Feeding The Dragon With Laws

If I say the word ‘empire’, what do you picture? Maybe it’s some Roman soldiers marching along a muddy road, looking strangely out of place in their Mediterranean mini-skirts. Maybe it’s a couple of ‘Ruperts'¹ wearing those beige, nob-end helmets, sipping G&Ts in a tent. Maybe it’s an American aircraft carrier with a fighter-jet taking off.

What would be in the minds of those agents of empire?

"Just doing my job."

The banality of evil.

Imperialism makes compliance seem normal. That's not the worst of it. It also has a few ways to use the non-compliers' tactics against them. I want to show you a certain way that Lefties in particular boost the strength of empires.

Let’s have a look at something that happened to the British Empire.

Pitt's Progressivism

He was a Progressive, the aptly named Pitt the Younger. In the 1780s, the young Prime Minister put in some much needed reforms. One of those reforms is particularly relevant to my point. Pitt the Younger curbed corruption in the British East India Company. He partly nationalized it. He put the directors of the British East India Company under the oversight of a governmental Board of Control.

I should explain: You might think of British Imperialism as those ‘Ruperts’ sipping G&Ts, but that came later, in the Victorian Era. Throughout the 1700s, the East India Company had its own mercenary army.² The British government was hands-off. Pitt’s policy switched it to hands-on. Or, more precisely, ‘hands at the ready’. I could go in depth, but, to be honest, I don’t have the expertise, and certainly don’t have the time here. Instead, let’s jump ahead two generations.

The Government goes Full Government

In the aftermath of the Sapoy Mutiny, the British government passed the Government of India Act 1858, which dissolved the East India Company and transferred all its governing powers directly to the British Crown. ³

The government became hands-on in 1858. Henceforth, one gets the full monty, so to speak. We may visualize the officers sipping G&Ts and teaching the locals how to play cricket. This is 100-proof British Empire.

Am I pointing to nationalization as a failure? Sort of. I don’t mean that the deed wasn’t well-meaning. I don’t mean that the status quo was sweet. The system in India of glorified privateers was horrible. Nobody wanted another Sapoy Mutiny. I do mean that the intervention made it worse because it summoned up a covert, unstoppable army.

“What unstoppable army?” Before I tell you, I need to make a presupposition clear. I don’t think that laws are simply curbs on action. Laws legitimize. There’s a link in the Latin root of the word, lege: ‘by law’. I believe that laws are normative for a society.⁴ On one level, this is blatant. If the law is that marijuana may not be smoked, then the social-norm is that marijuana is wrong. At a deeper level, the law spreads a cluster of related norms. These aren’t blatant at all. Making a new law is like spraying a fly with Raid. The cloud spreads out more than you see, and might kill other insects.

Legitimizing normie stakeholders

Between 1784 and 1858 something crucial changed. The stakeholders changed. These stakeholders were the people for whom The Empire mattered a lot, because they had a lot of money riding on its success. In the 18th century, investors in ‘the colonies’ were either brave, mad, über-rich, or all of the above. They were people on the margins. From the 1790s onwards, the investors increasingly came from the middle. Bougies backed Empire.

Now you’ve got real problems shifting that beast.

The proles also became stakeholders; in a different way. The proles began to enjoy tea, spices, and more. I want to leave the proles however. Let’s deal with the bougies, because that’s where the real power lies.

Seldom known today is the fact that it was the middle-class investors who put the most pressure on the government to send in the troops. The 1858 switch to 100-proof Empire was driven by bank managers, tailors, and lawyers.⁵ Sometimes, they even had real skin in the game. It had become the norm for bougie families to send one son to the colonies to make his fortune. This is the covert, unstoppable army: the middle-class with its life-savings on the line.

Summary of the argument

Lessons for Lefties

Lefties, by instinct, reach for the lever labelled ‘Regulation’. There’s a red button alongside labelled ‘Nationalize’. It doesn’t need to be Lefties. Note that the Trump administration nationalized 10% of Intel Corp recently.⁶ All this governmental regulation is like feeding a dragon. There are boons and banes, but if you want to slay the dragon, you make your task a lot harder. Avoid putting your faith in legislation. Your best bet is to delegitimize and rerisk. You need to push investment in imperialist companies back to the fringes.

I’m not sure how to do that. It’s very tough. I know that, at least, you need to fight bail-outs with all your might.