 Well my subject today is that of the greatest and most valued freedom of all and that all of us really treasure in our hearts. That is to say the freedom from consequences or perhaps I should say the freedom from adverse consequences, particularly economic ones. And I might even go so far as to say that this is the only freedom that much of the population of western countries now values and for which it is prepared to fight or at least to struggle. And you could call it free lunch syndrome and it affects millions of people. They want to have as much choice as possible but they don't want the consequences either practical or moral of their own choices. And I first became aware of this problem in a kind of incoate way when I was very young. A teacher told us something which stuck in my mind forever. I was about nine, ten years old I think. And I wasn't sure why it stuck in my mind and I think in the most literal sense it was untrue. He said that there were people principally beautiful women in the United States who after the privations of the war years wanted to eat as much as they could. They wanted to indulge their appetite in a way in which they had been unable for several years. But of course at the same time they wanted to avoid putting on weight. So in order to eat as much as they liked without becoming fat they swallowed in a capsule the head of a tapeworm that would absorb a considerable part of the food energy that they consumed. Now anyone who's seen a tapeworm, a beef or pork or even fish will have been cured of nature mysticism forever. No one who's seen a tapeworm will think that nature knows best. But in fact it's not true in the majority of cases that weight loss is a feature of infestation with tapeworms. And if there is any weight loss in such infestation it's because of a loss of appetite rather than absorption of food by the parasite. So I think the story is unlikely to have been true in the literal sense. But at the age at which I was told it I think I was about nine or ten as I said. One is rather uncritical about what one is told. And the story being more about human nature than actual physiology at least alerted me subliminally to the desire of people and the lengths to which they might be prepared to go not to accept or to avoid the most natural consequences of their own acts. Well let me jump forward 40 or 50 years to a small problem that arose in the hospital in which I worked and there was a male nurse there. And he was actually a very nice young man, a good nurse as well, kind and competent and unfortunately those two qualities don't always go together. But unfortunately he was enamoured of certain modern fashions among them that of piercing his visage with a lot of ironmongery. And there can be no doubt I think that self-mutilation with the assistance of others is one of the few industries that is genuinely growing in the western world. And the connection of this with the economic crisis is perhaps something that's worth exploring. Well the young man in question decided to pierce his ears with 12 or so earrings. And he was told by the administrators of the hospital that this was against the rules. It was not only unhygienic but tended to frighten old ladies when they woke up. He said that it was his right to pierce his ears in this way and the hospital did not dispute this but nevertheless it maintained its stance. What the young man angered by what he saw as the hospital's obduracy found hard to accept that was that his right to pierce his ears could not be exercised in the absence of consequences for his employment. For him rights floated in a metaphysical world where choice could be exercised in an entirely whimsical fashion. For him a right was only a right if he were protected from the consequences of exercising it. And this view of human rights encourages people to believe that there might be actions or there should be actions without unpleasant consequences for them otherwise their rights don't exist. In many cases an absence of economic consequences or at least of apparent consequences serves the end of entrenched bureaucracies or rent seekers such as I. Let me take the English legal system and from which I'm talking about an example from which I have myself sometimes obtained some personal rent as an expert witness. As an emblematic example in particular our taught system. This is the system by which people are compensated financially for wrongs that have been done to them and for a claim to succeed in the English system and I assume it's the same in the American system. It must be shown that a wrong has been done to someone by someone else and second that the person to whom the wrong has been done has suffered some pain or loss thereby. And incidentally I first became interested in this problem with the huge increase in legal claims against doctors that seem to flow from an advertisement in the outpatient department of the state run hospital in which I worked. The hospital managers hoping to raise a little revenue installed a system of television screens in the waiting rooms and which they hired out to local advertisers including and I should say especially lawyers one of whom came up with this inspiring jingle. Remember that this is to patients who are waiting to see the doctor. Remember where there's blame there's a claim. Which is just of course the right spirit to get the patient into before he goes to see the doctor. Well the complaints department of the hospital I might add now probably employs more staff than the entire hospital administration of 40 years ago. And one's rather reminded of the fact which I often elude that the British welfare state succeeded in creating more permanent invalids than did the first world war. The great majority of people who resort to the courts do not fund themselves of course. Either their cases are funded by from public funds or lawyers take on their clients on a no win no fee basis. And then of course the lawyers take out insurance against losing cases so you can see the whole system is not exactly designed to reduce the number of cases. Chamferty as it's practiced in the United States that is to say the means by which successful lawyers share the proceeds from their clients with their clients I should say is not permitted in England. A system has been created then which against natural justice means that anyone can claim against anyone else and have nothing or at least nothing economically tangible to lose thereby. For the person who sues there are no adverse consequences no adverse financial consequences and his choice to sue is of no financial significance to him whatsoever. Even if his claim is proved beyond reasonable doubt to have been grossly dishonest no penalty or even the mildest of costs attaches to the person who has made it. He pays no penalty for his lies or what amounts to an attempted extortion. He leaves the court with exactly the same reputation as he entered it and no blot on his character. And he has no blot even if as is quite often the case he has attempted such fraud on several previous occasions. I won't go into the other corrupt and corrupting mechanisms of the system. Suffice it to say that it has succeeded in conjuring up holy specious and non existed illnesses out of the air. For example whiplash injury which once they have entered legal precedent are as difficult to remove merely because of the fact of non existence. They are as difficult to remove from the tort system as books once were from the index liberal and probatorium the Catholic Church's list of prohibited books. And in Liverpool a city with an exceptionally high rate even for provincial England of dependence on public expenditure for its populations like livelihood. Buses are festooned with advertisements encouraging people to make claims against employers not that they have any employers but if they have employers. Or public authorities much in the same spirit as people are encouraged to buy lottery tickets. There with this difference that the purchaser of the lottery ticket loses the cost of the ticket when he loses. You have nothing to lose say the advertisements actually say that you have nothing to lose. This is not quite true of course reality is not so easily mocked. Those who enter the legal labyrinth soon find their lives completely dominated by it. They become obsessed with their cases a fraudulent claim becomes by constant repetition in the mind to appear to him who makes it to be a genuine one. So that in the end when he does not win his case he experiences a genuine sense of grievance which lasts for the rest of his life. I mean as we know grievance is lasts forever. And those who started out with with bogus suffering which is claimed only in the hope of compensation or compo as it is universally known in Liverpool. End up with real suffering and so on and so forth. And if you call a man an invalid or if he calls himself an invalid eventually he will become one. But those who enter the labyrinth do so under the impression that they have nothing to do but wait for the payment to be made without any other consequences to themselves. And they are encouraged to believe this and they are told that this is justice. Well the social and economic costs and effects of this system are not in considerable however. Not far short of five percent of the total expenditure on health care in the country goes on fees to lawyers now. It's increasing exponentially. And even though the number of lawyers in Britain has tripled in 30 years, since 1985 the absolute numbers of individuals involved professionally with litigation in this field is very small. That is to say a scheme which claims that there is freedom from consequences for litigants results in what is morally if not legally the malversation of funds into the pockets of a very small number of people. Costing something in the region of $120 per head of the population, man, woman and baby. Which is to say $500 a year for what used to be a normal family of two adults and two children. $500 a year is hypothecated to the payment of malpractice lawyers and their hangars on such as I through the tax system. If you include the payments made also to the claimants, many of these payments are wholly undeserved. They are made without court settlements only because the cost of going into court is so astronomical. People are prepared to pay off claimants. The figure rises to $1,500 a year. That is quite a burden for families and an economy to bear. As I said it comes about because of the dishonest promise of freedom from consequences made to the litigants. There could hardly be a better or perhaps I should say worse example of public expenditure for the sake of private enrichment. This is all brought about without the need for those enriched to have done anything illicit or illegal. Well I don't want to sound sensorious so I remind you that I too have fed or perhaps I should say sipped at this particular trough. It corrupts people even if they do nothing illegal and even if they work within it honestly and conscientiously. Never themselves lying for example or saying anything that they know to be untrue. But of course all this pales into insignificance by comparison with the life of choice but no consequences that the welfare state offers many people. Their choice it is true is restricted to a very small field because their housing, healthcare, education, social insurance, pensions and so on are provided for them. And they have little choice in those things which one might have supposed were of deep existential importance to them or significance. Their choices limited to such matters as what to watch on television and how to dispose of the pocket money that is left to them or I should say granted to them. And it doesn't really matter how they conduct themselves because everything that they have received is received as of right. And what is it right cannot be foregone because if it could be foregone it would no longer be a right but a privilege and something received by grace and favour. And no one these days can accept that he is privileged or in receipt of something that he personally did not deserve. And no doubt the decline of religious sensibility according to which life is felt to be a gift and not a right. A gift and not a right has something to do with this and I speak as someone who is not at all religious. Well the welfare state now has had the effect though I don't think it was necessarily the intention of its founders of continually lessening the consequences of acts or omissions at least for quite a large part of the population. The founders took seriously as a possibility and as something desirable the second leg of Marx's slogan in the critique of the Goethe programme from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. This is because they took the humanitarian view that there is nothing more cruel than need and for which of us would like to be in need. But many needs of course are independent of any effort we may make to supply them including amongst others and I think we all feel this the need not to be poor. And since poverty is nowadays almost universally defined in public discourse anyway as having an income less than 60% of the median income it follows that only redistribution on a very large scale can meet the need not to be poor even if everybody individually is poorer as a result. In the company of billionaires after all a millionaire is poor. The result of this is that for in the lower level of the economic scale the difference between making enormous effort and making none is significantly lessened. And where efforts are not rewarded choices that in other circumstances would be important are utterly without consequences or at least obvious consequences and I should say obvious consequences. And the main complaint is that the choice is not of wider scope than it is wider scope than other people have. At the other end of the economic scale of course and I've never inhabited the other end of the economic scale choices that are right for the individual if by right we mean those that lead to his personal enrichment are often wrong morally or for his company his society or even the world economy. Here the problem is initially one of the wrong incentives rather than an absence of incentives but they also include the lack of serious personal consequences if the person makes the wrong decisions and choices. And the spectacle of vast bonuses for people who work in insolvent banks has now become a pretty familiar one. And for such people adverse financial consequences do not exist and are known in advance not to have existed. But what's wrong you might ask with a life in which choices can be made without any fear of adverse circumstances. Is this not something which many of us secretly dream of we'd like to smoke without damaging our lungs to drink without having hangovers. Of course that is of no application here I understand that. And to eat without putting on weight and so on and so forth. Are we not like Harold Skimpol who said in Dickens' Bleak House I ask only to be free the butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpol what it concedes to the butterflies. Imagine though what a life without the possibility of adverse consequences for our acts and admissions would actually be like. And Milton puts it like this in Paradise Lost after Satan is expelled from Paradise. So farewell hope and with hope farewell fear farewell remorse all good to me is lost evil be thou my good. And perhaps there can be fear without hope but there cannot be hope without fear. So that the attempt to abolish fear for example the fear of need extinguishes the hope at least for many people of betterment by their own effort. And what is left for them is a small area of choice without consequences. This choice is not enough to give significance to a human life. Even if you're not a complete materialist and buying materialist I don't mean in the philosophical sense but in the sense of someone who believes that the main aim of life is or should be the maximum level of consumption. Even if you're not that you will probably agree that a life in which the standard of living is not all or is not at all or only very marginally dependent upon personal effort is one which is significantly deprived of an important source of meaning. There can be no pride in it and no self respect and you've only come to compare the deportment of people in the poor areas of western cities particularly Bournure in France or the bad areas in England, Liverpool where with poor areas in Africa most of Africa of course is poor where poverty of course is much much greater in the absolute sense and I want to make clear I'm no admirer of poverty to see that this is so that there's no self respect. Go for example to the city of Middlesbrough in the northeast England I say that rhetorically I don't mean you really to do it I wouldn't advise it. There is nothing quite as dispiriting as a steel town without the steel and the participation of the state in the local economy is approaching Soviet levels there and the largest private industry as far as I can see was state subsidized take away pizza. From my hotel I counted six pizza parlours within 200 meters six and you could tell there was an economic crisis on because a seventh had closed down just and the last steel blast steel blast furnace in Middlesbrough was in the process of being converted into a pizza restaurant. Well perhaps it's not altogether surprising in a town where pizzas are made in blast furnaces that many people are grossly fat. So if you go out at 11 o'clock in the morning in Middlesbrough in the center of Middlesbrough you will see people so fat that by the age of 38 they can move about only in wheelchairs. And you will see them taking their mid-morning light refreshments which consist of vast hamburgers with piles of fried potatoes which are washed down by sweet pink drinks and that is just before their lunch. What then are the results of the abolition of fear and with it hope? The choices that are available to people in this situation are of little consequence even to them. They don't care even what they eat or how they dress and carelessness and lack of discrimination become general. For such as live in these circumstances there's no higher and lower, no provident and improvident, no wise and no foolish. Even curiosity is driven out for why be curious in a world in which there are no consequences in what you do. So choice becomes and means little more than the fulfilment of the whim of the moment. That's all it is, it's just a whim. When Milton's Satan says, all good to me is lost, evil be thou my good. He expresses something that has actually come to pass. In a situation in which nothing makes much difference to one's material condition, the vacuum in meaning is filled by sensation and excitement which is more easily procured by bad behaviour than by good. Social pathology then abounds for it creates an interest in existence that would otherwise be lacking. At least bad behaviour and social pathology create crises that lend a saver to existence which would be without bad behaviour, the existence would be stale, flat and unprofitable. The one thing that can be said in favour of psychopathy is that it is not boring, at least not in the short term. And this helps to explain why the abolition of raw want certainly does not lead to a civilised existence in other respects. On the contrary it leads to a kind of fatalism without contentment, a fatalism without acceptance of one's fate as it were and a listless resentment which is sometimes punctuated by insensate outbursts of rage. Of course none of this will come as any surprise to those of us who believe that man is an imperfect creature, a flawed in his very nature, who needs the spur of fear as well as of hope to make him flourish and behave well. For where fear is removed, virtue does not flourish. Most people, when I argue that the abolition of the fear of want has disastrous psychological consequences, suppose that my criticism is mostly of the people who live in this hopeless and fearless limbo that I have described. On the contrary, if I were given to anger, it would be directed at those who have first created this horrible existential trap, perhaps unwittingly, but now refuse utterly to look the consequences in the face. That, ladies and gentlemen, is all I have to say. Thank you.