More Brief Thoughts on Assorted Matters

- Sovereignty in its purest and most absolute sense belongs to God alone. To royal monarchs he has delegated a limited earthly sovereignty. The usurpation of sovereignty is the source of all tyranny. The first to attempt to seize sovereignty for himself was Lucifer. The notions of individual and popular sovereignty, which lie at the heart of liberalism and modern democracy respectively, are merely two more recent attempts.

- Anyone who claims to care about the poor yet who supports a carbon tax is either a moron or a liar.

- It is only those who claim a monopoly on hate for themselves who support laws against hate.

- Culture today is a complete fraud. Traditionally, high culture feeds the mind and soul, while popular culture unites the community. Most modern and post-modern “high” culture, however, poisons the mind and soul, while the “pop culture” manufactured for consumption by the masses in the studios of Los Angeles alienates individuals and atomizes communities.

- The most effective instrument of Cultural Marxism has always been corporate capitalism.

- To say that Communism is bad is not to say that capitalism is good. Communism is bad because it is subversive, egalitarian, revolutionary, atheistic, anti-royalist, anti-aristocratic, materialistic and tyrannical. Many of these things can also be said of capitalism.

- Vegetarianism kills brain cells.

- Reading the history of how regimes like the Soviet Union and the Third Reich sought to suppress dissent and control thought through secret police, charges against which there was no real defence, and the atmosphere of terror and distrust generated by the justifiable suspicion that anyone, even a close friend or family member, might be a state informer, is like reading the blueprint for everything that liberals have done in the name of “human rights” and “protecting vulnerable minorities.”

- The same people who ridicule evangelical Christians for advocating “conversion therapy” for people attracted to their own sex think that physical mutilation is a perfectly proper treatment for people who think that they belong to the other sex.

- We live in a day in which doctors routinely prescribe mood-and-behaviour-altering drugs to children, usually after diagnosing the ordinary rambunctious behaviour of boys as some sort of phony-baloney pathology, and then we wonder why so many kids are now shooting up schools and killing themselves.

- The same people who think that it is “cool” to smoke marijuana – the long term use of which turns the mind to mush, makes people into babbling idiots, and can induce paranoia and schizophrenia – and are demanding its legalization, demonize tobacco, which has been linked, like everything else on the planet, to cancer, but which has a beneficial effect on the mind.

- If all the hawks in the so-called “war on drugs” really wanted to do something about the plague of substance abuse and addiction, they would start by going after the pharmaceutical companies and their physician accomplices who push pills as the answer to all of life’s problems.

- Economists keep coming up with plans such as free trade and socialism, that on paper are supposed to increase human happiness but all they deliver when put into practice is an increase in misery.

- It is those who insist that race does not matter for whom race matters the most.

- Environmentalism is perfectly sane and sound when it insists that we ought to look after our world and conserve our natural resources and the beauty of our surroundings for the sake of future generations but it crosses over into total madness when it demands that we worship the earth and tells us that our burning of fossil fuels is altering the earth’s climate and threatens our survival.

- There is no such thing as progressive Christianity. To the extent that something is progressive it is not Christian and to the extent that it is Christian it is not progressive.

- Christianity is a universal faith in that the Gospel is a message of salvation for all people, anyone can be baptized into the Church of Christ, and the redeemed that shall gather before the throne of the Lamb will be taken from “every kindred and tongue and people and nation.” This does not mean that Christians should look in favour upon the mass immigration that is eroding the national identities of Western countries and bringing about White Genocide. On the contrary, the Christian who supports this is guilty of the sin of impiety and is, in the words of St. Paul, “worse than an infidel.”

The Tory and Globalization

As we have seen, the Tory, the classical conservative whose believes in a stable and secure social and civil order in which royal and ecclesiastical authority pursue their shared vocation to cooperate for the common good, accepts market capitalism with many reservations and qualifications, and rejects socialism with a few light reservations. The market, he insists, can only be the force for good that liberals maintain that it is, in the context of the secure civil order and a culture informed by a moral tradition that supplies the brakes on human avarice that the market itself does not contain. Completely unfettered, as the liberal believes it ought to be, market capitalism becomes an idol that enslaves man rather than a servant that works for his good and a force that dissolves the social and civil order and the moral tradition. To alleviate the misery that had been brought about by the transition from feudal, rural, agrarianism to modern, urban, industrialism and to protect against the threat of revolutionary socialism, Tories introduced modest social legislation with the goal of healing the rift between rich and poor and reuniting them into “one nation”. Social legislation, unfortunately, has the tendency to grow and expand into what today we call the welfare state, more accurately called the provider state, which is as deleterious to the social and civil order and the moral tradition as unfettered capitalism. It allows people to think of themselves as generous and charitable, not for cultivating the virtue of liberal magnanimity by the giving of what is their own, but for voting help to the needy out of what is their neighbours’. It does harm by contributing to illiteracy, illegitimacy, the absence of fathers, high rates of criminal activity and victimization, substance abuse, and multigenerational poverty and dependence, among the people it is designed to help. It hinders the reforming of the organic ties, relationships, and institutions that were uprooted by the advent of capitalism.

The provider state is also one aspect of the convergence of capitalism and socialism that has taken place over the last century. A little over a century ago, Hilaire Belloc predicted this convergence in a book entitled The Servile State. In the struggle between capitalism and socialism, Belloc argued, neither was destined to prevail over the other but both together were moving towards the creation of system in which the bulk of society would consist of a labour force that would work for the owners of capital in times of economic prosperity and be maintained by the state in times of economic hardship. What Belloc called “the servile state” is remarkably similar to what Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn called the provider state.

It is ironic, perhaps, that in the decades following World War II when capitalism and socialism were most at odds with each other, as their avatars in the United States and Soviet Union respectively, were locked in what James Burnham called a “struggle for the world” with each other, that it became most apparent that the two were converging in the way Belloc had predicted. That the two would ultimately converge, however, is not in itself ironic, despite the tendency of the advocates of each to represent the other as their polar opposite, for both are manifestations of modern thought. The liberal who believes in capitalism and the leftist who believes in socialism both alike think of man primarily as a producer, distributor, and consumer of material goods. Furthermore, both tend to see man on a universal scale rather than in the context of a rooted tradition. Most importantly, both conceive of human history, especially that of the modern age, as moving forward from a past of darkness and suffering to a future of happiness and light. They are both, in other words, progressive.

That which unites the liberal and the socialist, separates both from the Tory, who is not a progressive. Canada’s most distinguished Tory thinker, George Grant, explained how the modern concept of progress was a secular mutation and perversion of the Christian doctrine of the Kingdom of God. Christianity teaches that God acts through history, particularly through the events recorded in the Gospels, to accomplish man’s salvation, to be fully unveiled in the future Kingdom of God. Modern man, has retained this general idea of the shape of history, in which he has replaced the Kingdom of God with the Kingdom of Man, thus arriving at the concept of progress. (1) In his best known book Grant described this Kingdom of Man, the end to which the age of progress is moving, as a “universal and homogenous state”. While Marxists thought that theirs was the true vision of progress and condemned American capitalism as reactionary, Grant argued that the American liberal had the truer understanding of the nature of the future state, one in which man would be completely free to remake himself and his world according to his will and that American capitalism rather than socialism would prove to be the means whereby the universal state is to be achieved. (2) As a Tory, however, Grant took a sceptical view of that universal state, looking back to the wisdom of the ancients, who held that a universal state would be a state of tyranny.

In one sense, history has borne out his assessment that the universal state would be that of the liberal rather than the Marxist in that the side of capitalism certainly won the Cold War, ushering in a new era that has been thought of by many as a Pax Americana. In this era, countries that have retained the Communist creed, such as Red China, have introduced market reforms, so as not to repeat the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, and socialist parties in Western countries such as Roy Romanow’s NDP in Saskatchewan in the 1990s and Tony Blair’s “New Labour” in the United Kingdom have also embraced the market economy. This is only one side of the picture, however.

As socialism has embraced the market, seemingly being taken over from the inside by capitalism, liberal capitalism in turn has embraced key elements of socialism. In the second chapter of The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, identified certain means whereby the industrial workers, having seized political power and become the ruling class, would wrest capital from the bourgeoisie and centralize it in the State and revolutionize the mode of production. They listed ten such measures as being “generally applicable” in “most advanced countries”. The second, fifth, sixth, and tenth of these have been implemented in all capitalist countries as have, to one degree or another, several of the others. (3) The capitalism that has conquered socialism from the inside, in other words, has itself been deeply penetrated by Marxism.

While Grant’s assertion that capitalism, rather than socialism, is the vehicle of progress must, therefore, be qualified by the recognition that the capitalism in question is one that has converged with socialism into the servile state predicted by Belloc, that it is moving us towards the “universal and homogenous state” is evident and indeed, is a fact celebrated by some of its advocates. (4) Nowhere is this more evident than in the phenomenon of globalization, the economic integration of the markets of the world, which phenomenon gives further testimony to how capitalism and socialism have converged in that among the main charges levelled against the corporations that profit from globalization is that these capitalist companies sell good manufactured in sweatshops in Communist China.

Globalization has been brought about through the means of free trade treaties negotiated between countries, both regionally as in the European Common Market and NAFTA, and on a global scale, such as in GATT. Free trade, in which tariffs and other protections of domestic markets are dropped to facilitate trade across national boundaries, has been a key element of liberal economics since Adam Smith and while the arguments for it from an economic point of view are not entirely lacking in merit, it has long been the element of free market economics of which the Tory has been most suspicious and for good reason, not least of which being that liberal advocacy of free trade being so often dressed up in utopian dreams of establishing a permanent world peace. While the Tory’s reasons for favouring specific protection policies may vary from age to age, and place to place, from the protection of a rural agrarian economy in the early nineteenth century Corn Laws in Britain to the protection of a developing manufacturing economy in the late nineteenth century economic nationalism of the Conservative Party in Canada, he accepts that the obvious truth of Ludwig von Mises’ argument that governments lack the ability to calculate what is best economically for everyone in their country individually, does not apply to their ability to determine what is best for their country collectively. It is in no country’s best interests to so integrate national markets that those who profit the most are companies and individuals with no patriotic loyalty or attachment.

There are, of course, many who make a big show about protesting against globalization every time there is a trade summit of some sort, but to the extent that they have any motive other than “it’s the cool thing to do” or “my teacher says I ought to”, it is much more like the envy that drives socialism than any patriotic objection to global integration. Indeed, their complaints against globalization are expressed in explicitly anti-patriotic language that depicts their own countries as villains and other people on the other side of the world as virtuous victims. The Tory recognizes that these are no true allies in the patriotic fight against globalization and the progressive universal state.

(1) George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, (Toronto: Copp Clark Publishing, 1959), especially chapter four "History as Progress"
(2) Geroge Grant, Lament for a Nation, (Toronto: Carleton University Press, 1965, 1978, 1989 ).
(3) The second was “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax”, the fifth “Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly”, the sixth “Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State” and the tenth “Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.” Three of these have been implemented in full. The means of communication and transport have been placed under strong state regulatory bodies rather than outright nationalized. To varying extents almost all of the others have been implemented as well.
(4) Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Free Press, 1992).

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.

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

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.