Substitute for the term “employee” in one of our new laws the term “serf,” even do so mild a thing as to substitute the traditional term “master” for the word “employer,” and the blunt words might breed revolt. Impose of a sudden the full conditions of a Servile State upon modern England, and it would certainly breed revolt. But my point is that when the foundations of the thing have to be laid and the first great steps taken, there is no revolt; on the contrary, there is acquiescence and for the most part gratitude upon the part of the poor. After the long terrors imposed upon them through a freedom unaccompanied by property, they see, at the expense of losing a mere legal freedom, the very real prospect of having enough and not losing it.
All forces, then, are making for the Servile State in this the final phase of our evil Capitalist society in England. The generous reformer is canalised towards it; the ungenerous one finds it a very mirror of his ideal; the herd of “practical” men meet at every stage in its inception the “practical” steps which they expected and demanded; while that proletarian mass upon whom the experiment is being tried because, by the nature of the case, only landowners can be affected by the law, and landowners would be compelled by it to safeguard the lives of all, whether they were or were not owners of land.
But the category so established would be purely accidental. The object and method of the law do not concern themselves with a distinction between citizens.
A close observer might indeed discover certain points in the Factory laws, details and phrases, which did distinctly connote the existence of a Capitalist and of a Proletarian class. But we must take the statutes as a whole and the order in which they were produced, above all, the general motive and expressions governing each main statute, in order to judge whether such examples of interference give us an origin or not.
The verdict will be that they do not. Such legislation may be oppressive in any degree or necessary in any degree, but it does not establish status in the place of contract, and it is not, therefore, servile.
Neither are those laws servile which in practice attach to the poor and not to the rich. Compulsory education is in legal theory required of every citizen for his children. The state of mind which goes with plutocracy exempts of course all above a certain standard of wealth from this law. But the law does apply to the universality of the commonwealth, and all families resident in Great Britain (not in Ireland) are subject to its provisions.
These are not origins. A true origin to the legislation I approach comes later. The first example of servile legislation to be discovered upon the Statute Book is that which establishes the present form of Employer’s Liability.--Hilaire Belloc (1912 [2nd edition] The Servile State, Section Nine ("The Servile State Has Begun")
As I noted in my first post on Belloc (recall), Hayek mentions The Servile State approvingly in The Road to Serfdom. The book is is quite clearly one of the founding texts of what shortly thereafter came to be known as 'property owning democracy' (as Ben Jackson notes here.) In addition, Belloc does anticipate a road to serfdom thesis (although surely does not originate it--it's in Tocqueville and probably earlier), but it's not Hayek's (or Mises') version (Edward McPhail has a lovely paper explaining that it here). It's worth taking a look at because in some ways, Belloc's road to serfdom thesis is an attractive alternative to both the Austrian (Hayekian/Misesian) road to serfdom thesis, and the Marxist one (articulated by Karl Polanyi [recall]) which suggests that capitalism naturally leads to fascism (or worse).
The quoted passage should give a hint of why Hayek would have liked Belloc. It's pretty clear that for Belloc the road to serfdom is fatally initiated once liability law distinguishes citizens between two kinds: employers and employees. This breaks, for him, the symmetry of all contracts. And on Belloc's view, a whole range of legislation, which puts the onus on employers regardless of merits or responsibilities of individual circumstances is not ground in, say, the ability to pay of deep pockets or in considerations of duties of care or basic fairness or Christian charity (or recognition that some employees may have severely limited options between certain kind of work or starvation),* but rather in a modern kind of paternalism. Here's how Belloc puts it a few pages after the passage quoted above:
But he sees in such paternalist legislation the start of a tendency, a fatal tendency, in which employers control the workers on behalf of a quasi-permanent status quo. The capitalist class will also help collect taxes for the state. (This is rather prescient--for in our times corporations end up collecting a good chunk of employees' taxes in the form of various withholdings.) For while at first paternalist legislation may seem to benefit the workers, at bottom the advantages to the state of corporations as tax collectors and agents of control of working classes -- and the very high costs involved in removing capitalists altogether -- will induce the state to help secure a relatively docile workforce for the the capitalist class in which collective bargaining will serve the interests of those at the negotiating table, but not those unrepresented.
Writing a century ago (but in the wake of Bismarck's welfare programs), Belloc argues that over time the welfare state will evolve two permanent classes: rulers and ruled. And while the ruled will have their lives preserved and a kind of permanent employment guarantee, which will be "necessarily transformed into a system of compulsory labor" (or what is now known as 'workfare'). The workers can expect to experience state violence if they wish to challenge this permanent arrangement.
The end-state of this state of affairs is one in which property rights of the capitalist class are secured, in which the working poor are guaranteed a basic income if and only if they work, and in which only the capitalist class has full citizenship. Of the road to serfdom theses this one has non-trivial plausibility to be our future judging by many dystopiab Hollywood movies.
To be sure, Belloc does not think this outcome inevitable in all capitalist structures, but if the initial conditions for the rise of capitalism are oligarchic (as he thinks occurred in England as a result of Henry VIII's confiscation of the monasteries and distribution of these lands to a limited number of cronies) this particular outcome is necessary. So, lurking in Belloc's argument -- he is not shy about this -- is a kind of argument for limiting excessive income inequality. In the lingo of Ingrid Robeyns, Belloc is a limitarian. To be continued.
*Belloc recognizes this point earlier in the text. He has a whole theory of biopolitics I return to some day.
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