Quotulatiousness

January 10, 2022

English counties explained

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jay Foreman
Published 13 Sep 2021

BUY MAP MEN MUGS, T-SHIRTS, POSTERS ETC…
http://www.mapmenmerch.com

SEE NEW EPISODES EARLY, AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES EXTRAS…
http://www.patreon.com/jayforeman

Written, presented and edited by
JAY FOREMAN https://www.twitter.com/jayforeman
MARK COOPER-JONES https://www.twitter.com/markcooperjones

AD, Camera, Props and Costumes
JADE NAGI https://www.twitter.com/jade_nagi

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa), CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons

I wouldn’t say it explains why my home town seemed to move from county to county every few years since my family emigrated, but at least it provides a few clues about the changes.

QotD: Absolute monarchs versus modern bureaucracy

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

As Tocqueville wrote: “There was a time in Europe in which the law, as well as the consent of the people, clothed kings with a power almost without limits. But almost never did it happen that they made use of it.”

True. His Majesty was an absolute tyrant — in theory. But in practice he was in his palace hundreds of miles away. A pantalooned emissary might come prancing into your dooryard once every half-decade and give you a hard time, but for the most part you got on with your life relatively undisturbed. In Tocqueville’s words:

    Although the entire government of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the emperor alone, and although he remained, in time of need, the arbiter of all things, the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.

Just so. You were the mean and worthless subject of a cruel and mercurial despot but, even if he wanted to, he lacked the means to micro-regulate your life in every aspect. Yet what would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible “to subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations”?

That moment has now arrived.

Mark Steyn, After America, 2011.

Powered by WordPress