View source for Edmund Burke, Welfare King

<!-- you can have any number of categories here -->
[[Category:Corey Robin]]
[[Category:Libertarian Hypocrisy]]
<!-- 1 URL must be followed by >= 0 Other URL and Old URL and 1 End URL.-->
{{URL | url = http://crookedtimber.org/2013/10/24/edmund-burke-welfare-king/}}
<!-- {{Other URL | url = }} -->
<!-- {{Old URL | url = }} -->
{{End URL}}
{{DES | des = Edmund Burke, considered a philosophical founder of modern conservatism and a representative of [[Classical Liberalism|classical liberalism]] took a huge government handout while opposing government help for poor laborers. | show=}}
<!-- DPL has problems with categories that have a single quote in them.  Use these explicit workarounds. -->
<!-- normally, we would use {{Links}} and {{Quotes}}  -->
{{Quotations|Edmund Burke, Welfare King|quotes=true}}

{{Text |
Some day someone should write an essay on the struggles of Edmund Burke in his final years to overcome his considerable debts—some £30,000—by securing a peerage and a pension from the Crown.

Throughout his career, Burke’s financial state had been precarious. Much to his embarrassment, he was periodically forced to rely upon well timed gifts and loans from his wealthier friends and patrons.

So terrified was he of dying in a debtor’s prison that he struggled in his retirement to learn Italian. His hope, claimed one of the many visitors at his estate, was to flee England and “end his days with tollerable Ease in Italy.” (He also floated, apparently, the possibility of fleeing to Portugal or America.) “I cannot quite reconcile my mind to a prison,” he  told a friend.

Thanks to the interventions of his well connected friends, in August 1795 Burke secured from Pitt two annuities that would wipe out his debts and a pension that, along with an additional pension and the income from his estate, would enable him and his wife to live in comfort into their old age.

Three months later, when Burke took up his pen against a proposal for the government to subsidize the wages of farm laborers during bad harvest years (so that they could sustain themselves and their families), he wrote, “To provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of government.”


}}