The Boy Is On to Something!

The Collapse of Democracy By Robert Moss Arlington House, 300 pp., $8.95 It’s been four months since Robert Moss’s book, The Collapse of Democracy, landed in the bookstalls here in Britain, and got dubbed “reactionary chic” by the Guardian’s lovable curmudgeon, Peter Jenkins. When I first read it, I thought it had about as much chance of becoming fashionable as my wife’s opus, Multivariate A pproach to Understanding Cultural Change in Late Post-Pleistocene South Africa, has of making the Book-of-the-Month Club, but I’m being proven wrong. It’s becoming considerably more than “chic.” It’s catching on all over, and after re-reading it some four or five times I think it should do the same in America. Dammit the boy has something, and I for one have come around to the view of Lord Blake: “It’s time we all started taking young Moss seriously.”

Lord Blake, who has just edited a book on British conservatism, argues that the time is ripe for a swing away from collectivism and back toward liberal democracy, so apparent have the failures of socialism become. However, he doesn’t show, as Robert Moss does, that in the Newspeak of today’s Britain it is all but impossible to discuss these failures so that everyone may understand. Those who rule Britain pass laws and take actions which produce results the opposite of their supposed intention: rent controls which are supposed to serve the homeless but have driven rentable properties off the market and have more than doubled the rents of those that remain; measures to protect workers which have paralyzed important segments of industry and added thousands to the unemployment rolls; “free” medical services which have wound up costing in taxes something like three times the total amount that was paid annually to doctors, nurses, hospitals, and apothecaries before socialized medicine came into being, yet make it necessary for anyone suffering an attack of appendicitis to wait almost a year for an operation; “anti-sexist” laws which have cut off countless job and career opportunities that were beginning to open up for women. The behavior of the government is almost exactly what it would be were its leaders deliberately trying to destroy the economy, yet in the current Newspeak it all seems to make sense, and criticism of the present state of affairs can only be made in language the public no longer understands.

MC

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Miles Copeland

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The Collapse of Democracy By Robert Moss Arlington House, 300 pp., $8.95 It’s been four months since Robert Moss’s book, The Collapse of Democracy, landed in the bookstalls here in Britain, and got dubbed “reactionary chic” by the Guardian’s lovable curmudgeon, Peter Jenkins. When I first read it, I thought it had about as much chance of becoming fashionable as my wife’s opus, Multivariate A pproach to Understanding Cultural Change in Late Post-Pleistocene South Africa, has of making the Book-of-the-Month Club, but I’m being proven wrong. It’s becoming considerably more than “chic.” It’s catching on all over, and after re-reading it some four or five times I think it should do the same in America. Dammit the boy has something, and I for one have come around to the view of Lord Blake: “It’s time we all started taking young Moss seriously.”

Lord Blake, who has just edited a book on British conservatism, argues that the time is ripe for a swing away from collectivism and back toward liberal democracy, so apparent have the failures of socialism become. However, he doesn’t show, as Robert Moss does, that in the Newspeak of today’s Britain it is all but impossible to discuss these failures so that everyone may understand. Those who rule Britain pass laws and take actions which produce results the opposite of their supposed intention: rent controls which are supposed to serve the homeless but have driven rentable properties off the market and have more than doubled the rents of those that remain; measures to protect workers which have paralyzed important segments of industry and added thousands to the unemployment rolls; “free” medical services which have wound up costing in taxes something like three times the total amount that was paid annually to doctors, nurses, hospitals, and apothecaries before socialized medicine came into being, yet make it necessary for anyone suffering an attack of appendicitis to wait almost a year for an operation; “anti-sexist” laws which have cut off countless job and career opportunities that were beginning to open up for women. The behavior of the government is almost exactly what it would be were its leaders deliberately trying to destroy the economy, yet in the current Newspeak it all seems to make sense, and criticism of the present state of affairs can only be made in language the public no longer understands.