On the British Welfare State

Introduction

Since 1945 the British state is a welfare state. It is one of the largest welfare states in the world. Despite Mrs. Thatcher and a decade of "Tory Austerity" the British state remains huge. According to the Office of National Statistics, there are some 32.5 million people working in the UK – of them 5.72 million are in the public sector; 17.6% of the workforce. In other words, 26.78 million people pay entirely for the salary of 5.72 million people. This alone though does not take everything into account. Employees of companies that exclusively or mostly contract to the government are considered "private sector" employees yet are financed exclusively by the true private sector employees. It does not consider the huge number of academics and intellectuals who only have those jobs because the state is willing to pay for the university level education of millions of students. This also does not take into account those receiving benefits of one kind or another. We can imagine that well over half of the total UK population is dependent on the state for means of living.

Manpower is not the full story. There are also the material costs – buildings, roads, medicines, armaments, servers and so forth. The government spent in the last financial year an eye-watering £1,115.2 billion (yes, 1000 billions) while GDP was at £2,146 billion. In other words, spending was 52% of total GDP. You might wonder how our small sliver of people working in the true private sector are able to pay for this. The answer is simple – they don't, at least not directly. The government has amassed some £2,223 billion in debt – more than the total GDP. The deficit stands at £323.9 billion – 15.1% of GDP shortfall in the revenue of the government when compared with spending. By what means is this shortfall made up? This will be inflationary spending – that is, the printing of bank notes. The drawback to the printing of banknotes is necessarily inflation. Mises called it "taxation without regulation". An indirect tax on every single man, woman and child as the price of every single item they buy goes up. Already inflation is approaching 8%. 7% is "out of control hyperinflation".

How did we get to this nonsense position? The story involves a surprise win for a small party and the weakness of a much larger one. The story involves ideologues, international affairs, a world war, and the cattle-rearing of people.

Let's change gears from the doom and gloom for one moment (worry not, we will delve right back into it very soon). Why am I even writing about this? I was recently at a library with a friend who "dared" me to read the most "cringe" book we could find. Right beside us was a copy of The Nanny State Made Me by Stuart Maconie. It was a done deal. Going into it I expected some drivel and then I would move on with my life. I hoped (but did not expect) a reasonable argument about why the welfare state may have some advantage. I received neither of these things but instead a brutal reality check. If this is how the average Briton thinks, it comes as not surprise the figures listed above are how they are. After returning the book I bought an immaculate second-hand copy off the internet and now sit here writing this very article. I have no critique of Maconie's style or interest: the book is well written and he shows flair. His childhood anecdotes were interesting to read. I will not be making critique of these things but instead only focusing on the reasons he gives for the importance of the existence of the nanny state.

Stuart Maconie is an English radio DJ and TV presenter for the BBC. He has also written a host of books. I must admit I had never heard of Maconie before this. Maconie can, I think, best be described as someone who takes the identity of "northern" more than anything else. He does describe himself as a "professional northerner". Some of his other titles include Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North and The Pie at Night: In Search of the North at Play. His little biography on the inside cover of The Nanny State Made Me also mentions pies and the north.

The foundations of Maconies text are in the introduction. I will quote him at length.

There is such a thing as society. If you doubt that, you probably aren't going to enjoy or even agree with what follows. But then with respect, if you dispute the existence of society, how are you reading this book? How has it arrived in your hands? Did it fall from the sky? Was it given to you by a fair maiden rising on the back of a unicorn? Is it magically written in rainbows in the azure skies above you? Did it grow out of the rich loam like a potato?

If it did, marvelous. But I think it probably arrived in your hand via a series of industrial processes that started with me at a desk in an upstairs room or on a train tapping on a laptop and then passed through a complex nexus of editors, designers and printers, people packing boxes in warehouses, people sorting stuff and selling stuff, all working collectively in an organised and co-operative way

The issues are easy enough to spot. To quote the father of economics

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest

These editors, designers, printers, packers, retailers did not sweep together with single purpose meant to distribute Maconie's work or any other, but from each their own desire for betterment. At each stage of this industrial (that is, capitalistic) chain, a trade has taken place. That trade is necessarily for the betterment for both parties. For example, the warehouse worker is trading time for cash, the warehouse company is trading the services of packing and moving for cash, the retailers purchase copies of the book to which they turn around and sell to the public for profits and so on. These people are not working collectively, in an organised manner or in a co-operative way. They are working as individuals, in an organic way. There was no top down "social" engineering to develop this chain but the bottom up organic process of economic evolution. The existence of "society" is irrelevant, if indeed, it does even exist. As an aside, I have challenged many, many people to define this so-called "society" and have yet to have a response. It always exists, always there, justifying every single state policy, organising every person and dictating every minutia of their life, everyone is aware of it, and understands it . Except me. And nobody who understands any of these deep philosophical truths about the obvious existence of this "society" is ever able to give me even a scrap of information about it. Perhaps I alone was born without a sixth sense to allow me to experience this giant Lovecraftian entity that permeates every pore of my existence, like a man born without the ability to see red. I think though, that it is much more likely, that such a thing does not exist and most people parrot these lines and phrases without giving them too much thought.

Post-War Welfare

The Nanny State Made Me (NSMM) opens with 1945. The war is over at last and the first election in some time is held. Churchill expected to sweep a victory but a surprise Labour victory comes. This is the first time the Labour party has an outright majority and places Attlee as Prime Minister.

He is not slow in his "reforms" of the nation. Revolution might be a more apt term. Maconie admits as such. Maconie also claims that Churchill and his "cronies" were fear-mongering about a new Soviet Britain – "our revolution was kinder and gentler", he writes. In some ways it was as such, but Maconie leaves out some details.

New Year's day, 1947, the mines were nationalised. This in itself is not particularly kind nor gentle. The government is able to remove vast swaths of property from individuals. Why? Because the government has a bigger stick. The government will be prepared to use violence against anyone who says no. What does this say about Britain as a nation now? This is a huge red flag, a huge sign, to every single person "don't found anything here because we will take it from you". Maconie might say this is good – keep those evil exploitative "capitalists" out of the nation. This view is quite mistaken. It is these "capitalists" who are able to increase the wealth of a nation though capital investment to serve the needs of the masses by bringing them what they want cheaper than competitors. To quote Mises

On the market of a capitalistic society the common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Those shops and plants which cater exclusively or predominantly to the wealthier citizens' demand for refined luxuries play merely a subordinate role in the economic setting of the market economy. They never attain the size of big business. Big business always serves—directly or indirectly the masses.

It is this ascension of the multitude in which the radical social change brought about by the "Industrial Revolution" consists. Those underlings who in all the preceding ages of history had formed the herds of slaves and serfs, of paupers and beggars, became the buying public, for whose favor the businessmen canvass. They are the customers who are “always right," the patrons who have the power to make poor suppliers rich and rich suppliers poor.

Hubert Tunney, who was now elevated to the assistant labour director at the coal board of Newcastle, gave a speech on this day. He said "absenteeism must be reduced, lightning strikes must be cut out. There is no necessity for these things". The miners for the next 30 years disagreed with this, as the strikes continued. The thought here was something like "mines are now owned by the government, the government is the good thing, so, we will have everything we need and do not need strikes". I trust one can see how deluded this is. In reality, the purpose of unions is to endlessly demand more, beyond that which it is even possible to provide. The government came to realise that the desires of a union can not under any circumstances be satiated, especially when the union feels the endless resources of the government should revolve around them alone.

Of course, this did not go quite as planned. Within short order a particularly cold winter struck. Coal production plummeted. The new nationalised coal system was incapable of providing the necessary coal supply to the nation. This was no some trifling small shortage either – at a time when the majority of electricity was from coal fired power plants and the majority of gas was not the natural petroleum gas we use today but coal gas (that is, a gas produced from coal) – electricity shortages were rife and gas pressure dropped to ¼ of its usual. Electricity was rationed for only 5 hours a day. This was after the war remember, within the life time of your grandparents. My grandparents lived through it. Why is a nationalised coal system unable to deal with such strains? It's easy to see. A private system of competing coal mines has a deep incentive to go out of its way to produce as much coal as possible. Naturally, in such times the price of coal will rise. Workers would be asked to work overtime, likely in exchange for extra pay beyond the hourly rate. A nationalise coal system does not have these incentives. Unions, now ever so powerful, say that a miner can not be asked to work longer than in the union documentation. All of the natural phenomena that allows coal production to rapidly spike and keep producing vital energy are removed. This is easy to understand. Maconie does not even mention this event. He sails along as though before nationalisation was the bad thing and after nationalisation was the good thing.

British "Health"

The British welfare state has become in many ways a kind of religion inside the UK. Maconie quite literally says "mess with the NHS, you are dissing and messing with Blighty in all its screwed-up, battered magnificence. The health service is a secular sacrament in the UK". No other nation in the world has quite a dedication to the health service as Britain. Then again, few nations are quite so dependent on the state health service for health as Britain. The NHS is, without doubt, the greatest vote-obtaining institution in this country. Any politician who promises X,Y,Z improvements to the service will win – it is that easy. The Labour Party promise billions in extra funding right now. The Conservatives promise to save the economy so the NHS can be funded long-term. Labour scare their voters into thinking the Conservatives will scrap it (they won't). The Conservatives scare their voters into thinking that Labour will make the country run out of money for the NHS (it won't; Labour will print more). It is in the direct interest of both the NHS and all political parties to ensure that most British people think they are dependent upon the NHS. It is in their interest to think such a service is sacrosanct and essential and without it we would all die. It is also in the interest of the NHS for the average British person to be as unhealthy as possible.

When it comes to most enterprises that people wish the government to take over, but especially so with health, people think more about some nice, pleasant feeling, abstract list of wishes than the economic and political reality of the wish. It reminds me of logical and non-logical action covered by James Burnham in The Machiavellians. While it might be nice to wish for public health, one must first instead consider if it is even possible to have public health before one asserts that we ought to have public health.

I'll quote at some length from Gabriel E. Vidal's The Health Czar Can't Calculate, Vidal says

But as economist Ludwig von Mises proved in his 1920 treatise "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," under central planning any rational economic calculation, that is, any method to efficiently allocate resources, is practically and theoretically impossible — not just of higher cost, lower quality, and reduced innovation; not just uncoordinated, inefficient, and ineffective; but literally impossible.

In practice, a health czar would have to evaluate the quality, revenue, and cost of complex production processes, and billions of healthcare goods, services, hospitals, pharmacies, nursing homes, surgery centers, diagnostic centers, laboratories, outpatient clinics, home health agencies, hospices, long-term-acute-care hospitals, ambulances, patients, physicians, nurses, therapists, and clinicians, all across geography and across time. The health czar must therefore consider an almost infinite number of permutations in order to correctly allocate trillions of dollar s.

Reformers argue that computers and an electronic medical record will help resolve this practical calculation problem. However, even if the health czar possessed the most advanced computer systems, hospitals, physicians, and producers of healthcare services will possess similar electronic systems to manage their own operations. Together, they would be capable of generating more data than the health czar can absorb and process meaningfully. Paradoxically, computers actually make economic calculation more complex and difficult.

The health czar must also consider two additional exacerbating factors. First, like all goods, healthcare resources by their very nature are substitutable for one another. For some cancers, chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgery may be substituted or complemented with one another. The health czar has to discover the natural substitutability of millions of healthcare services in accordance with the exchange relations that in a free-healthcare-market economy take place automatically, permanently, and instantaneously.

Second, capital can be invested to improve the efficiency and quality of any healthcare service. Hospitals may decide between investing in robots for pharmacy or the operating room to improve the productivity and accuracy of pharmacists and surgeons; or they may hire additional pharmacists or more experienced surgeons, or varying combinations of them. Simultaneously, the manufacturer of robots would need to decide to invest capital to develop either pharmacy, operating-room, radiation-therapy, or industrial robots and varying combinations of them and direct the production chain of all the inputs necessary to develop robots, such as software, research, labor, parts, raw materials, financial services, marketing, etc. This investment in production at both provider and manufacturer levels multiplies infinitely the permutations the health czar would have to evaluate.

In addition to facing the practical economic calculation problem outlined above, health reformers misunderstand pricing theory. Unlike the weather forecaster who faces a practical problem that can be resolved by the use of better satellites, faster supercomputers, and better equations and models, the health czar faces an unsolvable theoretical problem. He cannot forecast the price for health services because, by definition, prices can only be calculated by the free and unencumbered interaction between producers and consumers.

So, why not simply calculate the correct price of the healthcare goods? The issue is that prices are not merely the number of Great British Pounds handed over for some product but are a emergent natural phenomena that take into account all values of the buyer against all values of the seller. Since there is no "seller" and no "buyer" no interactions of values are possible. Furthermore, prices are not set by mere input goods – prices do not arise by taking the value of labour and products, summing them and then adding some amount for profit, but rather the value of labour and input goods are determined by the prices consumers are willing to pay for consumption goods. Put simply "costs of production do not determine prices of goods. Prices of goods determine costs of production". There is a fundamental epistemological issue with this conception that can not be overcome. In other words, something like the NHS has no idea if it is using resources wisely and thus can not make improvements to become more efficient.

The more pertinent issue to the NHS though is that it is free at the point of use. What this does in practice is ensure two things: the NHS will spend endless resources convincing people the NHS is essential for healthcare and ensure that the quality of care is as low as possible. This is because without any income from the service it provides, providing a better service is of no consequence. If the NHS wants to expand (which all organisations and institutions naturally will) it can not achieve this goal by providing a better service. It already has essentially a 100% market share. First, it must convince the public that the NHS is essential for healthcare, and no other systems are possible. Obviously, this is not true. Yet the public have been convinced. Indeed, now, it could be argued that the NHS is the official state religion of the UK. Secondly, the quality of service must be driven down as low as possible and then endlessly blamed on lack of funding, to endlessly create more funding. Several times a year for as long as I have lived the NHS has been in "crisis" or on the "brink of collapse". "Experts" agree. These "experts" also all work for the NHS.

If this madness continues to be a black hold of public finances and provides virtually no high quality care, it might be natural to wonder why politicians do not do something about it. In fact, the NHS is the best way for a politician to gain votes in the UK. To some extent, it is the only way. This state of affairs ensures that British voters never feel they can divorce themselves from the state, for without the state, who could possibly care for them? All a politician needs to do then is promise ever more funding for the NHS and they can win. In this way, the NHS and the parliamentary system are set up to be a permanent feedback loop: one convinces the public to that government is good and the other funds this activity...

Education

Maconie is, I'm sure you can guess, very much for the state involvement in education.

British education has changed a lot in the past century, as Maconie explains

British education was changing in the 1960s, faster than at any time in the preceding century. The first Labour government in over a decade were bent on driving through a new kind of education system, classless, egalitarian and hugely controversial. Comprehensive education would replace the three-tier selective system based on exam results at eleven with, in theory, a universal and identical educational experience for all British schoolchildren regardless of income, class or religion. It was, depending on your point of view, a grotesque piece of leftist social engineering or a first and most crucial step to a fairer society

Rather than take these glib remarks at face value, let us delve into what education means on a technical level. We can come to some conclusions about the social purpose of free education, and of compulsory education.

A first definition we must make is that "education" as such does not refer to schooling. In fact, the majority of education of a person is done outside of any institution, usually in the home. For example, the most critical skills of a person are developed by a child in their earliest years simply by virtue of being near other human beings, usually and most naturally, the parents. This would include things like walking, speaking, eating and so forth. In this sense, "education" can not be limited to only a formal setting, like a school. Why then, do we seemingly require more formal education? This is because the area of intellectual knowledge is generally beyond what it is possible to develop naturally. Many of the most basic facts taught at schools took many generations of work by specialised thinkers to discover – once Pandora's box is opened though, so to speak, most everyone can grasp some of these concepts.

Regarding Maconie's remarks about the changing face of British education then, we will necessarily have to come to the conclusion that this is a form of social engineering. This can not ever bring about a "fairer society". In some way, I am unsure what Maconie means by a "fairer society". It will certainly lead to less justice. It will certainly result in poorer educational outcomes for almost everyone involved. There is an illusion of education that simply teaching people necessarily leads to better economic outcomes. This is not the case.

As Rothbard explains

What then shall we say of laws imposing compulsory schooling on every child? These laws are endemic in the Western world. In those places where private schools are allowed, they must all meet standards of instruction imposed by the government. Yet the injustice of imposing any standards of instruction should be clear. Some children are duller and should be instructed at a slower pace; the bright children require a rapid pace to develop their faculties. Furthermore, many children are very apt in one subject and very dull in another. They should certainly be permitted to develop themselves in their best subjects and to drop the poor ones. Whatever the standards that the government imposes for instruction, injustice is done to all—to the dullards who cannot absorb any instruction, to those with different sets of aptitudes in different subjects, to the bright children whose minds would like to be off and winging in more advanced courses but who must wait until the dullards are hounded once again. Similarly, any pace that the teacher sets in class wreaks an injustice on almost all; on the dull who cannot keep up, and on the bright who lose interest and precious chances to develop their great potential.

The system of education that Britain has ended up with is certainly of no benefit to any child. The system focuses almost entirely on academic and intellectual subjects from an early age: mathematics, sciences, English literature analysis, history and so forth. Optional pathways for more vocational work come late, are sneered at and discouraged. University is becoming more and more universal. The problem with this is apparent in all students. Those students most attune to that kind of education must necessarily be hampered by a lowering of standards in order to allow the students who have almost no aptitude in those subjects to pass. Therefore, we are deprived of the flourishing of brilliant minds in the fields of the sciences, mathematics and philosophy. On the other hand, the students with no aptitude for those academic subjects will be forced to endure them till they are 16 or 18 years old, whereas they could have begun a vocational study, possibly even inside a business, from a much younger age. Thus giving them applicable and hire-able skills in the real market set by actual market demand and cash.

So many students now go to university that a degree in Britain is worth almost nothing. Literally thousands of people with degrees work in jobs alongside those that do not. Many of these jobs would be considered low skill, such as work in supermarkets, delivery or cleaning. This is not to sneer at those jobs but rather ask if this was a good investment. It seems inconvincible that without the social engineering of the state such a state of affairs could ever emerge. Meanwhile, these university graduates who end up in low skill work have totally foregone the opportunity for more skilled practical work outside of the intellectual sphere – construction, carpentry, metalwork, electrical work and so forth.

Another insanity we have to deal with is many thousands of students going to university to study "computer science". This is merely an example or a special case of what is already discussed, but I think it highlights the principles quite well. Computer science as a discipline deals with the nature of electronic computers, the theory of computing, aspects of operating system design, and other intellectual concepts. Unfortunately, these courses have become, for the most part, teaching people to code. While that is important, this prevents the flourishing of the next Turing who excels at this deep theoretical work. Meanwhile overcharging those who simply wish to learn web and software development. We need many more general programmers than we do computer scientists, and it seems insane that such a great expense as university should be incurred when this could just as easily be taught in colleges. It also seems insane to forcibly teach children who excel in software development at an early age foreign languages, geography, history and all other manner of subjects when they simply want to engineer.

Behaviour in schools is generally considered to be quite poor, and somewhat of an endemic among teachers. The simple reality is you can not teach someone something they do not want to know. This system will allow children to only learn that which interests them: a huge improvement for all children and teachers alike. Only the free market can be so responsive to provide this.

As Rothbard discusses, compulsory schooling came largely from the Protestants at first – Luther and particularly Calvin. It has always been a means of social engineering and control: first to enforce their personal Protestant values, but in time this evolved into more of a state control in general. Beginning with teaching that authority of the state should always be respected and the institutions of the state are essential, but slowly evolving into something far more sinister. Simply, education would be a tool of the state to manufacture an egalitarian society, which may sound cosy to some readers but make no mistake, what this means in practice is all of what I have discussed so far – levelling every child to the lowest common denominator in order to make them always dependent on the state. Teaching them always that the state is necessary for continued existence. Perhaps not telling them who to vote for per se, but certainly teaching them that politics and the vote is necessary and important for prosperity. Never will the state teach that it does not need to exist, or that democratic politics is necessarily broken by virtue of its very existence. Never will the state teach that possibilities of education, healthcare and law exist without it. Never will the state allow individual flourishing. This is perhaps the greatest crime that can be committed against a child, and yet it is applauded every day.

As yet more examples, I found an article by RealClearEducation which claims that 80% of graduates from university are worried about employment, yet employers complain that graduates are unemployable. Disappointing but not surprising!

Maconie also dedicates a whole chapter for libraries. Much of what has been said so far applies immediately to them too. While Maconie can tell many anecdotes from his childhood in how much he liked the library service, no attempt is made to justify why violating the property rights of other people by means of coercive taxation is justifiable.

Reacreation

Maconie also gives special credit to the nanny state for recreation. Maconie spent much of his childhood in public parks and other public recreational facilities.

In all these instances, the market is more than capable of providing all of these things. Health and fitness facilities are more than dominated by the private industry – gyms and swimming pools that are privately owned out-compete the state run ones. Part of this is how dramatically these institutions can specialise and adapt to meet the changing wants and needs of consumers as different styles of fitness become popular. Private parks exist, and some are even free of charge, being placed there as a generous gift from a benefactor.

Entertainment has been totally dominated in recent years by the growth of streaming platforms. I don't use them, so forgive me if I sound like a boomer while I write about this, but services like Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, Disney+ and so forth have become commonplace forms of entertainment. It is inconceivable that the state could provide such a service as such an attractive price people are willing to pay for. Indeed, in Britain people are forced to pay the TV license fee to fund the BBC, which itself has online streaming platforms and then still choose to pay for a Netflix subscription on top of that.

Maconie tells the tale of a council that owns a community golf course. Due to cuts they need to reduce costs, and so the golf course becomes privatised, but eventually that goes bust and so the course is shut down. Maconie tells this story as though the cuts were just some pure ideology of evil imposed on this town with its golf course. Of course, it is child's play to do a proper analysis of this. Firstly, since the golf course was the first target of cuts when costs needed to be reduced, we necessarily know it was a net loss for the finances of the council. Maconie mocks the private company for not being able to keep up the golf course and blames the free market for not being able to keep this "essential" service operating. Of course, Maconie has performed no analysis here. The free market is working precisely how it should: the golf course was losing money both before and after privatisation. What this tells us is that the service is simply not desirable to the local people. They have "voted" with their Great British Pounds, and did not vote for the golf course. In fact, the resolution is hidden inside Maconie's story: now the land has been converted into housing. Land is itself a resource, and the free market acts to move resources from less productive means as "voted" for by consumers to more productive means. While Maconie might lament that he can not have a gin and tonic on a sunny lawn over a nice game of golf paid for, not by himself, but by someone else, he failed to consider those who would really like somewhere to live.

The Dole

Maconie's approach to the dole, is shocking. For non-British readers "the dole" is a common slang name for direct welfare: this will be literal cash that is given to people, usually the unemployed. I hope you will forgive me if I quote Maconie at length, but his opening paragraph to chapter 6 strikes me as, quite literally, insane:

I first 'signed on' (n.b. signed on = started receiving welfare) in the summer of 1979. I was briefly, and not entirely unhappily, unmoored between disappointing A-level results – it turned out that stying out till 2am at Bluto's nightspot most nights was not a path to academic glory – subsequent resits and going away to college. Most of the literature of unemployment, from Walter Greenwood to Boys from the Blackstuff, us steeped in the murk of despair and anger. Through it you can usually hear the plangent clang of word like 'hopelessness' and 'humiliation'. The images of downtrodden men in silent lines, faces etched in shame and misery, the grinning spectre of poverty at their bony shoulder. I couldn't claim to know any such desperate privations at the time. Having no mortgage to find, no mouths to feed, no debts as such beyond the odd borrowed fiver, 'the dole' (or to be more accurate, 'supplementary benefits', since the dole requires you to have paid a National Insurance stamp for a couple of years) was just there to tide us over till the state, in its endless beneficence, gave us a small but tidy grant and packed us off to somewhere thrilling

I'm not sure if I can express the insanity of this position. Of course, we can see immediately that such a position is unsustainable. This is where Maconie's most entitled views come through: at first he was at least keeping up the veneer that there was some benefit to "society" for all these nanny state plans. Here, the mask slips and we see what he really is: greed incarnate. Not the greed of the capitalist who needs to satisfy the wants and needs of the masses to turn the profit he wants, but the greed of the man who expects everyone else to fund his personal lifestyle as he sees fit, without considering the expense to any other individuals.

At any rate, such a system would be, for lack of a better word, dysgenic. Persons in such a system have no incentive to start to establish themselves economically at the age when they really need to be establishing themselves economically. In Maconie's own description, he was sort of drifting until the state directed him. While this incentive view is more commonly understood and true, it isn't the exact most fundamental reason why this does not work. The more fundamental reason is economic calculation. Maconie, at that age, at that time, with a guaranteed floor of income and a guaranteed sum of cash to support him for X years in educational endeavour Y, has literally no idea what is economically profitable or losable. He is totally insulated and independent from the ability to receive economic feedback and know if he is using his time and resources in an efficient way to generate wealth for himself.

Housing

British social housing begins like most terrible things in this Isle, with Nye Bevin. Bevin wanted to make social and council housing so good in the UK that even rich people would want to live in them, and the need for private housing would simply melt away. This policy is foolishly misplaced. As Mises discusses at length in the Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, it is the capacity for profits and losses to be made that will allow an economic actor to understand value and if resources are being used in an efficient manner. Without this mechanism, one has literally no idea if the action one takes is economically efficient i.e. will serve the wants and needs of people. All this to say that Bevin betrays his tyranny: he projects out onto some millions of British people. He imagines that his personal wants and needs must be the same as everyone else's. This is the same incorrect assumptions Marx made – a socialist state would bring about the rapid evolution of the new socialist man. Such a new socialist man, or a new Bevin housing man, would not be a human being as we know that entity, but a sack of flesh with any unique personality stripped out. At any rate, what this does is take a very Rousseauean view of human nature – a view that it is simply nothing but social properties that define the personality of humans and there is no in-built characteristics determining anything about our behaviour. I, for one, prefer science, and know that there is a great genetic diversity across the human race, and some of this genetic diversity will determine or influence behaviour and personality in the womb. All of this is to say that Bevin can not legislate away simple human nature.

Quoting from Bevin

These new estates should not just be for the poor. It is entirely undesirable that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live. If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should be drawn from all sections of the community

Unfortunately for Bevin, the poor he so desperately wanted to help by turning them into worker-drone ants were not as keen on this as he would have liked. The first identified new town of the Bevin plans was Stevenage. At the time, a small town of 6,000 people but it was expected to increase in population some ten fold under these bold new plans. Initial reports were looking positive from the residents, as David Keynaston recounts, the residents said things like "it's time the town was woken up" or "it's progress, it's what we badly need here" or "I think it will be a benefit myself". However, as I always say, simply discard the results of all surveys as less than useless.

Lewis Silkin went to the town to tell the residents the wonderful news. The crowd jeered at him, called him a "gestapo" and a "dictator". To totally rebuke the claim that he was a dictator, he told them it "is no good your jeering: it is going to be done". Probably disgruntled that the stupid working class just were not up to the challenging of understanding his genius, forward thinking utopian ideals, he left, only to find local boys had slashed the tyres of his ministerial car and filled the fuel tank with sand. The Stevenage residents held a referendum on the plans. 2,500 people voted and no won with 52% of the vote, much like Breixt. And much like Brexit, those who think themselves as the champions of the working class immediately set about undoing the vote of the working class. Unlike Brexit, those set to ignore the vote won, and today the population of the town sits at around 90,000 people, give or take.

Most curious is Maconie's position that property owning is not healthy – "indeed, it's making us sick". Maconie can not seem to understand why anyone would want to own property. He can not understand why someone would want to have something that can not be taken away, something to cultivate and defend, something to pass onto children, something to be a legacy. If Maconie doesn't want these things and prefers to float as an economic feather in the void, that's fine. However, I personally would rather he did not use violence to enforce this position on me, nor on the literally millions of Britons who also wish to own a home.

Getting Around

Moving onto transport, Maconie describes the bus services in Manchester. He meets up with Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham who describes the shambles of a privatised bus system because there is "different colours, different companies, no integration, no planning, no common sense, no joined-up thinking". Of course, Burnham and Maconie have pre-defined the absence of centralised planing as the bad thing and will not see any evidence to the contrary. The complaint is that the busses are backed up on Manchester's busiest road. Unfortunately for Burnham and Maconie, I live in a British city which has only one bus company which is deeply in league with the local council, and exactly the same thing happens. Perhaps it is not the absence of plans but the presence of plans that cause such issues. It's easy to think about examples of this from Britain leading up to the election in 1945. In that election everyone was obsessed with "plans". In the end, it was the fact that there was the abstract notion of a "plan" from the Labour party that seemed to win them. Of course, having a plan is in itself not sign of success; one must analyse the details. Furthermore, this overlooks that the Conservative Party did have a plan - leave people alone.

Maconie also has a lot of love for Transport for London. He says TfL shows that a nationalised transport system works, since this has effectively kept the prices of tickets low. I disagree, the price of tickets has risen sharply, TfL simply sells them at a loss. This is the reason why TfL has become nearly bankrupt several times, depends on bail outs from the central government (that is, taxpayers) and has amassed some £11.175bn in debt (this was 12 months before the coronavirus lockdowns – I am not sure what the debt stands at now, but Sadiq Khan seems to never have a care about attempting to lower it, I imagine it is likely higher now). Maconie does not understand that a "price" is not merely the number of Great British Pounds you hand over for something but a representation of the value of some product or service. The true value of a TfL ticket is not shown publicly in the number of Great British Pounds you are expected to hand over for one, but is offset by the state (and again, by the state, I mean the taxpayer).

Culture and the BBC

Maconie works for the BBC. Maconie thinks the BBC is a good idea and we should keep it. Do I have to say more? Oh, fine, I will.

Maconie, frankly, knows, that his job would almost certainly be lost if not his pay significantly reduced if the BBC was privatised. It seems almost unbelievable that anyone would be willing to pay £159 a year for the BBC. For those who do not live in the UK, that cost is the current cost of a TV license. Yes, when the BBC was set up the government introduced a TV licensing scheme – in order to own and use a TV, even if that TV is never used to view public content, costs a flat rate of £159 per year per household. Currently, the fine for watching a TV you own in a home you own on a private TV satellite service you pay for, is £1000 if you have not paid the license fee. Literal insanity.

Services like Netflix or Amazon Prime generally offer content that most people prefer and are much cheaper. To add to this, people voluntarily pay for it. Thankfully the license is only mandatory if you actually own a TV or use BBC online services, so most people who have no interest in that "cultural" nonsense can simply side-step it. If nothing else, the BBC does massively hurt the television industry by putting off many people from getting cable or satellite with its atrocious fees.

The idea of such a centralised news and media company is also repulsive. The stark reality is, no institution is neutral. Not just in politics but in all fields. Every piece of media can be considered in some way or another to be propaganda. This piece is propaganda; don't think propaganda has to be false, fake or made up. In fact, almost all propaganda is totally true. I think people developed this view of propaganda being fake from WWII, where the Nazis were most associated with it. This just isn't the case. At any rate, giving the government the capacity to produce this propaganda is dangerous, for obvious reasons.

Maconie argues that the BBC is independent of the government; by this he means the BBC produces content independent of ministers – the Prime Minister can't just call up the BBC and order them to pull a story. This might be true, but this makes it far from independent. The higher ups of the BBC are selected by the government, and this will naturally lead to a cascade of persons being hired who share the same or similar views. Beyond this, people who would want to work for the BBC are simply much more likely to be of a certain character – someone who fundamentally believes the state is capable of doing good by acting in the economy as a "nanny". Even milk-toast Tories of the nation are a little sceptical of the government doing things; even these people are hard to come across in the BBC. Beyond this, who would work for a company and then spend every minute deliberately trying to make themselves unemployed? The reality is, every opinion, report, news and piece of fiction coming from the BBC is almost guaranteed to have at least implicitly the assumptions present that society exists and that the government is able to improve and has a duty to improve it. Almost certainly, there will never be a piece of content produced that has the assumption (or rather, knowledge) that respect of private property rights is the only known way to avoid conflict.

Looking Forward

Can we make any general statements of Maconie? Can these tell us anything about the current state of affairs in British mentality regarding the state? Can this tell us anything about how to fix the malaise of this nation, and maybe others all over the globe? I believe a solid yes to all of these questions is in order.

Maconie has what Ludwig von Mises describes as the anti-capitalist mentality. I have more than demonstrated this to be true. In Mises' The Anti-Capitalist Mentality he explores some of the social and psychological causes and consequences of these views. I would like to apply these to Maconie for some analysis.

Let us first begin with the necessary distrust of the marketplace. Maconie can not feel that the market is able to provide the goods and services to the people. Quoting Hoppe from his The Economics and Ethics of Private Property

Furthermore, historical evidence shows us that all of the so-called public goods that states now provide have at some time in the past actually been provided by private entrepreneurs or even today are so provided in one country or another. For example, the postal service was once private almost everywhere; streets were privately financed and still are sometimes; even the beloved lighthouses were originally the result of private enterprise; private police forces, detectives, and arbitrators exist; and help for the sick, the poor, the elderly, orphans, and widows has been a traditional concern of private charity organizations. To say, then, that such things cannot be produced by a pure market system is falsified by experience a hundredfold.

I do not want to simply leave it at that. Sure, we have empirical evidence to show that, yes, all of these things can be provided privately, but what is the a priori argument to support this? It arises from an enquiry into value: what does it mean for a good to have value? A good holds value in so much as it can be exchanged. I hold this to be true since I am not willing to use violence against otherwise peaceful people to enforce my personal view of value on others. Let us suppose I have good X. I think good X is worth £100. I try to sell good X but find that no person is willing to pay £100 for it. Eventually, I find some individual who wishes to buy it but is only willing to pay £80. There are a few possible options at this point. I may accept the trade – in this instance, since the trade was acceptable to both parties, we can categorically state that it was beneficial to both parties. Both parties perceive that they have increased their overall wealth, if not, the trade would not take place. I may also refuse the trade: in this instance the value of the £80 is perceived as being worth less to me than good X. While my customer may be disappointed the trade did not go ahead at £80, he does not have an entitlement or right to X, and so no harm has been done. In the third option, I decline but the customer holds a gun to my head and insists the trade will go ahead for £80. Here we have a coercive exchange, and since we have agreed that the trade going ahead indicates that I do not believe the after state of the trade would be beneficial, the total value of the system has decreased. Moreover, my rights have been violated since it was not the customer's, but my decision, what happens to X. In a fourth option I hold a gun to the customers head and force him to buy for not £80 but £100. This situation is the same but in reverse: now the total wealth has still decreased, and it was not my decision but the customers what he does with his cash. I want to emphasise that even though some "fair" compensation is given for the good X, theft has still taken place.

What does this mean? What this means is "goods" can only be present in voluntary exchanges. A good is a "good" because both the wealth of the buyer and the seller has increased: the buyer wants good X more than cash Y, and the seller wants cash Y more than good X. Should any coercive exchange take place, we have not a "good" but now rather a "bad". It is a "bad" because at least one person in the exchange did not want the exchange to take place and thus at least some natural rights had to be violated in order to take place.

Why does this miss Maconie? Well, for some of the reasons I have discussed so far – Maconie was taught in a state school where they would never dream of even making him aware of thinkers like Rothbard and Mises, Maconie has only ever worked for the BBC and tacitly knows that his comfortable job simply would not exist without the state. It seems unlikely that so many high paid journalists and radio commentators would exist without the state using force to redistribute wealth away from average British folk to this particular class of people.

Another issue with the nanny state model that I haven't heard many people discuss, is how it totally destroys charity. Very often in the past schools, Churches, streets, parks and all other manner of private amenities were provided to the community quite literally as a donation by a local wealthy benefactor. When all of these things become the purview of the state, natural charity collapses. I know someone who works at the local council, and the city here has quite a serious homeless problem. As a response the council started a scheme where all homeless people could be housed totally free of charge with no checks or expectations i.e. not being monitored for drug use and no expectation of ever getting a job or house. This is quite literally free housing at no cost or inconvenience. As part of her work, she would go out and try to convince homeless people to go (of course, they can not mandate they go), but more often than not they turn her down. She admitted that when she is out now, and these very same people come up to her to ask for money, she totally ignores them, because she knows what they turned down. Now, I'll let the reader interpret from this story what they will, but the natural impetus of each human to help another is totally eroded by the state. Maconie talks about Margaret Thatcher: "She was incalculated in many of her bedrock, catechistical ideas at the knee and bacon slicer of her dour grocer father Alfred and during her four visits each Sunday to the Methodist Chapel, albeit without picking up much Christian charity". Here, Maconie could not be more wrong. Christian charity is personal and private. Maconie acts as though Jesus was famous for saying "blessed be the tax collectors, for real charity comes not from the heart, but from the will of the state". We can not have a conception of "charity" without freedom to enact that charity. This is exactly what Deirdre McCloskey discusses in her The Bourgeois Virtues. It is only through the elevation of the proletariat to the bourgeois class can we truly flourish in this charity. Only though escaping the very soft slavery that Maconie wants for every person: whether they want it nor not.

Maconie's account of Britain fails. He does not paint an accurate picture of Britain, he presents that which is convenient to him while leaving out important details. He does not tell us how to save Britain, in fact, all his ideas are certain to lead to ever greater ruin. It is only through bringing about an end to the welfare state can Britain save itself from an ever declining public purse, politics and madness.

References

Web

UK Gov, Public spending statistics: November 2021, available from https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-spending-statistics-release-november-2021/public-spending-statistics-november-2021

Office for National Statistics, UK government debt and deficit: June 2021, available from https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicspending/bulletins/ukgovernmentdebtanddeficitforeurostatmaast/june2021

Office for National Statistics, Employment and Employee Types, available from https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes#timeseries

Office for National Statistics, Public Sector Employment, UK: December 2021, available from https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/publicsectorpersonnel/bulletins/publicsectoremployment/latest

Thomas Mackintosh, Why Transport For London's Finances Are Far From Healthy, available from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-54652907

Lynn Pasquerella, Why Higher Education Must Include a Career Focus, available from https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2022/04/06/why_higher_education_must_include_a_career_focus_110721.html

Gabriel E. Vidal, The Health Czar Can't Calculate, available from https://mises.org/library/health-czar-cant-calculate

Books

James Burnham, The Machiavellians, available from https://archive.org/details/BurnhamJamesTheMachiavellians

Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, available from https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth

Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, ISBN 978-0-226-55664-2

Murray N. Rothbard, Education: Free and Compulsory, available from https://mises.org/library/compulsory-vs-free-education

Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, available from https://mises.org/library/anti-capitalistic-mentality

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, available from https://mises.org/library/economics-and-ethics-private-property-0

Stuart Maconie, The Nanny State Made Me, 2020, Eubry Press, 9781529102413

David Kynaston, A World To Build, 2007, Bloomsbury Publishing, 9780747585404