Samizdata

A.N. Wilson is one of that species of writers that Britain has in abundance: well educated, articulate and not excessively intelligent. He is an exemplar of a particular strain of well heeled British thought that will praise a well crafted essay that states the received wisdom with an air of wise engagement and formulaic cynicism. However such people are deeply suspicious of anything resembling a rigorous argument (for that might imply the truth is not self-evident) or any attempt to make causal links beyond the second logical tier. This species of writer’s forbearers were the people who knew that ending unemployment was good, and that The National Socialist German Workers Party had ended unemployment in the 1930’s. Thus as they looked on and saw a tidy, neat Germany arise from the social and economic chaos of the Depression Years, they would state at parties in their Eton and Oxford educated accents that that Hitler chap might be on to something.

And so we have A.N. Wilson writing about Eugenics on Sunday, 10^th March 2002 in The Future lies with Eugenics. He quite interestingly and articulately describes an underclass in Britain that lives a life of state subsidised indolence, crime and childbirth, leading to generations predisposed genetically from birth to become predatory unemployed drains on the diminishing public purse that would otherwise be setting aside tax money for more worthy retirees.

And his solution? Keeping in the tradition of not so much Occam’s razor but rather Occam’s chainsaw, all problems are resolved in one causal step:

(A) The children of ‘hooligan parentage’ provide the majority of repeat offending criminals.
(B) Therefore the solution is to forcibly sterilise repeat offenders to prevent the birth of more congenital criminals.

The justification for this is that these hooligan elements not only absorb a disproportionate amount of appropriated state tax monies containing, housing and feeding them but also will have the temerity to demand an equal share of nationalised state welfare benefits in their dotage.

Now a more rigorous mind might have noted that the common thread here is not some societal line of poison genetics but rather who gets to share in the money the state has appropriated from its hapless taxpayers. The concept that perhaps it is the very structure of the predatory wealth destroying state that is the problem, rather than a genetic underclass, would appear to be a causal link too far for a writer whose primary aim is to be articulate rather than intelligent.

So house prices are skewed by state intervention in tenancy relationships, low end jobs are priced out of existence with minimum wages, undercapitalised businesses are bankrupted with taxes and regulations, tax monies are forcibly taken from the productive and given to subsidise unproductive behaviour and yet somehow the emergence of a perpetually unemployed underclass is deduced to be a genetic problem? Well perhaps it is. Maybe if a few more of A.N. Wilson’s class had contrived to get themselves slaughtered in Britain’s 20^th century wars, we would not have developed a political and media elite that seems genetically predisposed to blame everyone for the miserable state of Britain except themselves.

I cannot think of a more compelling argument for the importance of the libertarian argument that no state can be trusted with such a high degree of power over civil society as states have today. The likes of A.N. Wilson would have people castrated and spayed by the state because those people have to live in the reality that the likes of A.N. Wilson helped to create.