Forget it George and Davie, we need a Big Idea now, and this time it's social-ism

In the run up to 1997, I remember that one somewhat better, the Iron Lady was gone, love her or hate her, and the Tory government had become mired in "sleaze" and policy-wise had run out of steam, full of the second division of ministers that had emerged under Thatcher. Tony Blair and his New Labour project was another "Big Idea" whose time had come. Labour without the socialism. Economically responsible. With a plan.

And so we've had Thatcherism and Blairism over that past thirty years. But I think we will not get Brownism or Cameronism. Now, even moreso than in 1979, and certainly moreso than in 1997, we need a "Big Idea". Not merely a change of management. And, for all the coverage, I cannot see any "Big Idea" coming out of Old Queen Street. To prove their management credentials, they present, at their big show case conference before likely victory, a managerial mock-budget. Talk of freezing public sector pay, of everyone working for an extra year before retirement; these are not going to solve the terminal systemic problems in the anglo-saxon pensions system or the bloated state, unable to sap any more out of a shattered and second class productive economy.

And today's "Big Idea" ought to be not looking at how the State can be tweaked here and there or managed differently, but to look at the very nature of the State itself. As I quoted Albert Jay Nock in me previous post, here he is again, also from "Our Enemy The State":

The condition of public affairs in all countries, notably in our own, has done more than bring under review the mere current practice of politics, the character and quality of representative politicians, and the relative merits of this-or- that form or mode of government. It has served to suggest attention to the one institution whereof all these forms or modes are but the several, and, from the theoretical point of view, indifferent, manifestations. It suggests that finality does not lie with consideration of species, but of genus; it does not lie with consideration of the characteristic marks that differentiate the republican State, monocratic State, constitutional, collectivist, totalitarian, itlerian, Bolshevist, what you will. It lies with consideration of the State itself.

[...]

It appears to me that with the depletion of social power going on at the rate it is, the State-citizen should look very closely into the essential nature of the institution that is bringing it about. He should ask himself whether he has a theory of the State, and if so, whether he can assure himself that history supports it. He will not find this a matter that can be settled off-hand; it needs a good deal of investigation, and a stiff exercise of reflective thought. He should ask, in the first place, how the State originated, and why; it must have come about somehow, and for some purpose. This seems an extremely easy question to answer, but he will not find it so. Then he should ask what it is that history exhibits continuously as the State’s primary function. Then, whether he finds that “the State” and “government” are strictly synonymous terms; he uses them as such, but are they? Are there any invariable characteristic marks that differentiate the institution of government from the institution of the State? Then finally he should decide whether, by the testimony of history, the State is to be regarded as, in essence, a social or an anti-social institution?

Nock, of course, concludes as I too conclude; that the State is an anti-social institution - the enemy of social power that it unremittingly destroys. And so the "Big Idea" for today is, in fact a "socialist" revolution. A complete reversal of the centuries' old process of State power usurping Social power and never giving it back. Not the "socialism" corrupted by the coercive statist tendencies of the twentieth century "left", or of the "social democratic" tendency. But the confidence that social power can achieve what the do-gooders believe their states can do only much better.

It is an irony that in our own party what we think of and term "social liberalism" reflects a belief that the state should help liberalism flourish by its supposedly judicious interventions. For true "social liberalism" ought to be the belief, expressed by Nock, or Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or Gustav de Molinari that through genuine liberalism social power does not need the coercive state.

As David Boaz puts it in his "Libertarianism: A Primer":

The right term for the advocates of civil society and free markets is arguably socialist. Thomas Paine distinguished between society and government, and the libertarian writer Albert Jay Nock summed up all the things that people do voluntarily--for love or charity or profit--as "social power," which is always being threatened by the encroachment of State power. So we might say that those who advocate social power are socialists, while those who support State power are statists.

State Power is created by conquest and confiscation. From what Paine described as the "French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives" the state has exploited. It was no less exploitative from the seventeenth century Commonwealth's installation of mercantilist power - merely a different group was exploited. Nor, for all the talk that the universal franchise was the zenith of democratic achievement, has that exploitation ceased just because everyone now has a theoretical say - again, just another group, or groups, exploited from time to time. State power is the true "opium of the masses" with its ability to whisper softly, intoxicatingly to us that "the State will provide".

For those managerial politicians, those would be state exploiters, who cannot get away from their amateur management-speak, what we need is to "zero base" the state. For the state is no defier of the laws of the universe: for every state action there is an automatic and most likely undesirable reaction. It is state created privilege that enables some to exploit others' natural competitiveness in the market. And then the state says it needs to intervene and "redistribute" what would be more naturally distributed if that privilege had not been granted in the first place: more coercion, more exploitation, more state power. Every intervention of the state needs to be examined for the usually detrimental effects it has elsewhere and which it then claims as reason to usurp yet more social power to fix.

And we will find, invariably, that left well alone, without the depredations of the state in the first place, social power would have worked better. Social power, the power of all the associations we make one with another, even the ones we don't know about, such as my relationship with the forger of the brass ferrule in Leonard Read's "Pencil" whom I cannot know, is the only thing that can end this spiral of managerial, coercive, exploitative and ultimately futile statism. And its resurgence needs to start now, before George and Dave, and all that seek to come after them, manage to destroy it utterly. And with our now massively increased ability, through modern technology and communication, to organize for ourselves, for "people [to] have more to do with each other and governments less" there has never been a better time than now.

Socialism: it's not what you think!