We’re conditioned to accept the prevailing ideas of society, and most people inculcated with an inherent moderation and deference in the way that we act towards the authorities.  As a result of that deference in actuality, legend and popular folklore often tell us as much about our understanding of justice and freedom from tyranny as actions do.  The tale of William Tell is one such story.

In the 14th century, Switzerland was a very different place to the one known to us toward.  Yes, it still had the Alpine peaks and valleys and it was still back then known for its agricultural output (although chocolate may have been pushing it).  However, it was most certainly not neutral, but held firmly under the control of the Habsburgs, then a major dynasty, although not yet the preeminents that they would become, in the Holy Roman Empire.

Three Swiss cantons had signed the Federal Charter in 1291, affirming their sovereignty and independence from external forces.  The Habsburg governor of Uri, Hermann Gessler, eager to prove his dominance of the area, raised a pole in the centre of the capital, Altdorf, crowned by his hat, and ordered that all locals bow down before it, and, by it, show allegiance to the Habsburg regime and his own arbitrary rule.

Tell had other ideas, and refused.  Angered, Gessler ordered Tell to shoot an apple off the head of his son, Walter, with a crossbow, on punishment (of refusal or failure) of both being executed.  Fortunately, as that legend records, Tell proved himself to be an expert marksman, and, on 18th November 1307, 700 years ago today, successful took the apple from his son’s head.

When Gessler asked Tell why he carried a second bolt in his quiver, when Tell was clearly so talented, Tell replied that he intended to shoot Gessler if he had accidentally killed his son.  Enraged even more, Gessler had Tell locked up in a nearby castle, but, escaping thanks to a storm during transit, Tell returned to Altdorf, and killed the governor with his remaining bolt.  This sparked the people of the three cantons to rise up, and forever cast off the shackles of the Austrian regime.

Like the tale of Prometheus and that of John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, Tell defied the illogic of his overlords, and cast off his chains through righteous action against arbitrary tyranny.  All three legends, whilst none of them historically accurate, tell a similar story.  All three heroic individuals refused to bow to the absolute and unjustified rule to which they were subjected, and fought back, using both their brains and brawn.  If we judge the people by the tales that they tell, we can tell that freedom, whether in Ancient Greece, in 14th century Switzerland, or in the 20th Century, is an eternal desire, and one that cannot be denied.

Apparently, ‘caveat emptor’ means something completely different as far as the Guardian is concerned. Meera Selva seems to be very confused when it comes to what Africa’s major problem is when it comes to employing its mineral resources.

Apparently:

China has been quite rightly criticised for exploiting Africa, buying up mining concessions and primary goods in opaque deals that benefit African leaders but not necessarily their people.

And that’s the fault of the African governments, not of the Chinese companies. May this be a very timely warning to the lefties that populate the hills and vales of Guardiland: sometimes (read: “always”) government’s objectives aren’t the same objectives as their peoples. Maybe smaller government is the answer?

Elsewhere, Chinese self-interest is genuinely helping African economies. This week, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China bought a 20% stake in the Standard Bank group, Africa’s largest bank. The deal helps China diversify its financial services and sends a signal that Africa’s nascent investment banking and insurance industries are worth investing in. The deal also treats Standard Bank as an equal, not an institution that needs to be lectured by a more powerful group.

That’s because Standard Bank, unlike the other investments the Chinese are making, is a private company. Chinese self-interest helps Africans in this case because the Africans are interested in helping themselves. The invisible hand only works to the benefit of all when there’s a profit motivation.

If the regulatory system is such that there is illegitimate profit to be made, as is the case with “l’État c’est moi” dictators siphoning off billions to their own bank accounts, the invisible hand leads to illegitimate profit. The only way one can avoid such illegitimate profit is by privatising industry and guaranteeing private property rights more effectively than is the case in most African countries.

Africa is still being lectured to by western institutions that offer aid with one hand and put up trade barriers with the other. China on the other hand, sweeps in offering to do business. Guess which side Africa would rather deal with?

They’d rather deal with the sanctimonious Western governments that feel they have to spend their taxpayers’ money to soothe their guilt over slavery. However, since we don’t ask for anything in return, the Africa governments can deal with the Chinese at the same time. It’s not either-or; because of our ineptitude in forcing institutional reform in Africa, the Africa leaders can give Western aid to their people, and funnel Chinese investment into their Swiss bank accounts.

On the plus side, at least she supports free trade, right? Actually, she probably doesn’t understand what it even means, because that implies just as much institutional reform in Africa as it does in Europe. There are more barriers to trade between African countries than between Africa and other continents, and trade between African countries is derisory 10.5% of the continent’s total trade. Another example of government failure in Africa.

The fact of the matter is that Africa is the poorest continent in the world, the continent hit by the most debilitating military conflicts, and the most afflicted by the health and social problems that afflict it because it is governed by bad people doing bad things. The way to combat all the ills of the continent is to combat its tinpot dictators. If Meera Selva is truly interested in helping the world’s neediest, she’ll help them, rather than help their oppressors.

Today’s Times contained a bitter and, quite frankly, evil editorial by Carol Sarler on the issue of consent within the democratic system.  The issue is a challenging one for libertarians - split between legalists and activists - but I hardly think anyone that supports the cause of liberty can claim to be a Sarlerist.

It must have been mightily crowded last week: standing room only, up there on the higher moral ground, crammed with the bristling self-righteous who prefer, as they always put it, to “opt out” rather than to compromise a “principle”.

The fact that she puts the word ‘principle’ in quotation marks is a damning indictment of her lack of principle.  If she considers principle to be to illusion, maybe she should shut her mouth rather than preach her own principles to those that realise the value of morality.  But onwards to find out what principles she lacks…

Now, jostling for position, comes the JP who is fighting for the right to opt out of family cases that might involve same-sex adoption, the conscience-smitten family doctors who wish to opt out of the entire “process” of abortion – including even referring a patient to a doctor of different stripe – and the sanctimonious couple who have fostered 28 children but are opting out because they have been told they are legally bound to let children think that homosexuals are OK people too.

Snarling Sarler gives us more rhetoric claptrap that belies her complete lack of interest in moral activity or consistency.  I would wager that most doctors are doctors exactly because they are ‘conscience-smitten’, and consider caring to be a vocation.  Certainly, no doctor would work in this country, with its NHS-depressed wage structure, for the paycheque alone.  The same is true of the foster parents; it’s caring that makes them do anything.

I disagree fundamentally with these opt-outs (I think that, to quote a female friend, abortion is the best thing since sliced bread).  However, it is perfectly right for the individual to have opinions, right or wrong, that differ from the majority, and it’s the individual’s right to act upon his or her opinions.  When it is those opinions that make any opt-in possible, like the doctor or foster parents, to criticise compassion is to prove the sanctimony and stupidity that underline Sarler’s bile.

The whole trend is, frankly, social sense stood on its head. Such is our growing timidity of causing offence in the face of the doctrines of minorities that all anybody has to do is to invoke “morality”, “deity” or “principle” for it to appear that it is they who are pristine of spirit and the rest of us who occupy a lower dimension.

I don’t quite think these people are doing it for sanctimony’s sake.  They’re doing it for principle’s sake.  They have a belief that you don’t have - like the well-formed opinion that Carol Sarler is a f***wit - and they don’t want to give it up.  The only way you could be in a lower dimension than them is if you don’t believe in morality or principle.  Oh, wait, the quotation marks again?  Taxi to the seventh circle of hell for Ms Sarler.

The higher moral ground, in a democracy, belongs to consensus drawn from the values of the majority and implemented by the flawed beast that is the law. Those who would exempt themselves from it, no matter how enjoyable the fleeting fame of their martyrdom, deserve no more endorsement or admiration than any other petty delinquent.

As its name might suggest, the moral high ground belongs to those that act morally, not those that follow the word of the immoral man.  By opting out of others’ actions, they don’t necessarily act morally or immorally.  However, to coerce others, regardless of principle or belief, to follow the unprincipled and unbelieved word of the immoral man, is immorality defined.

That is the supposed ‘high ground’ that the majoritarian absolutist occupies.  That ground commands no heights.  It provides no defence from the superior arms of the individualist.  It does, however, pose a threat only by its prevalence as a belief, and by the fact that it is backed by the literal guns of the immoral man.

In the fact of that, these people are made martyrs against their wishes, when all they want to do is exercise a small opt-out that allows society to benefit from their large opt-in.  They don’t do it to become martyrs.  They do it for principle: the very thing that Sarler derides, and the very thing that Sarler lacks.

Unlike Northern Ireland, Burma doesn’t have a marching season, but, if it did, this would be it. A month of sporadic protests has escalated recently, after the military attacked some monks at a protest march on 5th September, and the past week has witnessed daily marches of monks and other civilians around the capital, Rangoon.

On Monday, tens of thousands of Burmese people turned out onto the streets to protest against the oppressive and primitivist military junta. Lower-end estimates for the number in Rangoon alone were 50,000, with potentially as many as 100,000 in the capital and unknown thousands in 24 other cities around the country.

That’s impressive, but it’s not unprecedented. Last time ended with the military ruthlessly cutting down the peaceful protestors, killing over 3,000 innocent people. Now, the junta has made ominous sounds, including threatening to ‘take action’ against ‘destructive elements‘ that were supposedly behind the protests.

Burma is one of the world’s most secretive and oppressive states. According to Freedom House:

The junta rules by decree, controls the judiciary, suppresses nearly all basic rights, and commits human rights abuses with impunity

Whilst Human Rights Watch adds:

Burma is the textbook example of a police state. Government informants and spies are omnipresent. … There is no freedom of speech, assembly or association.

Which is all very unsurprising, because it’s a military dictatorship.  They clearly have no qualms about opening fire upon civilians: including monks of the country’s supposedly state religion.

So we can’t be surprised when the ongoing series of protests gets ugly. We can only hope that, when that happens, the Burmese people don’t lack the will-power and dedication required, and that they refuse to bow down to those that deny them their most basic of rights.

The existence of the state can only be justified in defending the rights of its people: using its monopoly on the initiation of force to protect civilians’ indisputable rights from the threats posed against them. Most people incorrectly insist that a degree of enforcing a uniform and disputable morality is the responsibility of the state. The form of government best-suited to enforcing its own morality upon the individual is that guided by the immaterial, and ill-designed for tolerating dissent.

On 20 September 1870, the forces of the Kingdom of Italy, led by General Raffaele Cadorna, breached the Aurelian Walls that encircle the ancient city of Rome: home of the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. The capture of the city on that day completed the Risorgimento, and put an end to the temporal power of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope was given a rump state, the Vatican City in 1929 (by that nice fellow Mussolini), but one that is pathetically small: at under half a square kilometre, it’s smaller than Fitzrovia, and a quarter of the size of Regent’s Park.

Seeing the tiny scale of the Vatican, it’s easy to forget that, for over a millennium, the Roman Catholic Church held dominion of vast swathes of Italy, and, in league with the allied Holy Roman Empire and the French and Spanish rulers, held all of Europe under fear. Their two main weapons were fear, ruthless efficiency, and a fanatical devotion to the Pope. (Damn, their three main weapons were…)

When we hear of news of theocracies on the news, it’s almost always of Iran or Saudi Arabia, and always in unfavourable terms (except when it’s on Channel 4 or BBC, when it’s obviously laudatory: which proves that it’s a bad thing). But that belies for how long we, or, rather, our European neighbours, were in thrall to the same phenomenon: oppression at the hands of unthinking and unyielding dictators, enforcing their morality on others without earthly justification. Of all forms of government, the theocracy is the greatest of threats to liberty. On this day in 1870, the world was rid of one of the gravest of all time.

For the past two centuries, it’s been beaten into the British to hate the French, and all their (many, multitudinous, myriad) idiosyncrasies. However, as un-British as it may seem to celebrate the French national holiday, today, I found myself hoisting the red-white-and-blue and marking Bastille Day with as much pride as the most slimy and garlicky Provençal vintner. Every patriotic Briton should feel the same.

Despite what people say, what Bastille Day marked was not the end of monarchy in France. Instead, it was end of absolute monarchy: a system of government unchecked by constitutional limits, unfettered by morality or respect for the rights of any person but the King, and, crucially, completely different to the system used on this side of the Channel. Ours, as a representative monarchy, has been enshrined since Magna Carta, dating back to 1215.

Lacking a French Magna Carta, King Louis XVI was free to rule by decree, arbitrarily and without care. For all the boasts of ‘philosopher kings’, no French king ruled with any intellectual rigour or reason. When, on 11 July 1789, Louis XVI’s Finance Minister, Jacques Necker, advised the King to begin to budget his personal expenses, he was fired for his impudence. This act, one of reason against unreason and compromise against absolutism, sparked the Storming of the Bastille three days later.

The distinction between an absolute monarchy and a constitutionally-bound one is crucial. Whilst every French king was grotesquely unpopular in France, the British king at the time of the French Revolution, George III, was beloved by all, despite his mental faculties and colonial successes (or lack thereof). Even the future George IV, whose profligacy with money (and women) is and was renowned, was never under threat of losing his head, for one simple reason: whereas the French monarchs ruled in spite of the people, the British monarchs ruled because of the people.

Constitutionally-limited monarchy gives the framework of apolitical and non-partisan leadership, with a leader responsible for upholding the rights of the citizen guaranteed by such agreements as Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. Instead of being the statist element that is most arbitary, in a representative democracy, a constitutionally-bound monarch becomes the one that is most constant, and most likely to uphold the natural rights of the people from the otherwise unchecked terrors of either an absolute monarchy or a deified democracy.

That the United Kingdom has enjoyed this for so many centuries, and that France’s diametrically-opposed system collapsed so readily in the face of pitchfork-armed farmers (a taste of things to come), ought to be a celebration of our uniqueness, and the success of our (relatively) people-centric historic constitutional system. Our dislike of absolute rule makes ours the exceptional system that proves the rule.

If the readers of BBC History magazine had their way, everyone in the country would be enjoying a day off work today. In a 2006 poll, their readership chose the 15th June as the date they would like to see dedicated to a new national holiday to celebrate British values. Winning out over more auspicious rivals, such as VE Day, Armistice Day, Trafalgar Day, the 15th June doesn’t seem to have much going for it. That is, except that it was the day the first blow in the fight against tyranny hit home.

On 15 June 1215, the marshland of Runnymede, in Berkshire, was home to one of history’s rarest spectacles: an autocratic ruler giving away his power and his asserted right to rule by force alone. That day, King John of England signed Magna Carta, ending the absolute monarchy and guaranteeing basic liberties of all free men.

Beyond the intricate balancing institutions between the King and his Barons, Magna Carta guaranteed many of the rights that are protected today. It outlawed imprisonment without trial, false imprisonment, and disproportionate punishment; and guaranteed the right to self-defence, the separation of executive and judiciary, and trial by jury.

In short, it enshrined the rule of law and the mechanisms by which our inalienable fundamental rights - to life, liberty, and property - have been protected for the past eight centuries years. Without it, the people would be left as they were, prostrate in front of the state. Whilst Magna Carta did not, as no law thus far has, allowed man to live free of all tyranny, it was inarguably the first step, and, for that reason, ought to be commemorated as heartily as any day before or since.