The Connection Between Freedom and Money

On conservatives and prosperity

‘The greatest restriction on the liberty of the citizen is the complete absence of money, and therefore what conservatives should aim at is that people will have more money in order that they can be more free.’

-Lord Saatchi, interview with Jeremy Paxman, 21st October 2013

There was a time when Conservative politicians in the UK were interested in making conservative arguments. It ended fairly recently in historical terms. As recently as 2013, Lord Saatchi, former Chairman of the Tory Party and then-Chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies, was appearing on Newsnight (the BBC’s former flagship news and current affairs discussion programme, now sadly diminished in every respect) to make plain the conservative case for capitalism. I urge you to watch the video (Saatchi himself appears about 3 minutes in) - partly because, apart from anything else, it shows how much the quality of public debate has deteriorated in the last 11 years - but, in short, his case was that capitalism creates wealth, and the more wealth that people have, the more control they have over their lives and the more they can choose to do. He finished off by making plain what he thought Tory policy should be all about: ‘the connection between freedom and money.’

Conservatives have become shy about saying things like this, partly because they feel as though they have lost the intellectual case for Thatcherism. Indeed, an influential body of opinion has built up in right-wing policy circles that it is important to be ‘left on the economy and right on culture’, as though the two things are separate phenomena rather than being intrinsically linked.

I direct you to my more detailed thoughts on this here, but suffice to say: it is in fact a canard. Being ‘left on the economy’ means making the population reliant on the State; this definitionally makes it impossible to be ‘right on culture’, because the State is fundamentally and inescapably poised against everything that conservatives hold dear in respect of culture: family, community, religion, and so on. It seeks to enlist all of those things in its own causes at best by in effect nationalising them, or at worst to subvert and destroy them. Being ‘left on the economy’ means having a big State, and a big State will always in the end be ‘left on culture’. It is as simple as that.

Conservatives therefore need to rediscover their interest in being right on the economy and right on culture, and at the heart of this lies money. The more money that people have, the freer they are. Some people will use that freedom to do undesirable things - that is in the nature of freedom - but the great majority will use it for ends that are (to use modern parlance) ‘pro-social’. Take a walk around your local area and visit the nice enclaves where people have money, if you have reason to doubt me, and then compare those areas to those where people are poor. It is not that people in poor areas do not engage in community activities or have no community spirit, but that those in prosperous areas, having financial resources, and not having to face routine crime and disorder, are able to do so much more effectively. And it shows in the physical surroundings they create.

I am from a humble background, born to parents who did not have money, so I’m not shy about making the case for it: I would rather have more money than less, because I would rather have more freedom than less, and I would rather live amongst people who have the civic pride that derives from self-reliance and a sense of strong community, rather than reliance on the State. I would like to live under a system of law and governance which facilitates that for everyone. This is not, in the end, difficult to understand, and I can’t help but feel that a very large proportion of the electorate would agree with it.

(Another proposition with which they might agree is that, just as money is connected to freedom for the individual and the family, it is also connected to freedom for the nation in respect of foreign policy. The stronger a nation’s economy, the less likely it is that the State will be in debt, and the less reliant it will be on other nations in matters of defence. And the less reliant it will also be on mass immigration to prop up its economy. Again, this is not, in the end, difficult to understand. And nor is it difficult to understand why conservatives would find that proposition appealing.)

That the Tory Party is no longer equipped intellectually to make the case that we should all have more money and therefore more freedom is something of a mystery. It is partly of course another casualty in that general deterioriation in the quality of public debate which I earlier mentioned. But there is, I think, something deeper at work: a cultural transformation in the way in which the relationship between State and the economy is conceived, with the former imagined as owning, and managing, the latter, rather than the economy being understood for what it is - i.e., an epiphenomenon of commercial interactions between autonomous persons.

There is an awful lot to say about that transformation and why it has happened, and I do not intend to go into that subject in any depth here (many of my posts have been, directly or indirectly, concerned with it, as will many more in the future), but it is useful to go back to Leo Strauss and his exegesis of Xenophon’s ‘Hiero’ in On Tyranny, and in particular this crucial passage, on p. 70:

‘The best tyrant would consider his fatherland his estate. This may be preferable to his impoverishing his fatherland in order to increase his private estate; yet it certainly implies that the best tyrant would consider his fatherland his private property which he would naturally administer according to his own discretion.’

What Strauss is driving at here is that a tyrant - meaning, in short, a self-interested ruler who is unconstrained by law - will at his worst seek to simply enrich himself (i.e., his private estate), but even at his best will not want the populace to own their own property - since that would vastly constrain his field of action, and prevent him from doing the things he needs to do to exert continued control. Even the best of tyrants, in other words, will want to imagine the place he governs to be his to manage, in the manner of a feudal lord - responsible for its growth, its productivity, its balance sheet, and so on. This is because he, very simply, wants to create and sustain a relationship beween himself and the populace in which the latter are loyal, pliant, and even loving - grateful for his blessings and gifts, rather than desiring to have wealth and prosperity of their own.

This seems to me to be the root of the modern State’s interest in the economy - and, indeed, that of international organisations too. In January 2024 the IMF issued a periodic World Economic Outlook Update whose overview gives what Strauss was talking about a very immediate resonance. Look, for example, at the final paragraph, reprinted in full below:

Policymakers’ near-term challenge is to successfully manage the final descent of inflation to target, calibrating monetary policy in response to underlying inflation dynamics and—where wage and price pressures are clearly dissipating—adjusting to a less restrictive stance. At the same time, in many cases, with inflation declining and economies better able to absorb effects of fiscal tightening, a renewed focus on fiscal consolidation to rebuild budgetary capacity to deal with future shocks, raise revenue for new spending priorities, and curb the rise of public debt is needed. Targeted and carefully sequenced structural reforms would reinforce productivity growth and debt sustainability and accelerate convergence toward higher income levels. More efficient multilateral coordination is needed for, among other things, debt resolution, to avoid debt distress and create space for necessary investments, as well as to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Our political economy has in other words become steeped in the (entirely unspoken and largely unconscious) belief that the task of government is nothing more than to be a ‘good tyrant’ - owning everything as an estate which it manages on the population’s behalf. And this has seemingly seeped into the psyche of Tory politicians in government, too. The use of the word ‘tyranny’ sounds melodramatic, but is I think accurate in the sense in which Strauss meant it, and helpful for those who are interested the roots of the problems which confront us. Our predicament, in short, is that the ambition of government has closed in upon the ambition of all tyrants - to maintain and expand their status - and lost interest in the goal of extending to the people the honour of governing themselves. That would start with ensuring that everyone, plainly and simply, has more money. But that is not what the tyrant wishes to achieve. And thinking of everything within that framework in a sense provides us with all we need to know in seeking to understand why politicians no longer concern themselves with the task of maintaining the conditions within which private prosperity can grow as such.