Hasn’t The Guardian changed over the centuries?

That many of those who write for, or read, The Guardian are Marxists is not a surprise. Thus this in today’s letter section is not a shock:

In Capital, Karl Marx noted that English landlords helped establish capitalism by dispossessing peasants and commodifying land. They earned monopoly rents from their exclusive control of this productive resource – a portion of surplus value originally created by exploited labour and first appropriated by industrial capitalists before being transferred to landowners.

That in those early decades it was the landlords that won out is true. Incomes rose, diets improved, that extra money fed through, via the wheat (or “corn” in the language of the day) price into higher rents on agricultural land. That the economy grew but that the life of the working man did not all that much is called “The Engels Pause”.

Then something happened. The Piketty/Saez/Zucman work shows that agricultural land as a percentage of the national wealth plummeted until it’s not something we generally bother to measure now. Taking with it of course those vast fortunes of the aristocracy as invested in that land. What happened? We abolished the Corn Laws.

Or, to put this another way, we invented more agricultural land - in the Americas, the Ukraine - which then grew the wheat which fed Britain. The Engels Pause was over, the living standards of the workers started their centuries long substantial rise and that aristocratic wealth subverted.

All of which is a useful lesson we feel. That concentration of wealth, wide disparity in incomes, the horrors of economic rents piling up were solved by free trade. So, if we’re worried about the concentration of wealth, wide disparity in incomes, the horrors of economic rents piling up then we should try that solution that worked last time - free trade. Works for us.

But The Guardian. The fun thing is that the newspaper was actually set up to push those policies of free trade. Manchester Liberalism, Richard Cobden and all that. This was the whole purpose - to militate for the free trade that would benefit the lifestyles of the workers. It worked too.

Which brings us to the big question of today. How do we return The Guardian to proposing solutions that actually work?

Tim Worstall