There was one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.
– Murray Rothbard
A great novelist can, in a short passage, say more than a thousand scholars or non-fiction writers can in a lifetime. Hence, Dostoyevsky had modern technocracy’s number before it had really ever even been put into effect. In the section of the Brothers Karamazov now usually called the ‘Grand Inquisitor’, he laid it all out. In this story-within-a-story, Jesus is imagined to have returned to 16th Century Spain and is put on trial by the Inquisition. The accusation: that in rejecting the offer from Satan, when tempted in the desert, to be made ruler of the world, Jesus condemned mankind to freedom and thereby to suffering. It would have been better if he had accepted Satan’s offer and taken the opportunity to simply make everybody good, safe and content. The head of the Inquisition, the Grand Inquisitor, then paints a picture of what the appropriate relationship between the people and the church should be:
[A]ll, all will they bring to us, and we shall resolve it all, and they will attend our decision with joy, because it will deliver them from the great anxiety and fearsome torments of free and individual decision.
There are, then, Dostoyevsky is telling us, people in the world who think that the real problem with Jesus was that he wanted people to be free. Just think of the good I could do, these people say to themselves, if only I were in charge of every decision that anybody could ever conceivably make. I would make everything perfect. The implication is that freedom is necessarily undesirable; people should be made to do what is good for them, and free choice can only either get in the way of that objective or align with it – in which latter case it is moot.
One of the major exemplars of this school of thought was John Maynard Keynes. In his 1926 essay, ‘The End of Laissez-Faire’, Keynes – with a blitheness that is truly chilling – makes his contempt for freedom very clear. “Nor is it true,” he tells us in his very opening paragraph, “that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these.” And since this is the case, the last thing that anybody should want is individuals disposing of their own wealth as they see fit. That would leave too much to ‘chance’. Much better for intermediary bodies – in effect, quangos – to decide how much wealth people should be allowed to accumulate and where it should be invested (even to the extent of deciding how much of it should be invested abroad). “I believe,” Keynes wrote (stop for a moment and try to put yourself in the mind of somebody who had it in himself to write these lines):
[T]hat some co-ordinated act of intelligent judgement is required as to the scale on which it is desirable that the community as a whole should save.
This is the Grand Inquisitorial mentality, as it is applied to economics, in a nutshell: the last thing that anybody needs is people deciding for themselves how much money they should save. That is a matter of “intelligent judgement”, and this is a thing which ordinary people simply do not possess. No – the “desirable” level of saving is something upon which clever people should decide, and then impose on society. And much of the paraphernalia of modern macro-economic management follows from there, of course: the discovery of the “desirable” level of aggregate savings (and hence of spending), and the subsequent manipulation of the population into adopting it.
Keynes wrote at a time when the Labour Party was in its infancy, but it is his mentality – a Grand Inquisitorial mentality – that has come to permeate the way the party thinks about wealth and property. Hence, we come to a recent interview with John McTernan, a New Labour high-up and muchacho of Tony Blair, in which (likewise, with a blitheness that is truly chilling) we find the issue of housing coming under the lens of discussion. Again, stop for a moment and try to put yourself in the mind of somebody who has it in himself to say something like this:
A lot of wealth in the U.K. is in the form of housing wealth. It seems right that you should actually extract some revenue from that…. The reality is that the largest amount of wealth outside pensions held in the country, they’re actually held in the form of housing… Now, you can think what you like about housing, and housing is definitely a social need, but housing is a capital asset that’s been accumulating, particularly accumulating in the period of quantitative easing. It was a windfall to most homeowners, the fact, that the houses that they lived in have gone up in value, some of them even faster than their income went up. And I was able to figure that two trillion pounds in value increased to them, accumulated to housing in Britain during the pandemic when we were literally doing nothing but staying at home. Now, that is a windfall, and windfalls should get a windfall tax.
There are times when one feels as though public discourse has become too uncivil and that it would be nice if everybody remembered that, generally speaking, even one’s political opponents are approaching the matter of public policy in good faith. But there are other times when one is driven to agree with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon that the real issue we face is that we are governed “by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so”. This is one of those occasions: anybody who could utter the words reprinted above with a straight face should not be allowed within a country mile of the levers of power. And it is frankly mildly terrifying that such a person should be in a position to advise the U.K. Government about anything – let alone something as important as tax.
Let’s leave to one side the sheer gall of suggesting that the debasement of the currency in the form of quantitative easing and the subsequent inflation of asset prices – all of which was caused by the arrogance of Keynesian central bankers pursuing ‘unconventional’ monetary policy – constitutes a windfall for homeowners, as though it was some sort of freak weather event rather than a foolish way of propping up a zombie economy in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Quantitative easing was, and is, a policy choice – it was not a surprisingly bounteous bumper crop of cherries from the orchard which Scrooge-like orchard owners have been unfairly squirrelling away for themselves in the basement. And suggesting that its consequences should therefore be a windfall tax for homeowners takes a special level of mendacity: in McTernan-world, it seems, government broadly constituted (and one should by all means include the Bank of England under that umbrella) has licence not only to collectively make public policy errors, but then to traduce the public for receiving whatever ‘windfalls’ they do as a result, and to tax them for it to boot. That is a world that should only exist in fantasy.
And let’s leave to one side the suggestion that lockdown – a policy choice that truly merits the use of the word ‘catastrophic’ – was also simply an inevitable consequence of the pandemic (“when we were literally doing nothing but staying at home” – speak for yourself, mate; some of us had kids to look after, and some of us had jobs to do). To repeat: lockdown was not a weather event. It was imposed. That it was going to have serious economic consequences was evident to anybody with an ounce of sense at the time. The decision was taken to impose it anyway; the idea that it “seems right” to extract revenue from homeowners, who had no say in the matter, as a consequence takes, again, an exceptional level of gall.
And let’s also leave to one side the fact that one of the main drivers of the growth in house prices has been a chronic failure of supply to meet demand, and that this is more or less entirely the fault of repeated governments’ failure to grasp the nettle of planning reform, combined with high levels of immigration – both of which, again, are not weather events, but policies which have been deliberately chosen and pursued, and therefore not to be described as ‘windfalls’ in their effects on house prices, but as the necessary and obvious consequences of decisions made in government.
The reason for leaving all of these observations to one side, as important as they might be, however, is that they would distract us from the more important matter of what McTernan’s comments reveal about the mindset of those who now imagine themselves to be in charge of the U.K. economy.
Some time ago, I wrote a piece about an elderly couple who had been erroneously told that a house they owned would be compulsorily purchased by the local council to house asylum seekers. In it, following Leo Strauss, I made the observation that it was crucial for a tyrant to eliminate property rights and ultimately private property entirely. This is because a population of property owners is a population that has a route to independent prosperity, and independent prosperity is definitionally not what a tyrant wants. A tyrant wants the population to be reliant on him, so that he can retain their loyalty. Hence, as Strauss himself puts it (these words need to be printed and distributed on posters and t-shirts):
[The wise tyrant] would consider his [entire] fatherland his private property which he would naturally administer according to his own discretion.
The consequence is that tyranny is contingent upon an idea of property as something not which the population owns, but which is bestowed upon them in the manner of a gift, and on sufferance. If they are good boys and girls they get to ‘own’ a house, but they always have to remember that just as the tyrant giveth, the tyrant taketh away; and ideally in the end there will be no home ownership at all – everybody will be ‘housed’ (it is noticeable that McTernan generally, though not always, prefers to refer to ‘housing’ than ‘homes’) by the State, and be grateful for it.
In this sense, as elsewhere, then, it is sensible and apt to describe the trajectory that we are on as one that is in its essence tyrannical, even if to call the likes of John McTernan ‘tyrants’ would strike most people as hyperbolic. We are, in comparative terms, relatively early on in that trajectory, but it charts the direction in which we are heading: the gradual dissolution of the concept of private prosperity, and its gradual replacement by Keynes’s ‘intelligent judgement’, carefully and minutely micro-managing economic decision making at every level, and every given moment. And this is being done in the name of an inchoate and incompletely expressed ideal, within which no individual should ever be put in a position to exercise choice at all, since that would interfere – to take us back to Dostoyevsky – with the achievement of “joy [at being] deliver[ed] from the great anxiety and fearsome torments of free and individual decision”. Since delivering the population from the “great anxiety and fearsome torments of free and individual decision” is the essence of the promise that the tyrant makes, the explanation for the contempt for private property on display in McTernan’s comments becomes very plain.
It should nonetheless appall us. There is one, generally attestable, route to prosperity for the poor: the gradual accumulation of savings and capital in the form of property. I know this because my family has lived it; from both sides I am of Irish immigrant stock, supplanted into Liverpool and Glasgow respectively; my grandfathers were both skilled labourers and my parents were born into poverty. But the family collectively dragged itself up into something approaching a middle class lifestyle through home ownership, and I hope that my children will be dragged up further yet by the inheritances that they will one day receive from all of the hard work, effort and sacrifice that three generations have made on their behalf. To hear the likes of John McTernan suggesting that it “seems right that [the government] should actually extract some revenue from that” is – I am anxious not to use inflammatory language – shameful. That his mentality is so widespread across the political class is more shameful yet. But it speaks to the real source of our malaise: to own property is to be in a position, if one is lucky, to grasp at “free and individual decision”. And free and individual decisions are simply not what those who govern us want us to make – because a population capable of making free and individual decisions does not need government very much at all.
None of this is, in the end, very complicated, despite being rather shocking. Keynes did not want people to be free; nor did he wish for them to become prosperous. What he wanted was for them to obey the strictures of those who were “work[ing] out a social organisation which shall be as efficient as possible”; society was an interesting technical problem in need of solving, not a body of people with value in their own right. That was his mindset; it is also that of John McTernan; it is in the end what animates the Labour Party in particular. Those of us who live in the U.K. will have to get used to this mode of thinking, which, although it has been implicit for many years, is going to become increasingly explicit, and increasingly brazen, as Labour rediscovers its muscle memory and begins once more to flex. “It seems right that you should actually extract some revenue from that” is going to be the order of the day, across the piece. On second thoughts, maybe that’s what should be being printed on t-shirts.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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Sadly I think the majority of the population especially our young through the indoctrination centres calling themselves schools and universities, do not want to take responsibility for their own lives, they do not want to become free thinking Adults, they do not want to make choices or decisions outside of what to eat, what to wear, because it’s too stressful.
Thus the Marxist anti humans have through these institutions and the plandemic created a society of the very creatures described. The society will be made up of creatures of infantile interlect who look to the Government as parent to make its decisions for it. and be happy to be given pocket money and supervised safe play.
When this weak society crashes as it surely will how will it rebuild with a nation made up of willing Epsilons
I saw an article the other day saying; why the young are becoming disillusioned with everything Woke, I’m sure they’re still in a growing minority but maybe things are changing. They also left out votes for 16yo on their manifesto. Perhaps the rise in the younger vote in Europe gave them pause for thought.
This is exactly what Dr Michael Nehls says in his book “The Indoctrinated Brain – How to successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom.”
It’s well worth reading.
The policy of dumbing-down; weakening people’s ability to think for themselves and encouraging “herd-like” behaviour is deliberate; it’s been systematically applied for decades and is intended to result in a population which is entirely dependent on “Big Brother” and is easily controlled.
A much needed article. Thank you.
I have been commenting on DS for almost four years now and from the early days I have repeatedly made the point that the Davos Deviants will at some point seek to steal our homes. If the WEF message – “you will own nothing and be happy” – hasn’t landed for some people this article should hopefully act as the wake up call.
If owning nothing starts anywhere it starts with the stealing of our properties and how could it not?
Stealing property also goes hand in hand with the Theft of the Commons (Iain Davis). McTernan as an acolyte of Bliar is simply spouting WEF propoganda and satisfies their rule of telling us what they are going to do before they do it. It is therefore quite possible that Kneel and his mob will seek to tax the wealth out of our homes and a possible starting point might be via the Inheritance Tax route and then widen the net to personal properties. Obviously this will all be for our benefit
Look at the war on motorists and see how everything is linked – get us off the roads, fifteen minute cities, steal our homes and lock us in rabbit hutches.
Look at the attacks on farms and farmers. There are going to be deliberate food shortages designed to reduce numbers and to force us to eat bugs and this will be a lot easier if we are locked in 15 minute cities.
Everything, absolutely everything links to the depopulation agenda.
And as mentioned in that documentary on Bunkers, the 15 minute cities will kill you!
Think he was mostly talking about food shortages in that regard. There are two brothers that do a lot on the WEF on Youtube: The Kwack Brothers. It is ‘far out’ and most people laugh at owning nothing and being happy. I did at first. A mate told me, “how are they going to do that, you won’t give up your property”……These brothers go into detail on how they make it happen. Death by a thousand cuts!
Thanks Ron. I will look up the Kwack brothers.
I cannot find Kwack Brothers on Youtube. All I get is Kwak Brothers who seem to be property and mortgage advisors.
My bad. It must be Kwak Brothers, they cover property etc but do a lot of work on the Great Reset if you scroll through their videos. The Reset is a threat to everybody and what was GBN talking about; child benefit, yeah really important!
The Great Recession was bad. The spending of money borrowed/stolen from our grandchildren is already 16 times more and the secondary effects raise that figure.
In the pursuit of power these people behave evilly all the while exhorting us to ‘be kind’.
Off-T
Oh look, our new PM abusing expenses. Who’d have guessed?
https://www.declassifieduk.org/revealed-keir-starmer-billed-taxpayer-nearly-250000-for-travel-expenses-at-cps/
Another “Off-T”? An important subject, I’m sure – but distracting.
If you are not interested in Off-T’s then don’t read them.
Problem solved.
I too have ancestors on my fathers side who came to Leeds from Ireland and did well for themselves. My father grew up in Swansea and remembers watching a few Dog Fights as a kid in 1940. The Docs there were a target I’m told.
McTernan’s doctrine fails at the first hurdle. If he believes that the government has the right to tax a property’s asset purely because it has made a (paper) windfall gain then he must agree that in a parallel world where government policy or other factors had caused a property to, say, halve in value, then the government must be obliged to pay each property owner a subsidy. Swings and roundabouts.
Marx wasn’t an economist although many mistake him as one.
I don’t know if anybody follows Gary’s Economics, but he is very good on how the billionaires are stripping the middle class and governments of wealth, and is very much of the view that the middle class are destined to lose their properties.
For example, his latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHrl_7t779M
Above all, as Peter Hitchens has observed, the absolute necessity is the hereditary principle. With it, property can be bequeathed to the next generation. From this the family is established. And the family being the greatest obstacle to state power in that in it are created loyalties that are prior to and separate from any given to the state.
This is what torments those who run the state. That freedom might result in them not being loved or even needed. The Inquisitor’s view in Dostoyevsky’s account is an interpretation of the Gospel account of the wilderness temptation of Christ that amounts to the same thing.
The Tempter offers to inaugurate Christ’s kingdom on earth in the form of the Roman Empire, the ‘kingdoms – the provinces – of the world’; the ’empire of the whole earth’, as the Romans styled their empire. This is a gift. The payment for receiving it is that Jesus must ‘worship’ Satan. Jesus would become a client king, such as the Roman had. Satan is claiming to be the benefactor of mankind as the real emperor.
Note that this is Christ’s kingdom without the Cross. Why go through all that suffering and the uncertainty of whether there’s anything after death when there is an easier way. A way chosen by Satan-as-owner of the Roman State (as he declares he is and which Jesus does not refute).
Moreover, it would have been a rule enacted through the apparatus of the Roman state; through its economy, army, and bureaucracy. Whereas Jesus declares elsewhere that His kingdom is not of this world. Not somewhere else, just not made up of these things that polities are.
Taking up the Cross means denying the Self, not abdicating freedom.
“Government in the future will be based upon . . . a supreme office of the biosphere. The office will comprise specially trained philosopher/ecologists. These guardians will either rule themselves or advise an authoritarian government of policies based on their ecological training and philosophical sensitivities. These guardians will be specially trained for the task”
David Shearman An IPCC Assessor for 3rd and 4th climate change reports
“Free men in a free society must learn not only to recognize this stealthy attack on mental integrity and fight it, but must learn also what there is inside man’s mind that makes him vulnerable to this attack, what it is that makes him, in many cases, actually long for a way out of the responsibilities that republican democracy and maturity place on him.”
Joos Meerloo
Keynes was an evil man. Another socialist (posh communist)
That’s OK. Levy a windfall tax on all properties over £2.5m and one of the first to get caught would be -Tony Blair. Not least because he has lots of properties…
I’m sure he will find a way to evade tax.
I listened to this interview and deduced John McTernan is a Marxist nutcase.
I bought my house 20 years ago, it was a wreck, and I’ve spent north of £100k renovating it. In the early days I kept receipts but haven’t done for years. I have no idea how mush the house has cost to renovate and maintain, but it has added to the value.
I suspect people like me would be shafted as I cannot offset prove my costs to offset against ‘profit’
Since Labour has got in I’ve started spending my savings, I’d rather enjoy stuff I want but don’t need, rather than give it to the government.
That 100,000 quid you spent, improved your house, it improved your area, it freed up government from having to spend money painting and maintaining it. It created jobs in DIY stores and for plumbers, electricians, joiners, garden centres etc etc. By spending that money you created wealth and economic growth, but to government you are an easy target and their politics of envy see you with prosperity and they want to steal it from you.
Seconded
When we go and fill up our petrol tanks with 60 quid’s worth of petrol, the government steals 50% of it so we end up with only 30 quid’s worth. Even the Mafia wouldn’t have the audacity to charge this amount for their protection money. Here in the UK electricity prices are double what they are in the USA. Despite Obama and Biden trying their best to become more like Europeans, personal wealth not being stolen by government is still better in the USA than Europe and the UK and with the probable re-election of Trump that is going to continue. Meanwhile we have just elected the climate justice Labour Party who want to strip away wealth from people and use for all their social justice programs. They want you to have less of everything and one of the ways Miliband will do this is to remove the fuels that drive prosperity (coal oil and gas) and fob us off with wind and sun. It seems counterintuitive, since greater wealth by the use of fossil fuels would provide more for government to skim from us, but just like god, the mind of the eco socialist parasite “works in mysterious ways”
Great article.
McTernan (and the left wing Establishment) is simply promoting the WEF’s objective.
“The Great unwashed” will own nothing and be happy.”
And the unspoken but clear objective that they will be controlled by CBDCs and a social credit system.
I am waiting for Labour to announce what will effectively be a bedroom tax. Sole occupiers of a property which has more than one bedroom will lose the 25% Council Tax discount which currently applies.
This, they will claim, is “only fair” when so many families need larger houses (and so many asylum seekers need to be moved out of hotels and into permanent accommodation).
The next stage will be to tax people MORE for every unoccupied bedroom.
And finally, they will force those with unused bedrooms to take a lodger.
Because “your home” is not yours. It’s an asset which is available for the Government to exploit.
Aspects of this are analogous to the view of the Garden of Eden myth which I’ve held for some decades.
The couple eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and their eyes are opened. They discover that they are naked and are ashamed (self conscious). For their sin they are cast out of the Garden. This becomes referred to as the Fall (a bad thing).
To me this mythologically represents the development of an individual from infancy to adulthood. At some stage self consciousness develops, and from that point on, the individual has freedom, but importantly, the burden of responsibility.
The pernicious message from the Bible, then, is to extoll the virtue of innocent infancy where everything is provided, as opposed to the sinful development which occurs. When, in fact, the message ought to be that, like it or not, the healthy, constructive approach is to embrace the state of self aware, responsible adulthood wholeheartedly, and “just get on with it”.
What is so dangerous about the message of the myth is that it gets into individual and collective culture by a means which bypasses conscious scrutiny. I wonder to what extent that subliminal cultural message has influenced the worldview portrayed in the article?
We infer Eve allowed herself to be tempted by Satan, the father of lies. She believed his deceits, then having eaten some kind of fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, what is known as Free Will became the result of the original sin. We are free to choose good or evil. Knowledge, true or false, is now universally represented by a bitten Apple and if you want to know what that looks like, find a computer. Submission to human tyranny is not a spiritual state of mind, it is laziness (sloth). Eve was portrayed as innocent, but also curious and apparently gullible. In my opinion, the real question is, whether God created mankind to remain in a passive state of innocence or to learn to deal with the world through discernment, following His commandments. The pursuit of wisdom is no small task.
Àh, Love! Could thou and I with fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits– and then
Re-mould it nearer to the heart’s desire !
!
Keynes pointed out, in his book The Economic Consequences of The Peace, how
Lenin had worked out the best way to subvert a capitalist economy.
“There is no surer way to undermine the basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process harnesses all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a way that not one man in a million will be able to diagnose “