Georgian Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Georgian Era’
William Cobbett was delighted with one young woman’s protest against Mr Pitt’s ingenious ways of raising money.
In 1784, the use of a horse for purposes other than farming was subjected to tax, one of Prime Minister William Pitt’s many ingenious tax-grabs. William Cobbett (who blamed the taxes on the national debt racked up by unnecessary wars) chuckled with delight nearly forty years later, when he stumbled across a farmer’s wife making a gentle protest.
Adam Smith contrasted the Government’s handling of the national economy with the way most families handled theirs.
By 1776, the long-standing policy of favouring British producers and blocking overseas competitors had raised prices, cost jobs, and only last year driven the American colonies to revolution. Adam Smith thought it both damaging and insulting, for the humblest tailor or cobbler could have told the Government that this was no way to run a budget.
In January 1807, newspapers breathlessly reported that Napoleon Bonaparte’s rampage across Europe was at an end — but was it true?
In January 1807, as Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies swept across the Continent building his French Empire, British newspapers printed a cheering story about how the Russians had inflicted a calamitous defeat on Napoleon. William Cobbett didn’t believe a word of it, and expressed his doubts in a masterly metaphor which made ‘red herrings’ into a household proverb.
There are solid reasons why countries with lower taxes and less regulation tend to be more prosperous.
Eighteenth-century Britain was by comparison with most of Europe a remarkably free and stable society, and also a driving force behind industrial innovation and economic growth. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon regarded this as cause and effect: countries where government is quiet will be busier, more prosperous and internationally more friendly, and they explained why this will always be so.
Riding through Sussex, William Cobbett comes across a large family relaxing together in front of their charming cottage.
Radical MP William Cobbett was a man of strong emotions. Among them was a rooted objection to the Revd Thomas Malthus, who in a learned study on population begged Government to dampen the birth-rate among the working classes, or else the planet would soon be stalked by famine, war and pestilence. Cobbett faced the prospect of impending catastrophe without anxiety.
The citizen should not dutifully accept government intrusion as the price of community life.
In the early eighteenth century, some argued that those who enjoy the benefits of living in our society should accept that the authorities will police our spending, our behaviour and even our opinions as they think best. But the benefits of society do not come from having our liberties curtailed, objected John Trenchard MP. They come from having them protected.