Freedom is a noble thing

You may not know this, in fact I am reasonably certain that most of you will not know this, but after the Republicans and the Democrats the Libertarian Party is the third largest in the United States. It defines itself as the party of principle, of minimum government and maximum freedom. Could there be any better desideratum, I ask? No, there could not; for these are the principles on which America was built; these are the principles upon which all free societies should stand.

There is so much ignorance over libertarianism, over precisely what it means. It does not entail a free for all; it does not mean licence. While it is true, as I have said on several occasions, that my personal libertarianism – it is such a personal philosophy – comes close to anarchism, at least in the form advanced by Max Stirner, a considerable gap still remains. While I would prefer no government and no state, both restraints on natural liberty, I fully recognise that such a condition could not exist anywhere east of Eden. Instead I will go with the definition given by the US libertarians;

Libertarians support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.

Let me put this another way, let me put it in the form of a joke, one recently told by James Delingpole;

Have you heard about the vast Libertarian conspiracy? We’re going to take over the government – and then leave you alone.

Oh, my, how we need to be left alone; how we need to be free. Yes, free from all of the silliness of the interfering and bloated state; free from all of the health fascism, all the exhortations to do this and don’t do that. We could save millions by cutting government to the bone, by doing away with all of the unrepresentative extra-governmental bodies set up to monitor this or that aspect of our lives and our conduct. Above all we need government to stop treating us as if we were children.

Yes, the state is there, or should be there, only to protect our basic rights. This is what used to be referred to in this country as the night-watchman state, a condition where the sovereignty of the individual, the individual’s right to freedom and property, was respected. The problem is that a new type of state began to emerge from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, one that in the name of ‘reform’ created a form of feudal servitude, spending the money of the citizen, taking increasing amounts of personal income from tax creators to pass to tax eaters. As the state waxed liberty waned.

It’s not a question of ideology or party politics. The Conservatives, I regret to say, were just as bad as the Liberals, Disraeli just as bad as Gladstone. Both began a process of interference which combined in David Lloyd George, who opened a new, more intense style of intervention that is still being followed to the present day, a ruinous path of taxation and welfare that benefits nobody, that creates more problems than it solves.

No, that’s not quite right: it benefits the agencies of the state; it benefits the bureaucrats. We are robbed of personal income as we are robbed of choice in so many areas of our personal life. I would like to reverse it all, clear out the Augean Stable, clear out government and return sovereignty to where it belongs, to each and every one of us. There is no nobler cause than freedom.

I must be free or die

Every so often I like to pause and think about my politics. I like to clarify where I stand, for no other reason than confusion on the point still arises from time to time. That little box to the left (ah, the left!) more or less sums things up: I am right wing and libertarian. The one thing I am not is dogmatic, meaning that I will look at issues in pragmatic and empirical terms, reaching a conclusion on an independent basis, not through a prefabricated ideology. And, of course, not being shaped by ideology means that I am never consistent!

OK, I’m a libertarian, and I have to stress that this does not mean the same thing as a liberal, at least not in the sense that the word is used in the present time. I believe in freedom; I believe the state to be an intrusive imposition, an attempt to place limits on freedom. Still, we life in communities and communities have to be ordered, so I accept the state as a necessity, just so long as it is kept at a maximum distance. I dislike any form of welfare or state subsidy, which I believe to be corrosive of self-respect and economic freedom. More than that, the high levels of taxation they require do much to bleed the life out of enterprise, impacting on the very people that welfare is supposedly meant to help.

I dislike ideology, no, that’s not strong enough: I detest ideologies and states governed by ideology; I detest, as George Orwell put it, all the smelly little orthodoxies contending for our souls. I question everything, all suppositions and lazy mental shibboleths. It gives me no greater pleasure in debate than to demolish some argument with foundations on second-hand, usually half-digested ideas. Marxists are always fun, but, alas, no real challenge!

Frederick von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom ranks high among my favourite political and economic texts. I’m now discovering Frédéric Bastiat , a nineteenth century French classic liberal theorist (it meant something different then also!), who wrote an exciting little squib called The Law, the perfect antidote to The Communist Manifesto, published two years beforehand. It’s a wonderful polemic, an attack on what he calls the two forms of plunder – stupid greed and false philanthropy. Everything he says is just so apt; it was then; it is now.

Look at the monstrosity of the welfare state and welfare programmes, both in England and America, across so much of the developed world. One knows exactly what Bastiat means when he talks about the limitless nature of philanthropy; that expenditure does not solve a problem, it just creates a demand for ever more expenditure. In England the monstrosity was taken to a level of near perfection by the previous government, pushing the country to the threshold of bankruptcy. State philanthropy is a perversion of liberty. The only beneficiary is the state itself, the agencies of the state, growing fatter and ever more intrusive.

For me the only true guardians of freedom stand on the libertarian right. The left includes all the others: the statists, the ideologues, the socialists, the communists, the nationalists, collectivists of all kinds. After all, I’m just a fun-loving girl and a free spirit. My philosophy can be boiled down to one simple nugget: stay out of my light and I’ll stay out of yours. I take my stand always alongside Patrick Henry…and Wordsworth, of course!

It is not to be thought of that the flood
Of British freedom, which, to the open sea
Of the world`s praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed, `with pomp of waters, unwithstood,`
Roused though it be full often to a mood
Which spurns the check of salutary bands,
That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spoke: the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. - In everything we are sprung
Of Earth`s first blood, have titles manifold.

Bad Law

There is no more urgent task for the new British government –besides reducing the deficit – than reviewing the way this country has been governed over the past thirteen years. The previous administration was one of the worst we have ever had: lacking any big ideas it had to invent lots of small ones; it had to interfere with the liberty of the subject in such a way that not even Big Brother could have imagined possible.

I’m a historian by training, a specialist in the seventeenth century, in the period of Stuart absolutism. But, quite honestly, Charles I, Charles II and James II came nowhere near interfering with the basic rights of the citizen in the fashion of Blair and Brown, heading governments that even intruded into the most intimate areas of personal and family life.

The closest parallel I can think of is that of the rule of Cromwell’s Major Generals, a killjoy experiment much hated by the people of the day. James was overthrown in 1688 in the so-called Glorious Revolution less because of what he did and more by the fear of what he might do. Since 1997 we have had what might be referred to as an Inglorious Counter-Revolution, the rule of the new Major Generals, the Major Generals of New Labour.

I now have a copy of Philip Johnston’s Bad Laws, which serves as a thread to guide one through the labyrinth of laws and pettifogging rules that were inflicted on this nation over the past thirteen years. I’ve not a chance to read it all, but the passages I have alighted on at random have induced two conflicting emotions - amusement and anger; amusement at the absurdity, anger at the time-wasting pettiness. If I had been in charge of the Tory election campaign- and if I had pots of cash! – I would have issued a copy of this book to every home in the land.

I think of the last Parliament as the Rotten Parliament or the Expenses Parliament. But looking over Johnston’s book suggests a supplementary name- the Lazy Parliament. Too many of the laws introduced were poorly thought-out and badly drafted, part of Labour’s government for the sake of government. Why were MPs not more alert? Why was there no effective and detailed scrutiny of what they were being asked to approve? Were they too busy, I wonder, filling out expenses forms, flipping and claiming for porno, bird houses and kit-kats to pay attention to the affairs of this nation?

We have been deluged with so many petty rules and criminal offences that it’s quite impossible to detail them all. The Hunting with Dogs Act was the one that made my blood boil. Even those who support this might not know is that more foxes have been killed every year since it was introduced, and by the ugliest means conceivable.

The stupidity went on and on. The Religious Hatred Act introduced thought crime straight from the pages of Nineteen-Eighty Four. The Licensing Act makes it an offence to play a piano in a pub without authorisation. Even circuses now have to apply for a license for every venue they visit.

This, like so many of the hard Labour laws, was a charter for the council jobsworths, the army of snoopers set to police the rules. In Birmingham Zippo’s Circus was threatened with prosecution if the clown act blew an exploding tuba, this being considered a ‘live music performance’ and thus requiring a licence!

And then there was the seventy-five-year-old blind man who was issued with a £40 fixed penalty notice after his dog pooped in a field, or people returning from a supermarket in Brighton who had their wine confiscated for being in possession of alcohol in a public place!

Various pieces of anti-terror legislation have been a greater threat to law-abiding British citizens than to any potential Osama bin-Laden. Trial by jury, a most ancient right, is under threat, and the European Arrest Warrant allows our citizens to be extradited to other jurisdictions for offences which are not considered crimes in England.

The Firearms Act effectively wiped out the sport and livelihood of thousands of people. The War Crimes Act has resulted in not a single conviction. It’s now illegal to own a Shetland Pony without it possessing a passport with a picture. The Regulation and Investigatory Powers Act, the grand snoopers’ charter, allows officials even to read private communications and to monitor the movements of law-abiding citizens. And there is no point in me starting on yuman rights and elf ‘n’ safety for fear of trying your patience, or extending this blog to prodigious lengths.

We now have more CCTV cameras than any other nation in the world though there is no evidence at all that they are effective in reducing crime. We are observed even more closely than the citizens of such places as North Korea and Cuba. We are beset by armies of parking enforces and clampers, as well as being pestered by a growing army of health fascists. The smoking ban threatens to destroy the pub, one of the great British institutions. Latterly the nation’s health supremo has alluded to the deleterious effects of ‘passive drinking.’ Even school lunch boxes, an intimate bond between parent and child, can be investigated by the healthy eating brigade.

Since 1997 an additional 3000 criminal offences have been introduced, 1000 of them punishable by imprisonment. It’s as well to remember that a lot of this comes from the Central Committee of the European Soviet Union in Brussels, though it has harmonised quite well with Labour statist thinking, on the determination to micro-manage so many areas of our public and private lives.

From Identity Cards to Lunch Boxes each and every one of us has become a potential suspect, guilty until proved innocent. Sweep the lot away, sweep away the legacy of a dreadful thirteen years, either that or reintroduce Royal Absolutism, my favoured solution. We were much freer under its gentle guidance.

When, like committed linnets, I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my King;
When I shall voice aloud how good
He is, how great should be,
Enlargèd winds, that curl the flood,
Know no such liberty.

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.