Three Psychological Stages of Political History

I have a wacky theory about the history of ideas (or history proper as Mises would consider it.) When a child is born as far as s/he is concerned the parents are God. They are the authority on what is correct and what is false, they are also morally absolute. Their defining attitude towards their parents is a big "yes." Even if the parents are cruel or abusive, it must be me at fault not them - since they are the authority. At some point between 2 and 7, then later again in the teens, the youngster begins to assert their individuality by rebelling against the parent, the more the parent tries to apply authority and demand certain behaviours, the more the child will rebel against this authority with a resounding "no!" The child feels empowered by making the parents feel out of control emotionally, s/he asserts their dominance over them because the parents want compliance, and the child has the power to mete it out or not - causing the parents an easy time or grief. If the response to this "no!" is overly authoritarian or permissive and lacks engaging with reason and appropriate boundaries bad patterns can be set for life. The child can become compliant and later susceptible to peer pressure as he gets stuck in "Yes" or overly rebellious (even to his/her own detriment) and stuck in "No." From this point on any instructions or even mere advice from others - sometimes even from oneself - result in the involuntary impulse to rebel, stick heels in, and refuse to comply even if the request is in the child-now-adult's interests. This can create tremendous problems including a lack of self-discipline and relationship tumults. A wise parent manages to avoids unwittingly molding this kind of character by creating opportunities for his children to say no and rebel to safe and relatively trivial things. For example s/he does might not tell them not to smoke, know that if s/he does they will smoke. Perhaps they will be told not to climb that tree or to play in the muck instead, something relatively innocuous.

A mature person is able to say "yes" or "no". Without the ability to say "no" a "yes" is utterly meaningless because it does not come from the person's individuality. A "no" without consideration is also a counterfeit individuality, it makes one feel like they are having a say but actually they are purely governed by involuntary impulses as sure as those of the "yes man" or people-pleaser. The new man says "yes" to life; and in that he in many ways seems similar to the primordial man, but there is a critical difference - his yes to life is out of fully integrating all previous stages of development rather than an arrested development.

It's my assertion that maybe we have seen a similar evolution in the political sphere. Classic Liberalism arose as a response to a form of conservatism that was very much a "yes" to authority; the authority of the state, aristocracy, church, powers that be. The authorities of the time were very puritanical and their morals and social norms severely restricted the freedoms of people in terms of whom they could marry (usually whom their parents decided) what they could do for a living (what their parents did) what they could own (most of it belonged to their lord, many could not own land) what they could put in their body (moralizations about alcohol) what they should learn and read (mostly the bible) how they could pray (no pagan gods, no Judaism, etc.) and so forth. Now the arrival of liberalism was a resounding "No!" to authority. In a Hegelian fashion it formed an antithesis to the prevailing mores of the time. It continued to develop into other rebellious schools of thought that claimed to rebel against the prevailing authorities: socialism, marxism, communist, progressivism, &c. and reached its hedonistic peak in the 60s with the free love movement and all the big government and welfare programs - but it went to far too fast for a first attempt and soon there was a reaction against it which turned the tide back for a while. After the 80s it came back swinging though and has reached its second crescendo today with the social justice warrior movement. This has become the new thesis and it required an antithesis to counteract it. Clearly I believe that is libertarianism. It is the new man who integrates all previous stages of development in his evolution. In many ways it seems to harken back to certain "conservative" concepts which liberalism reacted against, but in reality the context of the acceptance of certain aspects of authority and tradition is now based on reason ("they have been shown empirically to work better than all that libertinism") rather than authority alone.

What do you think of my thesis? Are you the new wo/man?

The River: Public Policy or Private Responsibility?

What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have
greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in
common with others. 

—Aristotle

The idea of aspects of the natural world being "privately owned" strikes as rather crass to most people and perhaps with some good reason as it brings to mind a vision of heartless mercenaries sacrificing nature to the pursuit of profit. Industrialists, we are led to believe, can only possibly view nature as a means to and end rather than an end in itself, and in doing so reduce it to a disposable commodity.

However, this prevailing assessment does not take into the equation the fact that true ownership is attended by responsibilities to which an owner must be held accountable. Where rights entail responsibilities (as they have in the past under common law), and these responsibilities are enforced, the claim to a property will serve naturally as an incentive to conserve that property. In effect owners will become custodians.*

* (The words "ownership" and "property" have perhaps simply taken on negative connotations synonymous with exploitation for various historical reasons, and so it is essential in order to dialogue on these topics that we make explicit the fact that our definition of ownership is one that not only entails property rights but property responsibilities.)

Most people presume that government must fulfill the role of protecting the natural world, but this arrangement throws up some rather dubious incentives. When governments write policy documents about rivers, lets say, they tend to be for the purpose of  delineating who is allowed to exploit the river, on what terms, and in what measure. Special favours can always be handed out to cronies or campaign contributors; to “stimulate local business”; or for any other political ends that might attract short term support for office-holders regardless of the long term consequences. The rights to log a forest can be sold off to the highest bidder and the tax payer can be left with the burden of restoring it to health.


Where the river (or forest) has particular ownership (rather than general ownership) it is fully in the interests of the owner (or owners) to keep it permanently in pristine condition for at least three reasons. (Owners also need not necessarily be private companies or individuals, but also charities, trusts, worker or consumer cooperatives, NGOs, or any form of organisation - that notwithstanding,  even if held by a private corporations these same incentives will apply.)

The first is in order to retain (or even increase) the resale value of the river. The better condition the river is kept in the higher its value will become; and even if the proprietor has no plans of ever selling the river they still have no interest in losing whatever outlay they have sunk into acquiring it in the first place. As such, a particular owner has the maximum incentive to protect against the river being polluted and to take whatever action is necessary to prevent it from being polluted. As a rightful owner they have the legal and moral right to take action against anyone who pollutes the river because the polluter has damaged the value of their property.  As it is not under general ownership where everyone has as much right to abuse it as anyone else does, the proprietor's interests are aligned with the interests of the natural world, thus he is risen to the level of a custodian. 

Secondly, a well-kept resource is renewable - it can turn a profit indefinitely. A badly-kept resource cannot. If a river is ill-kept the return on the investment for acquiring that resource will soon dry up (no pun intended.) As such an owner who does not know how to take care of the river will stand to gain more from passing it on to someone who does than from keeping it. A superior custodian will be able to pay more to acquire the river since they know how to put it to good use indefinitely.  The best experts in keeping a river running cleanly stand to gain the most from owning them and therefore will be able to pay more to acquire them than those who lack that expertise. In this way those who are the best custodians of resources will end up with them in their care on average over time. (The same would go for forests, fisheries, or grazing lands; where altruism is not enough to motivate environmental concern, rational self-interest will usually do the trick.)

Thirdly, if the river is not properly kept and becomes polluted, this is inevitably going to have negative effects on neighbouring lands, industries and settlements as the pollution is carried by the river onto other people’s property. At this point, as the last line of defence against irresponsible misuse and management of the river is the threat of litigation against the owner for his negligent and harmful management of his property. Where others have suffered harm, loss of health, or damage to their own property, a particular owner should be forced to pay damages and reparations to restore them to their original condition. They can lose their personal property and have to forfeit ownership of the river if they are found guilty of causing damages. When the government causes environmental catastrophes, as they often have, they can only be tried in their own courts, and even so the property of decision-makers is never at stake - even if found guilty of wrong-doing, the public purse will eventually foot the bill. As officials in public institutions tend to have a diffusion of responsibility it is hard to hold particular culprits to account for their actions, rarely will a department be shut down or replaced where abuses occur as they are presumed essential even having "made mistakes". Often state officials have sovereign immunity, occasionally one or two resignations will be tendered as a  token gesture, but the machinery of the institution remains as well as the lack of moral hazard which set it up to fail.

Child Labour

Many people believe that it was the government that put an end to child labour in Western Nations but in fact almost all the children in Britain were already in school when child labour was banned. Likewise, child labor laws in the US were passed only after around 90% of the child labor had been eliminated anyway. A large part of the push for these laws came from labour unions who wanted to increase wages by reducing competition from younger workers, and as the business community was not particularly dependent on child labour any more it had no reason to lead a counter charge.

It actually requires an advanced economy to ban children from working. Children had worked throughout all of history, long before the onset of the industrial revolution had them conspicuously running around factories. It was a given fact of life because every pair of hands was needed to provide for a family, so they worked on the farm. As soon as Western economies were rich enough that parents could provide for their children without sending them to work they sent them to school instead. In the mind-nineteenth century before there was any mandatory education in the UK, 95% of children in Great Britain already had at least 5 and often as many as 7 years of education.

Further empirical evidence was recently provided, all to sadly, in Bangladesh where they tried to ban child labour prematurely only to find (as Oxfam reported) that the results were horrific. The kids went into prostitution, destitution, begging, stealing and starvation.

It appears that every society naturally takes children out the workplace when they are rich enough. It's not that parents, all throughout history, hated their children! They sent them to work because there was no viable alternative.

As world poverty continues to decline, things are going in the right direction. Child labour has declined by one third since 2000, from 246 million to 168 million children. It's not that we can do nothing in western nations to speed along this process either, in fact - with the political will - we can. Charity can help, but the primary necessity is to open up free trade with the poorest countries in the world. Removing trade barriers to buying their products would help lift millions out of poverty abroad and lower the cost of living for families on low incomes at home. The next step would be to use our influence to encourage those countries to open up their economies to foreign investment so that companies from all over the world would flood in, bringing technology, skills, and infrastructure while bidding up the price of wages. As adults are able to earn increasingly more they will be able to take their children out of work and into education where they belong.

A. S. 04-03-17

If you liked this article you may also learn from this related article on workplace safety.