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Samizdata quote of the day – What the end of politics looks like We are only, here in the UK, at the very beginning of the process of descent into tyranny. But it is helpful to frame our thinking with this in mind: that is our trajectory if we continue to imagine that state authority can be founded in political hedonism, or the unity of desire. And it is also helpful for us therefore to imagine how things can be different: what is the proper grounds for the authority of the state, and how are states indeed properly constituted?
The answer, for those who know their political theory, is the antithesis of tyranny: the rule of law. But it is the rule of law understood in a special way. It does not mean the ‘rule of lawyers’ (which we are now highly familiar with). It means something much more specific than that.
– David McGrogan (£)
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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No – certainly not.
We in the United Kingdom are not “only” at “the very beginning of the process of descent into tyranny” – the people are disarmed (traditionally the key step in establishing unlimited government power), the education system (including the private schools) teaches that government is the answer to all problems – via its spending and regulations, never even considering the possibility that bigger government may make things WORSE than they otherwise would be (the teaching of history is particularly perverse), Freedom of Speech has been savagely attacked – with THOUSANDS of people arrested every year, for their words.
We are well down the road towards tyranny – NOT just at the beginning of that road.
However, I agree with the second point – that the-rule-of-law is the answer and that it must be properly defined – but that brings us back to education, what people, including lawyers, are taught as “the rule of law” is NOT the rule of law as traditionally understood – the rule of law, as traditionally understood, was that a “crime” is a violation of the body or goods of someone else – by force or fraud, that is the Common Law. But both the vast mass of legislation over the last century (indeed more than that) ignore this principle – and lawyers and judges are also taught a very different idea of what the rule of law means.
When Thomas Hobbes wrote his “Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Law of England” he (Mr Hobbes) was the “philosopher” – and his idea of what “law” and “justice” meant (as in his “Leviathan”) utterly twist and corrupt these concepts – turning them into the will of the ruler or rulers (who can indeed by called judges – for judges need not be servants of the law and justice as traditionally understood by the non aggression principle, judges may be tyrants).
Mr Jeremy Bentham had much the same view – hence his claim that natural justice (as traditionally understood – non aggression principle) did not exist, and that rights AGAINST the state were “nonsense” and claiming that they had a natural origin in the nature of humans as free will moral beings was “nonsense on stilts” – as to Mr Bentham (as to Mr Hobbes) a human was NOT a being – they claimed that we are just machines, that we have no souls, no moral agency (free will).
Modern “Declarations” and “Conventions” about “human rights” pay lip service to the concept – but, if one reads them carefully (as lawyers and judges do) they do NOT defend the private property rights of individuals against the state – not even the right to keep and bear arms (the traditional definition of a free person in both Classical Greek and Roman law and Germanic law) or Freedom of Speech.
Mandleson said many years ago (while we were under the thumb of the EU) that we were living in a post democratic age, and much as I hated him saying that, it did seem to be true then and even more so now.
I think that the US Constitution and bill of rights should be taught across the west as something admirable. The fact that is not is very telling.
A good short book on the law (the effort to establish the principle of traditional justice, private property and voluntary contracts – the non aggression principle) is Frederic Bastiat’s “The Law”.
This shows that the idea of law is not confined to English thinkers such as Chief Justice Coke (see, for example, the Case of Dr Bonham 1610 – Coke was the great enemy of the master of Thomas Hobbes – Sir Francis Bacon who held that “law” was just the will of the ruler or rulers – see, for example, his “New Atlantis”, also 1610, where an “enlightened” “scientific” elite have total power over ordinary people – something that would have delighted Jeremy Bentham), or Chief Justice Sir John Holt (Chief Justice from 1689 to 1710 – and, like Coke, an opponent of the abuses of Parliament – NOT just the King, a foe of the idea that Parliament could commit any injustice it felt like committing, indeed declare such crimes “the law” – a position later pushed by Sir William Blackstone).
Indeed in some ways (certainly not all ways) France was a freer country than Britain in some parts of the 19th century – for example France did not have Income Tax or a Poor Law Tax.
The peak of liberty (of limited government) in France was probably 1869 (the same is true for Britain – although it depends what part of Britain you mean – for example in my home town of Kettering the state reached its point of most limitation in 1874 – as we did not have a School Board and national taxation in Britain reached its low point in 1874).
Even as late as the 1970s government in France was smaller, as a proportion of civil society, than in Britain.
The point that the rule of law is NOT the rule of judges is especially important – judges must first be taught what the law is (the principles of natural justice) and what it is not – and this education must occur long before they become judges.
In should be remembered that the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, of which Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was a leading member, was founded to destroy (to exterminate) the traditional (private property rights, voluntary contract, strictly limited government) understanding of what “law” and “justice” are.
Tyranny is not some unintended consequence of “human action, but not human design” – it is chosen by key people, it is their aim – their objective. And liberty is the same – it is also NOT the consequence of “human action, but not human design” – it does not just “evolve” (contra Hayek), humans beings (free will – moral agency) have to choose it and make the sacrifices, if need be their lives, to establish it and maintain it – the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
In judging any philosophy, either political philosophy – or philosophy of what a human is (are we human beings or not?) – what used to be called “the nature of man” – the key question is whether a follower of such a philosophy would be prepared to fight to the death to defend the private property of others (not just their own), including the persons of fellow citizens – from unjust execution.
A philosophy that teaches (in effect), for example, that “as long as it is not me who is to be hanged, I will not take up arms” is useless – ditto a philosophy that judges things by the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” – rather than individual justice.
It makes no difference if a gang of rapists gain more pleasure from raping someone than the victim suffers pain – pleasure and pain are not what justice (moral good and moral evil) are about – it is a category mistake to hold that they are.
Nor does it matter if executing an innocent person deters crime – as justice is not about this. Punishment should be proportionate to the crime (the intentional, free will chosen, violation of the body or goods of others) – whether it deters crime is not relevant.
You do not punish the innocent (regardless of what “good” punishing the innocent may supposedly do) – and you punish the guilty in proportion to their crime (their free will chosen violation of the bodies or goods of others).
Rour le Jour.
Yes – although liberty and democracy are very different things, BOTH have been undermined.
Individual liberty has been in decline for a horribly long time (hence the idea that we are at the “start” of the slide towards tyranny – is absurd), and so has democracy (the rule of the majority of ordinary people) been subverted.
For example, the British people were opposed to mass immigration – now wishing their country to be taken from them, but the wishes of the people were treated with total contempt by the establishment elite (from the 1960s onwards – 60 years now) – hence the plundering, the rape gangs, and so on.
Freedom of Speech was one of the first casualties of this anti democratic policy of the establishment elite – in a series of Acts of Parliament from 1965 (which also attacked Freedom of Association), 1968, 1976, 2010 (no doubt I have missed some dreadful measures – there have been many).