The Freeman 1972 - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

1972 IS FREE ENTERPRISE COMING BACK? 605brief narrative. One is the wish toprove that sympathy with the peopleand self-sacrificing efforts on theirbehalf, do not necessarily imply approvalof gratuitous aids. Another isthe desire to show that benefits mayresult, not from multiplication ofartificial appliances to mitigate distress,but, contrariwise, from diminutionof them. [When the Speenhamlandsystem was set up in ·1795] ...it was not expected that the poor rateswould be quadrupled in fifty years,that women with many bastardswould be preferred as wives to modestwomen, because of their incomesfrom the parish, and that hosts ofratepayers [taxpayers] would bepulled down into the ranks of pauperism....the larger becomes its extension[the involvement of the State]the more power of spreading it gets.The question of questions for the politicianshould ever be - "What typeof social structure am I tending toproduce?" But this is a question· henever entertains,15What makes this quotation sointeresting is the fact that, withminor editorial changes, one wouldassume it had been written lastweek - except that we haven'tsolved our problem yet. For thepurpose of the present discussion,it is obvious that England couldnot have risen to the heights ofprosperity and power a little laterwith a demoralized and pauperizedlabor force as the foundation of itsnational life. Certainly not theleast of the reforms which led toVictorian greatness was the liberationof the English laborerfrom a vicious system which destroyedall incentives to work andany reward for so doing. While nodoubt the intentions of those whodevised the Speenhamland PoorLaw were the best, the results overnearly forty years had been, asPolanyi tells us, "ghastly."The Anti-Corn Law LeagueThe next chapter in the story ofEngland's economic liberation wasthe famous "Repeal of the CornLaws" in 1846. The Corn Lawswere England's "farm program,"a very ancient and miscellaneouscategory of laws passed from timeto time to encourage the productionof grain. Since bread is· the"staff of life," the promotion of asound agriculture took on the auraof a sacred duty, although opponentsof the laws regarded themas a national swindle and insistedthat people in general would bebetter off without them.In his Wealth of Nations AdamSmith had a lengthy "Digressionconcerning the Corn Trade andCorn Laws" attached to the end ofChapter V, "Of Bounties." In fact,his digression is longer than therest of the chapter. As might besurmised, he was opposed to thoseassorted interferences with themarket. Early laws, he said, for-