Tag: "Life After the State"

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Laketown28th December 2013

Fresh from viewing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, I am struck by my abiding memory of the film. Not the elves, the orcs, nor the mighty dragon. Perhaps harking back to my most popular post of the year, The Hobbit: Tolkien the Economic Libertarian? I was struck by the commentary on the state in a reinforcement of Tolkien's beliefs. As I state in my earlier blog, in a letter to his son in 1995, Tolkien wrote about planning, organization and regimentation being an “ultimately evil

Life After The State, a guest blog by Dominic Frisby18th November 2013

'Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman'. So wrote AJP Taylor as the opening lines of best-selling English History 1914–1945. 19th century Britain was indeed a much more free existence than that of today. You didn't need a passports (you could travel abroad without permission or ID), you could change money without restriction, taxes were paid on a modest scale (8% of