Duncan Whitmore has replied to me again, so here is my response. Our exchange began with trade but has become a dispute about foundations. The surface topic is free trade versus a limited, strategic use of protection. Underneath that is a fight over what makes a liberal order possible, and what keeps it alive once the slogans have faded. Mr Whitmore argues as a principled libertarian. He takes property rights as natural rights, from which politics should withdraw save to avert plain evils. I argue as a contingent libertarian. I take rights as a settlement adopted by a community for chosen ends: prosperity, peace, continuity, and the minimal unhappiness compatible with survival. That difference explains why he treats tariffs as an outrage in themselves, while I treat them as tools that may sometimes be justified to repair the conditions that let liberty breathe.

He thinks ideas lead and institutions follow. I think institutions and coalitions carry ideas, and without the right social base the right ideas do not land. He wants perfect rules now. I want to fix the ship so the rules can matter again. If readers keep these premises in mind, the disagreement will be intelligible. Without them, we look like we are quarrelling about prices and steel. We are not. We are quarrelling about what survives contact with the world.

This having been said, I will restate my position as plainly as possible, expand where necessary, and answer the main points in Mr Whitmore’s reply.

On “natural rights” and why I reject them

Perhaps the main difference between us is that Mr Whitmore believes that “a principled libertarian believes that rights to life, liberty and property (or more precisely, just to property) are natural rights, the upshot of which is that people have the legal right to decide for themselves which ends are the most valuable to pursue.” I disagree. Unless you want to believe in Sebastian Wang’s Sky Daddy, there are no natural rights. There is no natural law. There is no standard of right and wrong outside the subjective wishes of human beings. What we call the rights to life, liberty and property are nothing more than an agreement made by a community in the light of its own intelligent self-interest.

Those rulers of a community who are sufficiently intelligent refrain from the grosser predations simply because these are inconsistent with the chosen ends of the community. These ends are a balance between the long-term survival and success of the community and the minimal unhappiness of the greatest number of its members. And I emphasise that these ends are chosen. There is no external imperative to choose them. They will be chosen because they are desired. Other ends chosen might as easily involve placation of the gods through mass human sacrifice and cannibalism. Whether the means are appropriate to these ends is a matter of fact. The ends themselves are not open to argument. All I can say, looking at such a community, is that those ends do not strike me as attractive. What I do find attractive is the kind of community I have mentioned – where the chosen ends are a balance between collective survival and individual happiness. In the same way, I like my own appearance in my bedroom mirror and scorn the mountains of rancid lard who infest the corridors of my school. It is a subjective preference.

The ends being chosen, whatever they may be, intelligent rulers of a community will make and enforce laws that are means consistent with their ends. They will promote ideologies and customs that give support to the laws independent of, though supplemental to, brute force. If, in a liberal community, one of these ideologies involves long chains of deductive reasoning from unproven assumptions to a statement of natural rights, so much the better. I will not sneer at these chains without provocation. They may begin in a mass of intellectual fog, but they terminate roughly where I agree they should. At the same time, please do not wave them in my face as if they are epistemologically equal to the laws of geometry.

I am not indifferent to liberty. I do not dismiss the moral language that has carried it. I say only that its real-world force comes from a compound of settled expectations, habits, enforcement, and prudence—none of which needs celestial warrant. If you demand metaphysics in order to defend freedom, you will lose it the moment your metaphysics loses prestige. I would rather defend it in the currency of consequences, and preserve it with institutions that work when the fashionable story changes.

Emergency and power: why sneers at “contingency” miss the point

Mr Whitmore sneers at my contingent libertarianism by throwing up examples of how our rulers have justified a progress towards total power with fraudulent claims of climate change and biosecurity. From this he says: “[O]nce you grant that the state may override liberty whenever ‘survival’ is declared, you hand politicians the incentive to inflate emergencies, or manufacture them altogether. The examples already given illustrate that they rarely resist that temptation.” I disagree. This country at the moment is under enemy occupation, and has been for at least a hundred years. It is hardly surprising if every law made and every tax imposed is for our destruction as a people. The answer is not to reject political power as illegitimate in itself, but rather to seek a new order in which our chosen ends will be more firmly agreed.

We are not choosing between a pure market and a predatory state. We are choosing between different coalitions and different uses of coercion in a world where coercion is not going away. The question is not whether “survival” will be invoked; it is who will be allowed to invoke it and to what end. Sneering at “contingency” pretends we can opt out of that choice by pronouncing the word “rights.” We cannot.

I do not propose to hand rulers a blank cheque. I propose to make any exception legible, narrow, and on a clock; to clear domestic distortions first; and to tie any support to performance. That programme is less a concession to statism than an attempt to discipline the only institution with the reach to unwind the distortions that now sustain it. If the word “prudence” offends theory, I can only say that prudence is the virtue without which the rest is ornamental.

Sovereignty, diplomacy, and the arithmetic of force

Mr Whitmore claims that British sovereignty is only partly about armed force. He says: “Whether it’s an individual in society or a state in the so-called ‘international community,’ security rests far less on brute force than on the voluntary willingness of others to respect your boundaries. That willingness is maintained by a mixture of interdependence, moral pressure, and, yes, deterrence – but actual physical defence only ever works against the relative handful who defy the rules. No matter how fast the munitions factories are whirring, if the whole world turned on Britain tomorrow, we’d be flattened before lunchtime.” I am not sure to what point of mine he is replying. I have never said that a sovereign British state should avoid diplomacy as part of the mix for its effective defence.

However, since he raises the matter, I will say that a sovereign British nation, committed to the defence and happiness of the British people, would be an existential threat to a global ruling class that has entirely different chosen ends. Diplomacy in this world would achieve nothing without at least the support of armed force, and this will need assured munitions.

Interdependence can be peace. It can also be dependency weaponised at a moment of pressure. The difference is option value. A country that cannot surge the basics of defence and energy stabilisation does not bargain; it pleads. My position remains modest. I do not call for autarky. I call for enough domestic capacity, and allied redundancy, to deny leverage to actors who do not wish us well. When a state can be humiliated by a bottleneck in a hostile port, the price vector is not the whole story.

What my proposal actually is—and what it is not

I do not think Mr Whitmore understands the main point of my earlier article. I will begin with his reply: “People are too dim or dependent to vote for liberty. So we’ll dazzle them with a soothing but dubious protectionist policy – one that suspends their freedom (just a little – we’re not committed protectionists, of course). Once their new jobs have made them suitably dignified and industrious, we’ll finally allow them to ‘hear’ the case for liberty. And let them have their liberty back.”

Since this is a parody of what I said, I will restate my case.

We live in a country where the formal consent of the electorate is needed to justify a radical change of policy. There is no present community for the kind of changes that both Mr Whitmore and I want, because the population has been both terrorised and moronised into formal agreement with the present order of things. Skilled industrial workers are generally the accepted leaders of the working class communities that gather about them. These men are, by virtue of their occupations, applied rationalists. They may not be interested in the intricacies of the natural sciences, but they do have a clear understanding of natural cause and effect in their own occupations, and a resulting tendency to some understanding of abstract ideas outside their own occupations. These are men open to persuasion about levels of tax and regulation. A population of compliance administrators on short-term contracts, and of delivery drivers, will be much more inclined to magical thinking and much more open to intellectual manipulation.

Belief in witchcraft declined in Europe after about 1660 not because of arguments against the belief, but because of a growing realisation that the world was governed by impersonal natural laws in which demonic intervention had no place as explanation. In the same way, the removal of large numbers of people from any appreciation of impersonal natural law has led to a revival of superstition. I live in a town that was once bursting with textile factories. These raised up a class of men who built libraries and debating societies and friendly societies. The factories have gone. The result is a population committed to the most nonsensical superstitions. One of the boys in my class told me last year how his parents choose lottery numbers by praying over their cat and then letting him walk across a living room floor laid out with numbered cards. Everyone believes in ghosts. Everyone believes in second sight. Everyone believes in some sense that wishing for something strongly enough will make it happen. These are not people open to arguments about economic efficiency and long-term utility maximisation.

The purpose of industrial protection is not in itself to make Britain rich. I agree that every tariff is a deadweight cost. I also agree that it raises up interest groups that will argue for continued protection and more protection. The purpose instead is to recreate a skilled industrial working class that may serve as a critical mass of opinion supportive of liberal ends and of the most likely means to those ends. Mr Whitmore seems to believe it will be enough to promise people cheaper underclothes from Bangladesh to make them vote for what he wants. I deny this. Instead, I suggest a promise of secure, well-paid employment is what will underpin a revolution against the present order of things.

This is not a scheme to trick people and withdraw liberty. It is a programme to restore the material and cultural conditions under which liberty ceases to sound like an argument for the right of hedge fund owners to sniff coke in the privacy of their own gated communities. It relies, first, on cutting domestic distortions that now make production here a fool’s errand; then on identifying a very small set of non-substitutable capacities where a temporary price shield, on a clock, buys time while the ecology of skills, suppliers, and plant is rebuilt. It does not multiply lobbies everywhere. It closes the door to most, and binds the few to published metrics and sunsets. You can call that “statist” if you like. I call it an insurance premium with a schedule.

The history that still matters

Mr Whitmore invites me to relitigate the late-Victorian slowdown. I decline. I did not cite it to prove that protection made nations rich and free trade made Britain stagnate. I cited it to show that ritual can blind a people to altered conditions. “We are free traders” became a creed regardless of what else was changing: the money system, education, corporate law, and the rise of managerial power. I could as easily turn the lesson against protectionists who treat a wall as a sacrament. Both sides should learn: economise with dogma.

Comparative advantage is not an exogenous fate. It is often built. A dense fabric of small tool-shops and foundries may look “inefficient” in a given decade and then be the ready seedbed for a new industry when technology jumps. It is a matter of institutions, norms, skill habits, capital deepening, and the compound effects of networks. If advantage can be built, it may sometimes be rational to protect fragility in order to preserve the human and institutional capital that makes the next advantage possible. A “thin” decision that treats an old electronics cluster as a relic can wipe out the craftsmen, testers, and line leaders whose presence would have made a later pivot into chip packaging or specialised modules cheap and fast. Protecting a sector for a time may look like sentiment. It may also be an investment in option value. It allows for time and continuity when a shock would erase the preconditions of future specialisation.

What I accept from Mr Whitmore

I accept, as I said, that Britain today is a services economy with high debt and yawning external deficits. Time preference is high. Savings are low. Reindustrialisation demands cuts to present consumption to fund capital projects whose fruits arrive later. That is a difficulty for any programme of conscious reindustrialisation. If I do not think it is a reason to do nothing, I still accept it as a difficulty.

I accept also that tariffs are taxes, that they can shelter incompetence, and that lobbies cling like barnacles. These are reasons to make any use of them narrow, timed, and conditional. They are not reasons to declare the lever illegitimate in principle when the alternative is drift into strategic dependency that no amount of rhetoric can unwind.

Finally, I accept that deregulation without order of operations discredits liberty. If you scrap the top layer while keeping the distortions that made the layer necessary, you will get calamities that will be blamed on freedom. Mr Whitmore is right to warn against that stupidity. He is wrong to use the warning as an argument against any targeted exception anywhere.

What I propose, so we are not arguing with straw

It is not a “programme” in the planner’s sense. It is a sequence.

1. Clean up money and finance to favour patient capital over churn. Stop paying the City to arbitrage your future.
2. Slash the cost of building and powering things. That means planning permissions that finish in weeks, not years; and energy policy that does not treat heat as sin.
3. Streamline permissions and create fast tracks for strategic plant. Cut the middle clerisy out of the loop.
4. Rebuild technical education and attach funding to outcomes. Pay for mastery, not for attendance.
5. Use targeted procurement, stockpiles, and surge contracts for resilience. Contracts can do most of the work that tariffs are asked to do.
6. Then, and only then, where you still face a fatal import dependency in a tight, defined domain, use a modest, sunsetted tariff or fee to buy time. Publish the clock. Bind support to performance. Turn it off on schedule unless performance justifies a short extension approved by vote, not by ministerial fiat.

If Mr Whitmore replies that any admissible tariff is a seed of capture, I will answer again that capture is already everywhere and that the cure for capture is not to abolish every instrument, but to build institutions that punish cheats and reward builders. The point of my sequence is to change the incentives so capture is harder and more visible.

Why this is a libertarian argument, even if it offends some libertarians

On libertarian grounds, which position should one prefer? If you think liberty is a set of deductions that bind the world, then you will choose Mr Whitmore, and damn consequences when they misbehave. If you think liberty is a political achievement that must be maintained by institutions and a social base that can live with it, then you will find my view more persuasive. A free order is not a cloud. It is a craft. It needs a crew trained in causes and effects, a pay structure that rewards patience and mastery, and a national posture that refuses foreign leverage. Rebuilding some of that may justify temporary and legible departures from pure border neutrality, provided the default is openness and the time limit is real.

There is nothing inconsistent in saying the abstract case for free trade is unbeatable and that the present use of the phrase “free trade” is a costume for cartel and leverage. There is nothing inconsistent in saying that domestic distortions are the primary cause of our ills and that, until they are cleared, prices at the till are not honest guides to risk. There is nothing inconsistent in saying that tariffs are bad in general and sometimes necessary in the particular, as tourniquets are. What would be inconsistent is to hold a theory so tightly that you refuse any measure that buys the conditions under which your theory can work again.

In conclusion, our argument is partly over abstract arguments about the foundations of a liberal order, and partly over the means to bringing such an order back into existence. He has suggested that we should leave matters here in our own debate. Very graciously, he has allowed me the last word. I doubt, however, that this is an end of the argument in general terms.

I have kept as much of my original wording as possible because I meant it. I have filled out the steps because some readers want the bridges made explicit. I have not withdrawn my acceptance of the abstract case for free trade. I have not withdrawn my contempt for the present system that trades under that name. I have not withdrawn my contention that comparative advantage is often made and that killing it with short-term arithmetic is vandalism. I have not withdrawn my view that a skilled, self-respecting working class is the precondition for any serious liberal politics in this country. And I have not withdrawn my belief that the British state, as presently staffed and directed, is an occupation government whose ends are not ours.

We can chant rights and hope the world blushes. Or we can act as if we intend to have a country in which rights are more than decoration. I choose the latter.