The following two quotes show a bridge between old-time classical liberals, represented by Adam Smith, the famous and 18th-century liberal economist, and Anthony de Jasay, the more radical liberal anarchist of our time.
The first quote comes from the manuscript of a lecture delivered by Smith (quoted after his death but later lost):
Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.
The second quote is from Anthony de Jasay’s book Social Contract, Free Ride, which I review in the forthcoming issue of Regulation on the 35th anniversary of its publication. De Jasay defines (classical) liberalism as
a broad presumption of deciding individually any matter whose structure lends itself, with roughly comparable convenience, to both individual and collective choice.
This bridge points to a common denominator between more moderate classical liberals and more radical libertarians: the ideal of a humble state. It is true that the correspondence is not perfect. Anthony de Jasay was more radical than his definition suggests. And other classical liberals—for example, Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan—accepted a potentially larger role for the state than the two quotations above imply. Buy I think that de Jasay put his finger on a necessary (and perhaps sufficient) condition for liberalism or libertarianism: a general primacy of individual and private choices over collective and political choices.
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To illustrate this post, I instructed ChatGPT 4 to “generate an image symbolizing the primacy of individual and private choices as opposed to collective and political choices, as it is viewed by classical liberals and libertarians.” The robot labored on that (although “he” seemed to have an idea of what classical liberalism and libertarianism are). I had to give other instructions, notably by evoking two individuals trading oranges and apples. Recall how James Buchanan used that image as a symbol of mutually beneficial exchange. The chatbot’s best or most striking image, which I use as this post’s featured image, is reproduced below.
READER COMMENTS
steve
Mar 7 2024 at 11:22am
I think Smith was absolutely correct that if you wanted to live at the level of opulence achievable in the 1700s, with a life expectancy of 35, that was all you needed. Not entirely sure the peak things was achievable with easy taxes.
Steve
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 7 2024 at 11:32am
Steve: I think that, on the contrary, he was witnessing the dawn of the Industrial Revolution as well as the relative restraint of government in the UK, the Netherlands, and America. See my two short pieces at https://www.econlib.org/workers-lives-during-the-industrial-revolution/ and https://www.cato.org/regulation/summer-2023/why-great-enrichment-started-west.
robc
Mar 7 2024 at 12:22pm
I would think that washing your hands before delivering a baby (how many years did THAT alone add on?) qualifies as “natural course of things”.
Also, “easy taxes” existed at least until 1913 (in the US – and still pretty easy for a while after that) so I don’t think your point holds up.
Brian
Mar 7 2024 at 4:42pm
I spend a fair amount of my work day pursuing health care professionals for malpractice. If you think we have decent (or affordable) health care because of the interventions of the state, you might want to reconsider. Back in the 80’s, Indiana Governor “Doc” (yes, he was a dr) thought you shouldn’t be able to sue a dr like you can sue the rest of us peons. So, he persuaded the legislature to pass the Indiana Medical Malpractice Act. Doc Bowen was persuaded by largely by defense attorneys and insurers of docs and hospitals ()especially Medical Protective one of the largest insurers). And, the defense lawyers and insurers led the way with the drafting. And, most states followed Indiana’s “lead.”
As a result – you can’t just sue a doctor here in Indiana. You first submit a proposed complaint goes to the Indian Dept of Insurance, which triggers what is called the “panel process,” which results in 3 of the doctor’s colleagues deciding whether or not the doctor committed malpractice. As a buddy who’s a spinal surgeon explained: “DON’T put me on a panel! If I say another doctor committed malpractice, I’ll never get another referral.”
As a result of the act, far more inept doctors commit malpractice and get away with it because few attorneys want to take med mal cases. Did sovereign’s interventions result in any savings to the general public? Did the sovereign’s interventions increase the quality of healthcare? I see no evidence that either quality improved or pricing improved because of the sovereign’s interventions. As usual, politicians exchange favors for votes.
You might wonder why we have employer paid insurance and medicare – it is only because of government meddling. Employer provided health insurance is a payment provided by employers for employees that is untaxed because of FDR/Truman and their ilk back in the early 40’s. And that leads to your other comment.
Your comments on easy taxes don’t seem to follow. An economic rule that has very few (if any) exceptions: The more you tax anything, the less you have of it; the more you subsidize anything, the more you have of it. We pretend to worry about the skyrocketing costs of healthcare, but the sovereign’s meddlings exclude reasons that might reduce costs at every step.
By divorcing people from the actual costs of healthcare, prices had no where to go but up. The history of dental work, insurance and pricing most readily demonstrates how costs go up when the consumer isn’t paying. https://grin.deltadentalins.com/archive/2018/winter/history-of-dental-insurance/
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices for dental services are 2,385.76% higher in 2024 versus 1954 (a $2,385.76 difference in value).
Perhaps most importantly are the tax $$ that are lost by pretending that insurance isn’t a form of income to be taxed:
“What’s the largest tax break in the federal tax code?
If you said the mortgage interest deduction, you’d be wrong. The break for charitable giving? Nope. How about capital gains, or state and local taxes? No, and no.
Believe it or not, dollar for dollar, the most tax revenue the federal government forgoes every year is from not taxing the value of health insurance that employers provide their workers.
Yet most people don’t even realize that they don’t pay taxes on the value of those health benefits. That’s too bad, says MIT health economist Jonathan Gruber, because it represents a whole lot of money.
“If we treated health insurance the same way we treat wages,” says Gruber, “we would raise about $250 billion per year more.” That not only makes the health insurance exclusion the federal government’s largest tax break, but it’s also “the third largest health care program in the U.S., after Medicare and Medicaid.”
And just how much does $250 billion represent in health care terms? “If we ended the tax exclusion, we could cover every uninsured American with health insurance twice over,” Gruber estimates.
But there’s another thing about the health care deduction that’s kind of surprising: It came about largely by accident.
“It was just a way to allow employers to evade the wage and price controls of World War II,” says Gruber. “And it’s sort of grown exponentially since, and there really isn’t a single health care expert who would design a system from scratch which would include this feature.”” https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/12/04/166434247/the-huge-and-rarely-discussed-health-insurance-tax-break
steve
Mar 8 2024 at 11:45am
Totally agree that malpractice is not a large driver of health care costs. There are some abuses, like in my state where venue laws allowed every case to be taken to Philadelphia where juries favored plaintiffs and handed out large awards. But, I dont see how that pertains to this argument. In the 1700s everyone could afford what was essentially the very best medical care because it was all awful. Medical care was about as likely to harm you as help. Remember that life expectancy was in the 30s.
However, if you want the large public health measures like sewers, food inspection, vaccines and reliable water at large scales no one has achieved those without considerable govt intervention. The pharmaceutical companies would not be successful without all of the money invested in basic research over the years. So if your idea of opulence is the very best medical care available in the 1700s, easy taxes and peace will do it. (I cant find any data on the cost fo wars and maintaining peace in that era. Does anyone know if it was possible to maintain easy taxes while having a military strong enough deter invasion/war?)
Steve
Jose Pablo
Mar 8 2024 at 7:44pm
Does anyone know if it was possible to maintain easy taxes while having a military strong enough deter invasion/war?
American military (which, you could say is strong enough to deter an invasion and then some) cost around 3.5% of US GDP (and, very likely, some of this is just pork barrel waste and an even more significant “some of this” is to “project power”, a not very defensive goal unless you are paranoid)
I would call a 3.5% VAT extremely “easy”.
BC
Mar 9 2024 at 3:05am
“However, if you want the large public health measures like sewers, food inspection, vaccines and reliable water at large scales no one has achieved those without considerable govt intervention.”
Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and “Other Health Care”) account for 46% of the federal budget so for about half our (federal) taxes, we could get the items listed above, along with anything else other than taxpayer provided entitlements, which are pure wealth transfers (i.e., zero sum, actually negative sum including deadweight losses) anyways. Proverbial “roads and bridges” don’t cost much; it’s all entitlements.
Richard W Fulmer
Mar 7 2024 at 12:41pm
In the West, affluence and life expectancy both rose significantly before WWII. What “peak things” do you attribute to high taxes? Social Security and Medicare will bankrupt the nation if politically unacceptable reforms aren’t made and made soon. Welfare ended the steady decline in the poverty rate and has helped create generations of broken families. Broken families have, in turn, fostered higher dropout rates, more drug use, more suicide, and more crime.
Jose Pablo
Mar 8 2024 at 5:57pm
Taxes basically shift money from the people that “create” peaks to the bureaucrats. How do you think this can create “peaks”? How come?
You might believe that taxes spent on the army, the policy and the judicial system (included the police) add something (I personally doubt it, but it is a fair discussion). But apart from that?
Do you really think that taking “command over resources” (aka “money”) from Elon Musk / Warren Buffett and sending it to Biden/Trump can create any new “peak”? … c’mon!!
Jose Pablo
Mar 8 2024 at 5:59pm
… that taxes spent on the army and the judicial system (including the police)
Ahmed Fares
Mar 7 2024 at 3:22pm
I yearn for the opulence of a medieval serf.
Serf’s Up!—Modern ‘Debt Serfdom’ vs. the Enviable Leisure Time of a Medieval Peasant
Jose Pablo
Mar 8 2024 at 6:34pm
Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.
This should be one of the most widespread fallacies. My grandfather, who was a farmer, likely had the equivalent of 3/4 months of “leisure” each year, which he spent diligently attending daily church services with my grandmother (who found the entire notion of “leisure” sinful). Whenever he could elude her watchful eye, he would also frequent the canteen. There, my grandfather would consume a wine that was, for all intents and purposes, undrinkable and engage in hours of card games with the very same group of individuals.
I am set to have three weeks of ‘leisure’ this year, which I plan to spend on a safari in Botswana. Last year, I went scuba diving in Bali.
To assert that my grandfather had the ‘most leisure’ of the two of us can only be perceived as a (very) sad jest. Poor old fella!
Ahmed Fares
Mar 8 2024 at 7:50pm
Pre-industrial…
Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today’s
A quote from yet another article.
The Lost Art of Leisure
Jim Glass
Mar 8 2024 at 11:13pm
I assumed this was just trolling at first … but really??? OK…
Hey, getting the free time that comes with a life enjoying subsistence agriculture is easy. Just quit putting in the work hours. Nobody makes you do it. Go subsist in the Pacific Northwest or some such place. If you want a community of souls such as yourself, there’s still plenty of subsistence agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa and good part of Asia. Of course, the subsistence agriculture quality-of-life comes with it — no more social media! — but that’s the pre-industrial opulence you want.
The one real challenge in comparison to medieval serfdom will be finding yourself a Lord to tie you to the land, own your labor, and force you to fight his wars against the next Lord over. Remember that serfdom was medieval Europe’s variation on slavery.
Aw, capitalism didn’t “take away” anything. People traded their time for reliable, cheaper, greater supplies of food, clothing, clean water, roofs over their heads, fewer dead children, and more entertainment to enjoy over longer lives. In ever greater amounts. All the way up to our times of lifespans of 80 enjoying Twitter. But if you don’t like the trade, nobody forces you to take it. Reject it. There’s still plenty of subsistence agriculture available for you.
While enjoying in-flight WIFI on the flight taking the kids to Orlando. That sure wouldn’t happen in medieval Europe — one third of children died by the age of five. Average life expectancy was <35. Malaria was a mass killer, among so many others (it wasn’t just the Black Death). This was all because, you know, life was so opulent!!
There are still a lot silly naive types about who wonder, “why did all those peasants move from their happy lives in the pleasant countryside into those evil, crowded, dirty, Dickensian cities?” as if a life of subsistence agriculture is like a perpetual vacation spent on the cousin’s hobby farm in Vermont. It isn’t. Not then, not in our time either.
Two Cheers for Sweatshops
BTW, as to all that extra leisure the peasants enjoyed from working fewer days per year … how much of it did they give back by having life expectancy of <35 ?
Richard W. Fulmer
Mar 9 2024 at 12:52am
Ah, serfdom! Those were the days. Dirt floors, no running water, no indoor plumbing. Cleanliness was nearly impossible, so skin sores and rashes were ubiquitous. Cloth was dear, so you were limited to one or two sets of clothing in your lifetime. Graves were robbed for the shrouds in which the bodies were wrapped. In wintertime, you slept with your animals to share their warmth and their fleas. Localized famines were common because transportation was poor. Occasional plagues were a bother. No drugs or antibiotics. But not to worry; if you became ill, a barber was there to bleed you. No dentists, of course, though you were unlikely to keep your teeth long anyway. Candles were expensive, so no reading when the sun went down. And there were those pesky lung diseases caused by breathing the fumes from wood and dung fires. Quite idyllic, really.
Jose Pablo
Mar 9 2024 at 1:42pm
Well, Richard, I’m not sure. In those golden days of abundant leisure, they had significantly lower levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. There were virtually no traffic jams during rush hour. And, what’s even better, they didn’t have to concern themselves with the boarding group they belonged to!!
Richard W Fulmer
Mar 9 2024 at 1:56pm
And don’t forget that annoying ads never interrupted your TV shows or your Pandora song list.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 9 2024 at 12:18pm
Ahmed: You write: “I yearn for the opulence of a medieval serf.” Whom is this quote from?
Let me add to, and quantify a bit, what Jim said.
According to data from the Maddison Project, GDP per capita (that is, average production, which equals average income) in France in 1321 (the earliest Maddison estimate for France) was $1321 (in 2011 dollars). There are places in the world that haven’t had an industrial revolution and where you can still obtain this opulence. Again from the latest Maddison estimates, for 2018 in real 2011 dollars:
Guinea-Bissay: $1,501
Togo: $1,451
North Korea: $1,596
A remote cabin in Alaska or Montana with no electricity and few steel tools would be another way to have maximum “opulence” and leisure–not counting the time spent surviving.
On these matters, it is preferable to get estimates from economic historians than from sociologists and ideologues. If you follow the links in my post above, you will find some sources.
Ahmed Fares
Mar 9 2024 at 3:20pm
Me. I was trying to have a discussion about leisure time.
I have lived this lifestyle. I grew up on a farm in Lebanon (I was seven years old when I came to Canada). No electricity, no running water, lights from kerosene lamps, etc. I recall a couple of times during the year when the adults worked hard, which was during the spring planting season, then some leisure time, then the harvest. The rest of the time was spent gathering olives, turning grapes into molasses, etc. That and the stored grains carried you over to the next planting season. Except for the planting and harvesting seasons, life was a leisurely pace.
Lebanon now has mechanized agriculture, so no one works the fields by hand anymore. With that, life became even easier.
So why do people leave that lifestyle? You might as well ask why Greeks, Italians, etc. would leave that lifestyle. In our case, it was politics. A lot of these countries with temperate climates which make life easier tend to have political problems. Lebanon, for example, had a 15-year civil war which led to a mass exodus of people. Now Israel and Lebanon are threatening to bomb each other back to the Stone Age.
I do agree with the other commenters that modern medicine is nice. But then, again, 100,000 Americans die of opioid overdoses each year. I sometimes wonder about the trade-offs we’ve made to get to where we are. Did we just trade some types of stress for other types of stress? Like peasant farmers worrying about the weather, which we now don’t, but we worry about becoming unemployed instead.
Incidentally, I was unemployed three times in a ten-year period starting with the 1982 recession. I’m still scarred by the stress of that, even though I’m retired now.
I hope that makes things clear as to where I’m coming from and that I have given this stuff a lot of thought.
Jon Murphy
Mar 9 2024 at 4:51pm
Ahmed-
I guess I am still a little confused as to your point. Is your comment about desiring the opulence of a serf tongue-in-cheek or not?
On a related note, my understanding is Schor’s story has largely been debunked. Manor records indicate serfs only worked for a little under half a year, but that half-year was all dedicated to the lord. Every bit of production they generated went to the Lord. Of the remaining time, some were feast days, in which work was forbidden but they usually had other duties to attend. The rest of the time was trying to eek out whatever living they could for themselves (in a time of year, I hasten to add, where farming and hunting were not very viable). So, the number of leisure days they truly had was much, much lower than Schor’s estimates, probably close to 0.
Now, I certainly understand desiring leisure time. I took about a 50% paycut to be an academic as opposed to working in the private sector. But I’d much rather work a lot but get to keep virtually everything I make (taxes aside) than work a lot and get to keep very little. Give me the modern “rat race” any day.
Ahmed Fares
Mar 9 2024 at 5:15pm
I used the word “opulence” in my comment because of that Adam Smith quote:
I was using it in the context of that time period.
As an aside, the leisure time of that period was of a different nature. To wit:
I was alerted to this by this article by Alex Tabarrok (MRU):
The Harried Leisure Class
Jon Murphy
Mar 9 2024 at 6:53pm
Ok, but that doesn’t answer my question. Is your comment that you prefer the opulence of the serf sarcastic or not? I mean, even according to your source, they did not have that opulent lives even though they had much leisure.
Ahmed Fares
Mar 9 2024 at 9:35pm
Sarcasm: Sarcasm is the caustic use of words, often in a humorous way, to mock someone or something.
No, definitely not being sarcastic by that definition. I actually believe that some serfs lived better lives than many people do today. Not just in leisure time, but in what they had relative to what people have now.
I personally know people working two jobs to come home to a moldy basement suite giving them health problems but too scared to complain because the rental market is tight, and they’re scared they may not find another place to rent. Also, skipping meals to pay the rent. I’ve also seen posts on Reddit by people in our city asking for help in how to live out of a car because they can no longer afford rent.
Serfdom is a step up from that.
Having said that, “opulence” was a poor term to use in referring to that. Perhaps I should have written: “I yearn for the abundance of leisure time of a medieval serf.”
Jon Murphy
Mar 10 2024 at 8:43am
Ok, well that’s just factually incorrect.
Richard W. Fulmer
Mar 9 2024 at 7:33pm
As you noted, people are far more productive today than in medieval times. That means that, if they choose, they can live in better and healthier ways with less effort than could a serf. With only a day or two of work a week, you or I could live far more comfortably than could a peasant living a thousand years ago. The fact that few people choose to live that way is a matter of taste rather than a question of economics or of survival.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 11 2024 at 1:10pm
Ahmed: Introductory microeconomic theory is useful here. Higher salaries or wages increase the (opportunity) cost of leisure, leading a utility maximizing individual to choose less leisure (ceteris paribus–see under the heading “work-leisure choice” or something similar in a microeconomics textbook). I discussed some implications of that in a previous post.
Mactoul
Mar 7 2024 at 9:14pm
A broad presumption of deciding individually any matter whose structure lends itself, with roughly comparable convenience, to both individual and collective choice.
This formulation recalls the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity by which matters should be decided at the lowest feasible level.
robc
Mar 8 2024 at 9:35am
Its also a federalist doctrine and, sometimes, a libertarian doctrine.
While there are non-federalist, non-subsidiarist libertarians, they seem weird to me. Top down libertarianism should be an oxymoron.
I have argued with some people who are localists, that they aren’t local enough, most decisions should be made at the household level.
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