had ever known who “thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us”. Burke, for his part, had heaped praise on Smith’s book. This suggests that Smith’s comment was no exaggeration.
Smith’s book marked the beginning of what is now called classical economics. It is both a history of the evolution of production and commerce and an argument for the free market. The specialization resulting from the division of labor results in greater production of any given product. The same principle applies on a larger scale to the specialization resulting from commerce. As everybody produces more and more of the product they specialize in to sell to others who in turn are producing other products, the general wealth of the nation increases, everybody is better off, and the best thing the government can do to facilitate the process is to keep out of the way.
Later, the term “capitalism” would be applied to Smith’s system. This was not Smith’s term. It was in fact coined by Karl Marx to refer to the period in his dialectic understanding of history, in which feudalism was supplanted by industrialism and commerce, and which Marx believed would be supplanted by revolutionary socialism leading to his communist utopia in its turn. The identification of Marx’s “capitalism” with Smith’s free market probably came about because Smith’s glorification of commerce could be seen as championing the activities and interests of the emerging bourgeoisie class. Marx, who saw everything in terms of class conflict, identified the bourgeoisie as the heroes of the capitalist revolution against feudalism and the villains in the coming revolution of the proletariat.
It is interesting that Marx regarded capitalism, not as a conservative or reactionary force in society, but a revolutionary one. As Marx was a champion of the revolutionary cause this observation on his part has to be regarded as praise of capitalism, which may seem odd, but actually makes sense when one considers his view of history as progressing towards a certain end.
Was Marx right? If he was right about capitalism being a revolutionary force what does that say about Smith’s arguments for the free market, which were endorsed, as we have seen by the leading 18th Century opponent of revolution?
The answer to the first question is yes. If we define capitalism as the historical transformation of rural societies with a predominantly agricultural economy into urban societies with a predominantly industrial economy, then capitalism was undoubtedly revolutionary. Capitalism weakened all sorts of ties that are fundamental to a functioning society. The ties between people and the land they live on were weakened as people moved en masse from the farms into the cities looking for work. The ties between people and previous generations were weakened as crafts and trades were removed from the home and concentrated in factories and stores. Institutions like the family were undoubtedly weakened and Thomas Carlyle was not unjustified in remarking that human interaction was being cheapened by being reduced to the “cash nexus”.
A few observations are necessary at this point. The first is that capitalism as described above was not the free market Adam Smith was advocating. The rise of modern, manufacturing-based economies, concentrated in large scale factories in urban centers, was accomplished with the active assistance of governments. This is a matter of the historical record.
The second is that those who condemn capitalism for its atomizing effects on society will not find an acceptable alternative in socialism or communism. Socialism’s objection is not to an urban economy centered on industrial manufacturing. Its objection is to that economy being in the hands of private owners instead of “the people”. The negative results of capitalism described above were regarded as positive and progressive by Marx. If capitalism was revolutionary, socialism is a thousand times more revolutionary.
A third observation is that manufacturing and increased production are not themselves the problem. It is not wrong for a society to desire a higher material standard of living for its people and this can only be achieved by increasing production. What is wrong is when people and society place make material prosperity their ultimate goal and make all other considerations subservient to that goal.
Adam Smith argued for a free market on the grounds that it was the best system for maximizing human industry and production and therefore increasing the nation’s material wealth and standard of living. He was right but his was not the best argument for the free market. The best argument for the free market is that freedom is itself a good. Moreover, freedom, the right and ability of people to make their own decisions for themselves (including economic decisions), is a superior good to any material goods that can be manufactured, bought, and sold. It is for this reason that a free economy should be defended against the advocates of a planned economy. The latter believe that they can somewhere find a group of experts competent enough to make everybody’s economic decisions for them.
That is the same arrogant mindset of rationalistic planning that Edmund Burke saw devastating France in the 1790s.
This does not mean I attach no importance to these matters. I believe in private property and in laws protecting private property. I believe that economic decisions are best made by those who will be most affected by the outcome of those decisions. For most economic decisions this amounts to the free market position - that people are themselves the best judges of what to buy and what to sell, how much to spend or ask for in a market exchange. Some economic decisions, however, must be made by the leaders of communities or the governments of countries. These are decisions whose outcome affects the entire community or country.
Examples of the first kind of economic decision include decisions as to what kind of career to train for, whether to stay in a job or look for a new one, whether to open a new business or seek employment, whether to save, invest,or spend one's income, and, if one has this option, what other than essentials to buy with one's income.
Examples of the second kind of economic decision include decisions as to whether a country needs domestic production of a particular commodity or whether it is better to rely upon foreign imports and decisions as to how much and what kind of infrastructure to build and maintain out of the public purse.
These decisions cannot be made in isolation from each other, of course. The decision a government takes, to protect its domestic iron industry, because a consistent supply of foreign iron is threatened by war, will affect the choices of those buying and selling iron and deciding whether to go into an iron-related line of work. Likewise, economic decisions at the level of a community or country, cannot properly be made without taking people's personal economic choices into consideration.
In 2009 I wrote a series of economic essays, most of which
were arguments for economic liberty and against socialism. It ended with "The Free Trade Cult", which argues that history demonstrates that free trade doesn't work the way economic liberals say it does. I intend to post several of the essays from this series including "The Free Trade Cult". The first essay in the series, the one which follows, was "The Economic Age". This essay came first, because it contained the most important thing I wished to say about economics - that we, whether we be capitalists or socialists, place too much importance on economics.
The Economic Age
By Gerry T. Neal
June 2, 2009
“The age of chivalry is gone. -- That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”
Those famous words were spoken by Edmund Burke in 1793, in response to the murder of Marie Antoinette by the revolutionaries in France. 2 years previously the 18th Century Whig statesman had written Reflections on the Revolution in France in which he rejected the abstract, rationalist, planning that led to the horrors of the French Revolution which had only just begun, and embraced the Tory view of traditional, organic society in which authority, rights, and liberty were firmly established by prescription. He had seen, even then, where the Revolution was headed.
Clearly, Burke did not think very highly of economists. What did he mean by the word “economist”? The context of Burke’s remarks would suggest that “economist” like “sophister” and “calculator” was being used to describe a class of people who rejected the noble sentiments of the age of chivalry – the gallantry and honor that, as Burke had just remarked, should have caused “ten thousand swords” to leap to Marie Antoinette’s defense. These people replaced these sentiments, with numbers, cold reason, and pragmatic materialistic calculations of their own self-interest.
Burke’s lament, was over seeing the day when such people would become dominant, when society would be rationally planned from the top down, and when people would be primarily guided by cold, rational, materialistic, pragmatic motivations in their everyday decisions rather than by noble sentiments and loyalties. He believed, that much of what made life worth living, which he summed up in the phrase “the unbought grace of life”, would fall by the wayside and perhaps be lost in such a society.
Burke was correct in his beliefs and his predictions. We see the evidence all around us. Far too many people identify “the good life” with obtaining material possessions and dismiss concepts like honor, loyalty, virtue, and character. The concept that true happiness is not related to how much you have compared to other people but to being satisfied with what you have and where you are, while familiar to the ancients and the great Christian ethicists, is alien to such people. This is true regardless of whether the rational materialist favors “capitalism” or socialism.
That does not mean that economic questions are unimportant or that “capitalism” and socialism should be regarded as equally good or equally bad.
Economics, a term derived from the Greek word for the management of a household, is today used to describe the discipline which studies the mechanics of the production, trade, and consumption of material goods and services. Thought on these subjects has been recorded for millennia, of course, but as a distinct formal discipline economics was only in its infancy stage in the 18th Century. While the nature of the discipline is such as to make it especially attractive to people with the rationalist, materialistic mindset Burke decried, it is by no means necessary for one to be a rationalist, materialist to form an educated opinion on these subjects.
Edmund Burke’s own views on economics are known to us. He was a friend of Adam Smith who published his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. Smith, who died in 1790, once remarked that Burke was the only man he had ever known who “thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us”. Burke, for his part, had heaped praise on Smith’s book. This suggests that Smith’s comment was no exaggeration.
Smith’s book marked the beginning of what is now called classical economics. It is both a history of the evolution of production and commerce and an argument for the free market. The specialization resulting from the division of labor results in greater production of any given product. The same principle applies on a larger scale to the specialization resulting from commerce. As everybody produces more and more of the product they specialize in to sell to others who in turn are producing other products, the general wealth of the nation increases, everybody is better off, and the best thing the government can do to facilitate the process is to keep out of the way.
Later, the term “capitalism” would be applied to Smith’s system. This was not Smith’s term. It was in fact coined by Karl Marx to refer to the period in his dialectic understanding of history, in which feudalism was supplanted by industrialism and commerce, and which Marx believed would be supplanted by revolutionary socialism leading to his communist utopia in its turn. The identification of Marx’s “capitalism” with Smith’s free market probably came about because Smith’s glorification of commerce could be seen as championing the activities and interests of the emerging bourgeoisie class. Marx, who saw everything in terms of class conflict, identified the bourgeoisie as the heroes of the capitalist revolution against feudalism and the villains in the coming revolution of the proletariat.
It is interesting that Marx regarded capitalism, not as a conservative or reactionary force in society, but a revolutionary one. As Marx was a champion of the revolutionary cause this observation on his part has to be regarded as praise of capitalism, which may seem odd, but actually makes sense when one considers his view of history as progressing towards a certain end.
Was Marx right? If he was right about capitalism being a revolutionary force what does that say about Smith’s arguments for the free market, which were endorsed, as we have seen by the leading 18th Century opponent of revolution?
The answer to the first question is yes. If we define capitalism as the historical transformation of rural societies with a predominantly agricultural economy into urban societies with a predominantly industrial economy, then capitalism was undoubtedly revolutionary. Capitalism weakened all sorts of ties that are fundamental to a functioning society. The ties between people and the land they live on were weakened as people moved en masse from the farms into the cities looking for work. The ties between people and previous generations were weakened as crafts and trades were removed from the home and concentrated in factories and stores. Institutions like the family were undoubtedly weakened and Thomas Carlyle was not unjustified in remarking that human interaction was being cheapened by being reduced to the “cash nexus”.
A few observations are necessary at this point. The first is that capitalism as described above was not the free market Adam Smith was advocating. The rise of modern, manufacturing-based economies, concentrated in large scale factories in urban centers, was accomplished with the active assistance of governments. This is a matter of the historical record.
The second is that those who condemn capitalism for its atomizing effects on society will not find an acceptable alternative in socialism or communism. Socialism’s objection is not to an urban economy centered on industrial manufacturing. Its objection is to that economy being in the hands of private owners instead of “the people”. The negative results of capitalism described above were regarded as positive and progressive by Marx. If capitalism was revolutionary, socialism is a thousand times more revolutionary.
A third observation is that manufacturing and increased production are not themselves the problem. It is not wrong for a society to desire a higher material standard of living for its people and this can only be achieved by increasing production. What is wrong is when people and society place make material prosperity their ultimate goal and make all other considerations subservient to that goal.
Adam Smith argued for a free market on the grounds that it was the best system for maximizing human industry and production and therefore increasing the nation’s material wealth and standard of living. He was right but his was not the best argument for the free market. The best argument for the free market is that freedom is itself a good. Moreover, freedom, the right and ability of people to make their own decisions for themselves (including economic decisions), is a superior good to any material goods that can be manufactured, bought, and sold. It is for this reason that a free economy should be defended against the advocates of a planned economy. The latter believe that they can somewhere find a group of experts competent enough to make everybody’s economic decisions for them.
That is the same arrogant mindset of rationalistic planning that Edmund Burke saw devastating France in the 1790s.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The Age of Economism and its Errors
In October of 1793, following the murder of Queen Marie Antoinette at the hands of the filthy riff-raff that had taken over France and in the name of “human rights” established a terrorist state, Edmund Burke gave a speech in which he lamented the death of the era of Christian chivalry. In this speech Burke famously declared:
But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Burke’s friend Adam Smith would probably not have appreciated this remark had he lived to hear about it. The author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and the father of modern economics had in fact died three years previously and so was spared the indignity of hearing his profession slighted by the man of whom he had once said that he was “the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us.”
What exactly did Burke mean when he made this remark?
Burke was mourning, not just the murdered Queen of France, but of the civilized way of life she represented. The world of faith and tradition, honour and chivalry, manners and civility, rank and order, with all that it entailed good and bad, was dying before his eyes, personified in the person of the daughter of Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa and wife of Louis XVI of France. In its place, he saw a new world arising, where society would be a laboratory for ivory tower intellectuals to test their abstract theories with men and women as their experimental guinea pigs.
That is what is Burke had in mind with those three words “sophisters”, “economists” and “calculators”. People, detached from the realities of human life, who believe that through cold, hard, reason and logic they can draw up a blue print for a society which will be better for all of its members than one which has slowly evolved through history and which naturally arises out of the relationships and interactions of people bound together by ties of kinship, culture, religion and history.
Some might object that the description above applies to economists who are socialists but not to classical or liberal economists who believe in capitalism. It is the former who believe in a planned economy and social engineering. The latter believe in freedom and letting people make their own decisions for themselves.
There is some truth to this distinction. Socialism originally referred, in the 19th Century, to various movements that sought to replace the private ownership of property with the collective ownership of property on the part of either the community or those who worked the property. The theory behind socialism is the idea that injustices occur in society because of inequality in status and wealth and that this inequality arises out of the private ownership of property. From this premise, the socialist logically proceeds to the notion that if we were to eliminate the distinction between “mine” and “thine” and replace it with an all-inclusive “ours”, an ideal peaceful society would arise, where all men are equals and brothers, sharing all things in common, where each “contributes according to his ability” and receives “according to his need”.
Socialism clearly belongs to the age “of sophisters, economists, and calculators”. It is completely out of touch with reality. It treats the evils and injustices which are an unavoidable aspect of the human condition because they arise out of human nature as a disease that can be successfully treated with a political and economic cure. It is therefore unsurprising that every society which has seriously tried to put it into practice has only exponentially magnified the misery of its people.
It does not follow from this that capitalism is categorically any different.
The “capitalism vs. socialism” debate which dominates academic discussion of political matters today reminds me in many ways of the “Calvinism vs. Arminianism” debate which keeps cropping up in discussions of Christian theology. The latter debate, as to whether the view of predestination and free will expressed in the Five Articles of Remonstrance of 1610 is more true and Scriptural than the view expressed in the Canons of the 1618-19 Synod of Dort, is treated by both sides as a debate between the only two logical positions on these matters, despite the fact that it is an in-house debate among the Reformed branch, of the Protestant wing, of the Christian faith.
Likewise, “capitalism” and “socialism” are subcategories of a particular kind of economy – the modern industrial economy. The modern industrial economy is an economy where the primary economic activity is the production and distribution of factory manufactured goods. It differs from the Western economy which immediately preceded the Industrial Revolution, in which the primary economic activity was agriculture and where items that are mass-produced in factories today were produced by skilled craftsmen. This economy was neither “capitalist” nor “socialist”, categories which are meaningless when applied to it.
Capitalism like socialism, is an abstract blueprint for society, drawn up by rationalist theorists who are out of touch with reality. It is more properly called economic liberalism because it is the extrapolation of the liberal worldview into economics. The liberal worldview is as out of touch with reality as the socialist worldviews. Liberalism is based upon the idea that people are by nature good and so like socialists liberals look for a source of evil that is outside human nature and which can be altered through political means. Hence the long history of liberal projects to eliminate evil through “universal suffrage”, “universal education”, and the like, each designed to eliminate a new “source of poverty, crime, and suffering” after the last project proved to be a dud. They all prove to be duds because poverty, crime, and suffering are born out of the human nature that is present in the breast of every human being and which cannot be eliminated by political solutions.
More immediately relevant to economic liberalism is the liberal view of society. Central to liberal theory is the idea that the “individual” is prior to society. An “individual” in liberal theory, is a generic person apart from society, whose identifying traits are not those which distinguish him from other people, but characteristics which liberal theory claims he possesses equally with all other “individuals” – personal sovereignty and natural rights. In reality, no such creature exists. Particular persons exist, but they exist within societies, societies which are both older than them and logically prior to them. People enter the world as members of pre-existing families, and by extension as members of the pre-existing communities and societies to which their pre-existing families belong, which are defined and bound together, by ties of language, culture, history, etc. Liberal theory blatantly contradicts observable reality.
Economic liberalism is directly derived from the liberal view of the “individual” and society. Economic liberalism or capitalism is the idea that a society’s collective economic interests are best served by its individual members entering into unrestrained voluntary transactions in which their motivation is entirely their own self-interest. When individuals enter into such transactions the impersonal forces of supply and demand which drive the market ensure that the outcome will produce the greatest amount of happiness for the largest number of people.
This theory contains both truth and error.
It is true that under ordinary circumstances, each of us is better qualified to make the decisions that affect our personal economic interests, than the government is to make them for us. As Dr. Thomas Fleming put it:
The one essential insight of free-market economics is that human beings are more efficient at providing for their own needs than any set of other people could possibly be, no matter how enlightened. (The Morality of Everyday Life, University of Missouri Press, 2004, pp. 18-19)
The problem is, that because liberalism sees the individual as being prior to society, and society as existing for the individual, liberalism concludes that a society’s economic interests lies solely in the personal economic interests of its individual members. Society cannot have any collective economic interests, to the liberal, because to the liberal society is an abstract concept created by individuals to serve their own self-interests. To treat collective society as having interests of its own is to commit the fallacy of reification (treating an abstract concept as if it were a concrete reality) to a liberal.
As we have seen, however, liberalism is wrong. Society is the reality. It is liberalism’s concept of the “individual” that is the abstraction. Therefore it is reasonable to expect that a society will have a collective stake in its own economy. Would a society not, for example, have a collective interest in making sure that has sufficient domestic production of all essential goods that would be needed in an emergency wartime situation in which dependence upon foreign suppliers might result in critical shortages if the enemy were to block the supply lines?
In light of the above, we would expect economic liberalism to depart from reality precisely where it denies society a collective stake in the economy, and this is exactly where we find it in economic liberalism’s devotion to the idea of free trade.
Free trade is the idea that a country should eliminate duties and tariffs altogether or lower them to the point where they do not result in a significant difference in price between foreign and domestic goods. The result is supposed to be that all goods will be produced where it is most efficient to produce them, productivity will rise across the board, prices will drop, and all countries will be better off. A country that puts free trade into practice will generally expect reciprocity on the part of its trading partners, but a true economic liberal insists that even a policy of unilateral free trade will be to the benefit of the country that practices it.
What does history tell us about the effects free trade has on a country’s economy?
In the early 19th Century the leading economic country in the world was the United Kingdom. Liberals and radicals were demanding free trade, and in 1846, Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel, formed an alliance with Liberals and Radicals against the policies of his own party and abolished the Corn Laws (laws protecting British agriculture). This led to the defeat of Peel’s government but it also put the UK on the road to free trade. A couple of decades later the UK had implemented free trade and eliminated its import duties and tariffs. Around the same time Britain was doing this the Republican Party was erecting a tariff wall around the United States. The Republican Party had been founded upon Alexander Hamilton’s economic system, which involved protecting domestic producers with tariffs and using the revenue to fund the government and pay for internal improvement projects like roads, canals, and railroads that would benefit internal commerce.
The UK practiced free trade for approximately the same period of time that the USA followed the Hamiltonian protectionist system of the Republicans – from the late 1860’s till the period between the World Wars. During this period the USA replaced the UK as the world’s leading economic country.
During this same period of time the new Germany which had united under the Prussian monarchy implemented economic nationalism similar to that of the Republicans in the United States. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck applied the economic principles of Friedrich List whose primary influence was Alexander Hamilton. Following this economic policy, Germany became an industrial power in the same decades when those Western European countries that were implementing free trade began to decline.
Liberal Democrats introduced free trade into the American Republic in the 20th Century. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the author of America’s welfare state moved America towards international free trade in the 1930’s and 40’s, and JFK, LBJ, and Bill Clinton moved America further in that direction. By that time the Republican Party had abandoned its founding platform and adopted free trade as well. During the post-WWII period in which America became a free trade country, Japan adopted America’s old protectionist policies. These decades were the decades of America’s decline as a manufacturing power and Japan’s rise to prominence in the new post-WWII high-tech economy.
None of this seems to faze true believers in free trade. A. E. Housman described free trade as being a fetish to the liberal, which seems accurate enough. In their ongoing devotion to policies that have proven disastrous whenever they have been implemented, economic liberals and socialists are alike.
This is not the only similarity between capitalism and socialism. For two systems which are so widely believed to be polar opposites of one another, they share a surprisingly large number of common goals and values. Both have a materialistic view which equates human happiness with having one’s material needs met. Both envision a classless society – capitalism the society of meritocracy, socialism the society of egalitarianism. Both have a utopian vision of a world where global peace has been established through the breaking down of traditional nations and societies into a one-world order.
Both are antagonistic to traditional, organic society, made up of families rooted in local communities with strong social and religious institutions, inevitably falling in a hierarchical arrangement of some sort.
What alternative to capitalism and socialism is there? Is there anything salvageable from the wreck of pre-modern, civilized, chivalrous Christendom that can guide us through the murky darkness of modernity?
The following principles are a start:
A) Private property is not the source of evil. The ills we face and must live with as human beings come from human nature, which is the nature of each of us. The law can contain human evil, by prohibiting us from hurting each other, and punishing us if we do. It cannot change our nature, however, and the only solution to the problem of human evil is a spiritual rather than a political one. Private property is a traditional social institution that has worked better than most if not all communal property arrangements.
B) Society is prior to the individual person within it. A society has collective needs and interests which must be balanced with the personal needs and interests of its members.
However,
C) Society should not collectively decide for its members things which are best left up to their own personal judgment. This includes personal economic decisions. Socialism treats the personal economic well-being of a society’s members as a collective matter to be handled by the government. Capitalism treats the collective economic well-being of the country as a personal matter to be handled by private individuals. Both are errors.
The principle of subsidiarity applies here. Subsidiarity is the principle that decisions should be made by the lowest level of authority that is capable of making them. A decision that affects your family should be made by the authority within your family. A decision concerning your local neighborhood, should be made by the neighborhood authorities. It is only when a decision affects the entire country that it should be made and must be made by the federal government. This applies in economics as in everything else. In practice it means that most economic decisions and transactions will resemble those in a liberal economy. It is not laissez-faire, however, because the government still has the right and responsibility to make laws and decisions which affect the collective economic good of the society which is distinct from the personal economic good of its members.
These principles are not a blueprint for an ideal society. No such thing can be created by the mind of man. They are however, pretty basic economic common sense, which is sorely needed in the ideological debate between capitalism and socialism.
But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Burke’s friend Adam Smith would probably not have appreciated this remark had he lived to hear about it. The author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and the father of modern economics had in fact died three years previously and so was spared the indignity of hearing his profession slighted by the man of whom he had once said that he was “the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us.”
What exactly did Burke mean when he made this remark?
Burke was mourning, not just the murdered Queen of France, but of the civilized way of life she represented. The world of faith and tradition, honour and chivalry, manners and civility, rank and order, with all that it entailed good and bad, was dying before his eyes, personified in the person of the daughter of Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa and wife of Louis XVI of France. In its place, he saw a new world arising, where society would be a laboratory for ivory tower intellectuals to test their abstract theories with men and women as their experimental guinea pigs.
That is what is Burke had in mind with those three words “sophisters”, “economists” and “calculators”. People, detached from the realities of human life, who believe that through cold, hard, reason and logic they can draw up a blue print for a society which will be better for all of its members than one which has slowly evolved through history and which naturally arises out of the relationships and interactions of people bound together by ties of kinship, culture, religion and history.
Some might object that the description above applies to economists who are socialists but not to classical or liberal economists who believe in capitalism. It is the former who believe in a planned economy and social engineering. The latter believe in freedom and letting people make their own decisions for themselves.
There is some truth to this distinction. Socialism originally referred, in the 19th Century, to various movements that sought to replace the private ownership of property with the collective ownership of property on the part of either the community or those who worked the property. The theory behind socialism is the idea that injustices occur in society because of inequality in status and wealth and that this inequality arises out of the private ownership of property. From this premise, the socialist logically proceeds to the notion that if we were to eliminate the distinction between “mine” and “thine” and replace it with an all-inclusive “ours”, an ideal peaceful society would arise, where all men are equals and brothers, sharing all things in common, where each “contributes according to his ability” and receives “according to his need”.
Socialism clearly belongs to the age “of sophisters, economists, and calculators”. It is completely out of touch with reality. It treats the evils and injustices which are an unavoidable aspect of the human condition because they arise out of human nature as a disease that can be successfully treated with a political and economic cure. It is therefore unsurprising that every society which has seriously tried to put it into practice has only exponentially magnified the misery of its people.
It does not follow from this that capitalism is categorically any different.
The “capitalism vs. socialism” debate which dominates academic discussion of political matters today reminds me in many ways of the “Calvinism vs. Arminianism” debate which keeps cropping up in discussions of Christian theology. The latter debate, as to whether the view of predestination and free will expressed in the Five Articles of Remonstrance of 1610 is more true and Scriptural than the view expressed in the Canons of the 1618-19 Synod of Dort, is treated by both sides as a debate between the only two logical positions on these matters, despite the fact that it is an in-house debate among the Reformed branch, of the Protestant wing, of the Christian faith.
Likewise, “capitalism” and “socialism” are subcategories of a particular kind of economy – the modern industrial economy. The modern industrial economy is an economy where the primary economic activity is the production and distribution of factory manufactured goods. It differs from the Western economy which immediately preceded the Industrial Revolution, in which the primary economic activity was agriculture and where items that are mass-produced in factories today were produced by skilled craftsmen. This economy was neither “capitalist” nor “socialist”, categories which are meaningless when applied to it.
Capitalism like socialism, is an abstract blueprint for society, drawn up by rationalist theorists who are out of touch with reality. It is more properly called economic liberalism because it is the extrapolation of the liberal worldview into economics. The liberal worldview is as out of touch with reality as the socialist worldviews. Liberalism is based upon the idea that people are by nature good and so like socialists liberals look for a source of evil that is outside human nature and which can be altered through political means. Hence the long history of liberal projects to eliminate evil through “universal suffrage”, “universal education”, and the like, each designed to eliminate a new “source of poverty, crime, and suffering” after the last project proved to be a dud. They all prove to be duds because poverty, crime, and suffering are born out of the human nature that is present in the breast of every human being and which cannot be eliminated by political solutions.
More immediately relevant to economic liberalism is the liberal view of society. Central to liberal theory is the idea that the “individual” is prior to society. An “individual” in liberal theory, is a generic person apart from society, whose identifying traits are not those which distinguish him from other people, but characteristics which liberal theory claims he possesses equally with all other “individuals” – personal sovereignty and natural rights. In reality, no such creature exists. Particular persons exist, but they exist within societies, societies which are both older than them and logically prior to them. People enter the world as members of pre-existing families, and by extension as members of the pre-existing communities and societies to which their pre-existing families belong, which are defined and bound together, by ties of language, culture, history, etc. Liberal theory blatantly contradicts observable reality.
Economic liberalism is directly derived from the liberal view of the “individual” and society. Economic liberalism or capitalism is the idea that a society’s collective economic interests are best served by its individual members entering into unrestrained voluntary transactions in which their motivation is entirely their own self-interest. When individuals enter into such transactions the impersonal forces of supply and demand which drive the market ensure that the outcome will produce the greatest amount of happiness for the largest number of people.
This theory contains both truth and error.
It is true that under ordinary circumstances, each of us is better qualified to make the decisions that affect our personal economic interests, than the government is to make them for us. As Dr. Thomas Fleming put it:
The one essential insight of free-market economics is that human beings are more efficient at providing for their own needs than any set of other people could possibly be, no matter how enlightened. (The Morality of Everyday Life, University of Missouri Press, 2004, pp. 18-19)
The problem is, that because liberalism sees the individual as being prior to society, and society as existing for the individual, liberalism concludes that a society’s economic interests lies solely in the personal economic interests of its individual members. Society cannot have any collective economic interests, to the liberal, because to the liberal society is an abstract concept created by individuals to serve their own self-interests. To treat collective society as having interests of its own is to commit the fallacy of reification (treating an abstract concept as if it were a concrete reality) to a liberal.
As we have seen, however, liberalism is wrong. Society is the reality. It is liberalism’s concept of the “individual” that is the abstraction. Therefore it is reasonable to expect that a society will have a collective stake in its own economy. Would a society not, for example, have a collective interest in making sure that has sufficient domestic production of all essential goods that would be needed in an emergency wartime situation in which dependence upon foreign suppliers might result in critical shortages if the enemy were to block the supply lines?
In light of the above, we would expect economic liberalism to depart from reality precisely where it denies society a collective stake in the economy, and this is exactly where we find it in economic liberalism’s devotion to the idea of free trade.
Free trade is the idea that a country should eliminate duties and tariffs altogether or lower them to the point where they do not result in a significant difference in price between foreign and domestic goods. The result is supposed to be that all goods will be produced where it is most efficient to produce them, productivity will rise across the board, prices will drop, and all countries will be better off. A country that puts free trade into practice will generally expect reciprocity on the part of its trading partners, but a true economic liberal insists that even a policy of unilateral free trade will be to the benefit of the country that practices it.
What does history tell us about the effects free trade has on a country’s economy?
In the early 19th Century the leading economic country in the world was the United Kingdom. Liberals and radicals were demanding free trade, and in 1846, Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel, formed an alliance with Liberals and Radicals against the policies of his own party and abolished the Corn Laws (laws protecting British agriculture). This led to the defeat of Peel’s government but it also put the UK on the road to free trade. A couple of decades later the UK had implemented free trade and eliminated its import duties and tariffs. Around the same time Britain was doing this the Republican Party was erecting a tariff wall around the United States. The Republican Party had been founded upon Alexander Hamilton’s economic system, which involved protecting domestic producers with tariffs and using the revenue to fund the government and pay for internal improvement projects like roads, canals, and railroads that would benefit internal commerce.
The UK practiced free trade for approximately the same period of time that the USA followed the Hamiltonian protectionist system of the Republicans – from the late 1860’s till the period between the World Wars. During this period the USA replaced the UK as the world’s leading economic country.
During this same period of time the new Germany which had united under the Prussian monarchy implemented economic nationalism similar to that of the Republicans in the United States. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck applied the economic principles of Friedrich List whose primary influence was Alexander Hamilton. Following this economic policy, Germany became an industrial power in the same decades when those Western European countries that were implementing free trade began to decline.
Liberal Democrats introduced free trade into the American Republic in the 20th Century. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the author of America’s welfare state moved America towards international free trade in the 1930’s and 40’s, and JFK, LBJ, and Bill Clinton moved America further in that direction. By that time the Republican Party had abandoned its founding platform and adopted free trade as well. During the post-WWII period in which America became a free trade country, Japan adopted America’s old protectionist policies. These decades were the decades of America’s decline as a manufacturing power and Japan’s rise to prominence in the new post-WWII high-tech economy.
None of this seems to faze true believers in free trade. A. E. Housman described free trade as being a fetish to the liberal, which seems accurate enough. In their ongoing devotion to policies that have proven disastrous whenever they have been implemented, economic liberals and socialists are alike.
This is not the only similarity between capitalism and socialism. For two systems which are so widely believed to be polar opposites of one another, they share a surprisingly large number of common goals and values. Both have a materialistic view which equates human happiness with having one’s material needs met. Both envision a classless society – capitalism the society of meritocracy, socialism the society of egalitarianism. Both have a utopian vision of a world where global peace has been established through the breaking down of traditional nations and societies into a one-world order.
Both are antagonistic to traditional, organic society, made up of families rooted in local communities with strong social and religious institutions, inevitably falling in a hierarchical arrangement of some sort.
What alternative to capitalism and socialism is there? Is there anything salvageable from the wreck of pre-modern, civilized, chivalrous Christendom that can guide us through the murky darkness of modernity?
The following principles are a start:
A) Private property is not the source of evil. The ills we face and must live with as human beings come from human nature, which is the nature of each of us. The law can contain human evil, by prohibiting us from hurting each other, and punishing us if we do. It cannot change our nature, however, and the only solution to the problem of human evil is a spiritual rather than a political one. Private property is a traditional social institution that has worked better than most if not all communal property arrangements.
B) Society is prior to the individual person within it. A society has collective needs and interests which must be balanced with the personal needs and interests of its members.
However,
C) Society should not collectively decide for its members things which are best left up to their own personal judgment. This includes personal economic decisions. Socialism treats the personal economic well-being of a society’s members as a collective matter to be handled by the government. Capitalism treats the collective economic well-being of the country as a personal matter to be handled by private individuals. Both are errors.
The principle of subsidiarity applies here. Subsidiarity is the principle that decisions should be made by the lowest level of authority that is capable of making them. A decision that affects your family should be made by the authority within your family. A decision concerning your local neighborhood, should be made by the neighborhood authorities. It is only when a decision affects the entire country that it should be made and must be made by the federal government. This applies in economics as in everything else. In practice it means that most economic decisions and transactions will resemble those in a liberal economy. It is not laissez-faire, however, because the government still has the right and responsibility to make laws and decisions which affect the collective economic good of the society which is distinct from the personal economic good of its members.
These principles are not a blueprint for an ideal society. No such thing can be created by the mind of man. They are however, pretty basic economic common sense, which is sorely needed in the ideological debate between capitalism and socialism.
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