Does The Anglosphere’s Libertarian Capitalism Produce More Creative Freedom?

Sometimes all of us, including not least Clameur de Haro, need a little lightening up and R&R at the end of a distinctly average week. And with that malignant pipsqueak Stuart Syvret purporting to decide for himself which aspects of legal process should or shouldn’t apply to him, the continuing myopia of Jersey’s public sector employees to economic reality, and an EU tax bombshell blowing a hole through an already questionable fiscal policy, this week has certainly fallen into that category.

So on this grey-ish, adjectival October Friday, here’s a classic from CdeH’s not too outrageously mis-spent youth – the great, great, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s legendary performance of Sweet Home Alabama for The Old Grey Whistle Test on (CdeH thinks) 11 April 1975.

Clameur de Haro remembers his youthful self, in those far-off days possessed of long-ish and blond-ish locks and always an aficionado of Whistle Test rather than TOTP, watching the performance, mesmerised. It was one of those moderately seminal experiences we can all recall in our lives, in CdeH's case a Damascene conversion to the blazing vibrancy and musical integrity of Southern Rock that’s lasted now for 34 years.

But looking it again after all this time got CdeH thinking - why is it that the greatest and most successful rock bands of the past 40 years have come predominantly, not just from the democracies of libertarian capitalism, but specifically from their Anglosphere countries?

Is it just the superficially obvious answer of commonality of language and culture? Well, maybe, but that doesn’t quite feel like the whole story.

Or could it somehow be more than this - a subtle consequence of the systems that regulate the Anglosphere societies being based on common law with the presumption that we are all free to do anything we like which is not actually prohibited, rather than the Continental tradition of codifed law that restricts citizens' freedom to only that which is specifically permitted?

So that a bunch of music-mad teenagers in Jacksonville, Florida in 1964 could just go ahead and get together to express themselves without needing 27 separate permissions plus elf'n'safety and risk assessments from state, county and municipal bureaucracies? And in the process create, out of nothing, an artistic and commercial product that millions have exercised their freedom of choice to buy for 30 or 40 years, and still do.

And perhaps that’s a handy reminder also to the dirigiste leftists who argue that libertarian capitalism is a zero-sum game, that there exists by definition only a fixed total of wealth, which requires activist governmental intervention to re-distribute it “fairly”. The amount of wealth isn’t fixed – it can be created out of apparently nothing, provided that individuals and entrepreneurs are allowed the freedom to create it.

Is it really that fanciful to wonder whether, if the enviro-militant Greenists get their way, in five years time, 50 years after Skynyrd was formed, the local jobsworths of the Barack Obamania Federal Energy Use Control & Allocation Agency will tell another bunch of music-mad teenagers in Jacksonville, Florida that they’re not allowed the obligatory licence to just get together for a band practice and jam session in a friend's garage, because the power requirement would represent an irresponsibly unnecessary and frivolous use of the planet's precious resources?

What a lot of enjoyment future Clameurs de Haro would miss. And what an unrelievedly dreary and joyless world it would be. We have to stop it happening, and with the wheels slowly but inexorably starting to come off the Great Anthropogenic Climate Change Scam wagon, we will. But in the meantime, and just for 5 minutes and 41 seconds, click the video clip to full screen, turn up the volume on your speakers, sit back, and enjoy those classic riffs.

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