Carswell/Rebel

Douglas Carswell, MP, has a new book called Rebel, in which he wrestles with an eternal dilemma: why populist revolutions sometimes bring tyranny. I don't know much about Carswell but the story of populist movements resulting in oligarchic catastrophe is the stuff of legends. The republics of Rome, Venice and the Netherlands all experienced the same thing: an inept populist revolt against the growing power of an oligarchy — by Tiberius Gracchus, Bajamonte Tiepolo and Johan de Witt respectively — followed by a counter-revolution that resulted in an even worse oligarchy that throttled prosperity, in the form of Sulla, the Council of Ten and William of Orange respectively. His book was reviewed recently by Ridley in The Times.


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Johan de Witt's story appears peripherally but horrifyingly in Dumas' The Black Rose. He tried to prevent the stadtholder of the Netherlands becoming a hereditary position, owned by the House of Orange. The similarities perhaps end there. De Witt was a cultured doctor of law with a fascination for Roman history who believed in free trade, free speech and republicanism. Yet in the end he ushered in monarchy, bankruptcy and decline.

That decline was not, Carswell says, because the Dutch lost their entrepreneurial spirit, as historians sometimes lazily assert, but because the Orangist elite became closed and parasitical, living off the spoils of conquest and investing their regressively raised taxes in bonds issued by over-borrowed government, rather than in ships and shops. By 1713, 70 per cent of tax revenue went on servicing debt. “A free-wheeling republic had become a restrictionist, rentier state,” as Carswell puts it.

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"Carswell reminds us that “every society that ever managed to sustain intensive economic growth did so by staying close to the free-exchange end of the spectrum”. Like a rainforest ecosystem, commerce is a self-organising system that results in spontaneous order and complexity. For instance, nobody has planned or is in charge of the job of feeding ten million people for lunch in London today, but this incredibly complex task will be achieved smoothly.

Yet history shows that free exchange is constantly at risk of being infected and captured by parasites and predators who live off productive people through taxes, tithes, rents, slavery, subsidy, war and theft. This is what killed the goose in ancient Greece and Rome, in Renaissance Italy and Holland’s golden age. From time to time anti-oligarch insurgents are needed to purge the parasites, expel the predators and free the economy from their burden.

Now, says Carswell, is such a time."

"One of the problems with most of the new radicals, whether a Trump, a Farage, a Wilders or a Le Pen, is that they seem to be in thrall to the myth of the big (wo)man, who will lead the people to the promised land. Carswell wants to challenge the myth of the Big Man who knows everything. Instead he would allow the organisation of society along bottom-up lines."

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(much from Ridley)