Liberty and Prosperity
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Liberty and Prosperity’
Fiery young attorney Thomas Erskine stood up in the House of Commons to denounce a bill aiming to silence critics of the Government.
In December 1795, the Seditious Assemblies Act was passed in Westminster. Aimed at snuffing out sympathy for the French Revolution, the Act banned critics of the King, the Constitution or even Government policy from airing their views in public without prior permission. William Belsham recorded that crusading lawyer Thomas Erskine, MP for Portsmouth, had reacted angrily at this travesty of English liberties.
Frédéric Bastiat made a tongue-in-cheek appeal to the French government, asking them to protect candlemakers from a cut-throat competitor.
In the 1840s, powerful lobbyists managed to get most European governments to pass legislation protecting their industries from being undercut by rivals. Frédéric Bastiat held this short-sighted indulgence up to ridicule, penning a tongue-in-cheek ‘Petition’ to the Chamber of Deputies in which French candlemakers begged them to crack down on a particularly glaring example of unfair competition.
Inspired by economists in Britain, Frédéric Bastiat explained to his own Government why their initiatives to boost the economy so often fail.
So long as it makes work for the working man to do, almost any initiative will have its champions. A superfluous rail upgrade, a local government vanity project, even burglary or a war, we are reconciled to them on the grounds that ultimately they create jobs and get the economy moving. Yet as Frédéric Bastiat explained back in 1850, the thought may be comforting but it isn’t really true.
Educational reformer Emily Davies argued that Victorian women had more to offer society than a purely ornamental erudition.
Many social ills, wrote pioneering suffragist Emily Davies, have their origins in a lack of imagination, that gift of empathy which smooths away much of the roughness of our common life. There was more to be gained from letting a woman use her imagination as an MP, than from teaching her quadratic equations merely so she can shine more brightly at a dinner-party.
The privileges granted to European merchants in fifteenth-century London led to seething resentment in the City.
The Hanseatic League was a confederation of merchant guilds and towns that gained a stranglehold on trade in northern Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Lübeck and other elite centres waxed fat, while to varying degrees towns from Novgorod to London were forced to accept restrictions on trade and political interference as the price of doing business. The yoke was heavy, and it chafed.
Those in Power may imagine that a docile and compliant public makes Government run more smoothly, but a society of that kind just won’t move forward.
John Stuart Mill was a firm believer in individual freedom, a conviction which led him to dissent from then-fashionable economic and social policy on women’s rights and American slavery. In On Liberty (1858), he warned politicians that a docile, on-message public might let the engine of State run more smoothly, but it will also rob it of any power to move forward.