Edmund Burke, Welfare King

“Three months later, when Burke took up his pen against a proposal for the government to subsidize the wages of farm laborers during bad harvest years (so that they could sustain themselves and their families), he wrote, “To provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of government.””
Brilliant. Conservative hypocrisy started early.

“Conservative sucks the government teat while decrying ‘those’ people getting just enough to scrape by.” is a very “dog bites man” story.

That is an amazing story.

Hypocritical of Burke? Somewhat, yes. But he was (presumably?) receiving a pension for his time as MP. That’s quite different to subsidizing private farmers. This is only slightly above mud-slinging, Corey.

“These were 18 century MP’s we’re talking about, not 20th century public employees.”

Nevertheless, it would be misleading to say that pensions were never granted for services to the government, or that expectations of such payments were never justified.

Here is a summary of a memorandum made on behalf of Burke, as quoted by one J. Holland Rose, in “The English Historical Review,” in an article called “Burke, Windham, and Pitt”:

“Burke understands that Pitt is so obliging as to think that his public services during thirty years may be recommended to HM s gracious consideration. Burke has never solicited or suggested a reward he has done nothing beyond his strict duty. But if he may compare his services with those of certain contemporaries he will refer to his arduous duties before and during the ministry of Lord Rockingham at the conclusion of which it was generally expected that some provision would be made for him. On the other hand the services of Colonel Barre and Dunning though no more conspicuous were rewarded by annual pensions of 3,000 and 4,000 respectively the latter gentleman gaining also a peerage. Burke’s reform of the pay office has led to important savings of public money and in general his work for the state has been far greater than that of Barre and Dunning who were amply rewarded twelve years ago. Many others whose careers have been shorter and less arduous than Burke’s have secured full recognition and pecuniary rewards. Lord Auckland being a prominent instance Mr Burke does not conceive that whatever HM may be graciously pleased to do for Mr Burke in the present temper of the public mind would be more unpopular or ill received in the nation than what has been done for any of these gentlemen. ”

Note the phrase “it was generally expected that some provision would be made for [Burke].”

“The old-fashioned way: living beyond his means.”

I don’t know how Burke accumulated all his debts, but in the same article I mentioned, J. Holland Rose claims that part of the reason for his pecuniary troubles was his financial support of “distressed French exiles:”

” Of late [Burke] had helped indirectly to bring about the accession of the Portland whigs; for, while disclaiming any direct part in the negotiations, he informed Windham that he had spared no pains to produce the dispositions which led to it. Further, his succour to the distressed French exiles had strained his scanty resources to the breaking point.”

30,000 late-eighteenth century pounds is a simply staggering amount of money. Think of all those Trollope novels (written a half-century after Burke’s death!), in which genteel middle-class people struggle mightily to acquire an income of a few-hundred pounds a year (resorting to every possible means other than working for the money); out of this few-hundred-pounds-a-year they expect to marry, have a pleasant home, raise and educate children, and employ at least one full-time servant, plus occasional labor.

What a story!

It reminds me of Hayek coming to the U.S. and one of the Koch brothers encouraging him to sign up for Social Security and Medicare.
http://www.thenation.com/article/163672/charles-koch-friedrich-hayek-use-social-security

In related news, today Dean Baker reports that Senator Ted Cruz’ own private healthplan has most likely been allowing him an $8000 tax deduction, i.e. a public subsidy. That is a much larger subsidy than anyone will be able to get on the Obamacare exchanges.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/senator-cruzs-health-care-plan-costs-taxpayers-8000-a-year

A cheap shot. There’s nothing hypocritical about Burke’s statement. His point is not that government, and certainly not that government officials, cannot adopt policies more or less materially beneficial either to needy individuals, or needy groups, or to society as a whole, but that the government itself does not produce the wealth over which society disposes.

To provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of Government. It would be a vain presumption in statesmen to think they can do it. The people maintain them, and not they the people.

It’s a seemingly obvious point, but one that not only conservatives by any means frequently find themselves having to recall for people – especially in government and also among the rich, as Burke also points out. Would any self-respecting socialist, or any reasonable person at all, disagree? Does government by regulating health care or agriculture or industry actually care for the sick or grow crops or make things?

The problems presented to economic and political theory by the experiences and reaction to the Speenhamland system, which Burke was addressing, should not be underestimated. Polanyi, for example, uses them as his central lesson in understanding the “free market”: its socially highly disruptive and even catastrophic effects; its need for systematic governmental action and protection, entirely contrary to its laissez-faire self-understanding; but also the eventual general adoption even by the Christian churches of what amount to capitalism’s key ideological prerequisites, based on an ancient logic. It is no small thing that the general development in relation to the Speenhamland system has been replicated throughout the world to this day, and is repeated periodically wherever “the market” comes to reign – in other words, virtually everywhere.

Lee Arnold @20 –

I can’t really hold it against Hayek, since unlike Rand and her ilk, he wasn’t really a dogmatic opponent of social insurance. How many libertarians remember this passage from Road to Serfdom?

There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.

The Kochs, of course, are another story…

So Burke was the first tea party icon; I have mine fuck off poor people.

The position of Edmund Burke is analogous to that of the Tea Partiers who get insurance for themselves and their families while vigorously protesting against the Affordable Care Act. Most people don’t understand why the Tea Partiers were willing to default on the national debt in their attempt to prevent the AFHA from going into effect. I wrote a blog which traces it back to the fact that the Tea Party was forged in the whit-hot heat of the right wing lies about the AFHA. It also explains why all the right wing lies. See it at:
http://brianebaxter.com/2013/10/14/the-affordable-care-act-and-defaulting-on-the-national-debt/

dn @24

+1

I love that passage from The Road to Serfdom(/i>. Great to see it quoted. Keep doing it :)

Hayek Hearts ObamaCare

Addressing Speenhamland, however, he was adopting, for better or for worse, a winning position that is very difficult merely to wish away.

The problem of the Speenhamland system was that it allowed employers to pay their laborers less than a living wage, with the deficiency being made up by the state. This was not a subsidy to the poor laborer, it was a subsidy to the agricultural owner class. What replaced it was a system that continued to subsidize the agricultural owner class, but only to the extent that the underpaid or unpaid laborer was willing to be imprisoned and humiliated. Winning position!

Keith (at 28): “I have mine; fuck off poor people”

Or the traditional version: “The working class can kiss my ass/ I’ve got the foreman’s job at last!”

Maybe a better defense of Burke would be to point out that in many cases (most cases?) the British constitution of those days simply made no provision for rewarding people who had, maybe, made a real contribution to the State. Payments of pensions, awarding of honours, ex gratia payments all happened, but all in response to pressure, requests, who you knew, political connectedness etc. You had to ask, you had to write to your relatives and/or influential politicians, you had to put yourself forward or get somebody else to push your case, or you got nothing. That included people who had really made a contribution. And of course such a “system” was rorted; look at the Premiership of Walpole. The wonder was that deserving cases got anything at all.

Of course it is better for defined services to be regularly coupled with defined rewards, but, for the most part, that came later (though there were always some “places”, sometimes sinecures, which were associated – sometimes only by custom – with defined perquisites).

Google reveals it was Grover Cleveland, vetoing the Dependent Pensions Bill “I have conceived of the ension list of the Republic as a roll of honour”

“A democratic government is not something distinct and apart from the citizenry, which can or cannot produce wealth and bestow or not bestow it on them. It is a mechanism, an arrangement, a scheme, a plan, decided on by all the citizens, for producing and distributing the common wealth”

Can you point out some examples of actually existing more-or-less democratic government (of nations)?

On the pension, Dr. Johnson wasn’t being gratuitiously snarky when he defined “pension” as the reward to a hireling for treason to his country – he was voicing a deep truth about 18th century British politics and administration.

Also, with every year that passes I appreciate the achievement of Northcote-Trevelyan even more.

It goes without saying that Johnson got one.

So familiar.

My public benefit is different because shut up, that’s why.

Corey Robin@12 – “The old-fashioned way: living beyond his means.”

Well, sure, but the amount suggests profligacy worthy of a Balzacian spendthrift. Or, idk, maybe this is normal for an 18th century “Gentleman”.

Geo https://crookedtimber.org/2013/10/24/edmund-burke-welfare-king/comment-page-1/#comment-491021

It only goes to show that Burke had no conception of democracy, or rather that his conception of it was simply mob rule.
Burke held to the same concept of democracy, a generally negative one, that had been traditional if not definitional for “gentlemen” or their equivalents in other social systems for most of recorded human history.

You may not like the concept or you may consider the concept obsolete, but it’s still a concept, and one whose key elements, or some might say insights, inform effectively all of our so-called democratic or liberal democratic constitutions worldwide. In such constitutions, “government” is less a “a mechanism, an arrangement, a scheme, a plan, decided on by all the citizens, for producing and distributing the common wealth,” than an impediment to the realization of just this economic democratist notion. (Or you might say that the “plan” or “mechanism” is an “anti-plan” or “anti-mechanism” that fulfills your concept by negating it.) The traditional argument that Burke likely read in the original Greek as a schoolboy would be that the so-called mixed regime or polity is desirable precisely because it offers more durable resistance to economic democratism, whose end result, it was widely believed (as it is still widely believed and as may be true), would be to impoverish all of society, and eventually to destroy it, in the name of justice. You’ll find comments along just these traditional lines elsewhere in the full context of Burke’s remarks as linked above. When I referred to Burke taking the “winning position,” I mean in relation to the larger argument, as taken in Britain to have been verified by the Speenhamland experience and aftermath, a critical moment in the birth of modern mass-industrial society or capitalism.

Run up a huge debt, perform a ‘service’ to the leaders of your country, and have the debt excused at tax-payer’s expense. Sounds like a role model.

Work hard in a system that prevents you from access to opportunity or redress, at wages which allow you to just avoid starvation, every moment of your working life is a direct service to your nation, when you cannot get enough work to sustain yourself –

Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

CK@50:
“Democracy: 1b. A government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation.” Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. A fairly standard definition, I suspect, and certainly what Paine, Godwin, Mill, Morris, Russell, Dewey, and all other serious democratic theorists meant by the word. To Burke, as I said, and you apparently agree, “democracy” meant rule by the swinish multitude, the bovine herd who were meant to graze contentedly under the great monarchical/aristocratic oak. Yes, his view of that was, as you delicately put it, “negative.” He simply could not imagine self-government by the many. He had, like (in this respect) all conservatives, a defective moral imagination. In fact, I would say that the inability to imagine a cooperative, non-hierarchical commonwealth is the most useful definition of political conservatism, at the philosophical level.

Manta@40: Can you point out some examples of actually existing more-or-less democratic government (of nations)?

No. Certainly neither 18th-century Britain nor (for the reasons novakant eloquently expounds @41) late-19th-, 20th-, or 21st-century America was a democracy. Elections are a necessary but by no means sufficient condition of democracy — surely everyone here at CT knows that. 18th-century American towns may have been democratic (at any rate, if there were any that allowed p0litical participation by women). Democratic socialism (again, as its serious exponents — Mill, Marx, Morris, Wilde, Russell, Dewey, Harrington, Walzer — conceive it) is the extension of popular sovereignty, universal participation, non-hierarchy — democracy — to the whole of social (not personal) life, including production. It is as yet only an ideal, but its time will surely come — around the 25th century is my best guess.

“power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly”

But what does it mean? I probably should go read Paine, Godwin, Mill, Morris, Russell, and Dewey, but in case you are able (and care) to explain this in a paragraph or two: what is “the people” and how is it capable of exercising power? and how does the concept of ‘individual’ fit into this? Thanks.

Mao @55: A rough definition of effective democracy: the degree to which governments solicit and respond to popular sentiment rather than money in the formation of law and policy. I’m not sure such things are susceptible of more precise definition, though anyone else is welcome to take a crack at it.

“He for subscribers baits his hook / and takes your cash, but where’s the book?”

This must have been absolutely fucking maddening.

It’s a pity Prof. Krugman doesn’t write in verse, or he could easily paraphrase Churchill’s jibe at Johnson when discussing the US fiscal apocalypse so often predicted but which never seems to actually happen:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/10/paul-krugman-addicted-to-the-apocalypse.html

Corey Robin (at 62) –

Thanks. I would distinguish between the payments made out of the Poor Rate and the sort of pension Burke received. You’re right in that the former was made within the legal architecture of National legislation (17th century), and to that extent my remark (at 60) that “Relief of the poor … wasn’t considered a matter for central (Royal) government…” is strictly wrong. But that legal architecture, so far as I understand it, did no more than authorise the collection and expenditure of money at a local (parish and county) level. No money was spent on pensions for poor relief per se by the Royal (National) government. But the Royal government did pay Burke’s (and Johnson’s) pension.

Mao @59: Democracy in a nation-state will require an aroused, determined populace and a modest amount of technical ingenuity, much less (I would guess) than the hundred or so most complicated technologies at present. I don’t have a blueprint — it will be a collective product, and will undoubtedly follow rather than precede the determination of the populace to govern itself. There are interesting suggestions in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia and a couple of paragraphs in an essay of mine: http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/plutocratic-vistas/.

Hector, if socialism is ” the extension of popular sovereignty, universal participation, non-hierarchy — democracy — to the whole of social (not personal) life, including production” (my definition @54, following the theorists I named, from Mill to Walzer), then what you’re describing is, by definition, something else. I know it’s customary to identify “socialism” with Marxism-Leninism, but that’s a lazy, foolish, intellectually disreputable custom.

Geo, I read the piece.
It seems to me that these days the word ‘democracy’ describes a market economy with private ownership of productive assets and with a large middle class. Ruled by the business elite, feedback by elections. Its success or failure is measured by whether the middle class is growing or shrinking, and prospers or declines on average.

What you propose, I can imagine it on the scale of a village or town, a section of a city. Beyond that, it becomes more and more problematic. On the scale of millions, tens and hundred of millions people living in radically different environments, government powers would have to be reduced further and further, upholding only the most basic, commonly agreed upon principles, and a very limited interpretation of those. Something like the Swiss model or the original US constitution (with much smaller States). But of course that would create its own problems. The current plague is money corruption, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only possible trouble.

Geo,

Your bs about ‘universal participation’ and ‘popular sovereignty’ sounds fairly revolting to me, but if you want to call it democratic ‘socialism’ I suppose I can’t stop you. the socialism *I* support is the one that involves vanguard parties, tough men with guns, and compulsory labor requirements, not your wussified ‘democratic’ kind.

In any case, resource shortages in the next century are going to make democracy as a form of government, whether the democrats call themselves capitalists or socialists, unsustainable. all future forms of government, I think, will be regimented, authoritarian, and based around rationing scarce goods.

Mao and Hector: “Democracy” and “socialism” are just words. Arguments about usage are interesting but not fundamental. What matters is: what are the possibilities for self-government? The obstacles you point out — scarcity, coordination, selfishness — to a radical solution are very plausible. I think those obstacles can be overcome, but of course it will take a long time and a sea change in the political culture. L’histoire jugera.

Geo #74: “of course it will take a long time and a sea change in the political culture”

Geo, hi, I’m not so sure about the “long time”. If inequality continues to worsen as it has done for around 40 years or so, then we are going to see new initiatives of propaganda and programs to explain it away and/or ameliorate its most dangerous aspects. If inequality accelerates, which is quite possible, this will come to a tipping-point rather sooner. Of course it depends on the various factors causing the inequality, and which one is most salient, in any given time or conversation. But it is important to remember that lots of people have already come to this conclusion, people as different as Mill, Marx, Keynes, Schumpeter, all the way through Michael Harrington (I am reading The Accidental Century, 1965) and now the growing number of economists looking at “capital-biased technological change” (and its likeliest outcome, “robot socialism”).

Harrington points out that it was Schumpeter who wrote on the two possible routes to socialism: the men with guns, vs. bottoms-up democracy. I would venture to guess that the “men with guns” route is now most likely to come from within the ranks of the current “corporate socialists” who command the megacorps and Wall Street, hoping to protect their elite positions in bleeding the public.

Geo, “a long way off”? Why is that? Do you think that it is because individuals naturally fail to have enough brains to comprehend the complexity of the system, i.e., there are inherent cognitive limits (of both reason and memory) in the individual? Or is it because the concentration of private ownership always manages somehow to remain a step ahead of the game, and can pay for the muscle to enforce it? Or is it a combination of these two? Either way, I see these games changing. Or is there another different reason, or set of them?

Geo,

Now your the one redefining words, with your ‘pseudo socialism’.

Rule by a vanguard party, involving state control of the economy in the service of the common good, is certainly one kind of socialism, nothing pseudo about it.

It would be pretty hard to argue that the Cuban economy is run ‘in the service of the Communist Party’ rather than ‘in the service of the common good.’

Of course, the usual suspects are no doubt going to do some crybaby whining about the loss of ‘freedom’ or whatever , but I’m sure most Cubans, outside of the exile malcontents, are happy to pay the price.

Mao Cheng Ji @73

In socialism scarcity is handled through rationing; in capitalism scarcity is handled through auction.

@82 That must be why they aren’t allowed out. They love it so much, you see, that anyone who’d want to emigrate must be a lunatic; they are just saving us the hassle of dealing with them by arresting them at the gate. And as for that business with the children of defectors well, with the adults being so cruelly deprived of the joys of submission to authority, the egalitarian instincts of the party can only be satisfied by gifting the children with a double dose.

Dare I ask why, in your opinion, virtually the entire Jewish population decamped for Israel as soon as they were given the opportunity? Do they just not appreciate the pleasures of tough men with guns and compulsory labour requirements?