Paternalism (‘we know better than you what to do with your money’)

It’s not stretching the truth to say that current revenue regimes were designed by sociopaths. Here’s a story that might reinforce this proposition.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s dad, also Edward, was a rotten father. Oh, yes, he hung around philosophising with John Stuart Mill’s dad, James Mill, but, what with that and his real estate business and his farm, he had no time, at all, left for young Edward Gibbon.

By age 15, Edward Gibbon Wakefield fulfilled every criterion for a sociopath. He’d been kicked out of three schools. His mother, not being able to control him, had sent him to his stronger-willed grandmother. When Edward was 11, grandma Priscilla wrote back in 1807: “my mind painfully engaged in the perverseness of dear little Edward - his obstinacy if he inclines to evil terrifies me”. His “pertinacious inflexible temper makes me fear for his own happiness and of those connected with him”. He “has a mind that requires delicate handling.”

While in Newgate prison for marrying the second (or was it the third?) heiress he had abducted, Wakefield had this great idea! You could keep the masses genuflecting to the landed gentry if they couldn’t afford the price of a block of land! All you had to do was to set the land at “sufficient price” and they were your slaves! So, you didn’t need convicts in new colonies if you had tax-paying wage slaves who couldn’t afford a block of their own.

The idea was enthusiastically taken up in founding the new, gentrified colony at South Australia. Although it worked up to a point, it was a bit of a pity that workers were thrown into unemployment within the year, and that economic depression ensued.

Nevertheless, Adelaidians still erected a monument to honour Wakefield and named roads after him, because he was part of the landed gentry and foreshadowed the very system to which we adhere today: i.e. let landowners line their pockets with the real wages stolen from those who work and produce! The middle class won’t even understand the process, or, for that matter, why recessions always follow the bursting of land price bubbles. Just ask all those who attended Davos last week.