Britons used to be able to rely on their parliament to safeguard liberty and their wallets. Those who were sent to the House of Commons came not as petitioners for a larger government and greater state expenditure but as guardians of individual freedom and defenders of private property. It was self-evident to them that those who spent their own money would always spend it more wisely than those who took others’ money and spent it to please whom they may.
During those times MPs, including even ministers, regarded restraint on executive power and tight control on public spending as unquestioned virtues, and the nation prospered. The United Kingdom was seldom better governed, more respected or faster-growing than when the great Liberal William Gladstone was – successively – chancellor and prime minister. His economic doctrine was simple: ‘All excess in the public expenditure beyond the legitimate wants of the country is not only a pecuniary waste but a great political and a great moral evil.’
A waste because bureaucracies are money- and power-aggrandising organisms which allocate resources more inefficiently the larger they grow. And a political and moral evil because the more individuals and institutions rely on the state for their income, the less initiative, enterprise and effort they display and the more they compete to outbid others in an auction of inadequacy in which their claim upon others is predicated on the injustices they can advertise. Industry is penalised, thrift punished, growth squashed. The incentives are all to divide society on the basis of whose grievances are most deserving of the salve of subsidy.
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