Britain Unleashed: small is beautiful
How could Britain become an economic powerhouse of the 21st century? Rather than, as it's currently looking, the home of reality TV, the reverse Flynn Effect and a general place of curiosity for people wondering how these people managed to rule a quarter of the globe?
England (and later Britain) became an empire because it was able to race ahead of its European rivals in the 17th and 18th centuries financially. Why? Because it was small. Unlike other European countries, it was not a polyglot empire (like Austria or Spain), nor a large kingdom ruling over various diverse regions and nationalities (like France), but a fairly manageable, reasonably united country, especially after the Civil War and Restoration resolved the constitutional issue. Because of this unity, which dated back many centuries, it had evolved fairly strong and relatively effective institutions of justice and commercial law (and unlike the Netherlands, it had the protection of the sea). This internal peace and unity allowed its people to develop a business culture, where they could meet, trade, invest and generally make money.
But this business culture, which was best defined by the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, was also aided by a strong moral culture. Capitalism is a fantastic system because it works within human nature, but although capitalism understands humans to be self-interested, it works best when people have some morals, and so do not destroy the system with corruption and graft.
England also had another great advantage over France, in that its system of primogeniture forced the younger sons of the aristocracy to find work elsewhere, whether in the Church, Army or trade. This kept the size of the non-working aristocracy to a minimum, while in France an increasingly large number placed intolerable pressure on those further down the pecking order (the modern comparison being the House of Saud, a situation that can only end badly). At the very least, if an English aristo didn’t want to get his hands dirty he could marry a wealthy new-money heiress and so allow talented people to rise up in society.
Today we have gone through growth, reform and democracy, and yet Europe, strangely, resembles the ancien régime in that, as in 18th century France or the latter days of Rome, large numbers of intelligent, well-placed people from the best universities see working for the state as their right and their future: not just those traditional gold-standard agencies like the Foreign Office, but in the various arms of the welfare and charitable sector.
That cannot continue, not only for financial reasons but because, as in Louis XIV’s France, it drains the economy of dynamism and encourages uniformity of thinking. We see this now in the intellectual straitjacket that grips academia across the English-speaking world, which Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate blamed for the increasing anti-intellectualism of the public. The widespread popularity of moribund, pseudoscientific ideas leads not to just to increasingly expensive and illiberal attempts by the state to fix human nature, but also creates a climate of intellectual cowardice. These are symptoms of societies in decline, not progress.
So there are lots of things we can do to unleash Britain by allowing people to get on with making money so that they can invest, many already listed by Daniel Hannan (I would add a negative income tax), but the historical lesson is that small is not just beautiful, but effective. Small countries bring big advantages, being more democratic, less corrupt and more dynamic, so pooling our sovereignty, either through European Union or open borders, is not the way forward. In fact, whisper it, the future may even be Greater Switzerland.
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May 16th, 2013 16:22
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May 10th, 2013 13:50
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May 2nd, 2013 14:04
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April 30th, 2013 10:59
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April 25th, 2013 12:17