At the time, while I sat there in the windy car park, with the sound of seagulls, and the dry grass tufts breaking through the concrete at the sides of the road, I had one niggling idea that the Reform Party could probably do with being a bit more assertive; there should have been a stand set up, with a flag or banner, permanently manned through the day, to welcome people coming from around the country, as I had done. And they should have let me know, that the canvassing event was off. I suppose they may have changed their plans for the immediate future, given that no other parties other than the comedy party, wish to stand for the election; and after the murder of one of their number for political reasons. I cannot hide the fact, that the murder, and the waste of so much effort to assist the party, and the general situation of my life, brought about in me, an unfamiliar feeling, of being spent, of unrelieved gloominess and enervation.
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I also began writing down a justification for why I was there at all. That is what I will now set down, in brief.
What am I doing, trying to belong to a political party? It is because I have started to take an interest in the activities of the government. The government, is that group of people, who have the power of life and death over me. At present, the state does not permit sentence of death over offenders, but this is policy which is premised on the understanding, that the option to operate a death sentence for some offenders against the law, is something held in reserve and is within the range of measures the state can use.
The state has the power to enter my house, for its own reasons, and then take me from it, and throw me in prison. I know that, because they have done this to me in the last few years, more than once. While these actions are regulated by law, the state does reserve to itself, what it sees as the legitimate monopoly on the initiation of violence, theft, and oppression of a man’s liberties.
The government also claims the right, in recent times, to confine all the other people with whom I am familiar, to their homes, when necessary, which it did in 2020. It also arbitrarily takes money from people like me, at its own discretion, and puts me under pressure to pay. If I refuse to pay, agents of the state will visit me, attempt to imprison me, remove my property, and so on. They can also interfere in my family life, more or less at will, by means of the their legal services, on the basis of decisions which are largely outside my control.
Having said all this, it is also right to emphasise, that the state or the government, is no more than a single actor, a mere agent, operating in the country where I live; and that what distinguishes the state from, say, any other person, is that I and most other people who live here, have consented to delegate the powers of violence and retributive punishment, and the collection of taxes, to it. It is only by consent, that the state operates as it does; and, it can be seen that it is a mere agent among others, if we examine other examples of states across the world and history, and we notice situations, where the state has degenerated into its basic form: the absolute monarchy, or the dictatorship, where a single person operates as the ruler of everyone else. That the state is a man, or a set of men, should be clear. And, that the power of this man or men, is dependent on consent, or choice, or fear. That is to say, the state is not something which should necessarily exist, and in some conditions, a state of nature is preferrable to consent to government.
Britain is not exactly governed by an absolute monarchy or an arbitrary rule by a despot. In Britain, there are legal restraints to the activity of the government, but they are slow and ineffective, and remain subject to the fancies or problems of the ruling group. Since Britain’s government draws its members from an Establishment, the weight of inertia is heavy and not in the individual’s favour, in a contest of will between the individual whose wish is for freedom on the one hand, and the state, on the other.
In a state of nature, there is no government. All the same, there is law. Since, whether from God, or from his own mind, a man knows what is right. What is right, is that he should survive; that is a law of nature, and a law of reason, which guides and leads to, other natural laws; and what prevents him surviving is, what we can conveniently describe as, naturally wrong. So, theft of what he needs to survive, is wrong, murder is wrong, for instance. In a state of nature, a man has law, and can survive. He can deal with crime and his enemies for his own part. A government is not required, in order to ensure the law is upheld, either, since in a state of nature, a man can see to his own protection and survival.
Personally, I don’t find that I need the outside world in general; I don’t need other people, and I don’t intrinsically need the government. If possible, therefore, I believe that the state government, which has operated in England for several centuries, should continue to exist, but that it should be as small and as out of my way, as possible. The state of nature is the best state to be in; but a small and effective state to which I can subcontract my right to protection of life and property, is better, where there are many people working and living in the same part of the world as me.
In my heart, I don’t want anyone to come near me. I don’t want the outside world to affect me at all, unless it assists in my survival. If I had any choice, I would not seek to co-operate with other people, by any application or request to the government. The government is that person who has the power of life and death over me, as I have said. So, avoiding it is preferrable. These feelings are derive, from my insight into what I most want, and what I am: I require life, and freedom; and therefore, I require some property, and somewhere to live, and some means of subsistence. But above all these, freedom. When the state makes any effort to limit my freedom, then I think it starts to become contrary to my interest.
I speak as an individual, idiosyncratic, and in a tone of voice which seems to imply, that you, the listener, would have his own and different ideas. However, I think the points I have made, underpin British constitutional arrangements; and, since the principles I have espoused are so simple and so incontrovertible, I think that they could be framed in less personal way, and be universally agreed upon. Man wants freedom; his interest is to survive; those who try to prevent him surviving or taking away his liberty, are wrong-doers, and he can see to their punishment; the state is merely the convenient way of subcontracting out, the deterrence or punishment, of people who attack a man’s liberty and survival.
However, I do chose to associate with other people, who share my interests, and who have agreed to live in common with me; if I chose to associate with them, it will be through the Church. The Church is the means by which, men live in common. It would be possible to talk about the arrangement of a town, and a local hierarchy of communal efforts at improving or shared living space, but these are not essential. If I were forced to agree to live meet other people, the bedrock inherited conventional place where that should happen, would be through the Church. I advise everyone to follow my example in this, and I intend to explain how the Church is the correct way in which to organise our lives together, while the State must be as small and limited as possible.
The use of the Church is clear; it solemnises weddings, births, deaths; it provides a meeting place; and it has a general teaching function. In addition, it brings out into the public space, for sharing in a limited way, what is most personal to a man, namely his relationship to God and to himself.
By and large, despite how it was when I was a servant of the state, when I was a trained soldier, among hundreds of others, I prefer to be alone. Solitude is the state of nature, the most pure condition of a human life. My heart tells me, to avoid other people; they barely exist when I know them; and when I don’t know them, they truly don’t exist for me.
When I have time to myself, my mind turns toward God, as much as it turns towards thoughts of other people. When I was sitting there in Clacton on Sea, disappointed and unaccountably empty of emotion, in the car, preparing to drive home but reluctant or disinterested in doing so, I’m thinking about the stupidity of the hope, that anything can be arranged successfully between people. Unless money is involved, they show no concern for standards, and loyalty, as a rule. They can’t be trusted, or, their actions are not predictable and dependable. It is preferrable to avoid other people and their organisations. I asked myself, how I could have been so foolish to have thought, that it was a good idea to agree to get involved in low level local politics, knowing as I do, human nature and its fickleness.
I wasn’t talking to myself, so much as feeling disappointed with life in general. A mood came over me, of weariness which is not something I am usually familiar with. I experience my time at moments of consciousness, as a debate with myself; yet, its not sensible to debate yourself in words; that’s not what language is for. So, you end overcome by physical feelings and a dread of anticipation. I you talk to anyone, you end up imagining someone who is as lonely and central as you are, to whom to talk. And that is, in one way of looking at things, what God is. I am going to say more about God later in this essay.
What I want to say immediately is, that the Church, is where I meet other people of the same kind as me. As Christians, we agree, that the outside world is not entirely real or important. The Church’s activity is dominated by creating an artificial world of order, beauty, and the afterlife, for this reason. The liturgy of the Church, is an attempt to create another world than this one; a kingdom of heaven. The Church says, that the kingdom of heaven is both something we create, and also something independently real.
The church also insists, that, when people get together, and elect or chose people to lead, then those leaders, have sacramental power, derived from God. The world in itself, makes me want to leave it; I want to forget about other people. But in Church, there are people who are like myself; and who have delegated sacramental authority. So, while in private I am turning toward God, at Church I am also turning toward God, the difference being only this: that at Church, I am in company, and in an environment specially built for that purpose.
What I am trying to say here, is that, the important things about my living and life, take part in Church; and by contrast, if possible, I should steer clear of the State altogether, if I had any choice in the matter. One only needs the state, when something has gone wrong: if there has been a crime, or a war.
It is obviously only to me, that these things are true; and, if I were writing philosophy, I would have to justify my claims and choices; however, for now, I state: there is only one thing that I will decide to do for the state: that is, to serve in the armed forces, and collaborate with the police, if there has been damage or theft of property. Everything else, I can do for myself. And, it is my preference, that the way in which I will interact with other people, will be via the Church; because, there’s just no reason to bother with other people at all, unless they share my approach to God and life.
Now, I was in Clacton, because, in Britain, the state is not simply there, as an agent to which one has to submit. Rather, the members of the state, have to be selected, and they offer to become state members. They stand for election.
And, because the state in my day, appears to be faulty, and to be contravening its own foundational principles, I have been forced by that circumstance, to get involved; to either stand myself, or assist others to be chosen.
The church has its purpose and use, and the state another; and they work alongside one another, for the benefit of a man. I think that this is how England used to be. Of course, men also associated with each other for work reasons, and work represents a bondage or enslavement to necessity, over which a man has little choice. But I am talking about matters over which we have a choice.
I appreciate that there socialists and internationalists, who see things differently; they want no Church; and they want a vast interfering state government, with the power to kill, and the power to force obedience, on other people. The most classic way in which they want the state to work, is as a thief of one man’s property, so as to dole out the results of theft, to another man. They call this socialism.
Such an idea, such a government, makes no sense to me, and is an abominable thing. What makes such a government more disgusting still, is that in recent times, the government has allied itself to an international, or global scale project of control and domination and cooperation. The state has taken to forging a place to live, for human beings, so that they no longer need to be free, or to survive. To achieve this aim, various nations are being disbanded, and all national states are being rolled into one. Britain is at the leading edge of this effort.
I can’t understand how a man would agree to co-operate with a thing which is, on a small national scale, unnecessary. But to extend it across the entire globe, is just perverse. In order to achieve its global reach, the state government, has resorted to reshaping the community, replacing the Church, and offending me, threatening me personally, and sharing out the means for my survival and my property, and sometimes the lives of people in this country, to a vast number of foreign and sometimes dangerous people.
I am prepared to allow the government to exist, so long as it protects my Church, and my property. If it doesn’t do that, then what is its point? It would be better, if men were simply allowed to do the necessary protective and legal work, for themselves. Vigilanteism, as they call it, would be preferable and necessary.
I’m speaking as a private, single individual here, with whom you can disagree or agree, depending on your temperament. Perhaps you have no skill at prayer, and have no time for reflecting on your life, or you don’t like being alone, and so on. So, you look to the government to provide you with a life. If so, you and I disagree.
But there is a political theory behind what I am saying, a reasonable justification for it, which I should be able to show you, so that you must agree with me. My views on the government and the Church, are not dictated by my moods, but rather by an idea I have. Effectively, what I am saying is, that if the government is not defending my property and my country, and my Church, then I see no point in it, and if it tries to take on other roles, then it is making itself my enemy.
The idea of a country, and the idea of a government, invoke the idea of a people and borders. The way in which a government protects me and the Church is, it strictly controls the visits of people who are contrary to the country, or my way of life.
What I have found, is that the governments of the past years, have interfered in my life, by allowing hostile people to come to my area. The state has collected my money, or stolen it, as you will, and then given it to other people, and endangered me in that way. I wanted to live in peace, but they are building mosques in my town; they are threatening my children with faked beliefs at school; they are interfering with my relationship with my wife, with government rules and legal requirements for how men and women must relate to each other, with the police instructed to ensure they take place.
With what purpose is the state government doing this? At the same time, its principle reason for existing, namely to organise a general army against my enemies, and a police force to take offenders to trial, are being neglected. If we follow the origins of government back, to how government arose, what it is for, and what it is owed, we do not find that it is carrying out its basic purpose anymore; and, it is acting along the lines described by the words: absolute monarchy, despotism, arbitrary rule.
And, I suppose, that this is exactly why I was in Clacton. I am looking for a way, of stopping the government. In a peaceful way. I have said elsewhere, that if a peaceful way cannot be found, then the Establishment will facture, and a civil war will begin. I was in Clacton, because I want to find the peaceful means of resistance to the government’s grand mistakes and intrusions, and its neglectful approach to security and law.
The internationalism and socialism of the governments, the entire choice at our disposal, the entire Establishment, is so international and neglectful of me and my country, that it’s almost a blatant, vengeful attack on me and my freedom and natural right to life. The British government sometimes seems to be, a traitorous vengeful enemy of me and my kind. They are destroying Britain as part of a systematic, and what they see as, positive activity. They seem to dwell in the ethos of the global man, as people who want to govern not as British people, but rather as internationalists who can rule without limits of national borders, across the whole earth, rather than in just one country; their ethics are similarly, global and not local. They think that it is good to destroy my nation, since, for a person who is a citizen of mankind, and is part of the global community rather than Britain, then my nation is an obstacle, an evil.
Who elects such people to rule a country? People who hate my country, are elected to rule it? I think that this has come about, because the entire Establishment is internationalist, and we have had no choice but to let them get to work, and to hold the offices which once and should belong to, patriotic leaders. Where the entire Establishment believes in globalised mankind, then the political choice between one rule and other, results in the same basic thing. Hence, why the Establishment has broken up: the contradictions between what government is doing, and what it ought to be doing, are too great, and a fracture has developed.
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We can see that the state is not the same thing as the nation, in the way in which the central supply of money is controlled. Money coinage, or printing, is controlled by government; which is delegated to oversee that there is not cheating with the currency. But government cannot simply create money, and for it to do so, would be for the government to get in volved in counterfeiting and crime.
It is assumed by young people, and by many who have not reflected on this matter, and it is warmly embraced as an aspiration by socialists, that the government should have total and complete control over the nation and the people, so that it can rule in a beneficent way, on behalf of all mankind. Socialism wants to supersede the rule of nature, as it were, and give man an entirely artificial environment where want is at an end, and survival is not necessary, and freedom exists only conditionally. It seems to many young or unreflective people, that this is the actual purpose of government. But when we look at how they print money, or how they receive and spend money, we see the truth: the state or the government, does not have control, and is merely one actor among others, with no great right to create money, than a common thief or counterfeiter has. The state is merely one of the actors in the activity of the nation. The government is simply one actor among many, and its power is limited, and rightly so.
When the state designs for itself some kind of plan, then in order to carry it out, the government must pay for it with its own money. That is what taxation is: in order to carry out any plan, the government, which does not make its own money by and large, must demand it from other people – in the form of tax. And, if it cannot collect enough tax, the only restraint on that demand, is the fear of unhappiness by the people who must pay. So, there is a limit to how much tax it can gather, and then spend as it wants. Facing this limit to its money supply, the government will naturally try to find money in other places than taxation.
We can see that the government is just another actor in our country, by the way in which it cannot simply resort to printing money; it is believed by children, and by a good number of people who look at the government as having unlimited power, that the Bank of England, can print money whenever it wants; but this it cannot do. The rule is, that any money that any bank creates, must be given to a specific person, such as the government, or to a private individual, as a loan, which must be paid back. And, once it has been paid back, it should be deleted, or burned, or disposed of. In effect, nobody can simply print money and simply give it away to the government.
The only part of the money which is printed and loaned to a private individual or a government, which is not wiped off the books of a bank, is the fee, or the ‘interest’, which it takes as the fee for lending the money. Interest payments are also a deterrent for profligate borrowing; as well as being, the business model for banking in general. In this state of natural work of banks, inflation should not really exist, since the money in circulation would be static. What makes prices rise, and the money supply grow, is borrowing and debt. Private individuals, or government, ask for loans, and the loaned money increases the amount of money in circulation. And this, eventually has to be returned to the bank, and written off. So, naturally, the money supply should be very nearly static, and prices would never rise, except for the existence of loans being made.
To explain why the government cannot simply print money, but must collect it from tax payers, or, receive loans from creditors, we can see the relatively recent instance, when the Government did print money. And we can see that it was basically theft from the people; if a government tries to print its own money, as it did in 2008, then it commits a crime, according to reason and Natural Law.
When the banks themselves were in trouble in 2007-8, and when the financial system of loans, which allow the inflation and increase of the size of the economy to happen, the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, invented a means of printing money, which was called ‘Quantitative Easing’. The Bank of England did not exactly print, but it did create digital money. With this money, it paid off its own old debts, which the government had accrued. It was explained, falsely, that when the government paid off its own debts, as a counterfeither would do, that this was to the benefit of the nation.
When the recipients of the money found themselves with cash which they could dispose of, or cash in a ‘liquid’ form, instead of the assets of government debt which they had previously held, these investors had to decide how to spend their liquid assets. They largely spent it on property, particularly in London. And, thus, most of what the government’s printed money did, was inflate the value of property in England.
The harmful result of this activity, was that the younger generation of British people, could no longer afford to buy their own properties. Which goes to prove several things: that the government must not be allowed to print money; that doing so worked in the government’s favour, but not in favour of the other members of the nation, such as the young. And, as an actor, it would be preferrable if the government simply went insolvent, in the longer term, since the result of allowing the government freedom of this kind, is that the people of the nation were impoverished, while the rich and the banking sector were allowed to purchase a great quantity of the national housing stock. Basically, allowing the government to print money, leads to inflation, and the devaluation of the savings of the people of the country, the devaluation of the money they earn, when they come to spend it on things they need, such as housing. The economy increased in size, the price of things went up, but the people remained in the state they were before, but with money which could buy less of what they needed.
But it is the default situation, that the government should not be able to print money, anyway. There is as little reason for the state to print money, as there is for anyone else to print money. Because the state sits in the position of a medieval king, or a despot, or a single individual; it just so happens, that common consent has put the power of life and death in the hands of that individual, on a temporary basis; and, in theory, the state’s authority is only by consent of a compliant and happy people, who chose to recognise the government’s authority, on the basis of how well it does its work.
The are other reasons why, for the sake of the people and the government itself, printing money is not allowed. One of them concerns the opinion of people in other countries, or those who trade with our country, by accepting our currency as payment. If the British currency is inflated, or untrustworthy, then buying things from abroad with British money, becomes impossible.
As everyone knows, the government has the power, on our behalf, to borrow money from the rich whether at home or abroad, so as to fall into debt, in order to carry out its plans for Britain. It is typical for a state, to borrow money in this way, in order to pursue a war, to engage in war, for example. When someone lends to a government, then they will do so, on the understanding, that the government will eventually pay them back, in a currency which is not unstable and inflated. If the currency is unstable, and likely to become watered down for no good reason, then those lenders, or the ‘markets’, would refuse to lend to the government. So it must avoid simply printing money, for that reason, too. The line of credit it may need in an emergency, depends on whether the government behaves sensibly, and is likely to remain capable of repaying the debt; and in this way, we can observe how ‘the government’ or what I call the State is, as far as its money is concerned, merely one individual among others, who happens to have special though temporary powers of life and death over the people.
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