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Edmund Burke: I am Edmund Burke, member of Parliament for Bristol and latterly for Malton, author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and approximately four decades worth of speeches warning that civilization is not a mechanism to be disassembled and reassembled by people who have read too many pamphlets. I watched France tear itself apart following precisely the kind of abstract principles that my colleague here has spent his career championing, and I watched the guillotine follow the philosophy with the reliability of a logical conclusion. Britain’s current miseries are the direct result of ignoring everything I said, which is, I confess, a situation I find both professionally gratifying and personally devastating.
Thomas Paine: And I am Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Agrarian Justice. I worked as a corset-maker and a tax collector before I picked up a pen, which perhaps explains why I write about the actual suffering of actual people rather than the romantic sentiments of a comfortable politician for institutions that have always served the comfortable. I was born in Thetford, Norfolk, which is to say I was born exactly nowhere in the estimation of the men who ran Britain, and I have spent my entire career explaining why that is the precise problem. Britain is declining because it never finished what the Enlightenment began, and because men like Burke spent every available moment making sure it did not.
Edmund Burke: Let me describe the patient before we argue about the diagnosis, since I find that clarity of description is always useful when one intends to be thoroughly right about everything. House prices in England have reached approximately nine times average annual earnings, and in London closer to eleven times. The National Health Service, that monument to postwar solidarity, is running waiting lists of seven million people and cannot recruit enough staff to function adequately. Net migration reached nearly nine hundred thousand in a single recent year, a figure that would have been considered fantastical by any previous generation of planners. Real wages have stagnated for the better part of fifteen years. The great manufacturing base that built the industrial world has hollowed out entirely. These are not abstract problems. They are the visible symptoms of a civilization that has lost its memory of itself, and I intend to explain precisely why that happened.
Thomas Paine: The symptoms are accurate. I will grant you that much before I remove everything else. But you have described the fever without identifying who gave the patient the illness. Those house prices exist because successive governments have allowed a relatively small class of landowners and property investors to treat human shelter as a financial instrument rather than a human necessity. I wrote in Agrarian Justice, in 1797, that the earth in its natural uncultivated state belongs to every human being in common, and that those who have monopolized the land owe a ground rent to the community they have dispossessed. Britain’s housing crisis is simply Agrarian Justice proving itself correct at the cost of an entire generation who cannot afford to live in the country they were born in. I am sorry to have been so thoroughly vindicated. Actually, I am not sorry at all.
Edmund Burke: How enormously generous of you to diagnose seventeen hundred years of English common law, the Magna Carta, the settlement of 1688, and the gradual development of property rights as the root cause of all suffering. I am sure the barons at Runnymede would be fascinated to learn they were building toward a land value tax. Let me tell you what the housing crisis actually reflects. It reflects the collapse of planning continuity, the destruction of the local institutions and local authorities that once built coherent communities with some understanding of the people they were building for, and the replacement of that organic local knowledge with abstract national policy made by people who have never stood in a town they were responsible for and felt the weight of that responsibility. Property ownership is, as I have always maintained, one of the fundamental anchors of civilization. The problem is that the combination of deregulated finance and ideologically driven planning has made property ownership impossible for ordinary people while simultaneously destroying the social fabric that once made renting tolerable. That is a different diagnosis with a different remedy.
Thomas Paine: That is a remarkably elegant way of agreeing with me while refusing to acknowledge it. The landowner class and the political class are the same class, Burke. They always have been, and you know it perfectly well. You sat in Parliament. You know who your colleagues were and what they owned. Your celebrated organic development is simply the organic compounding of inherited advantage across generations, dressed in the language of wisdom and continuity because that language is considerably more flattering than the accurate language of monopoly and exclusion. You wrote in Reflections that society is a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn. I wrote in Rights of Man that every generation is equal in rights to the generations that preceded it. The difference between those two positions is not philosophical. It is the difference between a system that serves those who are already established and a system that serves those who are just beginning.
Edmund Burke: Now. Since we are both apparently committed to genuine engagement rather than simply shouting past each other for the entertainment of the audience, which temptation I feel with particular force at this moment, let me do Mr. Paine the considerable courtesy of presenting his position in its strongest possible form. I do this not because I relish the exercise, but because demolishing a straw man would be beneath me, and I suspect beneath this audience, and besides, Mr. Paine would never forgive me.
Thomas Paine: I look forward enormously to watching you summarize my life’s work and then explaining, with immense rhetorical satisfaction, why I was wrong about all of it.
Edmund Burke: Mr. Paine’s most powerful argument proceeds as follows. British decline is the predictable and indeed inevitable consequence of a system in which wealth, land, and political power have always been transmitted by inheritance rather than earned by merit or need. The monarchy, the House of Lords, the great landed estates, the network of public schools feeding into ancient universities feeding into Parliament and the City of London, these do not constitute the accumulated wisdom of the ages. They constitute a closed circuit that allocates opportunity by birth and transmits advantage across generations regardless of merit or contribution. The housing crisis is simply land monopoly expressing itself in market prices. The stagnant wages are the result of capital having every structural and political advantage over labor. The crisis in the National Health Service is what happens when you refuse to fund a public institution adequately because adequate funding requires taxing the very people who control the government. Brexit was sold to working communities on the basis of nationalist sentiment manufactured by newspaper proprietors who paid minimal tax in Britain and suffered none of the consequences of the policies they advocated. The whole edifice of British decline, in Mr. Paine’s account, is the bill finally arriving for a system that was extractive from the beginning. It is a genuinely formidable argument. I want you to see that I have understood it before I explain why it is, in its essential structure, completely wrong.
Thomas Paine: That was almost fair. You left out the part where every human being has natural rights that no government can legitimately override, and the part where the people have an absolute right to alter or abolish any form of government that fails to serve them. But I will accept the summary as broadly accurate and move directly to destroying your position in return. Next time, on PhilosophersTalk.
Edmund Burke: Do like and subscribe before you go. I can say with complete confidence that people of discernment and good judgment will find this channel consistently rewarding, unlike the experience of reading Mr. Paine’s work, which rewards neither discernment nor judgment, only indignation.
Thomas Paine: Like and subscribe, and come back for Part Two, in which Burke will continue to explain why the solution to every crisis caused by entrenched privilege is more patience with entrenched privilege. He has been making this argument for two hundred and fifty years and Britain has rewarded him with a housing crisis, a broken health service, and stagnant wages. Results speak for themselves.
Edmund Burke: Insufferable.
Thomas Paine: Predictable.
