Liberalism Then and Now...

by: Les Carpenter
Rational Nation USA
Liberty -vs- Tyranny

True 18th century Classical Liberalism, the basis of a limited central government, individualism, and property rights is at great odds with modern liberalism. The following from reason.com points up the essential differences quite well.

In The Future of Liberalism (2009), Alan Wolfe writes that the true heirs to the liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson are not today’s classical liberals (libertarians (emphasis mine)), but rather the other kind of liberals, those who would use government power to assure autonomy and equality for all. Such “modern liberalism,” for Wolfe, is simply an updating of the original: In the eighteenth century, political power crushed autonomy and equality, requiring a free market as the antidote; now private corporate power under capitalism does the same, but this time the remedy is active government.

Early in his book Wolfe writes:

The core substantive principle of liberalism is this: As many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take. Expressed in this form, liberalism, as in the days of John Locke, is committed both to liberty and to equality. . . . [Emphasis in original.]

With respect to liberty, liberals want for the person what Thomas Jefferson wanted for the country: independence. Dependency, for liberals, cripples. . . . When we have no choice but to accept someone else’s power over us, we fail to think for ourselves, are confined to conditions of existence resembling an endless struggle for survival, are unable to plan for the future, and cannot posses elementary human dignity. The autonomous life is therefore the best life. We have the potential, and are therefore responsible for realizing it, to be masters of our own destiny.

This sounds pretty good, no? Being subject to another’s arbitrary will clashes with the liberal spirit, which projects the ideal of mastery of one’s destiny even as one cooperates with others for mutual benefit.

Equality as Core Value

I also agree with Wolfe that equality is a core value of classical liberalism, but not as he means it. True liberal equality is not income equality; nor is it merely equality of liberty or equality under the law. The first would require continuous violent state interference with voluntary exchange, while the other two are inadequate in themselves. By equality, I mean what Roderick Long calls, per Locke, “equality of authority.” For Locke a state of equality is one in which “all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank . . . should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection . . . .”

But now I must part ways with Wolfe because he has an utterly self-defeating idea of how to secure everyone’s mastery over his or her own one’s destiny: the welfare state. Judging by the history and nature of the state, we must conclude that Wolfe’s program would lead not to liberation but rather to subjugation of the individual. Wolfe has things turned topsy-turvy:

To advocate today what Smith advocated yesterday—a free market unregulated by government—is to foster greater, rather than lesser, dependency and less, rather than more, equality. . . . [I]n the highly organized and concentrated forms taken by capitalism in the contemporary world, removing government from the marketplace does not allow large numbers of people to become entrepreneurs in ways that enable them to set the terms by which their lives will be led; it instead allows firms to reduce their obligations to their employees and thereby make them more dependent on the vagaries of the market.

Impersonal Market Forces

The latter part of the quote has some validity, but before I get to that, let’s look at the general point. I take Wolfe to be saying—and he reinforces the point in this discussion with Russ Roberts—that one is less autonomous when subject to impersonal market forces than when subject to political forces ostensibly designed to ensure autonomy and equality. This strikes me as entirely wrong.

Admittedly, in a freed economy no one person or group would control the market forces (the law of supply and demand, and so on) to which we all must adjust as we carry out our plans. That would seem to impinge on our autonomy. But these forces are called impersonal precisely because they are not the product of any single will or directed at any chosen objective. Rather the term market forces simply refers to the spontaneous, orderly, and essential process (the price system) generated by other people’s freedom to choose what to buy and sell. In other words, each individual’s autonomy is bounded by each other individual’s autonomy. While we all must take prices and other people’s choices into account as we make our plans, we each have great leeway in the marketplace through which we can minimize our vulnerability to the arbitrary will of others. If one person won’t deal with you, someone else most likely will, so the prospect of being victimized by, say, invidious discrimination shrinks. {Read More}