Paying the Danegeld
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ‘em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
Rudyard Kipling
When dealing with an enemy, one has a few options. There can be a temporary peace, total conquest, or extortion. When one side has an overwhelming advantage, peace makes little sense, but total conquest may not be optimal either. The military campaign may be too expensive, the risk might be too great, or there could be a destruction of capital in terms of skills and resources that would make a victory pyrrhic at best. In these cases the stronger power can simply extort the weaker power into giving exchanging tribute for peace, thereby strengthening themselves while losing nothing of value. It makes more sense to bleed them than destroy them, and the victims are often more willing to pay off their oppressors than risk annihilation.
After a military defeat in 991, King Æthelred the Unready1 offered the Vikings under King Sweyn Forkbeard a tribute of about 10000 pounds of silver to cease hostilities. This tribute, the Danegeld, brought vast riches to the Vikings, but they weren’t above raising the rate. In 994, the Vikings came back demanding more tribute, and King Æthelred was forced to pay another 16,000 pounds of silver. Thus began a vicious cycle where the riches extorted were then used to make the enemy stronger, and therefore able to demand ever more payment in the future. Soon, the kingdom operated not so much for the general welfare of its subjects, but to transfer wealth to an external, hostile force. The extortion racket continued for decades until Sweyn Forkbeard's son, Canute, became King of England.2
Similar types of extortion are done at every scale, from an individual threatening to ruin a colleague by releasing damning information to mafias demanding “protection money” from neighborhood businesses to governments redistributing wealth through taxation from their productive constituents to ideologically aligned patrons. As power is gained with little to no loss, such appeasement only serves to invite more demands until the tribute becomes so onerous that the victims have nothing to lose.
While such extortion could be seen as all uses of force to secure resources, this is a gross oversimplification, though one embraced by radical individualists such as libertarians. The most infuriating part is how close they are to getting it, but falling just short. While mantras like “taxation is theft” and the “non-aggression principle” are woefully inadequate to handle the harsh realities of the real world, they understand fundamentals that are glossed over in modern civics, namely the primacy of violence.
Their main flaw is their philosophical dichotomy between individualism and mass, cohesive action. The ideal libertarian is a man on the prairie, a sovereign citizen with full control of his resources and wielding a rifle to protect them. While romantic, it’s clear why such a mindset doesn’t scale. Outside of Randian fantasies, armies can easily dispatch rugged but disorganized opponents with ease. It is why the Libertarian Party is, and always will be, a joke.
However, if one tries to scale the libertarian mindset to a unified collective, the libertarianism of the Hans-Hermann Hoppe variety, it becomes more tenable.
There is a government of sorts, and whether you consider the entity public or private is immaterial; the outcome is the same. It is emphasized that the government exists for the flourishing of its constituents. The police are there to protect the law-abiding. Fees are used to maintain roads. Building codes are enforced for the safety of the neighborhood. While there are some restrictions on freedom for society to function, the denizens know it benefits the group as a whole, even with some wasteful spending.
The ideal never lasts long, though. Bad actors will always find a way to worm into the organization. Maybe they’ll infiltrate the roads commission and build a little fiefdom. If you want your pothole repaired, get ready to make nice with them. In the beginning the demand might be minor, maybe a special favor or tickets to an exclusive event. As these interactions become normalized, other agencies are forced to pay their own tribute. Their funding spirals upward as less work gets done. The money forms a patronage class that can agitate other agencies and infiltrate those as well. Soon the entire bureaucracy becomes rotten. Roads aren’t being built, and the entire organization seems to exist to appease the worthless parasites. The bad actors that originally entered to exploit resources now have a little kingdom of their own to defend, built off pirating those trying to earn an honest living. The police now exist to extract wealth from the productive while doing nothing for public safety. The entire government apparatus becomes an extortionist racket as the productive members are milked as tax-cattle to fund their enemies.
High-trust, civic-minded citizens are most likely to fall prey by not acknowledging the ground shifting under them. They are most susceptible to the myths of good citizenry long after such a worldview is hopelessly counter-productive. The slow ratchet of higher taxes and lackluster services is viewed as a fact of life. Often, it takes more than a generation to pivot, as the young see with fresh eyes the collapse their elders refuse to confront.
This doesn’t mean all taxation and means of force are the same. While libertarians see all forcible extraction of wealth as equivalent, in the realm of power relations, this couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s very different for a government to tax for defense of one’s homeland, to build an economic safety net to ensure anyone in hard times doesn’t starve to death, and to form a minimum amount of health care for the poor. While one can argue about scale, efficiency, and levels of graft, these are at least tangible uses of government that doesn’t exist to simply serve someone with external loyalities.
Cronyism in local, state, and federal governments has always existed. In the years from the New Deal to the Great Society to the present, such cronyism has reached a fever pitch with new, legal avenues of graft open to anyone of the right political persuasion. Every year money flowed from the pocketbooks of productive citizens to radical progressives and foreign influencers, who then used that money to jockey for more power. Danegeld was offered by local governments, corporations, and cultural institutions to make the rabble-rousers depart for a time. The average taxpayer saw costs in every level of society rise, not just in taxes but compliance costs for increasingly nebulous regulations, all the while being frozen out of high-power positions and watching them be given to cronies instead. Agencies went from being a positive contributor to a wasteful but necessary component to an active enemy of those paying into the system.
For the longest time, this clear extortion was viewed as run-of-the-mill waste, the predictable outcome of government spending. While conservatives saw fat to be cut, progressives saw income used to form and maintain a vast patronage network. The sums of money got larger, the graft more blatant, and the terrorizing of normal citizens more pronounced. When Elon Musk came in with the well-intentioned but poorly executed DOGE initiative, the average person was awe-struck by the corruption. Money, likely in the hundreds of billions, went to a mass network of progressive NGOs that survived by government largesse. These orgs seemed to exist solely to be rabble-rousers. Intricate networks of NGO employees, loyal foot soldiers, and paramilitary wings of Antifa made people wonder if all the revolutions and turmoil of The Summer of Floyd, The Covid Hysteria, and the Rodney King Riots were indirectly funded through the federal government. It’s likely DOGE didn’t find half of the graft, as the Military-Industrial Complex, the Israel Lobby, and other sacred cows of the establishment right likely have the same level of corruption.
When police in several cities do little to nothing to deter crime, but will come down like the wrath of God to those who took matters into their own hands, people question the civic pieties they learned in school. When hucksters like Jesse Jackson gleefully extorted businesses for decades in clear cases of racketeering, they wondered why the legal hammer only went one direction. When America bombs Iran to sate the bloodlust of a foreign country, they wonder where loyalties lie. When non-profits like the SPLC are caught funding the very radicalism they pretend to be fighting, they wonder if these organizations thrive on chaos. They start to wonder if much of their taxes are being used by enemy forces to continue to crush their resolve. They wonder if the Vikings have taken over in all but name.
The first step in fighting paying the Danegeld is realizing you are paying the Danegeld, and for all of Trump’s foibles so far, he has laid bare the venomous contempt this patronage network has for the traditional American way of life. Billions of dollars were spent for the express purpose of alienating heritage Americans and importing their replacements. It isn’t relegated to Washington D.C. either. Religious congregations are realizing their higher ups hate their guts and will require churches to pony up funding for their own destruction. Hollywood now openly sneers at a large portion of their customers. Professional sports leagues are embarrassed by their own fans. It’s hard to pinpoint any organization that doesn’t have hostility towards their own conservative constituents.
This didn’t happen overnight, but through demanding little Danegelds that steadily increased. In the beginning, it could have been as simple as a small diversity statement or maybe a message against anti-Semitism to appease a small but loud minority. This small but loud minority had several distinct advantages. They were brash with their wants, unflinching in their moral superiority, and could handle social discomfort with ease. Outside the aggressive rhetoric of “Don’t Tread on Me” and talk of taking up arms, the natural libertarianism of the right is very susceptible to these pressures. The mindset of just wanting to be left alone makes these little compromises to “keep the peace” seem reasonable, a little pinch of incense to the gods, a little bit of Danegeld to keep things running smooth. The current disaster is something that has built up over generations.
The core belief of wanting to be left alone is untenable. No one can be totally left alone, and someone is paying the Danegeld. Conservatives in times past would loathe to put pressure on their progressive neighbors to donate to a pet cause, or hassle Human Resources to give a statement on a patriotic holiday. The progressive coalition has no such scruples, and that’s why they won. They had no issue with strong-arming either through social unrest or legal means to make everyone pay tribute to a moral crusade.
And why shouldn’t they? Why should a business be about just making money and not being a vehicle for social betterment? Why shouldn’t taxpayer money be sent to patrons of your own ideology? Even a culture warrior has to eat. While it’s true that throwing money haphazardly creates graft, it’s a failure of moral fortitude to be unable to say that everyone should have to contribute to social betterment. That guy might not be the best programmer, but he is competent and believes what you do and therefore should be hired. It doesn’t matter if your neighbor is pro-abortion, he should donate to the pregnancy resource center. It doesn’t matter if that DINK couple never wants kids, they can subsidize those who do. It’s called being a good person.
If universities can’t be objective, a financial penalty might straighten them right up. If Human Resources is discriminating against whites, make it as financially painful as refusing to hire a minority. Maybe they can grease the skids a little by hiring one of your friends or donating to one of your pet causes. The only way to keep bad actors out of a system is to have mechanisms to bleed them dry by both legal and extra-legal means. And the only way to defeat an out-of-control patronage network is to bleed it dry and make one of your own.
Of course, some might complain this will only create corruption in the other direction, and they have a point. Bad actors on either side can grind productivity to a halt and create enemies, but this doesn’t mean building patronage through one’s opponents resources is verboten. In fact, it is necessary. For the right, regaining a cultural foothold again after the other side has been subsidized by public funds for generations will require picking winners.
In a world of heavy partisanship, being able to extract wealth from your enemy isn’t a moral failing, but an effective strategy to keep your enemies down and your friends elevated. Maybe sometime in the future a better equilibrium will hold, partisanship will evaporate, and a new high-trust, civic mindset will form. Maybe, but for now, someone is paying the Danegeld, so you might as well be the Viking.
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The King was named this for refusing to listen to advice, not being unready in the modern use of the term.
Yes, the story is more complicated, but we’re rolling with it.
I found it very well written and easy to read, congrats!
While reading about the taxation debacle it occurred to me that we're often arguing about different maps and details while the terrain we're on is materially different to what existed in the past (and not so long ago either). What I'm going to say next is not ideological and I'm not a Gold-bug, but up until there was a gold standard, in the 1930s for Europe and up to 1971 for the USA (and we can throw in the 1945-71 window, non implementation of Breton Woods, etc), government borrowing was heavily curtailed, and borrowing during wars had to be repaid (not just interest and rolled over debt).
I think this matters a lot more than any of us realize. Gold served as an external anchor, an accountability mechanism. Within such a system, governance institutions need the citizens, or subjects, to flourish, in order to increase money supply without devaluing its value.
It's obviously a bigger discussion, but since the other topic is the failure of ethics and morality, I think this needs to be kept in mind, because ethics (and morals) needs accountability, as I'd argue the falling trust in institutions passes through 'micro-observations' in our daily lives from dysfunctional public services all the way to blatant corruption.
As you rightly wrote, it's great to imagine oneself to be living in the wild, until one needs common services (medical, police, etc). Libertarians (in general), but also Anarchists, cannot build complex societies, but they can complain about real common sense self evident problems crashing into dominant narratives excusing and explaining the absurdity of reality, in much the same way as people can complain about economic inequality and find themselves becoming Communists. There's elements of truth in all their criticisms, notwithstanding that their proposed alternatives collapse in reality.
Society as it stands now is just about money. Anyone who doesn't agree is an extremist, with different flavors.
This is also related to the point about corruption in terms of largesse spending on ideological things that don't matter, patronage networks, the bloated MIC budget (cost+ procurement, leading to needing to spend ten or a hundred times more than elsewhere to get the same value), etc. If government spending is limited to what it collects in taxes, by definition it can never go over budget without a crisis. Danegeld were the accumulated savings of the Danish crown, after it had spent on operating expenses. That they couldn't hire mercenaries to fight the Vikings, like the Venetians would have done, sucks for them.
Unfortunately at an individual level, we've all been corrupted by the financialization since the 80s, with asset price increasing faster than currency devaluation. Unfunded liabilities, from public pensions to welfare systems, are another great example of corruption in terms of creating moral hazard of those who stand to benefit from it. Welfare and pensions can and should exist, but they should be realistic, and a world without inflation.
We're currently downstream of more than half a century of illusory wealth and creature comforts.
I'll give another stupid example just to highlight how much of a hole we've dug ourselves in without realizing it. Back in the 1930s the first proposals for the enshitification of consumer goods emerged as a mechanism to boost consumption (Great depression era). Officially such a policy was never adopted, but as if by magic, consumer goods started having a shorter shelf lives. Case in point: the lightbulb. We can argue ourselves stupid about LEDs vs incandescent bulbs, until we realize there are government regulations and a private sector agency (defacto a cartel) placing limits on how long light bulbs can last. We can blame government and the public sector all we like, until we're honest about reality and realize oligarchic/monopolistic tendencies are real and the only way to keep them in check is government. But for this we need a culture promoting ethics, morals and virtues.
The grassroots movements accomplish little. The institutions and levers of power must be seized, like the Christians did with the Roman Empire.