The Britain of the mid-19th Century was the greatest civilisation that has ever existed. It had a mighty empire, a mighty navy, it had wiped out the slave trade and it was at the forefront of the Industrian Revolution, the greatest improvement in living standards in history. And now, as I write, it is hanging on by a thread: divided, debt-ridden and weak.

So, where did it all go wrong? Here – in reverse chronological order – is my list of the key dates:

2008. Reaction to the Financial Crisis.
Had the banks just been allowed to go bust and the banking regulation that reduced their numbers abolished we would not be looking at 20 lost years.

1997. Opening the borders.
Allowing the establishment of hostile communities in your country is not a good idea.

1987. Leaving the NHS untouched.
By 1987, the Thatcher government had privatised just about everything. Only the NHS and education were left. And they flunked it. Mind you it would probably have been electoral suicide.

1969. Failure to defeat the IRA.
If you reward terrorism you get more of it.

1965. Race Relations Act.
Keir Starmer is wrong. Britain does not have a “proud tradition of free speech”. But it did have some free speech. This act along with various successors outlawed some forms of speech. Those successors progressively outlawed freedom of association which might have gone a long way to taking the sting out of the Integration Crisis.

1964. Abolition of the Death Penalty.
I appreciate libertarians tended to be divided on this issue. We may have a lot to say about what the law should be but very little about what should happen when it is broken. But if you are going to end a long-standing tradition it had better work. It didn’t.

1963. Robbins Committee.
This led to the subsidisation of higher education and the subsidisation of student living costs. Where you get subsidy you get communism.

c.1948. Ending of the right to defend oneself with a firearm.
I got this from the late Brian Micklethwait but I haven’t been able to confirm it. Brian’s point was that if you couldn’t use guns to defend yourself there was very little point in having one and so it became easy for the state to ban them.

1948. Nationalisation of rail.
Along with coal, steel and many others along the way. Losses, strikes, decline, waste, unemployment.

1947. Town & Country Planning Act.
Pretty much stopped building anywhere where people might want to live. A huge contributor to putting home ownership out of the reach of millions.

1931. Abandoning the Gold Standard.
Inflation and boom and bust became the order of the day.

1920s. Abolition of the Poor Law.
I mean to write about this one day but TL;DR while the Poor Law had many shortcomings it did at least keep people alive while keeping the costs down.

1922. Creation of the BBC.
A monopoly communist propaganda organisation using the most powerful media then in existence which non-communists were forced to pay for. What could go wrong?

1920. Beginning of the War on Drugs.
Other than the crime and changes to the drugs themselves (making them more dangerous than ever), the persistent failure of the War on Drugs gave the state the excuse for ever greater assaults on civil liberties.

1918. Universal Adult Male Franchise.
This meant that people could vote themselves other people’s money. It very quickly led to the replacement of the (not very) Liberal Party by the (not-at-all liberal) Labour Party. Mind you, it should be pointed out that a lot of the damage was done well before.

1910. People’s Budget et al.
In introducing the state pension, a state GP service and unemployment benefit this laid the foundations of the Welfare State that is currently doing such a good job of bankrupting the country.

1910. Payment of MPs.
I put this one in tentatively. I would like to say it meant Members of Parliament no longer had to have made something of themselves but given that a large number of them came from rich families that is not quite true.

1906. Taff Vale Judgement.
This effectively put trade unions above the law leading to endless strikes, uncompetitiveness, industrial decline and unemployment.

1890s. Death Duties.
Bit by bit this destroyed the aristocracy by forcing a fire sale every time the head of the household died. [And that did what exactly, Patrick? Summat! It did summat!]

1875. Trade Union Act.
This allowed picketting or the intimidation of non-striking workers by trade unionists. I have to thank Paul Marks for bringing this one to my attention.

1870. Forster Act.
This established state education along with all that went along with it such as indoctrination, poor quality education and the opportunity costs involved in children not being able to earn money or learn a trade.

1845. Banking Act.
This began the extension of the Bank of England’s monopoly to the whole of the country.

Anything I’ve missed?

Can someone artistic come up with a graphic mashup of John Lydon & Nigel Farage?

BTW, Lydon is actually a very bright and in many ways deeply admirable figure.

“Oui, la récompense la plus agréable qu’on puisse recevoir des choses que l’on fait, c’est de les voir connues, de les voir caressées d’un applaudissement qui vous honore.”

“Yes, the most pleasant reward one can receive from the things one does is to see them recognised, to see them greeted with applause that honours you.” – Molière,

– Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

-*-

Wise words. Combine them with the equally wise saying “If you want a job done, do it yourself”, and you get this:

French professor accused of ‘gigantic hoax’ after inventing Nobel-style prize, as reported by the Guardian‘s Kim Willsher:

At a ceremony at the French national assembly attended by Nobel prize winners, former government ministers, MPs, decorated scientists and academics, all attention was on a previously unknown literature professor.

Florent Montaclair, then 46, a balding, bespectacled figure in an ill-fitting suit and rosé-coloured shirt, was receiving the 2016 Gold Medal of Philology – the study of linguistics – from an international society of the same name.

Montaclair was the first French recipient of the medal, previously awarded to the Italian author and linguist Umberto Eco, those attending were told.

It was a glittering event and an impressive achievement – but unfortunately, detectives claim, the award itself was entirely fake and part of a complex international hoax worthy of a film script.

and

Until 2015, when an article appeared in his local newspaper claiming he was about to win the equivalent of a Nobel prize or Fields medal, Montaclair was an unremarkable teaching instructor who liked to write fantasy books, many about vampires, in his spare time.

I’d give one of his novels a go, if any have been translated into English. But perhaps he ought to consider a change of genre, given his demonstrable talent for producing realistic fiction.

After the national assembly ceremony, Montaclair, who gave a Tedx Talk titled the Galilean Challenge, decided the next recipient should be the American intellectual Noam Chomsky, then 87, who travelled to Paris to collect the award in front of 200 people.

Don’t be too sad for Professor Chomsky. He has had awards, prizes, fellowships, honorary degrees, medals and memberships of learned academies poured upon him, not to mention his being the recipient of personal monetary tokens of esteem. His trophies surround him like a glittering ocean. Their lustre can scarcely be dimmed by one of them turning out to be an academic vanity project.

The Guardian article then quotes the public prosecutor, Paul-Édouard Lallois:

Lallois said whether Montaclair obtained that promotion and any material gain from an allegedly fake diploma and medal was at the heart of his investigation.

“In his view, the medal is not a forgery. A forgery implies that there is a genuine medal. As the genuine philology medal does not exist, his medal cannot be a forgery,” Lallois said.

“Anyone can create a medal. You can order online the ‘best journalist in France’ medal, in gold, silver or bronze, award it to yourself and hold your own little ceremony quietly at home over drinks.

“If you stay at home with your little medals on top of your mantelpiece, there are no legal consequences. If, on the other hand, you mention it to your employer, if you mention it to the media, and if all this leads to a certain amount of professional recognition, then it has concrete implications, and that is where the notion of fraud can begin to arise.”

It begins to arise, certainly. But does the notion of fraud ascend all the way into full existence? Like the man accused of wearing a toupée to cover his baldness who replied, “It’s all my own hair – I paid for the toupée myself”, Professor Montaclair could defend himself on the grounds that those in charge of awarding the Gold Medal of Philology sincerely believed he was a worthy laureate.

Montaclair could also point out that many prestigious academic prizes are awarded by foundations that are the creations of one man, with the only difference from his International Society of Philology being that their founders were rich enough to rent offices in a nice part of town and persuade or hire famous names to serve as judges. Montaclair clearly sought to hide his award to himself among his awards to other people such as Umberto Eco and Noam Chomsky. If he had remained undetected he might well have managed to pick up a few well-known academic names to serve alongside him in deciding who should receive future Gold Medals. Perhaps his plan was to discreetly retire once the whole process had become self-sustaining.

Or if one wants something more democratic, the media will laud as “world-leading” bodies such as the International Association of Genocide Scholars that allow anyone who pays a fee to become a voting member. Professor Montaclair could say that his society… just hadn’t got any other members yet.

In the end, I would say that even if he does somehow manage to escape a penalty under French law, his use of his home-minted Gold Medal to gain promotion was morally a fraud. And, OK, the whole International Society of Philology being made from his left sock was a bit dodgy too. But the line between a fraud and a gutsy founder operating on the principle of “if you build it, they will come” is not utterly clear cut. Despite being a five times winner of the Prix de l’Academie Solent, I find this a difficult philosophical question.

Barack Obama's "you didn't build that" comment during the 2012 election, part of a larger argument that successful entrepreneurs ultimately derived their wealth from public investments, was widely considered a gaffe at the time.

In retrospect, the former president sounds downright capitalist. A decade and a half of leftward drift in the Democratic Party has given us the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), who argues that not only did you not build that, but if you're rich enough, you actually stole it.

The New York congresswoman went viral yesterday for comments she made on comedian Ilana Glazer's podcast describing any billionaire's wealth as inherently unearned.

"You just can't earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they're worth, but you can't earn that," said Ocasio-Cortez in the middle of a longer spiel about how capitalism forces people to "internalize" economic hardship as their own fault, and not the result of wider capitalistic forces.

AOC: "There's a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can't earn a billion dollars. You just can't earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they're worth, but you can't earn… pic.twitter.com/tUi9xTlQ2B

— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) May 7, 2026

The notion that someone has profited off of others' misery simply by being a billionaire is silly. Philosopher Robert Nozick debunked this idea with his Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment. To summarize, if you redistributed all wealth equally, Chamberlain would quickly end up having way more money than everyone else because a huge number of people would be willing to buy a ticket to see the basketball player live.

Nozick's point was that even from a starting point of complete economic equality, some people's superior skills will enable them to make more money than others and that's fine. The people who voluntarily pay to see Chamberlain are better off for the experience, even if the money they spent on tickets recreates vast wealth inequality.

People have offered the more contemporary example of Taylor Swift as a rebuttal to AOC's comments, but the point is the same: You can indeed become a billionaire by doing something obviously uncontroversial and non-exploitative like selling concert tickets.

Take the billionaire Taylor swift.

Her recent Era's tour grossed over $2 billion. The customers are very happy, and most of them would gladly have paid more for their tickets. In the documentary they cover the dancers and some of the crew, who are all shown to be happy with… https://t.co/8r1YV6GlAl

— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) May 8, 2026

Indeed, the source of Swift's wealth is not so different from AOC's interlocutor. Glazer is a successful actor and comedian who's become, even by contemporary American standards, rich and famous by selling performances that people want to see.

The fact that she hasn't obtained the stratospheric levels of wealth that Swift has doesn't obviously make one the oppressor and the other the oppressed. It does reek of envy and petty status competition.

There is of course a case that Taylor Swift's fortune is partially derived from ill-gotten gains. While many consider her to be a talented performer, and she's certainly a skilled businesswoman, her wealth depends in part on copyright protections of her music that many libertarians would consider a form of unjust, state-granted privilege.

The point is that it's not the amount of money Swift has earned, but her means of acquiring it that determines whether her fortune is deserved. The primary question to ask is whether one earned their money conducting voluntary exchanges in a free market, or through some state transfer or grant of privilege.

To be sure, in our modern, mixed economy, there's plenty of state transfers going around. Contra AOC, there are makers and moochers on every rung of the income ladder.

The billionaire who lowers consumer prices by creating an online retail giant and distribution network hasn't inherently exploited anyone. The middle-income tenant living in a rent-stabilized unit in New York is benefiting from an inherently parasitic relationship created by regulation.

In a follow-up comment on social media, AOC claims that the largest form of theft in the economy is $50 billion in wage theft.

The single largest form of theft in America is wage theft. $50 billion a year are stolen from American workers.

If a billionaire amasses their wealth by underpaying their full-time workers so severely that they must rely on food assistance and government programs to survive,… https://t.co/fH9pBZbpSa

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 7, 2026

Even if that weren't a nonsense figure that vastly exaggerates the amount of wage theft in the economy, it would still pale in comparison to the $4.5 trillion confiscated from workers' paychecks each year via federal income and payroll taxes.

In her interview with Glazer, AOC complains of the "myth" we've created of the productive billionaire to justify wealth inequality. The far more pervasive myth seems to be the one the congresswoman retails in: that government taxation and state-granted privileges can't be coercive exploitation because you didn't earn that money anyway.

Sheldon Richman ends his essay on libertarian class theory with a call to "raise the class-​consciousness of all honest, productive people. That is, the industrious must be shown that they are daily victims of the ruling political class."

AOC wants to obfuscate the fact that she is a member of the ruling class with her own rags-to-Congress story. Don't buy it. Stand in solidarity with the billionaires she'd like to see the state grind into dust.

The post Contra AOC, You Don't Have To Be a Billionaire To Be a Leech appeared first on Reason.com.

The Trump administration’s downsizing USAID has brought the usual claims: that without US aid, millions of poor people around the world will die of starvation and disease. Not surprisingly, the claims are exaggerated.

Luck egalitarians fallaciously declare property and wealth to be illegitimate or at least suspect due to a mysterious, unquantifiable force called luck. Their arguments fail even if what they claim about luck is true.