“Whizz Whizz Zoom Zoom”,“Tariffs and Deportations” or“Billionaires hoard all the wealth”: take your pick
We should look at these statist solutions and tell their proponents that the things they propose won’t make people’s lives better and may even make them worse.
Politics, or at least the political debate, seems to be settling down. There are, I feel, three emerging camps competing for our attention and the shape of the future will be influenced by how this debate resolves. But first the three camps.
“Whizz Whizz Zoom Zoom”.
Lots of talk about abundance, JFDI, ‘build baby build’. AI generated images of sleek trains and skyscrapers. Very masculine language reminiscent of the old Wall Street ‘big swinging dicks’ approach. YIMBYs. Urban density. All the world’s problems are because government doesn’t build enough.
“Tariffs and Deportations”.
Ethnonationalism. Culture is ‘downstream’ of race. Talk about ‘Christendom’ and Western civilisation accompanied by images of cathedrals and bucolic countryside. Appeals to fear. Economic protectionism. Lots of references to farmers. Stopping migration solves everything.
“Billionaires hoard all the wealth”.
A new green coat over the fading red paint of socialism. Appeals to fairness. Talk about poverty, disability, welfare and inequality. Free stuff for the people paid for by taxing the wealthy. The state can fix everything.
There is, in addition, the fast disappearing residue of the old politics along with milder versions of these three polemics. What is striking for me is that all of politics, whether left or right, has turned away from the idea of markets, prices and free enterprise. Even in the ‘whizz whizz zoom zoom’ world the emphasis is on the state, whether it is ARIA in the UK or the EU promising to spend €500bn on fast trains, the expectation is that accelerating the betterment of humanity requires an active (and large) state. To fix the housing or energy supply problems there’s no suggestion that the state should just get out of the way. We are, instead, to get a new ‘whizz whizz zoom zoom’ sort of planning because otherwise the houses, factories and generators will be wrong - in the wrong place, making the wrong thing, using the wrong fuel. Without the new ‘whizz whizz zoom zoom’ planning there’ll be urban sprawl and car dependency where there should be apartment blocks and tramways. People, who should be all hugger-mugger because crowding makes for economic growth, might choose to spread out, get a little space to breathe, do economically wasteful things like have families.
Meanwhile the new, often ethnonationalist, right, inspired by (and borrowing the language of) the political and intellectual left, tells us the state must focus on identity, specifically on the cultural or racial identity of a place’s ‘natives’. The manifestation of this ideology differs from place to place; in the USA with its racially heterogeneous population, the bad guys are Mexicans illegally taking American jobs and foreign businesses that make things cheaper than in the good old USA. In the UK the baddies are economic migrants from Africa and the Middle East. Plus of course ‘neoliberalism’, ‘globalism’, George Soros and the WEF. We need an active state that will round up and deport all the bad people, turn away from international agreements, treaties, and organisations. Build a wall - real or regulatory - to keep out the foreigners and behind which the nation can rebuild its strength safely protected by a vigilant state from those alien forces seeking to undermine us.
The old left divides. Part joins the ‘whizz whizz zoom zoom’ world but most, inspired by the old tradition of spite, stand next to the newly greenwashed wall of socialism. Simple slogans (‘wealth tax now’, ‘billionaires are hoarding wealth’, ‘the basics of life should be free’, ‘capitalism made the climate emergency’) are accompanied by unaffordable promises built on the Scrooge McDuck Fallacy that there are untold billions being hoarded by the rich and their corporations which the government could seize if it just stopped being controlled by those billionaires. This greenwashed red wall has no economic policy, no plan for growth, just a view that the state must grab as much of the economic pie as possible so it can give people what they want, free stuff. Here also we find the twin sister of the new right as the rainbow politics of identity and grievance gets used as a route to power. Trans-rights, islamophobia, anti-racism, decolonisation, native land acknowledgement, pronouns and ‘black lives matter’ create a febrile pot-pourri of anger replacing old ideas of women’s and gay rights, not being racist and treating others with respect.
All of these emerging ideologies share the idea that people - residents, citizens, natives, customers, mums and dads - are dependent on the goodness of the state. As Zohran Mamdani declared after his winning the mayoralty of New York: “…we will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about”. This, from a new generation socialist echoes an earlier statist’s motto:
“Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato”
“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” sums up a 21st century view of government held by right, left and centre. Whether it is the centrist obsession with digital ID, the nationalist right’s protectionism or the new left’s dislike of landlords and private ownership, all of politics puts an activist state at the heart of their promises to fix the problems that were largely created in the first place by an activist state.
Housing problems that were caused by restrictive planning controls and the state pushing interest rates down will be solved either by a different set of planning controls or by the state spending billions to build cheap rent homes for dependent (in some cases just white dependent) peons to live, grateful for the care and concern of a benevolent state. High energy prices or water shortages will be resolved through price fixing, nationalisation and more billions of state spending. And the lack of jobs will be ended by more state spending to create jobs. Even the ‘whizz whizz zoom zoom’ enthusiasts with their talk of abundance prefer a state-directed, state funded system of securing growth and betterment - they love China - because, left with choice and freedom, people might produce the wrong sort of growth and betterment. Urban sprawl, comfortable family life, the good life rather than the exciting urban hedonism those abundance-seeking young men believe is the only right way to thrive.
The debate ought to be about choice versus compulsion, the limits of free trade, how to help growth and the extent of regulation. In a world of stagnant growth brought about by the failures of the big state, we are still trapped in the idea that the answer to our problems lies with the government. The first instincts of every politician regardless of their place on the left-right spectrum remain to promise people free stuff, to intervene to prevent choice, and to put up barriers to business, innovation and opportunity. Until we break this cycle and reduce people’s dependence on the state, there is little prospect of getting abundance, a fair society or stable communities. What dominates discourse now promises the opposite, thoughtless slogans attack faceless bogeymen - billionaires, the EU, globalists, NIMBYs - while the policies proposed are simplistic and unworkable: ‘tax the billionaires more’, ‘round up and deport all the aliens’, ‘build a 1000 miles of high speed railway’. The debate is filled with trite ‘this one simple trick’ solutions that each tribe gets excited about before the next simple solution pops up and that tribe forgets that earlier simplistic fix.
This isn’t a plea for us to continue with the failed politics of the years since the 2008 financial crisis, where we all believed that Gordon Brown had saved the world when in truth the post-crash strategy locked us into stagnation. Rather it is a cry for us to recognise that, if it is OK for accelerationists, greenwashed socialists and nationalists to look back to 19th and 20th century ideas, maybe we ought to do the same. Let’s rediscover the simple truths about why free markets work, champion free exchange, and learn the lessons we got about why statist answers fail from Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. We should look the advocates of big government and big intervention right in their eye and tell them that, while we see their heart is in the right place, the things they propose won’t make people’s lives better and may even make them worse.