Liberty and Prosperity
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Liberty and Prosperity’
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.
In one of his ‘Cato Letters’, John Trenchard took issue with the view (popular in Westminster) that the public could not be left to make up their own minds.
John Trenchard MP was not so naive as to imagine that the general public were always right. But he thought they owed their errors to being misled by politicians, and that they usually recognised the truth when they were allowed to see it. If only, he sighed, the politicians would stop trying to pull the wool over our eyes, and concentrate on doing the job for which they were elected.