Adeste Fideles

Yesterday, I cracked; I bought a copy of 'The Shock Doctrine'.

This essay might just get me tossed out the next edition.

I'm only at Page 14, yet the book has already made some strong impressions; principally that in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Jamar Perry most likely had no problem which could have possibly been solved by him being the object of Naomi Klein's curiosity.

'Economic shock therapy' should be considered a school of economic thought in its own right, not just as one aspect of Klein's concept of 'disaster capitalism' - for what it's worth, I agree with her that 'disaster capitalism' does exist.

The analogy she draws between Chile in 1973 and Iraq in 2004 seems solid; but her fixation on the world of the moment makes her miss the first example that same world ever saw of the 'disaster capitalism' she describes. On the other hand, given what it was and where and when it happened, it's entirely reasonable that she shouldn't know.

Ms. Klein puts my name very close to the phrase 'free market ideologues'. If she thinks that what I am, then I'm more than happy to clear up the misunderstanding.

And she completely fails to understand just why Milton Friedman would describe himself as being like "an old-fashioned preacher delivering a Sunday sermon"; it's because - all together now - economics is not a science, but a religion, and he was one of its High Priests.

This is a conservative heresy, but the historians of the future will probably judge Friedman far more harshly than he has been judged up to now. In preparing this essay, I re-read the interview he gave to Peter Brimelow which was published in 'Forbes' in December 1997. It's on a website Naomi Klein probably doesn't read.

Immigration restrictionists laud that interview because of Friedman's observation that "(i)t's just obvious that you can't have free immigration and a welfare state"; yet his words do not make at all clear whether or not Friedman would have favoured free immigration if the welfare state were no longer to exist. He might have been a member of the Minutemen for all I know; yet his words are ambivalent, and give the impression he was far more interested in the welfare state than immigration.

And for all his references to having been proved right, that interview contains irrefutable proof of his fallibility. He said,

"I've been predicting the euro would never happen. I'm still not sure I'm wrong."

Well he was, with bells on.

It is no surprise that Naomi Klein should not have heard of the first time that the strong imposed disaster capitalism on the weak. It happened in Scotland, and to fully understand it requires a detour down the bye-ways of Scottish history.

The very phrase 'political oeconomy' was coined by Sir James Denham-Steuart of Coltness, a quixotic Lanarkshire Jacobite whose views were in print almost a decade before 'The Wealth of Nations' hit the streets.

'The Wealth of Nations' was, of course, the work of Adam Smith, sometime Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. As recently as the 1920's, the Scottish Catholic Church forbade Catholics to study that subject at that institution.

Adam Smith - what a name; that of First Man, and Everyman. He might have been a Tourettist with the worst case of echopraxia in the literature; but you couldn't create a better name for a cult's totem if you tried. Norman Davies, a historian whose works the conservative should approach with the utmost caution, wrote of the religion Smith fathered that,

"(Economics) has moved into the void left by the decline of religion and the moral consensus; and it is increasingly seen as the main preoccupation of public policy, a panacea for social ills, the source even of private contentment. From being a technical subject, explaining human society in the way that medicine explains the human body, it threatens to become an end in itself, laying down goals, motives, incentives. Smith, the moralist, would have been appalled."

Oh, I'm not so sure.

One of Smith's most avid disciples was a grasping, deeply unpleasant Highland lawyer named Patrick Sellar; and it is Patrick Sellar, not Milton Friedman, who deserves to be known as the father of 'disaster capitalism', for his elimination of the community of Strathnaver, almost 200 years ago.

There's a surprise.

A land agent of the Countess of Sutherland, Sellar believed in the absolute truth of 'The Wealth of Nations' so avidly that in order to prove it was true, he burned people out of their homes; as I once put it elsewhere -

"...there are remarkable similarities between, of all things, the reconstruction of postwar Iraq and the most notorious episode of the so-called 'Highland Clearances', that of Strathnaver, and they're rooted in administrative over-reliance on economic theory. The State Department wonks who thought that spontaneous order would just break out once the Iraqis were free, free, free were just as wrong, wrong, wrong as Patrick Sellar, a devout disciple of the bits of the 'Wealth of Nations' that he liked, was when he thought that crofters settled on parcels of land too small for their subsistence would just divide their labour and prosper; no questions asked. It didn't happen then - it's a pity anyone thought it would ever happen now. "

What happened in Strathnaver was precisely what happened in Iraq; and what's worse, it happened for the same reasons, and suffered the same failed outcomes. In both cases, the strong enriched themselves at the weak's expense through the use of force.

Economics is a brutal religion. As a possible hero of the future once said, "(e)ven warring Mafia Dons respected each other’s homes"; but neoliberal 'disaster capitalism' economics doesn't. It wants in to your home to do business, regardless of whatever wish you might have to protect your privacy and your family.

Before neoliberal economics, you just bought your utilities from the Gas or Electricity Board; and the elderly and vulnerable didn't have guys like Billy Aitchison and Sonny Devlin coming to their doors. Politicians' blind acceptance of neoliberal economic ideology, or more accurately their belief in its religious dogmas, has been the sole enabler of these mens' activities. Do any of us really feel richer because they've been allowed to be in business? Have we really become a better country because of them?

The British working day is now 24/7/365, and it all depends on sales. As soon as you get in from a day's work, a telesales agent is on the phone trying to sell you something. No transaction seems complete without some kind of pitch being made to buy another service, whether it be insurance or a store card. We have become addicted to buying, and in consequence a disproportionate number of us are now employed in selling - an activity for which only a very few have the aptitude and inclination, which is the real reason why call centres have such high staff turnover rates. This is not a natural state of affairs. This has been manufactured.

Yet just today, Tim Worstall reports the greatest invasion of the British home by neoliberal economics to date -

"The government has been accused of trampling on individual liberties by proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables.

Under the regulations, bailiffs for private firms would for the first time be given permission to restrain or pin down householders. They would also be able to force their way into homes to seize property to pay off debts, such as unpaid credit card bills and loans."

So a state-sanctioned thug will be permitted to break your arm in your own living room in order to make you pay unsecured debts. This is not capitalism; it's gangsterism.

Yet incredibly, this has been reported on the same day it's also come into the public domain that ministers have been planning to charge benefit claimants interest of 27% per cent on social fund loans. On December 4 2007, I raised questions regarding the atrocious service that some Incapacity Benefit claimants were receiving, resulting in them being effectively forced to take crisis loans. Now those loans, only ever granted on the condition that repayments are deducted at source from future benefits, are going to carry an interest rate over 13 times higher than the Bank of England base!

In a world which is moving backwards, in which the middle classes are in the process of being reproletarianised, this is as close to the reintroduction of serfdom as we have yet come.

Just three days ago, I described Peter Mandelson as being 'a man on a mission' for trying to get as much of the Royal Mail as he can into private hands before the economy really goes belly up in 2009. It seems I wasn't wrong - the 'Independent' has reported that,

"The Treasury is considering privatising other state assets in what critics have called a recession "fire sale". These include:
*Ordnance Survey
*The Met Office
*The Forestry Commission
*The Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in Westminster
*The Covent Garden Market Authority
*The Royal Mint
*The Tote
*Buildings owned by British Waterways
*British Nuclear Fuel's stake in uranium enrichment company Urenco
*The Oil & Pipeline Agency, which manages the UK's underground network of fuel distribution pipelines. "

Given that this essay concerns economic practices more suited to 1809 than 2009, ye tricorn is typped to Masters Lindsay and Tall.

This is not 'privatisation', a practice which at all times has the same relationship to handling stolen goods as nationalisation has to theft. It is not even the healthy seeking of normal profit. This is pillage - a pillage instigated by those whom the pillaged have appointed to safeguard their interests.

There is a now little-used word to describe this kind of behaviour. That word is treason.

The word 'neoliberal' derives from the Romanian 'neoliberalismul'; according to Stanley Payne in 'A History of Fascism', it was the policy of the Romanian Liberal Party in the 1930's, 'that stressed more authoritative and corporate organisation under a modernising elite to create a modern social and economic structure'. For all their talk of being progressive, New Labour has been regressive instead of modernising; yet in very other respect, Payne's analysis fits it to a tee. For the past 11 years at least, the United Kingdom has been led by elitists with a policy platform appropriate for a Balkan backwater the best part of a century ago.

The elitism of our elites is so elitist that it's begin to alarm even the elitists themselves. In today's 'Sunday Times', no less an elitist than Andrew Sullivan himself writes,

"...a smaller government historically led to stronger, wealthier elites and they used their economic wealth to maintain their political power. "

There are those who believe that this process is being duplicated as we speak, and that mass privatisation is one of the tools that such elites use in order to strengthen their political power. In that sense, we are all Americans now. But people who suggest such things are of course nothing more than conspiracy theorists, deserving of no fate other than to be stripped of whatever shreds of intellectual credibility they have left.

It does give you another insight into the philosophy behind small government conservatism, though, doesn't it?

Economics is a religion - as I commented here,

"It is predicated on the belief - not the fact, mind, but the belief - that all human beings act rationally at all times in their own interests. This makes it a particularly vile and Satanic religion, because that proposition is sufficiently tempting to weak minds to make them think it might be true. It means that the economist, like the Freudian psychologist, becomes detached from God because their beliefs deny the existence of such phenomena as grace and providence. As John Maynard Keynes, who was to classical economics what Arius or Pelagius was to the early Church, put it, the actions of every man alive are dictated by the writings of some long dead economist. You can opt into or out of religious belief - you have no such leeway with economics. "

In fact, this is wrong - the Pelagius of classical economics was not Keynes, but Marx. Keynes was instead its Luther.

It's nearly Christmas, the whole point of which is remembering the hope of redemption and salvation. If we're going back in time 200 years, then let's go the whole bloody hog. There is absolutely no reason why one group should be able to luxuriate in the past while the rest of us have to suffer in the hell they have made of the present.

Let's hear it for one of my favourite characters from the early 19th Century -Gregory XVI, the most ultrareactionary pope in history.

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI could give his flock no greater gift this Christmas than by doing something that Pope Gregory XVI would not have hesitated to do; he should anathemise economics, publicly declare it a false religion, and issue an edict forbidding Catholics to study it. If the study of moral philosophy could be banned, so too can the study of economics. He should warn the world of its dangers and call for those Catholics whose faith has suffered through having studied economics to reconcile themselves to their Church for the love of God and in the hope of eternal salvation.

If that helps save one soul this Christmas, then the opportunity cost of the derision he would suffer from economists would be a price well worth paying. Adeste fideles, brothers and sisters in Christ - it's time to come home, where a warm welcome awaits you.