PROLIFIC CRAP FROM MATTHEW PARRIS

At the launch party of my book at the Institute of Economic Affairs, I quoted with approval a paragraph from the Tory MP and Times columnist Matthew Parris:

“The British Left has never had a problem in principle with intervention, coercion  or prescription. Why would they? To the leftist mind, impressed with the  possibilities of collective action channelled into statist structures for the purposes  of increasing the sum total of human happiness at gunpoint, the idea of wading  into the Middle East to sort things out was always going to have an instinctive  appeal”.

Here is a politico linking the Warfare State and the Welfare State – both need guns. Now that is promising. Maybe, I thought, we could move off the bogus spectrum of Right versus Left (what would the British Right do, Matthew?) to the real issue: Big Government versus Small Government, and thus debate what functions necessarily belong to Government. What must be done at gunpoint?

We had Matthew’s answer on Saturday 29th March; one helluva lot. Under the title of “The State Works; Have faith”, his list of things that only Government can do includes the following:

"Put Canary wharf on the map. Get Crossrail built. Get roads built. Get decent  healthcare for those who are poor and chronically sick. Underwrite and arrange  free and universal schooling. Protect us abroad [wow] and police us at home.  Force the pace on Climate change. Frame, amend and administer the law. Defend  the interest of the generality against the appetites of individuals. Create a  national park, guarantee a green belt. Hold back the march of a million breeze  block bungalows across the countryside. Redistribute wealth and power."

Both history and theory demonstrate that nothing on this list must necessarily involve Government, and much of it is touched on in my book (the basic issues are ownership of property and the signals of market pricing).  But what I would like to concentrate on here is not Matthew’s list above, but rather his assertions below:

“The great challenges as they appeared in spring 2008” are “the environment,  the regulation of banking, fair trade, malaria and HIV-Aids, congestion,  immigration, asylum.  What has anti-statism to say about any of these?  I cannot  remember a time when the ideas of Hayek, Joseph, and Sherman all seemed more  distant to the anxieties of the hour”.

Firstly, Matthew, haven’t you left a few biggies out?  Like war, including Iraq (on which you have those major debates with your colleague David Aaronovitch), political corruption, and falling living standards, all of which are the direct result of Big Government, and only Big Government (ie your statist structures). What about major government cock-ups (like losing discs with data for 25 million people, or Katrina, or last summer’s flooding – about all of which Big Government had been warned months and indeed years earlier and done nothing about it).

Secondly, let’s look at the challenges named by you and generously assume that they are the topics on everybody’s lips (I’ll leave out the environment – too long to cover here, so buy my book!):  banking, where your now irrelevant Hayek’s proposed denationalisation (ie re-privatisation) of money is still the only solution; fair trade (if it’s not free it’s unfair and highly damaging to the poor); malaria and HIV-Aids, (where Big Government is responsible for the deaths of millions of people by banning DDT); immigration (never a problem until Big Government took it on, and now a huge issue as I write – see also my book page 63); and asylum (where last week The Independent Asylum Commission attacked the system as inhumane).

On all these matters the State does NOT work. Anti-statism can hardly do worse. Indeed Statism stole these issues at gunpoint, Matthew, from the far superior laissez faire system. Oh, and by the way, that chap Hayek not only revealed statism as dictatorship (elective or not) in The Road to Serfdom. He showed why the worst get to the top. And he showed elsewhere that the perennial “challenge” of living standards and the quality of life is far better dealt with outside the State, because the taxes government take attack the division of labour at its roots.  My calculation (see Chapter 7 of my book) is that every extra pound of tax reduces overall living standards by about 65p, and vice versa, and that’s before any waste!

Come off it, Matthew.

I should have known better, of course. In Chapter 8 (Ideological Crap) of my book I took to task another Times columnist, Associate Editor Anatole Kaletsky, for including in his necessary list for Government the following: law enforcement, poverty alleviation, environmental protection, the promotion of public culture (see my entry of March 10th on “Crap Art”) and the financing of pure scientific research (see October 29th). And this from a self-described “instinctive liberal”!