Socialism, by which I mean democratic socialism, is an absolutely appalling doctrine, but the worst thing about socialists is that they are liberals too.
The worst thing about conservatives is that they are liberals too.
The worst thing about liberals is that they are no longer liberals because they no longer believe in freedom.
If you seek their monument look at the European Union which actually boasts of being not the superpower it once hoped to be but a ‘regulatory superpower’.
Look at the edifice of DEI and environmental regulations
The best thing about Marxists is that they are not liberals. When one listens to Marxists, while keeping in mind the tenets that are
de fide in their false religion, they have a lot of insights because they understand power.
Marxist legal scholars of the Rosenberg Circle have developed the idea of regulatory imperialism. Regulatory imperialism means the way in which the increasing complexity complexity of compliance rules bind companies like the sleeping Gulliver was tied up by the Lilliputians
He broke free in an instant.
Multinational companies have done the same.
Compliance laws benefit big companies. Small and medium sized ones live off their largesse but cannot compete with them.
It is, in fact, a kind of trickle-down economics, a theory that Arthur Laffer invented and wrote on the back of an envelope over dinner with Donald Rumsfeld.
The economists say it doesn't work. It always entrenches the position of the rich and keeps the less rich in their places.
That's certainly the case with compliance legislation. The large companies that are polluting or infringing other laws are able to absorb the cost of fines while they build market share.
Actually the companies lobby for more and more regulation because the more regulation there is, the more entrenched their market position is.
There are still people in Eastern Europe who are nostalgic for the communist days but it's better ruled by Washington. That’s beside my point which is that nature abhors a vacuum and the vacuum left by the Soviet rulers was filled by the Americans and their Frankenstein’s monster, the European Union.
What we have seen is the systemic transformation of Eastern Europe into a managed regulatory colony
That's where Marxists are more insightful than people who believe in the European project.
The Rosenberg Circle do not see economic growth as a rising tide that lifts all boats and see compliance as purely a battle for power.
Who whom, as Lenin didn’t say.
I'm an admirer of the British empire but this kind of colonialism is much less benign.
When a structural failure or procurement scandal occurs in a large international organisation, executives do not panic. Instead, they point to completed compliance files to prove they followed standard protocol.
Nowhere does this trap snap shut more aggressively than with the heavy industries of the European periphery.
Consider how this economic imperialism hands infrastructure construction and defense procurement, two things essential to every nation, to foreigners.
EU procurement directives demand an extraordinarily complex trail of data mapping, running the gamut from granular carbon accounting to corporate diversity quotas within supply-chain networks
I spend much of my time meeting lawyers and there was a time when I thought public procurement law was tedious and in the dear bygone time it was, but now it's the opposite.
It's by far the most exciting, the most cynical area of law there is.
The world, Horace Walpole said, is a comedy for those who think, a tragedy for those who feel, and public procurement law in Europe is the same.
Patricia Kovacevic (Osmani), a Romanian lawyer who has got into the compliance game in the United States, says the quiet bit not out loud but sotto voce when she notes that varying regulations produce "different levels of sophistication" and inevitable "consolidation." "Sophistication" means the money to hire expensive lawyers, while "consolidation" is the execution warrant for less sophisticated companies.
The great global corporations actively welcome this mountain of red tape, knowing that while their own treasuries can carry the weight, their smaller domestic rivals will simply suffocate beneath it.
To this modern malaise, the radicals of the Rosenberg Circle propose a Marxist revolution, an idea not without romantic charm to a Tory like me.
Rejecting the naive notion that Eastern Europe can ever achieve equity through obedience, they advocate a spirited regional mutiny that throws Brussels' ESG metrics and procurement rules entirely out the window. In place of these abstract data traps, they demand streamlined national codes that favour producers, raw industrial output and state-subsidised domestic firms legally shielded from the jurisdiction of foreign courts.
It is a grand, if perilous, scheme of decoupling, built on the simple concept that to escape the trap one must stop paying the legal tribute, refuse to tick the boxes, and reclaim the ancient right to manage one’s own affairs.
For the truth don't go to lawyers, go to historians. They understand. Compliance law dates in England to the 1986 Big Bang which revolutionised the City of London. It began in the United States in the early 1990s. It has proved a failure. It should be abolished.
I have always thought most employment law should be abolished too. In England everything from Barbara Castle's laws onwards. In a free society there should be very little employment law. I tend to think competition law should be scrapped too. Let freedom ring out!
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