Whigs and Liberty

The Whigs and Liberty - part 2 13 September 2009A Brief History of the Whigs and Classical Liberals and Their Influence in Bringing Personal Liberty to The Ordinary Citizen.
We would like to draw to your attention, that all law everywhere has been originally designed around The Ten Commandments. If you have not read them, buy a Bible and do so. The Ten Commandments and the Book of Proverbs alone are worth the price of any bible. Nobody can go wrong if they obey the Commandments.
Unfortunately, some politicians, lawyers and legislators think they know better than the wisdom of the ages. The craving for unearned wealth by those who produce nothing, and the subsequent meddling with free markets and the laws governing the secure property rights and free market actions of participants, brings us most of the world’s strife.
As explained above, social commentator and philosopher, Albert Jay Nock pointed out that the great social philosophers of the 17th and 18th century England, the Whigs, contemplated a government whose interventions should be purely negative in character, and that beyond these negative interventions it should not go. It should have no coercive power to enforce any positive interventions what-so-ever on the individual.
The Whigs ‘wither away’ the omnipotent State
Nock continues:
“When the Whigs came into power, they kept all the foregoing tenets in mind, as did the early Liberals who succeeded them. They worked steadily towards curbing government’s coercive power over the individual; and with such an effect as historians testify, that by the middle of the eighteenth century Englishmen had simply forgotten that there was ever a time when the full ‘liberty of the subject’ was not theirs to enjoy. In this connection the thing to be remarked is that the Whigs proceeded by the negative method of repealing existing laws, not by the positive method of making new ones. They combed the statute book and when they found a statute which bore against ‘the liberty of the subject’ they simply repealed it and left the page blank. This purgation ran up into the thousands.
“In fact, in 1873, the secretary of the law society estimated that out of the 18,110 acts which had been passed since the reign of Henry III, four fifths, [about 14,488], had been wholly or partially repealed. The thing to be observed here is that this negative method of simple repeal left free scope for the sanitive processes of natural law in dealing with all manner of social dislocation and disabilities.
“These processes are usually slow and usually painful, and impatience with them leads to popular demand that the government should step in and anticipate them by positive statutory intervention when anything goes wrong. The [Classical] Liberals were aware that no one, least of all a ‘practical’ politician can foresee the ultimate effects, or even all of the collateral effects, of such interventions, or can calculate the force of their political momentum. Thus it regularly happens that they bring about ultimate evils which are not only far more serious than the specific evils which they were meant to remedy, but are also wholly unexpected.
“American legislative history in the last two decades shows any number of conspicuous instances where the political short cut of positive interventionism has been taken towards remedying a present evil at the most reckless expense of future good. The prohibition amendment is perhaps the most conspicuous of these instances.”
But it was the wisdom of the Whigs and their policies of negative interventionism which was instrumental in turning a society of serfs into a nation of free men - the freest men in all of history. The repeal of the corrosive laws of positive interventionism by the state, prying into every facet of men’s lives, was one of the keys which turned tiny England into Great Britain. It made them, through competition and free trade, the most productive men in all of history, and they became the most prosperous people ever. The market oriented, unplanned dynamic society, about which F.A. Hayek has so eloquently and passionately written, had arrived on earth for the first time in all of history.
World War I, beginning in 1914, became the start of England’s decline. That war cost Great Britain alone almost seven and three quarter billion pounds, and the introduction of a heavy progressive income tax stopped the dynamic progress in its tracks. Future living standards were blown away in the form of guns, shells, bombs, unprecedented bureaucracy and senseless slaughter of millions of young men. But that is another story.
Unfortunately intellectuals thought that by government planning, by allowing governments to indulge in positive interventions, they could improve upon Man’s state of affairs. The early pre-Marxian French socialists, Henri de Saint Simon and Auguste Comte knew nothing of economics and were mathematicians. They thought that prosperity for the masses was merely an ‘engineering’ problem. Dwelling upon the highly regarded scientific work of Sir Isaac Newton, they thought that as the universe was controlled by the marvels of mathematics, it would be an easy matter to organise human affairs likewise, by developing their ‘scientific’ plans for society. This is the very basis of Keynesian economics today; econometrics they call it; men engineering their fellow men and their affairs. Late 19th century lawyers, and the influence of the early Fabians, overran the wisdom of the Whigs and their policies of negative interventionism.
In the space of only from three to five generations the intellectuals under the influence of Henri de Saint Simon and Auguste Comte, Rousseau, Marx, the Fabians and Keynes and their disciples have made the about turn complete. And today, all over the world we have the people of many previously free and prosperous nations suffering from the results of positive intervention, some indeed, from intervention in its most virulent form, socialism - which is total positive interventionism.
The 20th century will stand as a historic witness to the stark horrors of socialism everywhere - in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia, in Mao’s China, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, in countless other societies around the world, and to a lesser, but still serious extent in England, once the cradle of liberty.
On February 19th, 1948 Winston Churchill said, ‘I am told that 300 officials have the power to make new regulations, apart altogether from parliament, carrying with them the penalty of imprisonment for “crimes” hitherto unknown to the law’. And today, unelected officials do what they like, all at citizens’ inconvenience and expense.
The personal liberty, so dearly won by the preceding generations and the Whigs, has been dissipated by both unelected and elected Pied Pipers. The individual now dances to the tune of those who hold the reigns of state power. It is well at this point to remember, as we descend into a fascist state, the words of Benito Mussolini:
Fascism, is for liberty. And for the only liberty which can be a real thing, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. Fascism ... the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people.’
The Fuhrer, Lenin and Stalin and Chairman Mao and Pol Pot, and other socialist dictators thought likewise.
This is the future we face unless we have a change of heart. We have already discussed briefly, one of our nations’ greatest impediments to personal and national development, severely overzealous taxation, one of the hallmarks of the fascist state.
Recommended Reading: Our Enemy the State by Albert J. Nock. Liberty Press, Indianapolis, USA.The State of the Union by Albert J. Nock. Liberty Press, Indianapolis, USA.The Constitution of Liberty by F.A. Hayek. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA.The Counter-Revolution of Science by F.A. Hayek.How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman. Three Rivers Press, New York.THE FATAL CONCEIT - The Errors of Socialism by F.A. Hayek. Edited by W.W. Bartley III. The University of Chicago Press.
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