Let Them Eat Cake!

I think of libertarian tech engineers, and there are plenty, who separate ideas into categories, making command paths through logic, feeling quite freed up to do so. Then, politics seem to follow: Do this, get that. Don’t do this, don’t get that. Clean and simple. In America, they’d call it the Rush Limbaugh effect, typically displayed in tenth-grade boys. Someone doesn’t work? The state shouldn’t give him money. If he doesn’t work, there are no entitlements. Oh, he’s disabled? Well, too bad. Oh, he’s a war veteran? Well, that war is over now.

Frances McCue*

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I have just finished reading the single best article of the year: “In the Shadow of the Poor Law” by Stewart Lansley. Published in the January 2022 issue of History Today,** the article analyzes Great Britain’s laws dealing with the poor and their poverty and eviscerates the attitudes and thinking that lay behind the failure to improve their lot. As the subtitle of the article states, “Britain has been a high inequality, high poverty nation for most of the last 200 years.”

There was a decades-old quote that went either “Thatcherism is Reaganomics with knobs on” or “Reaganomics is Thatcherism with knobs on.” I don’t remember which way it went (and a Google search didn’t help). But the important point is that what Lansley shows about Britain’s callousness toward the poor was similar to the policy of the American government that flowered during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and has led to the gross inequality we experience today in this country.

I will not attempt to quote from Lansley’s article; it would take up the rest of this post. Instead, I urge you to read the article itself (the link is below). And see if you agree with me on its importance.

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Let me end this brief post with Steven Nadler’s summation of Spinoza’s view of religion:

Being truly religious is not a matter of what you believe or how or where or even if you pray. Rather, it consists only in following the simple moral precept to love your neighbour, to act towards all with justice and charity.***

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* https://www.thesmartset.com/what-yeats-has-to-do-with-it/

** https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/shadow-poor-law

***  https://literaryreview.co.uk/letting-go-of-god