From Free Life, Issue 23, August 1995
ISSN: 0260 5112

Editor's Note: This article is a reply by Chris Cooper to Nicholas Dykes' reply [Free Life No. 22, April 1995] to Mr Cooper's review of Mr Dykes' book Fed Up With Government? [Free Life No. 21, October 1994]. For reasons that my last sentence should make clear, the debate is now closed.

The nub of the problem posed to libertarians by party political activity is: how will principles be sacrificed in the flood of compromises that will inevitably follow entry into the political process that libertarianism is largely directed against?

This is the problem that Mr Dykes' book Fed Up With Government? inevitably raises, and that my review largely addressed. Mr Dykes presents, on the one hand, many statements of goals that many libertarians can agree with and, on the other, many practical policy proposals; but whether the latter can achieve the former is highly questionable, and question them I did. Thus I did not "sneer at a commitment to libertarian principle", as Mr Dykes claims: I poked fun at the gross compromising of those principles that he embraces. And my questions were always serious, even where they were humorous.

It is a serious question whether government will be more oppressive or less if more power goes to the local level as against the national (which is what Mr Dykes means when he speaks in his book of "restoring the balance") . It is a serious question whether government interference in the economy can be restrained if it is once permitted to intervene on a large scale in major sectors such as road-building. It is a serious question where, and for what reasons, the American Constitution, or the Swiss, has failed and succeeded; and how, and for what reasons, some proposal modelled on them should fare better.

I was genuinely interested as Mr Dykes raised each of his suggestions, and genuinely disappointed in his failure to work them out. Throughout his book, Mr Dykes is long on principle and policies, but short on the arguments that would link one to the other. I never doubted the sincerity of his protestations of principle, and I heartily agree with most of those principles, but that is not the point - the things he has to say in his book and those he adds in his reply are statements of intention, not of reasons for the superiority of what he proposes. I discharged the first duty of a reviewer, which is to give the reader a sense of the book: I quoted a pretty full sample of Mr Dykes' opinions and proposals and clearly separated them from my own commentary.

But Mr Dykes does not seem to like the rules of the game of reviewing: for instance, that the reviewer has to deal with the book as it is published, not with the one that the author now wishes he had written; with the thinking that appears in it, not with what the author has later moved on to; with the opinions that are published, not with the ones that he has shared with his friends over the years and that contrast so comically with the appearance presented by the former. He has to review the "compromise positions that the author wishes he had left out entirely". Mr Dykes complains of all of this and even hankers to write the review himself.

Mr Dykes cannot give me lessons in the art of reading: he has misunderstood several things in my review that most readers will have found quite transparent. He accuses me of entertaining the idea of nuclear war against China: it should be obvious that I was confronting him with an inevitable consequence of his own position, that Britain should never have conceded the colony's return to China. (I think a case for military resistance to China could be argued; but in any event, it is not "barking mad" to point out that nuclear threat is the consequence of an author's position, and to demand an argument in its support; equally, making such a demand is not a symptom of an appeaser's mentality - the somewhat contradictory trait that Mr Dykes manages to impute to me.)

Mr Dykes accuses me of seizing on two favourable references to Margaret Thatcher and ignoring "whole chapters of sharply worded criticism". But many Conservatives are fond of crediting the then Mrs Thatcher with all the achievements of the eighties of which they happen to approve, while blaming the Tory establishment for all that they disagree with. Mr Dykes reads in his book remarkably like one of these, and it is only with his current Reply that his readers (as opposed to his circle of friends) learn otherwise. Mr Dykes accuses me of quoting him out of context. (This phrase always puzzles me. How else can one quote?) But my quotations do not misrepresent him. I contrasted his policy proposals with the principles they are intended to serve. They provide their own ironic contrast, without the need for any distortion by me.

Mr Dykes wants his protestations of principle to excuse the policy weaknesses, and it won't do. Mr Dykes may "attack", "lambast" and "decry" all forms of statism and collectivism; but opening his book at random I am reminded that, for example, he proposes that roads and railways should be put into the hands of companies that, rather than operating freely in the marketplace, should be controlled by charter and should remain under British control; and that any union closed shop (along, of course, with many government activities) that "inhibits the registration of vessels as British" will be "eradicated"; and so on. And these restraints on liberty are to be financed by a panoply of "temporary" measures that in fact would be with us for ever.

I believe - and I don't think there is anything in the review to lead a reader to think differently - that Mr Dykes is a humane man and a deeply committed libertarian. I think he should accept that I too am serious and sincere in my criticisms.