Edward Coke's contribution to English Common Law
Sir Edward Coke (pronounced 'cook') was born on February 1st 1552. He is widely regarded as one of England's most prominent jurists, and one who firmly established the primacy of English Common Law, putting himself personally at risk from Stuart monarchs who tried to put themselves above it.
As Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, he declared the King to be subject to the law, and said that the laws of Parliament were void if they violated "common right and reason". James I & VI and Charles I had granted monopolies and patents in exchange for cash as a way to obtain funds outside Parliamentary control, but Coke wrote and advocated the Statute of Monopolies that substantially limited their powers to do so.
As an influential judge, he often ventured into constitutional law with his voluminous writings, declaring that no tax or loan could be implemented without the permission of Parliament.
His greatest contribution to the liberties of Englishmen was the Petition of Right, which reaffirmed the principles of Magna Carta, and is regarded as one of the three seminal constitutional documents of English law, along with Magna Carta itself and the 1689 Bill of Rights. He wrote affirming the right of habeas corpus, and declared that that no private citizen could be forced to accept soldiers into his home, or be subject to martial law imposed upon civilians.
In a 1604 decision that has reverberated through history to affirm the rights of the subject against authority, Coke declared that “the house of every one is to him as his Castle and Fortress as well for defence against injury and violence, as for his repose.”
Against the overweening power of the state, personified in the monarchy, Coke set the justice of English Common Law, and through his judgements and writings ensured that its principles were enshrined in the constitution, and that no person, however powerful, was above them.
How horribly the language changes
We’re all intensely interested in sustainability issues. We’d not want the species to disappear in a howling wasteland of nothingness after all - so we’re pretty interested in making sure that current arrangements are sustainable. Where they aren’t we should do something about it too.
The problem is that as soon as we’ve got this societal agreement that this something is a good idea then the promoters of it go of and change the meanings of the words in use.
For example, perhaps there is something in this idea that clothes should be made for more than a couple of wear. We don’t think so - in fact we’re sure that there isn’t something in it - but it’s a useful concept to consider all the same.
The six companies, which include Amazon UK, JD Sports, Sports Direct and TK Maxx, have not taken any action to reduce their carbon, water and waste footprint. None of them use organic or sustainable cotton and only two – Sports Direct and Boohoo – use recycled material in their products.
The interim report by the environmental audit committee singles out Amazon UK for its notable lack of engagement in sustainability.
As we say we’re fine with considering whether waste etc is sustainable and we’re sure we know the answer too. But looking at the actual report we find something more:
...We also asked four leading online retailers to answer similar questions following evidence at our first hearing about illegally low wages for garment workers .....We believe that there is scope for retailers to do much more to tackle labour market....This is an interim report on the sustainability of the fashion industry
The labour market has nothing to do with sustainability. What wages the workers are paid can be a source of concern, of course it can, but it’s nothing at all to do with whether the system itself can carry on, is sustainable.
And yet in the language of a parliamentary committee wages are a part of that environmental sustainability. For no reason other than the campaigners have done that bait and switch. We out here are convinced that whether the world can carry on for a few more hundred years is important. Under that banner the campaigners have smuggled in their own concerns about wage levels.
It’s in this manner that inequality gets renamed as poverty, legal privilege in favour of previously disadvantaged groups is social justice and so on. We need to be careful abut what concepts are being smuggled into the national discourse in such a manner.
Dr Madsen's Memories
Many conversant with the Adam Smith Institute will be familiar with our President, Dr Madsen Pirie. Madsen, along with Dr Eamonn Butler founded the Institute in 1977.
Madsen has compiled a series of small windows into the idiosyncrasies of his career and personal life. The memories are in no particular order; some are from early childhood, middle life, and some from the recent past. They are a compelling collection of incidents, events and observations which we would recommend for an insight into the making of Madsen Pirie.
Below is a small excerpt into the kind of writing you may come across on the website.
To most reading this who have somehow found themselves perpetually hooked the weird and wonderful alcove that is the Adam Smith Institute blog, lighthouses may bring to mind the genius of Ronald Coase. And, usually, this may be the case for the more wonky areas of the publications of an economic think tank. Nonetheless, we invite you to explore another side of the lighthouse.
The Madsen's memories post entitled Spurn Head lighthouse and faraway lands provides, a deeper, perhaps even lighter take on lighthouses.
“As a child I had looked out to Spurn, sometimes wondering if anyone out there was looking back at me. There was, of course. A middle-aged man was looking back to the beaches of his childhood with fond memories.”
Written with sabre-toothed clarity, witty judgement and a cautious discernment of the reader’s state of mind, these posts may well be the quick read that gives you something to ponder on for the train journey to work or even the inspiration for a blog post of your own.
New posts are available at 7am every weekday, click here for more.
Venezuela's failure has a name: Socialism
Dr Madsen Pirie reflects on the failures of Venzuela’s leaders, their love of socialism, and the tragedy its enforcement has brought to what was once South America’s richest state. As events come to a head, and Maduro’s grip on power looks uncertain, we in the West must be ready to help the country’s citizens in any way we can.
When Congress passed the anti-slavery amendment
It was on January 31st 1865, 154 years ago today, that the US Congress passed the 13th Amendment that banned slavery, and sent it out to the states for ratification. Nearly two years earlier, Lincoln had used Presidential war powers to free slaves in Confederate states as they came under Union control, but the amendment made slavery unconstitutional.
It was one landmark among several that made illegal the ownership of one human being by another, the total denial of liberty. It predates written records and was practised in many cultures. Slavery involved suffering, and many captured slaves died in transit. The Arab slave trade, for example, which lasted over 1,000 years, typically saw 6 or even 10 die for every one that reached the destination. In the Atlantic slave ships, some 15 percent died en route, while the remainder suffered appalling conditions.
Other landmarks in the campaign for its abolition included the 1807 UK Act, inspired by Wilberforce, that abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire. In the half-century following, the British navy seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard. Wilberforce himself lived to see the 1835 Slavery Abolition Act pass into law.
A US landmark was the 1807 Act under Jefferson that banned the import of slaves, although it left the domestic practice in place. By the civil war it was estimated that one-third of Southern families owned slaves, so the 13th Amendment made a vast difference to the lives of millions.
The 1948 Declaration of Human Rights specified that, "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms." No person today may legally be enslaved or held in slavery, and the most basic human freedom to live free from bondage is enshrined in international law. To those who say slavery is still with us in the form of human trafficking, chattel slavery, forced marriage and child soldiers, Steven Pinker gives an eloquent distinction between what it is now, and what it was for most of human history:
“There is an enormous difference between a clandestine, illegal, and universally decried practice in a few parts of the world and an open, institutionalized, and universally approved practice everywhere in the world."
That experimentation machine we need
There are myriad methods of doing things, cornucopias of things to be done. We need, desire, some system of sorting through what can be done, what we’d like to have done, to see where a match can be made. A way of doing something we want done. The difficulty is compounded as the onward march of technology means that both are a moving target, what can and what we want.
At which point a story from something we’ve been doing this past 6,000 or more years, growing rice:
Junpeng is part of a pilot project to see if it’s possible to grow more rice with less water and fewer greenhouse gases. The dramatic difference between his two crops points a way to help the world’s 145 million small rice farmers, and could also greatly reduce global warming emissions from agriculture.
The project, backed by the German and Thai governments and by some of the world’s largest rice traders and food companies, has seen 3,000 other farmers in this corner of Thailand’s “rice basket” near the Cambodian border trained to grow sustainable rice according to the principles of a revolutionary agronomical system discovered by accident in Madagascar in the 1980s.
Jesuit priest Henri de Lalanié working in the highlands observed that by planting far fewer seeds than usual, using organic matter as a fertiliser and keeping the rice plants alternately wet and dry rather than flooded, resulted in yields that were increased by between 20 and 200%, while water use was halved. Giving plants more oxygen, minimising the competition between them and strictly controlling the water they receive is thought to make them stronger and more resilient to flood and drought.
The original finding was serendipity. The growth has been people trying it and finding it works. The end result highly desirable, but it’s the method of getting there which is important. Suck it and see and do more of what works.
This is, of course, a market method of testing innovation. The government involvement is telling people about it, not insisting that they do it nor planning who or how.
It’s not an outcome of bureaucratic planning now, is it? And thus our estimation of the value of bureaucratic planning above market experimentation is?
Mass murder of Stalin’s state "enemies"
On this date, January 30th, in 1930, the Soviet Politburo ordered the extermination of the kulaks. Stalin had decreed they were enemies of the Revolution, and they were castigated and humiliated before large numbers of them were murdered. The kulaks were peasants who were slightly better off than field labourers, having perhaps a couple of cows and a few acres of land.
This, to Stalin, made them part of the hated property-owning middle class. He wanted production of food to be done large-scale on collective farms. The kulaks were an obstacle to a peasantry totally dependent on, and subservient to, the state, and must be eliminated. Stalin declared, "The resistance of this class must be smashed in open battle and it must be deprived of the productive sources of its existence and development." This meant confiscating their animals and their grain, needed for the Red Army, and leaving them to starve. Then their land was seized.
Many were sent to gulags, with hundreds of thousands dying along the way. Some were executed, and others left to starve to death. Solzhenitsyn put the number killed at 6 million. It is reckoned that this policy led to the great Soviet famine of 1932-33 that killed millions more. It was one of the great disasters of Russian history, and it was entirely man-made.
Historians estimate that this wanton act of mass murder was but a drop in the bucket that Stalin later filled with the blood of his peoples. By coincidence, on the same date, January 30th, three years later in 1933, another mass murderer, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany.
Statistics matter Mr. Lammy, statistics matter
David Lammy does seem to major in an insistence that Britain treats those of differential melanin contents differently, even unfairly. At which point we’ve got to insist that statistics matter. Really matter, for they’re how we understand the world around us:
More than half of the inmates held in prisons for young people in England and Wales are from a black and minority ethnic (BME) background, the highest proportion on record, the prisons watchdog has said, prompting warnings that youth jails have hit “American” levels of disproportionality.
About 51% of boys in young offender institutions (YOIs) – prisons for boys aged 15 to 17 and young adult men aged 18 to 21 – identified as being from a BME background, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) found.
In addition, the inspectorate found 42% of children in secure training centres (STCs) – prisons for children up to the age of 17 – were from a BME background.
The proportion of BME boys and men behind bars in YOIs in England and Wales is nearly four times the 14% BME proportion of the wider UK population.
It’s that last line which is the error. For ethnicity as a portion of the population varies by age cohort - obviously enough, mass immigration is a recent enough phenomenon. Rough numbers from Nomis tell us that in these age groups some 23% or so of the population are BAME.
Thus the number of young men in those prisons is disprortionate, yes, and we’d love to know why too. But we still have to start with the right numbers.
For example, when we consider who has the top jobs - as has been done recently - there is the other side of this same number. The young are indeed more likely to be BAME than the general population and thus the old less so. Who is it that has the top jobs? Those who have aged into them. That may or may not be the entire explanation but it’s an important point to take into consideration before we make any conclusions.
For statistics really do matter, they’re how we make sense of a complex world.
Madsen Moment — Private Foreign Aid
Families sending money abroad is more direct and more impactful than big-ticket public aid. It’s time to talk up philanthropy, and recognise the power of individuals to change the stars of their friends and relatives overseas.
133 years of petrol-driven cars
On January 29th, 1886, Karl Benz took out the first patent for a petrol-driven car. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen was a three-wheeled automobile with a rear-mounted engine. It had steel-spoked wheels and solid rubber tyres. It went on sale for 600 imperial marks, or just over $4,000 in today's money.
There had been earlier "horseless carriages," including Richard Trevithick's steam-driven vehicle, demonstrated in London in 1803, and said to be the first such vehicle. But the Motorwagen, with its lightweight 954cc single-cylinder four-stroke engine, represented a real breakthrough because of its energy efficiency. It ushered in the age of the private motor car.
Not surprisingly, the coach companies tried to use government to stop motor cars, much as cab companies try to stop Uber. In the UK early cars had to have a man walking in front with a red flag, until the law was repealed in 1896. Horses and carriages were expensive, but cars could be made cheaply, and after Henry Ford came along, they were.
Planners have never liked motor cars. They give the drivers too much independence, the freedom to go wherever and whenever they like. Planners prefer to move people together in units to preordained destinations. Planners prefer public transport for that reason, and many have tried to make life difficult for private motorists. Private cars have proliferated despite them.
No-one foresaw for many years the polluting gases that petrol engines emit, or the health-harming particulates of diesel engines. But they do now, and the age of the internal combustion engine that Benz heralded is drawing to a close. I have driven a Tesla for four years, and predict, along with others, that fossil fuel engines will be banned from cities within years. This does not mark the end of private transport, however, or of the freedom and opportunities it has brought to ordinary people for decades. On the contrary, self-driving cars and people-carrying drones will make it available to those unable to drive, and artificial intelligence will largely solve the problem of congestion and collisions.