Liberty and Prosperity
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Liberty and Prosperity’
However loud his critics shouted their disapproval, Abraham Lincoln would neither deprive them of free speech nor change his opinions.
In 1864, as the American Civil War progressed, talk in Washington had turned to how rebellious Confederate States ought to be handled should the Union win. President Lincoln’s appeals for reconciliation were brushed aside by supporters of the Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill, a cock-a-doodle-do of victory designed to give Washington sweeping powers.
Pliny admired Julius Mauricus because he spoke his mind, and Emperor Nerva because he let him.
Rome welcomed gentle Nerva (r. 96-98) with relief following the death of Emperor Domitian, who — thanks to hangers-on such as Fabricius Veiento, and the feared spymaster Catullus Messalinus — had maintained a vicious police state. Pliny’s friend Julius Mauricus had lost his brother in one of Domitian’s purges, but he was still speaking his mind.
The English ‘Cato’ cautioned that sabre-rattling sanctions and other forms of coercion are never in the country’s economic interest.
The wisdom in the 1720s was that the Government and its wealthy partners should use their superior financial and military resources to shape global trade in the British interest; so they bribed, bullied and bombarded foreign lands and peoples into working for us instead of themselves. Wars spread, debts mounted, and ‘Cato’ wondered what happened to sane men when they joined the Cabinet.
Peoples of another culture or region will not long tolerate a Government that uses guns and soldiers to secure their obedience.
By the 1720s, there were already rumblings of discontent coming from England’s American colonies, but John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon warned against strictness from London. When government of a distant or culturally different people falls to your lot, the only way to keep them on side is to give them a mutually satisfactory degree of freedom and self-determination.
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.
Thorold Rogers looks at how Governments have tried to make trade ‘fair’, and concludes that they would have been better ensuring it was free.
To Sir Francis Bacon, writing in 1625, it was self-evident that one man’s gain is always another man’s loss — that if Paul is doing well Peter must be doing correspondingly badly. He wanted Governments to step in and even things up, but Victorian economist Thorold Rogers warned that Bacon had fallen prey to a delusion which has nursed wars and corruption, but brought no justice.