We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Samizdata quote of the day “And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.”
Edmund Burke, the 18th Century politician who has been described by historian and journalist Paul Johnson as the “greatest Irishman who ever lived”.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
Something about that which is received cheaply has no value springs to mind… When we do not feel we have earnt what we are given we value lightly both what is given – and the giver.
Julius Seizer
Great quote!
I wonder what Burke’s famished fellow citizens would have made of this during the Great Famine of the 1840’s?
They were really pleased at not having the state barely help them. They were over the moon at the pious respect given to property rights, such that the British government let landlords export by the boat load tonnes of food while millions starved.
They were really, really delirious at being able to freely emigrate in coffin ships to the USA (1 million) and other countries (a further million).
Finally, collectively joyful (verging onto religious ecstasy) at being able to freely die en masse (an estimate of 500,000 to 2.5 million by most respectable academics’ counts) as the dreadful peasants werent entrepreneurial enough to diversify away from potatoes.
What the thick idiots didnt realise is that they were blissfully free. Despite this they still bit the hand of the government – and it didnt even feed them! Ungrateful scum!
Gildillocks wrote:
Well, Burke lived from 1729 to 1797 and the Irish potato famine was from 1845 to 1849.
Also, on Burke’s particular point, was the government directly responsible for feeding the Irish with potatoes (eg through nationalised potato production) prior to the famine? If not (and I understand it was not, though I am open to correction), how does this refute Burke’s point?
Best regards
For reference: Thoughts and Details on Scarcity
Best regards
The old “the evil British did nothing during the famine” myth is back again.
No doubt we will have Queen Victoria called the “Five Pound Queen” (actually the lady gave at least five thousand Pounds – add a couple 0s to get that into “modern money”) and all the other stuff.
Sir Robert Peel tried importing maze at taxpayers expense (there were crop failuries all over Europe remember) – but Irish activists claimed it was “Peel’s brimstone” (because it was yellow) and tried to scare even starving people into not touching the stuff.
Russell (the next Prime Minister) tried massive public works projects – but these were a terrible mistake as they concentrated the Irish together (on building roads from “nowhere to nowhere” and so on) and they died of various forms of sickness.
The government soup kitchens (oh yes there were such places) were badly run (they always are), and people were sometimes kept away from private soup kitchens because they were told that if you used them it meant you had turned into a Protestant hence the Irish term to “take the soup” (to became a traitor and outcast).
I would like to see some hard evidence that private groups made people “curse the Pope” (and so on) before they gave them food – but evidence and Irish nationalist stories do not go hand in hand. As long as people could be kept away from the “wrong sort” of helpers that was the main thing. Thankfully there were also Roman Catholic aid organizations (but not extensive enough).
So the British were evil because they “did not give help” AND the British were evil because they did offer help.
Where the British CAN be justly attacked was for the land confiscations of the past (that had hit both sides of Edmund Burke’s family in past generations – both the Norman Irish Nagles of his mother and the Burkes of his father’s kin, although the father was a Protestants) and for the web of early 18th century (and before) laws.
The laws that undermined Irish overseas trade and the domestic economy, and the laws that made Catholic land owning very difficult (for example dividing the land among all the sons – thus reducing farms to unproductive plots fit only for growing potatos) actually all the laws had been got rid off long before the blight of the 1840’s – but the damage had already been done. It would take a very long time for Irish economic development to get Ireland to the same level as England (although for those people who think that the agricultual revolution and then the industrial revolution were bad things that made people in England “worse off” that may be a hard thing to understand).
Indeed there were vast numbers of deaths (due to sickness – but people were weakened by lack of food) way back around 1740 (if my memory serves) – something that would have been unthinkable in England at the same time.
The Irish economy was a lot weaker than the English (due to the various state interventions over a very long period of time), indeed even taxation was higher (if it is calculated correctly).
As Edmund Burke was fond of pointing out (indeed he was one of the first people to do so) what matters is not “tax per capita” but total tax (all taxes added together) as a proportion of the economy.
As the Irish were (on average) much poorer than the English the tax burden (which looked lighter) was actually much worse.
Of course the above is much more difficult that “the government did not provide help during the famine” so I doubt Goldillocks will be interested.
“You are just an anti Irish Catholic bigot”.
My mother’s name was Power (from my grandfather James Power) Catholic Irish.
You see things are complicated.
Even Jerry Adams (the head of Sinn Fein) who is so proud of his father (who, among other things, lit the bomfires on the Black Mountain that helped guide the Luftwaffe to kill over a thousand people and burn half the housing stock in Belfast) can also trace his line directly back to Colonel John Adams of Lincolnshire (“Adams” is not a celtic name) – a classic “British imperialist”. Of course John Adams married into the O’Neil’s – but then again there are O’Neils who are Protestant.
And (of course) hundred of thousands of Catholic Irishmen volunteered (from both North and South) to fight for the British Crown in both World Wars (not all Irishmen went along with the I.R.A. love for Adolf Hitler).
Are you confused yet?
Remember “until a person is totally confused they have not yet seriously started the study of Ireland”.
There were efforts – sadly insufficient – to feed starving people but clearly those efforts failed. The British government also – at great controversy at the time and at the cost of splitting the Tory party – abolished the Corn Laws in 1846 in order that cheap food could be imported to Ireland.
The dependency of the Irish peasantry on potatoes is in fact a strong argument for the sort of trade and enterprise that free marketeers favour. Ireland in the early 19th Century is a classic argument for industrialisation and against protectionism.
Paul Marks’ points are spot-on.
Ooh, err! Sorry not to get back earlier but I was away most of the time, which is why I hardly feature around here.
Nigel: Telling me what the dates for Edmund Burke and the Irish Famine are is very kind, but unnecessary – I know them. The girl may be blonde, but she’s not so dumb!
The fact that Burke and the Irish Famine were at the same time or the famine preceded Burke was not my point. I was simply wondering, given that he apparently said this, what he’d have thought of the famine given this blanket statement. I was trying to point out – and have obviously failed – that such absolutist comments cannot be true in certain circumstances. I therefore took the example of the famine as an example of government inaction leading to a dire result.
Paul: Life is complex. Yes it is. So I am wondering why you are simplistically assumming my politics here? You seem to have classified me as raving Irish Nationalist, which I am not – thoroughly English, thoroughly Protestant (that rare breed that actually believes in it as well) with a thoroughly politically incorrect Protestant great grandfather who traded gold in the
Pale. As a further point I am not even on the left of politics (it seems we have to reveal our political affiliations in order to be understood), believing that the dumb worship of government that has prevailed in the twentieth century is a sign of people not facing up to the fact that there are areas in life where its just tough and the government simply cant mollycoddle your pain – go look elsewhere!
As to my point, which I seem to have completely failed to make, – for which apologies – it simply cannot be the case that a government should not provide bread under any circumstances, as this quote implies. To say that the puny government effort at feeding the Irish failed does not invalidate government intervention, it simply says that this intervention was pathetic. I dont care that the possible cause of the famine was tax, land rights etc. the cause of the famine is incredibly complex and is still being debated today. The fact is that the government allowed food exports to go on while the Irish starved, and did virtually nothing. Cecil Woodham-Smith (no political axe to grind there) says that Ireland had more than enough food to feed itself and that during the five years of the famine Ireland was an exporter of food. Yet, the government, knowing what was happening did nothing. I am not saying that therefore government should do lots, but I am saying that in this instance doing nothing led to catastrophe and therefore you cannot come up with a simple quote like Burke’s, nod sagely at it and come up with a whole doctrine of non-intervention under any circumstance. (if that is what you are saying, which I take it to be given the tenor of this web site)
My hunch – and it is only a hunch on which I stand to be corrected – is that the government of the day was so into the doctrine of free trade that allowing food exports in a time of famine was one of its blindspots, it was like offending against one of the Ten Commandments. (In a previous famine, that of 1782/3, in a less doctrinaire age, the government actually barred exports from Ireland despite protestations from merchants, thus getting prices back down again and avoiding worse) and, yes, before I get the response I am an admirer of much of the Victorian age.