Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
December 24th, 2019
Ummm... "neoliberalism"?
After all, one of the uses of the word "neoliberalism" by shouty leftists on and off the internet is as a way to pretend to erase all differences between Milton Friedman and Bill Clinton. It seems to me "libertarianism" is a fine word for Milton Friedman & co., where the "-tarian" is there to disinguish it from the "-al": i.e., "libertarianism" is not "liberalism" in the modern American use of the word.
It is worth also pointing out that "libertarianism" is not "liberalism" in the nineteenth-century British classical economist sense of the word. Consider nineteenth-century British classical economist and moral philosopher John Stuart Mill. Three months ago I was rereading a passage where he wrote: "Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes..."
Note that word "imprisonment". The world Mill saw as of 1871 was not just a world of poverty and drudgery—a world in which humans had to work long and tiring hours at crafts and tasks that came nowhere near to being sufficiently interesting to engage the full brainpower of an East African Plains Ape in order to win a living standard barely above subsistence. The world Mill saw was a world in which humanity was imprisoned: not free, in a dungeon, chained, and fettered. Freedom accompanied by dire poverty was, in John Stuart Mill's view, not freedom at all. **That** was a nineteenth-century classical liberal. But how many modern libertarians would agree? As best as I can tell, zero. For them liberty is liberty, for them in today's economy with today's technology poverty is probably your own fault, and for them even if your poverty is not your own moral fault you probably deserve it because of your own bad genes.
So I would define "neoliberalism" thus: "use market—that is, crowd-sourcing—means to social democratic ends **where they are likely to work*; use government to support and empower the market to make it more productive; use pre- and re-distribution to create an acceptable distribution of income and social power; and do not ask of government planning and command-and-control more than they can provide."
And let me close with one of my favorite quotations: Daniel Davies: "Most sensible... was... Galbraith's aphorism that the quest of conservative thought... has been 'the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness'. Some rightwingers are not hypocrites... they admit that their basic moral principle is "what I have, I keep". Some... are hypocrites... they pretend... "what I have, I keep" is... the best way to express a general unparticularised love for all sentient things. Then there are the tricky cases where... we haven't yet discovered a better form of social organisation than private property for solving several important classes of optimisation problems..."
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