Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Everything old is new again. Via Richard North comes this interesting discussion of innovative mine-detection and -clearing techniques used by the white Rhodesians against Mugabe’s insurgents.
See also this post and this post for an insightful and much broader discussion of British military capabilities and political/military errors in the Iraq war. (These posts are not recent but remain highly relevant.)
Let me list all the people we are not particularly proud of in Britain at the moment. First off, are the politicians. Nothing new there, you might say. Whoever could be proud of politicians? Still, they seem to have messed up the aftermath of the Iranian hostage-taking and release in a particularly noxious fashion, not least because of their pusillanimity with regards to the boys in uniform. No, I don’t mean the Iranian Revolutionary Guard but our own boys in uniform, specifically the First and Second Sea Lords.
Scott Burgess has an op-ed in the UK Times today. He talks about how the National Health Service in Britain is in the midst of a financial crises so severe that they are removing every third light bulb to try and keep their electric bill down. Yet the government agency still funds alternative medicine as a viable option for their patients, even going so far as to shell out the cash for five homeopathic hospitals.
Scott wonders how this can be, and seems to think that it is an unnecessary drain on an already tottering system. I disagree, and I think that it is a very clever way for the British government to relieve the pressure.
What are the deepest roots of Anglosphere exceptionalism? Some of the most commonly attributed sources are wrong: Protestantism, for example. England was exceptional long before Protestantism. Alan Macfarlane, from an anthropological perspective, has taken the story back into the Middle Ages. His predecessor F.W. Maitland, from a legal perspective, took it back a little farther. The Victorians and Edwardians (Stubbs, Maitland, Acton) agreed that the English retained from their Saxon ancestors something of the “liberty loving” ways of their Teutonic forebears, as depicted by Tacitus almost two thousand years ago. This type of thinking fell into disfavor in the 20th Century. But I think the Victorians were on the money.
Some of our readers might have heard the sad news of the death of Lord Harris of High Cross. Yes, yes, I know he was in his eighties but that does not alter the fact that his passing fills one with great sorrow both on the political and, in my case, personal level.
Ralph Harris was one of the people responsible for the intellectual underpinning of the Thatcherite revolution. His colleague, Arthur Seldon, died last year. (And, by a strange coincidence, I attended yesterday the memorial meeting for Sir Alfred Sherman, a somewhat more controversial figure but one whose achievements must not be overlooked. Lady Thatcher was present, looking fragile but well.) Sadly, that generation is going and we shall all be the poorer for it.
I have known Ralph since my late teens (though he actually thought he had known me as a young child) as my father attended the IEA lunches in the late sixties and early seventies, when their ideas were generally considered to be a brand of harmless lunacy at best. Even in those days Ralph cultivated his persona of the Edwardian gentleman, hats, moustaches, waistcoats and walking sticks included.
What mattered above all was not his mannerism, not even his fantastically ebullient personality – nobody could ever forget Ralph even after a brief meeting – but his hard-headed approach to Britain’s problems.
Neither he nor Arthur Seldon would have been welcomed in the wishy-washy, condescending tory-toff Conservative Party of David Cameron. They would both have been horrified to hear that a Conservative Party leader could snootily dismiss the notion of choice in education for all. I can still remember Ralph Harris’s tones when he talked about that public school boy Anthony Crosland vowing to destroy “every f***ing grammar school”. [Apologies for the implied swearing – those are the words Crosland used.]
Ralph Harris came from a working class family in north London, went to a grammar school and thence to the University of Cambridge. He knew the importance of good education for people who wanted to rise and achieve; he, as well as Arthur Seldon, knew that the working classes had been perfectly capable of looking after themselves and their families; they knew how destructive the welfare state, imposed largely by do-gooding middle class politicians, been to working class families and, beyond that, to the whole of British society.