I am reading Deirdre McCloskey’s Why Liberalism Works, which I shall confess I’ve started with some ambivalence. “Aunt Deirdre”‘s last book is a collection of essays and most of the time this genre is ill suited even for the most talented of writers. Occasional essays were meant for the occasion, indeed, and they do not always survive it brilliantly. Yet Deirdre has obviously worked a great deal on these essays, and they form a consistent and cogent whole.
The title at first appears vague enough, and can leave you wondering what the subject may be. Yet it is faithful to the contents. McCloskey wants to show that a small-government liberalism is the best item in the menu of political ideologies so far, by pointing to its successes and its virtues.
There is, in the book, quite a lot about democracy and classical liberalism’s ambivalence towards it. McCloskey maintains that “Liberals Are Democrats” (a little play with tautology, in the title of chapter 4) but she has her own perplexities about recent elections and the rise of populism.
Yet she doesn’t buy into epistocracy, which she considers in tension with her own message. McCloskey’s main message is that ordinary people can be entrusted with having a go at their own lives and their own projects: “the essence of humane true liberalism… is a small government, honest and effective in its modest realm, with a hand up for the poor. Mainly leave people alone to pursue their non-violent projects voluntarily”. Yet we know (and McCloskey knows) that choosing for oneself is one thing, voting in an election for a party whose platform and policies are largely unknown, in their minute details, even to its members, is quite another.
McCloskey writes:
For collective decisions, I say again, a liberal democrat often results in poor choices. Such is life. In reaction, Jason Brennan puts forward a bizarre suggestion for a rule exclusively by the well-informed, with college degrees, and Hayek a bizarre suggestion for age retractions on voting. But even such undemocratic policies would probably not result in much better choosing – besides stripping away the equal human dignity for everyone that is the core belief in the liberalism both men advocate.
In a sense, McCloskey, fully knowing how powerless an individual vote is, sees it as being part of that dignity that a liberal society accords to each individual. Yet another key message of her book is that bigger and bigger government, by bossing people around, jeopardizes that very dignity.
So, what do we do if it is the people’s will as expressed in their free votes that produces a bigger government, which in turns cuts into their dignity and freedom?
McCloskey’s answer relies on culture and persuasion (sweet talk). The only way to improve decision making is for the government to decide on less. The only way people will accept that the government should decide on _less_ is that they got convinced.
This is, if you wish, the standard libertarian answer, the one that propelled the many efforts to spread these ideas in the last fifty years or so. Given the paucity of results, and the apparently unstoppable growth of governments everywhere, you could find it unsatisfactory – hence the need to imagine some institutional solutions helping in the way (but how make the electoral public swallowing them?). With all its limits, McCloskey’s answer still looks attractive to me – and, indeed, more consistent with a system of ideas that, different than its competitors, doesn’t think its values can be imposed at gunpoint on people.
READER COMMENTS
nobody.really
Nov 15 2019 at 11:22am
Which system of ideas eschews imposing values at gunpoint? Are we discussing the Amish and Mennonites? Or are we discussing a system of ideas that DOES embrace coercing others at gunpoint–where it’s own value system deems such conduct justified?
I find much commendable in libertarianism (“liberalism”), but I encourage people to get over this need to deny the embrace of force. We’re discussing differences of degree, not of kind.
Lee W.
Nov 15 2019 at 7:42pm
Liberty is, as Jan Lester puts it, the “minimization of proactive impositions.” Defending against proactive impositions does, indeed, often require the use of force but this force is not an imposition itself simply because libertarianism is a competing paradigm. That would be equivalent to arguing that religious tolerance is no different than a state-enforced religion because both are competing ideas.
nobody.really
Nov 16 2019 at 12:11am
Ok–so the same disavowal of force as the Amish and the Mennonites? That looks like minimization to me.
If the state intervenes to stop parents from practicing a religion of child sacrifice, would that constitute state-enforced religion (or values) that interfere with the parent’s practice of religion? It would surely represent an example of competing ideas.
Thaomas
Nov 15 2019 at 11:42am
My suggestion is to try persuasion at a more granular level. Clearly advocating “small” government (which often comes across as “minimal” government) does not work. Why not go issue by issue: wage subsidies instead of minimum wages, tax credits instead of government provided child care, consumption tax rather than wage tax for financing SS and Medicare, progressive personal consumption tax instead of personal and business income taxes, revenue neutral tax on net emissions of CO2 rather than a Green New Deal, cost benefit analysis of new and existing regulations and public expenditures.
Jeff Hallman
Nov 17 2019 at 10:57am
The likely result of advocating A rather than B in the current system is that you end up with both A and B, which is not an improvement.
Thaomas
Nov 18 2019 at 2:23pm
It still probably beats just arguing that the cost of B it greater than the harm B is supposed to ameliorate. Moreover, once you’ve gotten that far, it seem that the marginal benefit-cost of adding, “but A is cheaper,” is pretty low.
B has been doing pretty well these last 15 or so years without help from those arguing for A. Why not give it a shot?
Jason Brennan
Nov 15 2019 at 10:57pm
I don’t say that, and explicitly disavow that position. I guess Deirdre was too busy writing to read carefully the things she critiques. Oh well.
MarkW
Nov 16 2019 at 8:28am
This is, if you wish, the standard libertarian answer, the one that propelled the many efforts to spread these ideas in the last fifty years or so. Given the paucity of results, and the apparently unstoppable growth of governments everywhere
Are the results really all that bad? In no particular order and off the top of my head, here are some of the positive changes (in the U.S.) that I can think of that happened during the last 50 years:
Legalization of gay sex and then gay marriage. The end of regulation for interstate trucking and airline routes and fares. Legalization of home-brewing. Legalization of home-schooling. School choice (vouchers, charters, cross-district enrollment) along with an end to forced busing. Post Kelo eminent-domain reform. Marijuana legalization. Legalization of fireworks. Repealing the national speed limit. Pending reforms of civil asset forfeiture, excessive fines, and qualified immunity. Lower income tax rates. Nixon’s wage and price controls (just inside the 50 year window) would be unthinkable now. The rolling back of occupational licensing and reform/repeal of certificate of need laws. And don’t forget the deregulation of the telecom industry. As a college student, I recall having to wait until 11PM to call my girlfriend to avoid a huge phone bill (disputes over phone bills between housemates were common then), and as a little boy I remember almost accidentally revealing to an AT&T repairman that my parents had installed an illegal upstairs phone extension connected to a black-market phone (at the time, customers were required to pay for every phone in the house and were not allowed to own phones — they had to be rented from the company).
I think we sometimes lose track of successes, forgetting what things were like before, and become overly pessimistic as a result.
Matthias Görgens
Nov 16 2019 at 10:53am
Thanks for writing the list that I was about to write myself.
On a global scale, we also have the fall of Soviet socialism, and the transformation of China away from Mao’s communism.
Or the (partial) privatisation of eg the UK railroads. Or legalisation of intercity buses in Germany.
The UK railroad privatisation is particularly interesting: it was quite successful, but is deeply unpopular in surveys. Yet still seems to survive politically.
Average tariffs around the world are much lower. Capital and exchange rate controls around the world have decreased.
In the US, not even Trump did too much to roll back neoliberal successes.
Thaomas
Nov 16 2019 at 12:32pm
All true, but how much of the progress was “bought” at the cost of the creation of a very large structural deficit that is a significant drag on growth and continued dithering on taking cost effective action against CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere.
MarkW
Nov 17 2019 at 8:22am
None of the things I listed had anything to do with either deficit spending or climate change. Nor did a big one I forgot to mention — the switch from conscription to an all volunteer military. But you also bring to mind another area of success for liberal/libertarian ideas — namely emissions trading schemes for pollutants and catch shares for managing fishery stocks in place of command-and-control regulations.
nobody.really
Nov 20 2019 at 3:59pm
“Lower income tax rates”?
Jon Murphy
Nov 16 2019 at 12:47pm
Mark-
You make a good point, but on the other hand you list just 16 items over a 50-year period. Now, I know that your list is hardly exhaustive, but still 16 items. That equates to the removal of just .3 regulations a year. Conversely, the Federal Code added nearly 40 economically significant regulations last year alone. They average about 42 a year since 1982.
Jon Murphy
Nov 16 2019 at 1:33pm
To be clear: I do agree with you that libertarians are largely a pessimistic crowd and there have been major advances in human freedom, especially in my lifetime (since 1989). I firmly believe we are living in a golden age of humanity and a lot of that has to do with the rapid, albeit imperfect, spread of liberalism in the world.
But liberalism’s triumphs have long stood on a razor’s edge. The backlash against free trade and the glibness at which people approach central planning schemes like carbon taxes, tariffs, industrial planning, and the like concern me.
James Buchanan once wrote (and I am paraphrasing here) that we do not learn political economy the way we learn physics (this comes from his essay on Adam Smith in Volume 19 of the Liberty Fund’s Collected Works. Unfortunately, the exact name of the essay escapes me right now). We are seeing a resurgence of the same old tired ideas of the past Century, rebranded now with new urgency but still based on the same flawed premises. If we rest on our laurels, we are liable to see many of the gains we’ve made take steps backward.
MarkW
Nov 17 2019 at 8:51am
I agree there’s plenty of cause for concern. The Republicans haven’t been this protectionist since perhaps Smoot & Hawley and this cavalier about deficits since, well, forever. On economic issues, current Democratic candidates are running to the left of McGovern and perhaps even European socialists. And many Democrats have become dubious of both due process and free speech (watching the ACLU trying to thread the needle between pleasing their leftist donors and maintaining their commitment to free speech is painful). So yes, lots of reasons to worry, but still, we shouldn’t lose sight of the many successes.
Jon Murphy
Nov 17 2019 at 9:40am
Agreed
nobody.really
Nov 20 2019 at 4:20pm
I wonder about these statistics. Note that “deregulation” generally means different regulation. Thus, people cite the deregulation of the telephone monopoly as a liberal success. Yet that was accomplished with MASSIVE regulatory effort; monopolists do not meekly authorize newcomers to interconnect with their systems. Should we regard this as an evil “significant regulation”?
I vaguely recall a federal government shut-down, accompanied by all the standard blather about bloated government intruding on people’s freedoms, that had the effect of delaying efforts at deregulating the wholesale energy markets. Yay?
The size of regulatory manuals is a poor measure of economic burden. The tax code is huge largely because it provides people with so many options. We could greatly simplify the code–but it would almost certainly entail REDUCING people’s alternatives. Yay?
Mark Brady
Nov 16 2019 at 9:28pm
When Alberto has read as much of Deirdre McCloskey’s Why Liberalism Works as he chooses to, I’d be interested to learn what exactly he believes is original in this book. Of course, the basic idea – small-government liberalism – is not new, and McCloskey wouldn’t claim that it was. What I have in mind is what is novel about McCloskey’s arguments for that position.
The “Look Inside” feature enables us to read the entire Index, and I am struck by the fact that McCloskey says nothing, or next to nothing, about international relations and issues of peace and war. This is surely a major omission in a book that seeks to defend small-government liberalism.
Mark Brady
Nov 16 2019 at 11:09pm
Deirdre McCloskey writes that in Britain they call it “Orange-Book Liberalism” (p. 5). For the record, this is a reference to “a book written by a group of prominent British Liberal Democrat politicians…in 2004.” (Wikipedia) Be advised that in so far as the expression is used today, it almost always refers to policy debate among Liberal Democrats. You won’t normally find libertarians and free-market conservatives using the phrase to describe their own views.
Roger D McKinney
Nov 18 2019 at 9:32pm
I have read McCloskey’s trilogy and really enjoyed them. That said, McCloskey avoids a very important topic that I’m sure he is aware of – envy. Helmut Schoeck wrote the classic “Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior,” but a lot more has been done on the topic since then. No one has bothered to prove Schoeck wrong and I doubt that’s possible. It’s so obviously true.
If Schoeck is right, and I’m sure he is, no amount of reason, logic or evidence can change the minds of envious people and envy is the power behind socialism, as Jonathan Haidt shows in his “Righteous Mind.” Schoeck argues that Christianity caused the inflection of per capita GDP in the hockey stick pattern by suppressing envy enough to allow for innovation. That happened in the Dutch Republic as McCloskey has written.
Changing voting rules won’t change anything. There is an obvious negative correlation between the decline of Christianity in the West and the rise of socialism.
Fred_in_PA
Nov 22 2019 at 12:00am
Roger;
I’m getting lost in the double negative of “negative correlation between the decline of Christianity in the West and the rise of socialism.”
Don’t you mean the opposite? That as Christianity has declined, socialism has risen? (A positive correlation?) Or am I viewing this with the wrong time frame?
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