Winston Churchill was tossed out of government at the end of WWII while he was negotiating at Yalta, and replaced by Clement Attlee, a Labor socialist. Attlee made instant peace with Stalin, giving him eastern Europe, and instituted free healthcare paid for by over-taxing and taking over the British coal mines, steel companies, and railroads. The electric and gas companies, several major trucking companies, The Bank of England, The Thomas Cook’s Travel Agency, and several other companies that Labour thought were too big. The following joke exchange between Churchill and Attlee is supposed to have happened when they found themselves in the men’s room of Parliament

Churchill is supposed to have moved as far as possible from Attlee among the stalls.

“Feeling standoffish, Winston” Attlee is supposed to have said.

“No. “Frightened,” Churchill is supposed to have replied: “Whenever you see something large you try to nationalize it.” (source: The Past Laugh).

It’s funny because ….. there is a fundamental similarity between personal freedom and economic freedom. Nationalize the business a person built with his sweat, friendships, and optimism, and you take away a lot of the person. The difference between social democrats and the rule of republican law is thus more than just who is better at running a railroad or electric company in terms of the trains running on time, it removes the chance of a person to be a person, and makes him or her part of an undifferentiated mass. A mass with equal comforts, and not the ability to succeed or fail as an individual.

There is merit in both sides as shown by the following exchange of speeches.

Clement Attlee, the last and perhaps greatest of mustached British PMs

In May 1945, Winston Churchill said on radio: “I must tell you that a socialist policy is abhorrent to British ideas on freedom. There is to be one State, to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State, once in power, will prescribe for everyone: where they are to work, what they are to work at, where they may go and what they may say, what views they are to hold, where their wives are to queue up for the State ration, and what education their children are to receive. A socialist state could not afford to suffer opposition – no socialist system can be established without a political police. They (the Labour government) would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo.”

Attlee’s response the following day was: “The Prime Minister made much play last night with the rights of the individual and the dangers of people being ordered about by officials. I entirely agree that people should have the greatest freedom compatible with the freedom of others. There was a time when employers were free to work little children for sixteen hours a day. I remember when employers were free to employ sweated women workers on finishing trousers at a penny halfpenny a pair. There was a time when people were free to neglect sanitation so that thousands died of preventable diseases. For years every attempt to remedy these crying evils was blocked by the same plea of freedom for the individual. It was in fact freedom for the rich and slavery for the poor. Make no mistake, it has only been through the power of the State, given to it by Parliament, that the general public has been protected against the greed of ruthless profit-makers and property owners. The Conservative Party remains as always a class Party. In twenty-three years in the House of Commons, I cannot recall more than half a dozen from the ranks of the wage earners. It represents today, as in the past, the forces of property and privilege. The Labour Party is, in fact, the one Party which most nearly reflects in its representation and composition all the main streams which flow into the great river of our national life.”

Churchill claimed, of Attlee that “there’s a lot less there than meets the eye.” But England seems to have accepted that equal wealth outcome is a virtue that should be provided, except as, under Attlee’s socialist government, when it brought starvation and a lack of fuel. “When you hold back the successful, you penalize those who need help.” (Margaret Thatcher)

The more American approach is stronger, though rarely heard today: that there is a certain success in doing it yourself, even if it comes out poorly. Your’s is the hard-won failure. Here’s Theodore Roosevelt.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt, Man in the Arena speech, 1910.

Robert E. Buxbaum; Nov. 26, 2013. I love great thoughts, but rarely rise to do these great deeds. Here’s some photos of Roosevelt, and here I overcome fear of ladders.  Here’s something about my greatest invention, a membrane reactor.

Attlee is also responsible for Britain arming the Arabs in 1946 to help them starve out and kill off the State of Israel. I’m not sure if this is a symptom of do-gooder socialists that they demand the punishment of workers, or if it’s Attlee’s peculiar dislike of Jews. Either way, I can not say I approve.