Mr. Randall Brown writes: “I’ve just read Ralph Raico‘s article ‘Rethinking Churchill,’ dating back over 20  years. He was I believe a voice for the Mises Institute. He makes Churchill sound like a war-mongering, fuming socialist liberal, a cheap power-mad opportunist! It really upset me. How do you answer writers like this?

A: Not quite the right fit

He was profoundly for a liberal society, in which the economy is driven by private enterprise, and in which money is allowed to “fructify,” as he quoted John Morley, “in the pockets of the people.” The modern world, the world that requires freedom of religion and limited government, can abide no other kind of politics. But this kind of politics is demonstrably vulnerable to war. It is also vulnerable domestically. If a disaffected majority, necessarily made up of the many who are poor, or relatively poor, expropriate the wealth of the few, it is a tragedy that will destroy justice in the state—even if the poor have a grievance against the rich.

Churchill was trying to prevent that. How? There one must understand what he meant by “Constitutionalism.” For Churchill, this is a very rich subject, rather like the writings of James Madison.He saw the problem of bureaucracy, and of excesses by the majority, very clearly from an early day. The problem is more mature now than it was in his time. That is why it is easy for some of Churchill’s solutions to look leftish from our modern vantage point.

Liberty

The answer to your question, then, is that not a “closet socialist.” He thought socialism, a far milder form than what we know today, incompatible with human liberty and an obstruction to human progress. Careful study of Churchill’s complex views will show that above all he regarded liberty as the most important characteristic of a just society.

Further reading

Soren Geiger, “Churchill: What We Mean by ‘Civilization,'” 2019

Richard Langworth, “Democracy is the worst form of government….,” 2009

_____ _____, “A Life Devoted to Constitutional Liberty,” 2021

This quotation is now going around the web, broadly attrib­uted to Churchill. Is it accu­rate? “Social­ism is a phi­los­o­phy of fail­ure, the creed of igno­rance, and the gospel of envy, its inher­ent virtue is the equal shar­ing of misery.” —M.S. via email.

It is more or less correct, but it’s a truncated version of two separate comments, run together to make them more interesting (in the eye of the drafter).

“Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” —Perth, Scotland, 28 May 1948, in Churchill, Europe Unite: Speeches 1947 & 1948 (London: Cassell, 1950), 347.

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” —House of Commons, 22 October 1945

A variation on the above is: “I do not at all wonder that British youth is in revolt against the morbid doctrine that nothing matters but the equal sharing of miseries, that what used to be called the ‘submerged tenth’ can only be rescued by bringing the other nine-tenths down to their level…” —House of Commons, 13 June 1948

Churchill’s legacy includes his philippics against socialism, said the late Dr. Harry Jaffa,

which are no less trenchant than those against fascism and Communism. Consider the following excerpts from a speech in the Commons in 1949: “I was brought up to believe that taxation is a bad thing, but the consuming power of the people a good thing. I was brought up to believe that trade should be regulated mainly by the laws of supply and demand and that, apart from basic necessaries in great emergencies, the price mechanism should adjust and correct undue spending at home….I was also taught that it was one of the first duties of Government to promote that confidence on which credit and thrift….can alone stand and grow. I was taught to believe that these processes, working freely within the limits of the well-known laws for correcting monopoly….would produce a lively and continuous improvement in prosperity. I still hold to those general principles.

“Socialists [on the other hand] regard taxation as good in itself and as tending to level our society….Everything possible is done discourage and stigmatize the inventor. The Chancellor [of the Exchequer] speaks in slighting terms of profit earners….What a lot of contempt he put into it—”profit earners.” There was an old Gladstonian expression: ‘Let the money fructify in the pockets of the people.’ That is regarded as a monstrous device of a decadent capitalist system.”

This moreover puts us in mind of that dictum concerning property asserted by the Father of the American Constitution, James Madison, when he said, in the Tenth Federalist, that “the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property [is] the first object of government.” One might add that according to Madison, the U.S. Constitution is intended to provide equal protection to unequal abilities. This is just as surely what Abraham Lincoln meant when in 1864 he wrote to the Workingmen’s Association of New York that “Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; it is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.” *

* Harry V. Jaffa, “Requiem for Socialism and the Iron Curtain,” Remarks on Churchill’s Birthday, 30 November 1990.

In Part 1 I of the health care discussion I wrote: “Churchill considered socialism—a far milder form than we know today—incompatible with human liberty, and sought a way of ameliorating the complaints of the poor (or relatively poor) without confiscating the wealth of those who produce it.” A reader disagrees…

The social­ism that Churchill railed against was a far stronger ver­sion, with very high taxes, and things like state con­trolled indus­try. He would have regarded the Democ­rats as “center-right” com­pared to the social­ist par­ties of the 20th cen­tury, with their com­mit­ments to nation­alised indus­try and very high tax rates.

The British state, like the Amer­i­can, is much larger today in rela­tion to the pri­vate sec­tor than it was when Churchill retired. At the high tide of Labour social­ism, 1951, 20% of Britain’s econ­omy had been nationalized. Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment is spend­ing ever-increasing shares of GDP, the national debt equal to or exceed­ing GDP. Taxes are higher now than they were when Churchill retired. Is there any phase of modern daily life where we are not reminded of the pervasive influences of government?

Socialism redefined

Nei­ther Britain nor America practices pure social­ism, in the sense of gov­ern­ment own­ing all means of pro­duc­tion, which is com­mon to com­mu­nist coun­tries. Even there it’s not com­plete. China calls its sys­tem “mar­ket social­ism,” what­ever that is. Creep­ing cap­i­tal­ism, per­haps?k

The West’s prob­lem is creep­ing social­ism, which need not involve nationalized industries. It does not mat­ter who holds the title to a prop­erty, like an insur­ance com­pany; it mat­ters who gets to direct it.

Churchill argued that social­ism is like Nazism and com­mu­nism in being mate­ri­al­ist and dehu­man­iz­ing, explains Larry Arnn:

In oper­a­tion, modern socialism is more mod­er­ate, at first. But it builds a bureau­cracy that becomes a weight in soci­ety; it becomes a new form of aris­toc­racy, Churchill says explic­itly, worse than the old form.

A question Churchill had to face in his time was: if you are for the social safety net, includ­ing health care, how do you pre­vent that from build­ing a soci­ety of “drones” (his word), ulti­mately dom­i­nated by a bureau­cratic elite? The safety net is good, nec­es­sary, and can be made to work. but social­ism destroys its work­ing because it sets out, in prin­ci­ple, to destroy and super­sede it.

* * *

Churchill answered that ques­tion in many ways: the social safety net is sim­ple jus­tice; with­out it the “peo­ple will set their faces like flint against the money power.”  A con­sti­tu­tion should pro­tect the peo­ple against this ten­dency. A con­sti­tu­tional arrange­ment begins with the prin­ci­ples of indi­vid­ual rights includ­ing prop­erty rights, self-responsibility, the sov­er­eignty of the cit­i­zen, and the com­pe­tence of the cit­i­zen to man­age his own needs (except in extra­or­di­nary cir­cum­stances) and the gov­er­nance of his country.

One may look at today’s bureau­cratic gov­ern­ment in light of these cri­te­ria. What is its prin­ci­ple? Does it in fact oper­ate to waste resources and to over­come the inde­pen­dence and sov­er­eignty of the peo­ple?

Churchill is not here to weigh these facts and make the judg­ments. We are. And we can learn from his criteria.

Statistics

I thank Kyle Murnen of Hillsdale College for the following information:

According to the UK Economic and Social Research Center the total managed expenditure (aggregate public spending derived from public accounts) was about 37% of GDP in 1955.

According to the 2012 Treasury Report, total managed expenditure in the UK was 45.5% of GDP in 2011-2012.  Another source reports that  pubic spending was 34.95% of GDP in 1955 and 42.7% of GDP in 2013.  The numbers are a bit different, but both show an 8% growth of government spending in relation to GDP since Churchill retired.

MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann is for the proposed American healthcare reform bill, which is neither here nor there.

What is interesting to Churchillians is his use of Winston Churchill’s words to support it—from both 1945 (when Churchill was campaigning against socialism), and 1936 (when Churchill was urging rearmament in the face of Nazi Germany).

In 1945, Olbermann says, Churchill

equated his opponents, the party that sought to introduce “The National Health,” to the Gestapo of the Germans that he and we had just beaten just as those opposing reform now have invoked Nazis as frequently and falsely as if they were invoking Zombies. Churchill cost himself the election because he didn’t realize he was overplaying an issue that people were already damned serious about.

Er…not exactly, Mr. O.

Churchill did not use the “Gestapo speech” to oppose Labour’s national health plan, which, in general at least, he supported (see next post). He used it to describe—in what was later thought to be a poor analogy—the kind of compulsion citizens might expect under a socialist government:

No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.

And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip? I stand for the sovereign freedom of the individual within the laws which freely elected Parliaments have freely passed.

It is an article of faith in “enlightened” circles that Churchill made a bad mistake by comparing the 1945 Labour Party, led by the kindly, self-effacing Clement Attlee, to Hitler’s political police. Maybe so.

But it strikes me as interesting when a friend in England, a confirmed Labour supporter, likens the tactics of certain modern Labour town councils in Britain precisely to those of the Gestapo: in their suppression of free speech; in their attempt to destroy those who disagree with them; in their vitriolic hatred of opposition media.

If Churchill’s words don’t put you in mind of certain recent developments in America, read on.

Olbermann now switches to the Churchill of 1936, who, he says,

made the greatest argument ever for government intervention in health care only [sic] he did not realize it. He was debating in Parliament the notion that the British government could not increase expenditures on military defense unless the voters specifically authorized it, just as today’s opponents of reform are now claiming they speak for the voters of today, even though those voters spoke for themselves eleven months ago.

Churchill’s argument was this: “I have heard it said that the government had no mandate….Such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility [of Ministers] for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate.”

And there is the essence of what this is. What, on the eternal list of priorities, precedes health? What more obvious role could government have than the defense of the life, of each citizen? We cannot stop every germ that seeks to harm us any more than we can stop every person who seeks to harm us. But we can try dammit and government’s essential role in that effort facilitate it, reduce its cost, broaden its availability, improve my health and yours, seems, ultimately, self-explanatory. [sic]

We want to live. What is government for if not to help us do so? Indeed Mr. Churchill, the responsibility for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate!

Leave aside the question of whether the current healthcare proposal would expand or shrink access to healthcare. To equate it with a threat to a nation’s existence is quite a stretch. But let’s start by quoting all of what Churchill said, on 12 November 1936:

I have heard it said that the Government had no mandate for rearmament until the General Election. Such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility of Ministers for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact the prime object for which Governments come into existence. The Prime Minister had the command of enormous majorities in both Houses of Parliament ready to vote for any necessary measures of defence.

“The responsibility for the public safety is absolute.” Indeed so: the safety of the nation against those who would snuff it out. That is, inarguably, “the prime object for which Governments come into existence.” They do not come into existence to pass out largess until the public till is exhausted and the currency debased. The American government was not created to force every citizen to buy a good or service—which is part of the current healthcare proposal, but nowhere authorized by the United States Constitution. And has never before been mandated in history.

True, the President does have “the command of enormous majorities.” Yet he seems unable to make them “vote for any necessary measures.” Why?

It would behoove him, and the Congress, and the rest of us to ask. Is it, for example, because 75% of citizens are happy with their healthcare? Or because they prefer piecemeal solutions that are more easily monitored—tort reform and portability, for example—to a comprehensive plan that would inevitably lead to massive spending and rationing? Or because a large majority fear that like Medicare, which will go broke inside a decade unless altered, this amplification of Medicare will also go broke—or exclude many for whom Medicare is now accessible? Or because it will require punitive taxes? Or because they can see no example of anything run efficiently by government, from the Postal Service to the war in Afghanistan? All these are legitimate objections, and people are not Nazis to express them.

Salon.com, which agrees with Mr. Olbermann about health reform, says he did nothing to advance their cause: that his argument is self-defeating:

[He dug] up a Churchill quote from the 1930s where the former British prime minister insisted government had a right to provide for people’s well-being. But what was the point? Churchill is dead; the healthcare reform plan isn’t remotely modeled on Britain’s National Health Service; the only people who think it is are the conservative opponents of reform.

In the narrow sense, that’s a rejection of Olbermann’s argument. In a broader sense, Salon is also right. Churchill is dead. This is not 1936 or 1945. Lady Soames is often wont to remark: “You must never suggest what my father would do or say about any modern issue—after all, how do you know?”

What her father said about liberty never goes out of fashion, and here is the most memorable sentence in  his “Gestapo speech” of 1945: “I stand for the sovereign freedom of the individual.”

Of course, Churchill’s times are often paralleled in ours. That’s the value of studying history—how Churchill reacted to challenges which may seem familiar to thoughtful people. And, since Mr. Olbermann likes to tell us what reminds him of Hitler, let me say what reminds me of Hitler.

It is people who think it appropriate to offer an email address where Americans can report anything “fishy” they might see or hear emanating from the thoughts and opinions of other Americans. That reminds me of the Gestapo.

It is a teacher who makes little schoolchildren chant, “Mm, mmm, mm! He said that all must lend a hand, To make this country strong again, Mmm, mmm, mm!
He said we must be fair today, Equal work means equal pay….Hello, Mr. President we honor you today!
 For all your great accomplishments, we all doth say hooray!”—set to the music of “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

That reminds me of the Hitler Youth.

Commentator Mark Whitting writes: “This is going beyond the beyonds, as this writer’s Irish granny used to say.”

That, Mr. Whitting, is putting it mildly.

If we are going to draw anything from Churchill’s “Gestapo speech” that bears on our current situation, it might be what Churchill said about gathering “all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.

“And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?”