20 Mar 2025
A thousand or more years ago, the Catholic church sold protection, known as salvation, after death, known as the afterlife. This was controversial but lucrative. Over the years, this practice faded, due both to the rise of the Protestant movement and the lack of supporting evidence. As far as I am aware, no one from the afterlife has been in touch to say whether it worked.
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION – PROGRESS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, SLOWLY
Happily, some gifts of health, comfort and security became available for free as modern, industrial economies developed. In the UK, average life expectancy rose impressively, doubling from around 40 in 1870 to 80 in 2020. (Though one should remember that this is a skewed statistic due the high infant mortality rate in Victorian times. Anyone who actually lived to 21 had a decent chance of some more decades.)
Parliamentary legislation very gradually reflected the idea that poor people should not be expected to die young. Child labour laws were implemented at glacial speed. The minimum working age was raised to twelve in 1901, fully 67 years after the abolition of slavery act.
From here, the slowness with which respect for common rights evolved seems surprising. Two world wars may have accelerated some aspects – the right to vote after WW1 and the right to education after WW2. The Clean Air Act of 1956 deserves to be remembered better than it is.
As we know, the rights to unemployment and various disability benefits have gradually entrenched themselves until they have become a public liability of monstrous proportions with no political party daring to address the issue lest it lose votes. This is arguably how democracy works but it is also how national bankruptcy works.
And here is the core of the issue. Claims of safety from all kinds of things like ill-health and economic disaster come with an invoice that somebody has to pay and ultimately that somebody will be you.
THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE – NOW WE’RE TALKING REAL MONEY
The cost becomes ruinous when we begin to be protected from unknown threats, an attitude sometimes known as “the precautionary principle”.
The precautionary principle is presented as a responsible way of dealing with unprovable risks. This has been central to the environmental doom movement and clicked ominously into gear when the decision was taken that it was the responsible thing to do to put people in mortal fear of Covid-19.
Most recently, we are being encouraged to be spooked by Lord Voldemort aka Vladamir Putin. When I was a youngish adult, the USSR finished west of Berlin. In 2025, the border of Russia, which is certainly not the Soviet Union, is more than a thousand miles further east. Yet it is being labelled as an existential threat, demanding sharp increases in defence spending, whatever that means, at a time of some considerable economic difficulty.
The effect that this has had on Germany in particular is remarkable, regardless of whether one blames it all on Donald Trump. The new Chancellor Friedrich Merz looks rather like Harry Potter but he will be doing more than waving his wand to defeat Voldemort. He has persuaded the lame duck Bundestag to scrap decades of responsible financial rules and to push through at least €800 billion in precautionary borrowing in the face of the threat of “he who once was literally in Berlin”.
In order to assemble this nodding coalition, which is dependent on the votes of those who have already been excluded from the new parliament, Merz had to bribe the Greens with a pledge of €100 billion to be spent on yet more performative environmental destruction of Germany’s industrial base. It must be hard for Germans to keep track of all the threats from which they are being protected.
How ironic that much of today’s economic crisis (record borrowing costs, feeble income) are arguably (I would argue) the result of net zero madness and panicky Covid measures. One crisis gives way to another, almost as if there is a pattern to this.
And coincidentally or not, inevitably some people will get rich – spurious green schemes, spurious medical experts and next, Europe’s largely dormant military industry. Your protection money will be making someone happy.