by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Modern liberalism was first articulated two-and-a-half centuries ago, particularly in the Anglosphere, and most particularly in Scotland and Massachusetts. Ancient liberalisms there had been, though only rarely articulated so radically and so widely as in 1776 and after. In 1381 John Ball had asked, “When Adam delved, and Eve span, / Who then was the gentleman?” For this he was drawn and quartered. In 1685 the Leveler Richard Rumbold declared from his scaffold in Edinburgh that “there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into this world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.” Then the hangman sprang the trap door.
When liberalism was in fact applied widely, the true liberalism of people like Adam Smith and Abigail Adams had most gratifying results. Liberalism was always contested by the forces of conservatism—by, as Robert Burns put it in his liberal anthem of 1795, “yon birkie ca’d a lord.” But the motto of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1780 by dawn-time liberals, declares that Sub libertate florent, “Under liberty they flourish.” And so at length they did—not because of war, slavery, imperialism, tariff protection, redistributions, trade unions, national banking, internal improvements, or other schemes of the nation state and its allies, nor because of the inevitable course of the class struggle, nor even because of Enlightenment and science.
To take up briefly that last, the practices of Enlightenment and science as often as not armed the state as much as they gave scope to its subjects. Frederick the Great was spectacularly Enlightened, composing music still performed. But he was, to put it mildly, no liberal. Fritz Haber invented artificial fertilizer to feed half the world. But he also patriotically invented chlorine gas for the Great War. And his close colleagues a little later invented Zyklon-B, with which the German state gassed other patriotic Jews.
The turn to liberalism was a new and fundamental personal liberty to endeavor, with immense consequences in human flourishing. “Give it a whirl,” said the new liberals. Steadily widening permission to try out new ideas or new places or new work or new relationships, denied for millennia, caused innovation to explode. People anciently stultified and consequently stuck at $2 a day were stunningly enriched in body and soul. World real income per person has risen since 1776 by a gob-smacking 2,500 or 3,000 percent, by now $50 a day on average worldwide, and $130 a day in the U.S., and more in Switzerland, a superabundance reasonably expected to continue doubling every long generation or so—for a factor of eight over the century to come. The unprecedented enrichment will continue the factor of eight during the century just passed and the factor of eight likewise during the first, founding century of liberalism. Nothing so much as a factor of two, once and finished, had happened before—two perhaps under the Five Good Emperors in Rome, or in China during the Song Dynasty.
The Great Enrichment of 1776 to the present decisively falsified Malthusian and other pessimisms. And, in accord with the startling liberal doctrine that, as Burns sang, “a man’s a man for a’ that,” the ancient routine of the powerful coercing the powerless has been acknowledged to be evil, even by the powerful—usually of course insincerely. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Or at least it has during the two-and-a-half centuries of our Liberal Era—a liberalism now, as usual, under siege.
What is this “liberalism” enunciated by the forefathers and foremothers—Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, Frédéric Bastiat and Alexis de Tocqueville, Ramon Aron and Rose Wilder Lane? Briefly, it is equality of permission. Parts of such an equality are human dignity, in cosmopolitan fashion ,and equality of standing to speak, in pluralistic fashion. But more generally it is an equality for all responsible adults to endeavor.
It is not the equalities of outcome or of opportunity, which of course are properly accorded to children in a loving family. Outcome and opportunity as political ideals, to be contrasted with an adult and responsible permission, became popular—though never achieved—in the middle of the 19th century. Socialism and “New” Liberalism arrived well after equality of permission had begun the liberal revolution and its resulting Great Enrichment. In 1846 the true liberal Thoreau began “Resistance to Civil Government” by declaring “I heartily accept the motto,—’That government is best which governs least,’ and I should like to see it acted upon more rapidly and systematically.” By contrast, the New Liberalism of the 1880s, still with us, summons the government to attempt to assure the equalities of outcome and opportunity, as children are assured in a loving family. The state has largely mostly in the attempt at such material equalities. But it has succeeded spectacularly in making us more and more into children, then serfs. The residue of the new liberty of permission made us rich in matter and soul, from Scotland and Tuscany to Hebei and Maharashtra. And the enrichment from equality of permission, ironically, achieved indirectly a substantial degree of equality of material outcome and opportunity.
Think of a constitution as the rules for a footrace, a nice or nasty footrace. Liberals by any definition have agreed since the 18th century that the ancient rules such as “Kings always win” or “Women always lose” are to be replaced in life’s footrace by rules of justice as fairness for all. Equality is the watchword, though not the old equality of slavish or childish domination by our betters or our elders—betters and elders exempted from the equality, their proud powers naturalized. We liberals do not approve of the delight among our conservative friends for unearned hierarchies, and for strong men gloriously in charge, whether the hierarchs be oppressive or paternalistic or merely romantically dazzling.
But the modern political left since Rousseau and especially since Marx, sometimes calling itself liberal, has promised for life’s footrace a rule of that equality of outcome. We are to cross the finish line together, arms locked. All of the children get medals. It’s a lovely vision, meet and right and practical inside a loving family or a little group of loving friends. During the Romantic Era, which not quite by accident has been coterminous with liberalism, its loveliness has appealed strongly to most teenagers. They emerge from a loving little family into a little group of loving friends, and then establish their own loving families. Good for them. Socialism works inside small groups, and is quite wonderful when it does.
But attempts to apply an equality at the finish line of the footrace to larger groups than family and friends has regularly failed, economically and then politically, and at length even in many of the little intentional communities motivated by an egalitarian ideology. St. Paul heard that some Thessalonian Christians were refusing to work, in anticipation of an imminent Second Coming. Why work if the Messiah will divide the sheep from the goats tomorrow, or maybe next week? Why work if a very generous basic income is paid to you, extracted from other people’s work-product? Why cook if Mom will anyway? Common sense counsels taking a free ride, and a free lunch. To this St. Paul thundered, Margaret-Thatcher style, “He who does not work should not eat.” Lenin in 1917 also adopted 1 Thessalonians 3:10 as his motto, “if we are not to indulge in utopianism.” Communists were no softer than Thatcher or St. Paul, on the sound prediction that a big society of free riders eventually runs out of other people’s work-product to redistribute. An equality of outcome, the brain surgeon paid at the finish line the same as the street sweeper, certainly comports with an equality of souls. A believer— Abrahamic, Buddhist, or whatever, and any liberal, classical, new, or whatever—would delight in such an outcome. We liberals of any stripe are egalitarians, after all. But, alas, in large groups the ignoring of a person’s marginal work-product, and making payments by the noble belief in the equality of human worth, in which all we theists and liberals do fervently believe, does not work. Through gross misallocation and the collapse of spurs to innovation, in the short run and in the long, it leads, in a large group to a dismal equality of poverty, and then to tyranny. Such attempts fail, even when they are kind and sincere and gentle. They fail more spectacularly, as in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, when hateful and insincere and violent.
By contrast to this hard-leftish program of equality of outcome, the middle of the conventional political spectrum, recognizing in life’s footrace the impracticality and consequent evil for large groups of a Rousseauian, coercively enforced equality of outcome, has promised instead since John Stuart Mill an equality of opportunity. Let us all begin the race together at the same starting line. Then it’s race on, yet prudence and justice are served. Splendid. No Cinderella is held back while her sisters race for the hand of the prince. Again, such an equality should and often does work well for small groups, such as loving families, or the friends in the Cheers bar at 75 Chestnut Street in Boston, or the elite runners in the Boston Marathon lined up together at the start. By fair rule or loving custom, let us begin the race equally.
Yet liberalism of any sort has claimed also since its dawn in the 18th century to be ethically cosmopolitan. In a proposed equality of opportunity we are not to be provincial or nationalistic. A child born in South Sudan is to be valued equally with a child born in France. Nationalism, though romantically inspiring, plainly violates cosmopolitan and Christian and liberal ethics. There’s no liberal case for a We-ism that confines our ethical concerns to Us.
And therefore the practical problem is that no compensation short of immediate emigration to Paris can put the South Sudanese child anywhere near the same starting line of the French child. Consider the enormous quantitative gap between the lifetime investments in the one compared with the other. A child in Chicago like Michelle Obama, born to wise and careful though not rich parents, lines up in the marathon of life many miles ahead of a child in New York like Donald Trump, born to foolish and careless though rich parents. She achieves a life well lived. He achieves the living Hell of being himself. Poor Donald, denied equality of opportunity.
Under the sweet, Millian, mid-spectrum proposal of equality of opportunity, a sadly disadvantaged child with inferior luck, genes, strength, beauty, nationality, inheritance, parentage, and inherited and cultivated intelligence is somehow to be compensated, to be brought up to a full, or at least a reasonably approximate, equality with the golden child at the starting line. But how? Perhaps nails are to be driven into the brains of the intelligent children, or the beautiful children are to be defaced, or good parents are to be denied, in order to achieve equality of opportunity. Or sums of money in compensation are to be provided by coercing other people—sums that can be, if you like such abstraction, rigorously proven to exceed all the world’s money income. The lifetime investments in children even in a poor country exceed what sums can be extracted by the state from such a country’s income over the same years, in order to advance a few inches towards equality at the starting line. It can’t be achieved substantially, except I repeat within a small group—and then sometimes to the deadly disadvantage to outsiders, in the style of exclusive cartels in business or exclusive labor unions in employment or Edward Banfield’s’ “amoral familism.” We indulge a foolish utopianism in believing it can be done on a large scale, or in pretending that our pathetic attempts at redistribution, such as foreign aid or public schools, actually compensate for differences, even approximately, nonexclusively and therefore in proper liberal fashion.
Achieving even approximate equality of opportunity, that is, requires either impossible money sums, tin order to bring people up to equality in compensation for their inequalities of other gifts, or else a Procrustean trimming of feet and head of the children on whom the fairies have sprinkled rich gifts at birth. And anyway it requires massive coercion by the only “we” in sight, the state. Take the boys away from parents at age seven to be educated uniformly for battle, as in Sparta after Lycurgus, or as in the Zulu kingdom under Shaka. The schemes raise the children as slaves of the state. When rigorously implemented by the state, they do result in military victories—but nightmares of illiberality, in Lycurgus’ Sparta and Shaka’s Zululand.
And an impossible but coercively attempted equality of human heights or intelligence or material outcomes crushes the gains from our varied gifts. In a short story in 1961, “Harrison Bergeron,” Kurt Vonnegut Jr. imagined a future of perfect equality of opportunity. Fast runners are weighted down like thoroughbred racehorses. Intelligence is handicapped. Stutterers such as John Rawls and me are assigned jobs as radio announcers, needing three minutes of painful stuttering to read out the three sentences of the weather forecast. No, of course not. Better to embrace diversity, letting the variety of gifts do their good works. As St. Paul noted in 1 Corinthians 12: 4-6, “There are different kinds of gifts. . . .. There are different kinds of working.” Good for us. We economists call it “comparative advantage,” an obvious rule for work assignments in a sports team or a little family—though we economists have never been able to persuade anybody but ourselves that for a nation it is also true and enriching, as it is, massively, and has been in the Liberal Era, and the end of history.
And needless to say, even little families and little groups of friends said to have a lovely equality of pizza—inspiring the warm-hearted, bourgeois teenager to imagine a mid-spectrum equality of opportunity, or even a leftish equality of outcome—are often not truly egalitarian, either at the start or at the finish. The pater familias, or the natural leader, is tempted, as recorded in numberless histories, to take selfish advantage of his superiority, the way King David did to acquire Bathsheba. Royal Agamemnon took Briseis from his subordinate, the swift-footed Achilles, with known results.
Yes, we might well tax ourselves, me to pay for the elementary education of the poor, on Mill’s argument that an illiterate citizenry spills over to endanger us all. A cynic might respond that a literate citizenry has proven quite as dangerous as an illiterate one, sometimes more so. Witness the most literate nation in the world, 1933-1945.
People are dangerous when inspired to mess with other people’s equality of permission.
Redistributions—such as public expenditure on education, even if clumsily done—do at least make the non-cynical feel satisfied that they’ve done their liberal, egalitarian duty. Unhappily, no, they haven’t. For one thing, education, though of course necessary for the admirable sort of flourishing that Mill wished for us all, can’t come close to achieving equality at the starting line, not in the actual world of varied gifts and differing families and South Sudans. And for another— the harsh cynic adds—state education run by large bureaucracies, trade unions, and schools of education will not achieve even the cultural flourishing for which Mill so nobly wished for Britain, if not in his day job for India. And it certainly does not achieve even a rough equality of dollar incomes for people with very different sorts of gifts and tastes and backgrounds.
And state education is of course coercive, requiring hard men with guns to enforce its taxes and regulations. As the liberal economist Mark Pennington notes in his recent book advocating a surprisingly “Foucauldian post-modern liberalism”—rather similar in its ambition to my surprisingly “Christian liberalism” advocated in another book—“it may be an inevitable aspect of a state that tries to incentivise improvements and to equalise opportunities [in education as in everything else] that it will require [in the Foucauldian jargon] a decentred network of disciplinary surveillance to monitor and to ‘police’ the relevant incentives, standards and opportunities.” In a more direct fashion the scare-quotes come off the word “police.” A famous news photo in 1965 showed Iowa State Police chasing little Amish children through corn fields to force them to go to public schools. The publication of the photo ended abruptly and permanently the state of Iowa’s illiberal plan to coerce Amish children into public schools, though educated in their own, Amish-run schools. Margaret Thatcher—said to have been a liberal—nonetheless centralized K-12 education. Thus state education.
To try to compensate by state action for all inequalities of opportunity, or even for some of the major ones of birth, in short, is a Romantic and utopian plan with no chance of even approximate fulfilment. If you disagree, examine the quantitative evidence. You will be disappointed. Yet any liberal would of course, I repeat, be thrilled if the equal starting line or for that matter the equal finish line would miraculously occur, even if merely substantially closer to such an ideal than the corrupt and incompetent results of socialism and New Liberalism have in fact achieved. It would be wonderful—would it not?— if we could get closer by the comprehensive action of the modern state to equality of opportunity and outcome. It didn’t work.
But in historical fact we did get it, and it did work, from a liberalism of equality of permission, approximately yet substantially. In 1901 the formerly socialist but by then liberal American economist John Bates Clark predicted, on the basis of what had already occurred, that in an economy of equality of permission during the century to come “the typical laborer will increase his wages [in real terms, allowing for inflation] from one dollar a day to two, from two to four and from four to eight. Such gains will mean infinitely more to him than any possible increase of capital can mean to the rich. . . . This very change will bring with it a continual approach to equality of genuine comfort.” His prediction was spot on, quantitatively speaking, achieved by liberalism, not by the state—which of course in Clark’s time had hardly gotten going in its promise of freedom from want to be achieved by its expanding coercions. Henry Maine in 1861 celebrated the triumph of permission liberalism in the previous decades as a wonderful shift from status to contract. Since then we have steadily moved from contract to coercion. Contract works. Coercion doesn’t.
The modern myths of statism are anti-liberal, envious, zero-sum, coercive, and childish. They suppress, for example, innovation. Innovation through the liberation of human creativity is what caused the Great Enrichment—not the capital accumulation on which both bourgeois and Marxist economists obsess. And the unintended reversals of progress arising from redistributive and regulatory schemes have often been distressingly large. We have repeatedly embarked on statist schemes ranging up from rent control to full-bore communism, and have found repeatedly that they damage the very poor we earnestly intended to help. The attempts to push towards equality of opportunity routinely then turns hideously illiberal. The jack-booted Iowa State Police arrive.
True liberals, I say again, are above all egalitarians. That’s what makes them different from conservatives. But what makes them different from progressives is that they are also realists. Our friends the progressive utopians promise that, “I’m from the expert, masterful, parental government, and I’m here to make you utterly equal and truly happy.” A Bolshevik motto in a 1918 poster was, “We shall drive mankind to happiness with an iron hand.” It doesn’t work as advertised, and meanwhile it has made modern citizens into children waiting to be fed. Better “adultism,” as a liberal equality of permission might be called.
The statists often point out with an air of satisfaction that Frederick Hayek’s fear in 1944 that we were on the road to serfdom has not turned out. Nor, they say, has Orwell’s prediction in 1950. Modern social democracies, they say, are sweet and good. What the statists miss, as for example Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have in their eloquent books in favor of steadily expanding state action, is what the liberal Hayek wrote in 1955 in a preface to the American paperback edition of The Road to Serfdom. He noted what has turned out, and more today than in 1955, is the social psychological creation of childish serfs out of adult citizens:
The most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people. This is necessarily a slow affair. . . which extends not over a few years but perhaps over one or two generations. . . . The political ideals of the people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. This means. . . that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.
And another of Mill’s arguments for state education, like all the statist arguments that have been based especially since the 1920s on the economist’s notion of spillovers, or “externalities,” has no logical stopping point short of an all-encompassing state. In any society, after all, we bump into each other, we irritate each other, we contradict each other, we out-perform each other, all day long. Prices registering the opportunity cost of some of the bumping, called by the economists when priced “pecuniary externalities,” prevent a war of all against all, at least for the priced goods. It works pretty well, if the outcome is accompanied by a widespread ideology accepting it. Burns sang of the ideology of liberal respect: “The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor, / Is king o’ men for a’ that.” Damned right, and self-respecting, unlike the children waiting to be fed. But a society consists mostly of non-pecuniary externalities, good and bad, large and small. “Let us have,” says the Millean liberal, “education for all, because of spillovers of illteracy.” But wait. As my beloved colleague at Cato, the late David Boas, a very great liberal, put it, one would wish likewise all manner of externalities to be checked, such as that everyone, say, applied underarm deodorant. Not doing so creates an obvious spillover, if less grievous than illiteracy and many hundreds of others. But the spilling doesn’t automatically justify —and maybe not even in the elementary case of elementary schooling—state coercion of the malodorous or the taxpayers or of the Amish children. In sweetly democratic theory we “tax ourselves, and impose regulation, through our elected representatives.” Yes, once in a while we vote for or against an immense bundle with goods and bads. A true liberalism of equality of permission proposes to unbundle, and leave the choice to the varied people with their varied projects of life.
In the matter of education, parents mostly love their children, and know intimately their gifts and handicaps, and wish them to be educated, especially in a modern economy in which education is so obviously the largest form of capital. So they send them to school, as indeed many Americans did before public schools, and as Black parents did after slavery against fierce opposition by the whites in charge. And at length the parents advised their children to apply deodorant, too.
Externalities are not simply technological, as economists believe without much reflection, but are defined socially all the way down. If factory smoke became fashionable to breathe, it would stop being a negative externality and would become instead a positive one. If those in control of the state apparatus delighted in non-literate citizens, as once they did, no negative externality relevant to the wishes of the master would arise. That conservative Jews and Muslims object to women wearing tops that do not cover arms, because it arouses lust in men, is surely a spillover. It ”exists.” But the liberal asks: does it justify clothing police?
A quasi-liberal equality of opportunity at the starting line, and of dealing with what the society at present deems the grosser externalities, sounds at first very far from a dreadful, ant-hill equality of outcome and the removal of every single externality, to achieve utterly uniform, equal lives. Some recent rhetoric of equality seems to have such an ambition, and supposes that the ambition can be achieved. Any inequality whatever is cited indignantly as justifying more coercion by the state. Yet if we seriously attempt a project of substantially—that is, quantitatively significantly— eliminating inequality and externality, we achieve in logic and fact a human ant hill. A notable student of ant hills, E. O. Wilson, when asked about the top-down idea for organizing humans to achieve equality and harmony under socialism, replied that, “Karl Marx was right, socialism works. It is just that he had the wrong species.”
If miraculously we were all precisely, ant-hill identical—Al Capp’s little shmoos will serve for quite elderly readers; for the rest wholly blank slates—then with an identical starting line we all would of course in logic cross the finish line of the Boston marathon at exactly the same time of 2 hours, 19 minutes, and 59 seconds. Mathematically correct, sir. But political theories should deal with the blessedly or cursedly varied world as it actually is, or a version of the world that could actually occur under the actually observed boundary condition, the starting lines. Political theory should not deal, as most of it has, with a wholly imaginary world in which redistribution and regulation and state education and clothing police are implemented by virtuous philosopher kings magically perfectly, whose wide policies generate no untoward side effects. On this matter the beloved Mill, like the beloved Homer, nods. He asserted that production is one thing, a thing of labor input determining economic value, and that distribution of the proceeds is another, an independent thing of justice. His assertions, both which are mistaken, came to dominate modern political philosophy and its doppelganger from the 1930s, “welfare economics.” The economist’s absurdly pretentiously labeled Second Theorem of Welfare Economics—which formalizes Mill’s supposition—liberated econowannabe-philosophers to speculate on imagined worlds never to be.
And, I repeat, the only “we” that can undertake the hopeless projects of correcting by coercion all or even most of the bigger inequalities of outcome or of opportunity, or offsetting by coercion all al or even the bigger externalities, both of them present in an unlimited yet socially chosen number, is an omnipotent state. Every non-true-liberal political philosophy slides down towards the hideous statism of Plato’s Republic or of Hobbes Leviathan or of Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat. “Inequality” and “externalities” have become all-purpose rallying cries among quasi-liberals, raised recently for example by the economist Joseph Stiglitz, for imposing more and more and more state coercions. Joe calls his proposed coercions “mild.” But he offers no evidence that they are. Perhaps he has never been seized by the sheriff, twice, for unwarranted psychiatric examination. Perhaps he has never been jailed for sitting in at a drugstore lunch counter. If the coercions do happen to seem mild, such as traffic laws, he offers no ideas about how to keep them non-violent when, say, an Alabama police officer stops, for a broken turn signal, a Black man at the wheel. The coercions, that is, are mostly illiberal, utopian, incoherent, unscientific, unlimited, unjust, unwise, and, if you are caught violating them by smoking a joint, decidedly un-mild. Look at the illiberal polices and corresponding coercions built into the U.S. Federal tax code, in its violation of the common law of allowable evidence and the burden of proof.
§
A true and sober yet egalitarian liberalism, then, should promise in the footrace of life neither an equality of outcome nor an equality of opportunity, nor the righting of every externality that someone claims without evidence is large and easily offset by somehow clever and disinterested state action. The statist economist or philosopher or politician should not promise to fulfill a plan on which one cannot possibly deliver. It’s irresponsible. Such progressive chatter by Ivy-League graduates does not fool the working class, which knows the actual score: Harvard and Yale 29, the local community college and the assembly line zero. And when the false promise of equality of opportunity fails, as it must, it has proven repeatedly to be politically corrupting—generating and exploiting envy and anger in the style of Juan Perón and Donald Trump.
The declared policy of equality of outcome or of opportunity has the same tension between ideal and practice as seen in Christianity between “give away all your goods to the poor, and follow me” on the one hand and an ordinary Christian life on the other. Paying a tithe to the church does not give away all your goods. Paying taxes for the state to redistribute a little, or even a lot, doesn’t, either. The loose rhetoric of the New Liberals recommending that the rich “pay their fair share” in aid of equality of opportunity has no upper limit in logic. Admittedly, neither does it have a lower limit. In both cases it’s justified, if that’s the right word, by Bentham’s utilitarianism. Economists believe they follow it, but they can’t. If people are assumed to be equal in their capacities to enjoy utility, then the greatest happiness of the greatest number implies rigorously that incomes must be strictly equalized, down to the last dollar. To speak of the other bound, taxation-as-theft would likewise imply exactly no taxes at all. A somewhat loose liberalism seems more sensible. Utilitarians from Bentham through John Rawls have stopped short of the implication of taxation driven up to confiscatory, the way secular clergy or ordinary Christians stopped short of the asceticism of the Desert Fathers or itinerant friars.
What, then, should be the true-liberal rule in the footrace of life?
It should be—for natural justice to the individual and for the consequent flourishing of the individual’s fellows—an equality of permission, or allowance, or approval for a general right to do, to enter in the race as an adult. It should be what Adam Smith proposed in 1776 as “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty.” Abraham Lincoln used the metaphor of the footrace, declaring in 1860 that “when one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life.” Wherever you start in the race, or wherever the betting might predict you will end it, under a liberal equality of permission you may, as the sporting British put it, “have a go.” “Fair goes” say the even more sporting Austrians. The Poms get to bat, then we do. May the best team win. Even in a literal game like cricket, no coercive state intervenes to make the teams equally skilled, or to eliminate every externality of body-line bowling or aggressive field placement for a fast bowler. In economic games in a liberal economy you are permitted—not subsidized by extractions from others—to open in 1881 a better department store in Chicago, to give the lady what she wants, with money-back guarantees, if you can imagine it, in the way working-class Marshall Field did. That’s what “competition” means. Competition is not, as imagined by many non-economists, a terrifying struggle red in tooth and claw, or even the zero-sum of a footrace or a cricket match, but the positive sum so spectacularly achieved 1776 to the present of the permission to enter the race and to offer what you imagine is a better good or better service to customers, or the better thought or music or painting. As the German philosopher of money, Georg Simmel, put it in 1900, economic competition is not a coercion but a seduction. And it results of course in improvement for the customers in their race of life, as does equality of permission in speech or music or painting does. In a liberal society, “fair goes” enriches less like a zero-sum footrace and more like a win-win square dance, the explosion over the past two centuries of average real income per person in the world by 3,000 percent, and the cultural explosion accompanying it.
A liberal equality of permission, then, allowing people to proceed in the race or the square dance or the obvious and simple system of natural liberty without let and hindrance, opposes the anciently coerced or inherited hierarchies of gender, status, class, or office, a top-down governing of the childlike women or slaves or, as Mill did in his day job, I note again, the Sub-continent’s subjects under British rule. The year before Lincoln’s deployment of the metaphor of the liberal race of life, as the historian Allen H. Guelzo notes, the Harvard philosopher whom Lincoln had followed from his wide reading, railed against the old opposite of equality pf permission— “the worst of all forms of civil polity, …that which binds a man for ever to that condition of life in which he was born, be it of high or low degree.” To our great good, Lincoln was determined to better the condition of life in which he was born, as his father’s rail-splitter having barely a year of state education.
If the liberty of permission is raised to a leading ethical and ideological principle, it makes for dignified people, though they begin the race ever so poor. Dignity is what people want above all, and was harshly denied before equality of permission. Riches are very nice, as NNN observed in 193DD: But the poor man of independent mind sets aside envy and anger, and in self-respect he gets on with the footrace. Robert Burns, who in his life had done so, composed in 1795 the liberal anthem I’ve been quoting:
What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an’ a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ that:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that; . . . .
The man o’ independent mind,
He looks an’ laughs at a’ that.
If that doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, especially when sung to its string tune by Sheena Wellington at the opening of the new Scottish Parliament on 1 July, 1999, you are not a liberal. The poem sums up what a true liberal advocates: “Then let us pray that come it may, / As come it will for a’ that, / That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth / Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that.”
In the Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, the earliest quotation for the phrase “at liberty” is 1503: “That every freeman be at liberty to buy and sell with every other,” which is the point here—that true liberalism is most deeply and most plausibly the permission, the allowance to participate “at liberty” in the economy, as eventually also in the church and then in the polity—equally, if a “freeman.” Yet quite a few men in 1503 were unfree, denied this or that permission, and one out of two people were women, denied many more. Robert Burns himself did not have enough property to vote. The shocking novelty that he and a few others articulated in the late 18th century was declaring that every adult was to be free, equally “at liberty.” And at last even the poor and the enslaved and the women and the Catholics and the handicapped and the queers and the immigrants and the population of the Sub-continent were to be at liberty. As Langston Hughes sang in 1936, “O, let America be America again— / The land that never has been yet— / And yet must be—the land where every man is free.”
You might personally, under true-liberal rules for the footrace, be sorely disadvantaged at the starting line, like working-class Benjamin Franklin, Robert Burns, John Keats, Michael Faraday, Abraham Lincoln, Marshall Field, Andrew Carnegie, or for that matter middle-class yet African-American Langston Hughes. A pity, though little can be done about by state action. But if living in even a partially liberal society, you have at least partial equality of permission, and can have a go at entering and perhaps winning the race, from whatever starting line God or nature or family or society gave you. You might become a scientist-statesman, the bard of Scotland, a great Romantic poet, a pioneering chemist, a poet-president, an innovative merchant, an innovative steel maker, or a prodigious political poet. True, the Hebrew Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes wisely observes that “the race is not to the swift. . . but time and chance happeneth to them all.” But in the true-liberal race, at the least no hooks or chairs to block and trip over, as my mother used to say, are to be placed by human folly or malice in the path of fair goes for all.
The hooks and chairs enthusiastically recommended for state action by left and right and middle among political philosophers are placed, of course, by our masters authorized by our occasional and issue-bundled vote to exercise the state’s monopoly of coercion. The hooks and chairs are artificial, merely of human design, sometimes designed maliciously, sometimes designed on the sweet superstition that our masters are wise and loving parents, very skilled in designing regulations for us children. Such deliberate hooks and chairs imposed by our sovereign lords, though not the lamentable but irremediable constraints of time and chance and the first law of thermodynamics, are therefore within our power to remove, next Tuesday if we wish. Under the obvious and simple system of natural liberty, said Smith, “the sovereign [in possession of the legitimate monopoly of coercion] is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society.” In contrast to an imagined duty to superintend a thorough equality of outcome or of opportunity, or to offset every externality that Joe Stiglitz imagines, a true liberal equality of permission can be attained worldwide, if we wish, Tuesday next. Take away the superintending hooks and chairs, and burn them. Burn redlining maps of neighborhoods. Burn laws against homosexuality. Burn the War on Drugs. Burn draft cards. Burn 95 percent of the Federal Code. Burn the tacit agreement between the Vatican Bank and the Mafia, at least if a restrained state can prosecute it. Burn also, egregiously cruel parenting, at least if a restrained state can prosecute it. Burn, Baby, burn.
A straightforward instance of the state’s superintending hooks and chairs, among millions and counting, is the law that prohibits U.S. residents from buying prescription drugs outside the U.S. The drug companies in the U.S., by employing some 1,500 lobbyists in Washington, leave patients in the U.S. with upwards of ten times higher prices for drugs than Canadians or Mexicans. Congress and the President could burn this particular hook and chair tomorrow afternoon if they wished, letting the rest of the world also serve, as Americans do now, as guinea pigs for developing of new drugs—or, more likely, paying for marketing ploys such as all-expenses-paid vacations in Hawaii for prescribing doctors and their families. Congress and the President don’t wish to do it, and boast instead about allowing Medicare to bargain with the drug companies, and about imposing price controls on insulin.
Even if the many millions of superintending hooks and chairs were altogether wise of plan and pure of intention, as the drug laws decidedly are not, the few theoretically desirable hooks and chairs are very often in practice placed incompetently. The seat belt for autos was patented by Volvo in 1959 but then thrown open by the company to other manufacturers. It came to be buckled up mainly by adult prudence, not by state coercion. The lawyer Ralph Nader implacably opposed seat belts, on the grounds that people were childishly imprudent and would not buckle up. He insisted instead on state superintendence backed by coercion to install in every car the expensive and unreliable air bags, which he got. Like behaviorist economists, most lawyers believe that people are hopelessly imprudent. Childish. I suppose the lawyers’ daily contact with idiotic clients wanting to sue everybody in sight persuades them of this. It’s understandable—though scientifically mistaken in view of the ability of most people to cross the street or manage their lives in most other ways without tort or error, with the help of voluntary arrangements in the market, saving them from rot or error, arrangements discounted by behaviorist economists. Therefore the lawyers such as Ralph Nader and the behavioral economists such as Richard Thaler propose yet another hook and chair to coerce the foolish dears. In the event, cheap seat belts save many more lives than air bags do. Marshall Field’s money-back guarantees save many more mistaken purchases than consumer protections do. Nader and Thaler do not know what they are talking about, a common result of trying to lay down a future by state planning in a world in which, for one thing, time and chance and the first law of thermodynamics happeneth to all.—or in which drug and car companies do dirty deed by corrupting a too-powerful state. Or in which existing laws make first-best policies inefficient compared with hard-to-discern second- or tenth-best. Or in which above all, Smith wrote, “in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.”
Of course the state’s regulations are claimed, if often disingenuously, to protect us all. In fact they very often render us victims. Most occupational safety laws, for instance, are happily accepted by big companies, in order to drive small companies out of the market. Big companies have big legal departments. Tariffs on imports prevent us from buying where we want, and keep people in the wrong jobs. Agricultural subsidies and protections raise the price of food and fiber, denying income to poor Africans and Central Americans. Many claims of eminent domain are unwise or corrupt. Many wars are very unwise or very corrupt, not infrequently both.
The New York Times recently used a study by the Mercatus Institute and its own research, machine reading of all the millions of U.S. regulations. It discovered that to run an apple orchard in New Hampshire you are subject to 12,000 hooks and chairs, fully 5,000 of them particularly “relevant to orchards.” Orchardmen will deny it, but that’s because they’ve adjusted to the rules, as people do, and have stopped noticing them, the way we stop noticing the custom of which side of the road to drive on (which is self-enforcing and needs no state intervention) or the results in high prices from tariffs on foreign trade (which depend entirely on state coercion against the bold, and beneficial, smugglers). The pile of printed rules of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration about an orchard’s ladders alone would reach the middle branches of most apple trees. Robert Frost spins in his grave.
Yet next Tuesday’s attainable equality of permission will taste to moderns like weak tea beside the exciting if wholly unattainable spiciness of substantial equality of outcome or of opportunity, or of comprehensively offset externalities. The excitement is another unhappy consequence of our Romantic Era, mixed with a highly unromantic utilitarianism, inspiring together in young radicals a revolutionary fervor about state planning, and in old moderates at least a quiet self-satisfaction about an egalitarian duty fulfilled, and in economists and calculators young and old a persistent itch to add more coercions. The Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in London embodies in its name the correlation of a closely conducted and French- Enlightenment orchestration of society with an excitingly revolutionary Romanticism, and top-down conducting. Equality of permission from the Scottish Enlightenment of Hume or Smith or Ferguson feels merely classical, Mozartian. It’s merely the boring old Flute and Harp Concerto in boring old C Major, K 299. Let’s have instead that Romantic crash-bang with soaring programmatic themes turning the world upside down. Das Liebesverbot. Wow. Conducted by Benthamite social engineers, it can make the world again. Double wow.
And yet consider the possibility, in view of its astonishing successes since 1776, that a modern ideology of equality of permission—the candidate for vice-president in 2924 Tim Walz, expresses it as “Mind your own damn business”—might by itself be sufficient for a good society, making for the dignity we all seek, and making for the accomplishments of liberal art and science and economy.
§
In 1989 the political theorist Judith Shklar gave the usual definition of an adult, boring, minimal, classical, unromantic, unexciting, weak-tea liberalism: “Liberalism has only one overriding aim. . . . Every adult should be able to make as many effective decisions without fear or favor about as many aspects of her or his life as is compatible with the like freedom of every other adult.” Notice that “the like freedom of every other adult” denies coerced redistribution from Peter to pay Paul and other violations of equality of permission. Shklar’s and mine is Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty, not the positive liberty routinely nowadays added into the definition of liberty—he “freedom from want.” Shklar’s “effective” in “effective decisions” might, alas, be gesturing towards positive liberty. As Smith put the Shklar-Berlin negative liberty in an economic context, “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.” Notice, too, that the Shklar-Berlin-Smith definition does not say that she or he is constrained not to “hurt” or “offend” or “succeed against” her or his competitors. Liberty means being permitted—without superintending hooks and chairs set up by other humans through the state—to bring new industry, capital, and ideas to the competition to the seduction of the customer. Marshall Field can open Marshall Fields.
Minimal liberalism is equality of permission. Even our sovereigns in the state are to be made equal with us in their permissions, the Danish king peddling to work on a bicycle. You are permitted to decide to buy from whom you wish, sell to whom you wish, say what you wish, write what you wish, move where you wish, love whom you wish, endow what you wish, worship as you wish—all within the egalitarian constraint of the deals that others, similarly permitted, are willing to offer. Excepting modest taxation and restrained policing in line with the relaxed but true liberalism I am advocating, for protection against the few sorts of private force or fraud that the state can justly and efficaciously reduce to tolerable rarity, or the tiny number of great externalities such as plagues or invasions or global warming that the state can justly and efficaciously reduce to tolerable rarity, you are to have no physically coercive master, be they husband or priest or sovereign or bureaucrat.
The claim is sometimes heard from quasi-liberals, especially if they are not accustomed to reasoning quantitatively, that we liberals should in fact approve of quite a few of the present projects of the modern state, or at any rate the less obviously violent ones. Airline regulation, if not qualified immunity for the police. The Food and Drug Administration, if not the War on Drugs. And on, and on. As the Blessed Smith himself put it in the same core passage of 1776 that I’ve been quoting, the sovereign does have “a duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.” Our sovereign should indeed attend to big non-pecuniary externalities, such as those plagues and invasions and global warmings. And yes, some few safety regulations enforced with the sovereign’s cudgel make it easier to go about our business with confidence—though our quasi-liberal friends typically forget, or deny, that a private certification of airlines or drugs or doctors, or private inventions reducing CO2 emissions, might achieve the same results as does hauling out the cudgel of the state. A “board-certified doctor” is a fine thing, but not so much if by state protection he is enabled to exercise monopoly power, instead of facing the free choices of patients. There’s a balance to be struck between protecting people by state law on the one hand and on the other letting people self-protect by an adult prudence supplemented by tort law and by unfettered entry of competitors into protective devices and institutions. Buckle up in your Volvo instead of relying on the airbags. Shop at money-back Marshall Fields on State Street instead of no-money-back Goldblatt’s a few blocks south.
But we must be quantitative and hard-minded to get the balance even approximately right. An airy, non-quantitative rhetoric of exists/not, on/off, yes/no as in the writings of the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Richard Thaler and most of the other economists and their philosophical followers about the “existence” of inequalities and externalities, and the ”existence” of a wonderfully wise state capable of dealing with them, will not suffice, scientifically or ethically. The old joke is that a chemist, an engineer, and an economist are stranded on a desert island with only a large can of baked beans to eat. How to open the can? The chemist: “Heat it with our fire until it explodes.” The engineer: “Stab the side with a sharp rock and pry it open with a big stick.” The economist: “You guys are sooooo crude! It’s easy: assume we have a can opener.”Assume imperfection in markets and perfection in states. Easy.
When a true liberal makes some modest, quantitative, scientifically justified, Cato-Institute suggestion for, say, deregulation, a suggestion supported even by the Clintonite Progressive Policy Institute, the retort by the statist left or right, at the People’s Policy Report or the Heritage Foundation, is to accuse her of being a crazy anarchist, probably a bomb-throwing nihilist. “What, don’t you want any state?!” Such a retort to a serious calculation of cost and benefit is disgraceful. Serious people should stop using it. Tell me instead about your counterevidence. Argue seriously, so that we can together in a liberal conversation discern the right. We true liberals want a state to deal with some private crimes and with the larger externalities, but we want every such policy to be tested by serious calculations—as the War on Drugs, again, was not—and then afterwards evaluated by a report on actual outcomes, and then adjusted—instead of asserting what the policy is “designed” to do and then going home for dinner. The relevant questions are not answered by qualitative theorems of existence, but by quantitative calculations—how much, how many, with what fruit on the whole in light of unintended consequences, and to what extent the state can in quantitative fact do better. It’s Cato-Institute stuff. It’s not “conservative.” It’s sensibly true liberal. It’s adult, accepting as little children do not the reality principle.
Smith in the passage about public works and public institutions had in mind the little Scottish school in Kirkcaldy financed by taxes on local property, and the Royal Navy financed by taxes on beer, together with a modest number of other public expenditures amounting in sum in 1776 to, say, 5 percent of GDP in peacetime. University education in Scotland was paid directly by the students, and directly to the professors such as Smith, a pecuniary externality, or rather an internality. It is why Scottish universities were superior to the anciently endowed colleges of Oxbridge, at which Smith spent six unhappy years. Yet by now the modern state commonly takes for its lovely programs not 5 percent but 35 to 50 percent of GDP. It subsidizes the children of rich lawyers and businesspeople in their university educations, and intervenes in apple orchards with 5,000 regulations. Smith, too, spins in his grave.
The great American sociologist Howard S. Becker (1928-2023) spoke of a “world.” He was implicitly contrasting the people in his “world” with the “rational men,” the jerks playing a non-cooperative game posited by the great American economist Gary Becker (1930-2014, no relation). And he was more explicitly contrasting his “world” with the “fields” inhabited by proudly, snobbishly, fully Enlightened Frenchmen, also jerks, using hierarchical ploys to demean and exclude other people by testing whether they knew who wrote “The Well-Tempered Clavier,“ achieving nonequality of permission, as imagined by the great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Becker wrote:
The metaphor of “world”—which does not seem to be at all true of the metaphor of “field”—contains people, all sorts of people, who are in the middle of doing something which requires them to pay attention to each other, to take account consciously of the existence of others and to shape what they do in the light of what others do. In such a world, people … develop their lines of activity gradually, seeing how others respond to what they do and adjusting what they do next in a way that meshes with what others have done and will probably do next…. The resulting collective activity is something that perhaps no one wanted, but is the best everyone could get out of this situation and therefore what they all, in effect, agreed to.
It’s true liberalism, true equality of permission, the “affordance” that industrial designers pursue in making cars, faucets, packaging democratically easy to use, enabled by reducing what Cass Sunstein calls the “sludge” obstructing access. True liberalism is not cruelty, or some allegedly modern “possessive individualism,” or a disdain for community, or “I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.” No you aren’t, dear. You are not an island, entire of itself. You are, as Smith showed in detail in his other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a social creature. Adam Ferguson in 1767 articulated the characteristic discovery of a Scottish Enlightenment enthusiastic for individual liberty, as against the reason-mad French Enlightenment enthusiastic for constructing the world again by top-down coercion: “Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what is termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments [that is, institutions], which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” Not top-down. Not French. Not the U.S. Congress. Not the World Bank. Not statist economists.
Musical improvisation is like that, as affirmed by the jazz and classical trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. It’s not surprising to learn that Howie Becker himself was from age 14 in Chicago a part-time but paid jazz pianist, and that his first book was about jazz musicians. Improvisation, with its resulting spontaneous order in a Beckerian world, is the liberal outcome of the equality of permission praised by Hume and Smith and Ferguson and the other Scots during the 18th century, and detested by the statists in 18th-century France, and now also in 21st-century Scotland. When the modern Scots sing Burns’ liberal anthem they think he was praising socialism, not liberal self-respect. They are mistaken. The masters in the old USSR detested jazz itself, as an instantiation of the bottom-up equality of permission they so very deeply detested. They loved instead top-down ballet, marvelous but not at all improvisational if the dancers are not to run into each other, and they loved top-down orchestral music, marvelous but white noise if not conducted from the top. In The Stones of Venice (1851-1853) John Ruskin praised the bottom-up democracy of Gothic architecture as against the monotonous top-downism of the expert architectural masters of the Renaissance such as Andrea Palladio. Yet, wholly inconsistently, Ruskin the Romantic detested true-liberal economics.
Democratic, bottom-up equality of permission began by accident after the 15th century in northwestern Europe from a series of happy if precarious victories over the routine illiberalism of human lives since Eden and agriculture. Partial victories were seen for example in the Radical Reformation and in the divine wind scattering the Spanish Armada. Further east and further south in the Eurasian lands at the time, by bad luck despite some flickering possibilities at commercial Osaka and Novgorod and Venice, such victories were rare. Tyranny is hard to break, as the Russians and Chinese have long known, and as the subjects of Tudor and Stuart monarchs in Britain knew very well indeed. At length, by more good luck late in the 17th century, the exhausted reaction to the Wars of Religion tipped the balance towards liberalism, at least in Holland and the Anglosphere. Late in the 18th century a true liberalism was supplied with a political theory, in Edinburgh and Philadelphia and occasionally even in Paris. It proposed “Let’s just get along,“ letting all sorts of people pursue each their lines of activity. When back in 1681 Louis XIV’s Comptroller-General Jean-Baptiste Colbert had kindly offered to help the businesspeople of Paris, the story goes, they replied, doubtless alarmed by the proposed extension of state coercion into their businesses, “Laissez-nous faire,” Let us do [it]. ‘Thanks awfully for the wonderful offer, Monsieur l’État,” they might have put it. “But without your splendid intentional, top-down, ant-hill designs we’ll carry on with our admittedly rough-and-ready spontaneous cooperation and competition, as in the evolution of fashions in furniture.” In the version of the story told by the early true-liberal economist Pierre de Boisguilbert, “an important merchant” assured Colbert that “everything would go perfectly well because the desire to earn is so natural.” Yes, and on the consumer’s side the desire to get a good price for a baroque sideboard is also natural. The Parisian furniture maker meets the consumer, and they strike a deal from which both gain. The multifarious outcomes are the best the bulk of the people could get out of the situation and therefore what they all, in effect, agreed to. They do not agree, note, to a Hobbesian or Rousseauian or Buchananesque or Rawlsian contract social designed by a masterful lawyer/choreographer. They would not agree, for example, to a singular, uniform, ant-hill, and centrally planned line of activity, except in a war of survival, or in the Romantic and utilitarian excitements of nationalism or socialism or syndicalism, or, if you please, a national socialist workers’ party combining all three to glorious effect.
Getting along with each other, I have admitted, is unexciting, minimal, bourgeois, Swiss, even a little sappy. But ever since the hierarchy of fixed-field agriculture first imposed upon us all a physically coercing master, and then ever since the Liberty Movement of the past two and a half centuries initiated a stop to many of its old physical coercions by the masters, the boring, new-old liberalism has served us exceptionally well. In liberal countries the anciently authorized whipping of sailors, servants in husbandry, apprentices, wives, children, and the enslaved ceased, eventually. The equality of permission of true liberalism has been our first, last, and best chance to get the lashes off our backs and the boots off our faces.
Yet almost immediately the more exciting theories of equality of outcome or of opportunity, or the inequality of syndicalist protection of a trade union or a business cartel against competition, and later the economist’s appeal to ubiquitous externalities to justify still more interventions, overturned the modest and briefly British program of true liberalism. A New, or Social, Liberalism, I have noted, began to take hold in Britain during the 1880s. At the same time Bismarck devised an illiberal welfare state, and in the next decades American Progressives used the big stick to carry out their racism and eugenics and xenophobia. By now the faux-liberalism of a coercive social democracy and the rule of statist economists has arrived at that 35 or 50% of GDP. The program of all the New Liberalisms is to use the coercive power of the state to set right the horrible inequalities of outcome and of opportunity, the lack of proper protection for unions and cartels, and the horrible externalities—all the social problems suddenly perceived in the 19th century by the bourgeoisie and its teachers and preachers, ethically serious folk, at first mostly Protestants. The social problems were newly exposed in surveys and photographs about how the other half lived, supplementing ancient and then Romantic clichés about the evils of city life. They are everywhere a journalistic template. Let’s do something about The Latest Problem. Don’t just stand there. Panic! Never mind that most of the problems are in fact hardy myths, such as the impoverishment and alienation of workers by “capitalism,” the sexual evil of slum neighborhoods, the decline of the middle class, the rising inequality, the novel cultural vulgarity, and the prevalence of bowling alone—to be solved by the wisdom, competence, and honesty of the modern state, such as Louisiana or Italy.
The 19th-century coinage “social problem” would have seemed absurd before liberalism. Everyone should have a coercive master, or else the gates of Hell open. Take up your cross, and shut up, for you have infinite bliss to come. With liberalism, whose first triumph was solving the newly perceived social problem of slavery, the phrase “social problem” exploded. Many wanted to go beyond boring old true liberalism to an excitingly activist state. The New Liberals, the Protestant social gospelers, the Catholic social teachers, and the revolutionary socialists agreed on the matter. Romantic hostility to a spooky “capitalism,” and enthusiasm for an imagined social justice or general will, implemented by a coercive and utilitarian state, became in the early 20th century commonplace among the clerks. Not markets. Not that “capitalism,” from which the clerks nonetheless got their daily bread. “By the late 19th century,” observed the historian of the bourgeoisie, Jürgen Kocka, “capitalism was no longer thought to be a carrier of progress.” From the 1920s on, even the formerly true-liberal tribe of economists increasingly asserted—I repeat, with little or no quantitative or other scientific evidence for the assertion—that a market economy of equality of permission is chock full of terrible, nationally significant imperfections. Class warfare. Unemployment. Monopoly. Externalities. Inequality. Informational asymmetries. Ignorant consumers. By now we turn to the state when it rains.
An excess of statism is defended as a “middle path” by our beloved quasi-liberal friends, and also our beloved compassionate-conservative friends. Let the state, which is very good at such tasks, especially when advised by economists such as John Maynard Keynes or Paul Samuelson or Joseph Stiglitz, fix the imperfections. All will be well on the middle path to what the medieval Europeans called Land of Cockaigne, and the American folk song called the Big Rock Candy Mountain. If it’s not yet attained, and if we spot more unquantified but surely highly dangerous imperfections, we need merely add more hooks and chairs, new institutions for example, and stir.
A true liberal agrees with his statist friends that we need coercive protection against very bad or very careless people who would significantly spoil our safety or our equalities of permission. And some few of the uncountable infinity of externalities are worth some state action, such as bold fraud. Alfonso Capone was a thieving monster, admittedly one created by the state’s new project of Prohibition against the externality of male drunkenness. Yet many protections from the private monsters exercising force and spilling externalities on us are self-supplied by adults independent of state action, by locking their doors at night and by moving away from smokestacks and by not believing everything they hear in late-night TV ads. But we do need also a little state, one with a legitimate monopoly of coercion, to help stop the bad guys stealing or polluting, or at any rate, as I said, the few such bad guys against whom an adult prudence or a restrained law of tort cannot protect us. Mafiosi with their guns. Russians with their atomic bombs. Railroads dumping sparks onto wheat fields. In an essay on Kipling in 1942, Orwell argued that Kipling “sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.” Agreed.
But Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the middle-path guardians? (By the way, about the feeding, and the economy generally, Orwell was less perceptive, even when he drifted during the 1940s in a true-liberal direction. He never troubled to understand economics. Like most people he reckoned that living in an economy qualified him to understand it.) Most states always and worldwide, as any moderately well-informed observer knows, are clumsy at best—and more commonly are protection rackets, providing jobs for the cousins and cadres, or are simply one-man tyrannies, most of them as ignorant and loony as, say, Elon Musk. Orwell’s last two novels showed, and Judith Shklar showed in her writings about what she called appropriately, and advocated for, “a liberalism of fear,” that the chief modern fear should be fear of the very state, ipsos custodes, a state immensely expanded since 1914 in its expenditure and authority and capacity for coercion. The coercive overreach recently by most states except Sweden in reaction to Covid 19, closing the schools, and bankrupting the downtowns, has shown recently how far down an Animal-Farm or Nineteen-Eighty-Four path even the nice countries have traveled, never mind China or Russia. To be sure, an invasion by the Black Death killing a third to a half of Europeans, or a military invasion by the terrifying Canadians threatening to take over northern Maine, is justly to be repelled by state action. By all means. But as H. L. Mencken put it a century ago, our masters, whether democratic or not, know that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” “Fear not us, “the masters say. / “Fear that man across the way.”
The impulse of a modern statism, claiming in bizarre fashion in the U.S. the noble title of liberal, is to repeal this or that equality of permission. The economic historian Jonathan R. T. Hughes chronicled in 1977 the contending impulses of Americans, to an apparently liberal “Don’t tread on me “ but at the same time to a clearly statist “Don’t do that.” The true-liberal formula in the U.S. has been instead, as my grandmother born in the 1890s used to say, “Do anything you want, but don’t scare the horses.” Such a modern equality of permission has been sharply challenged by statist enthusiasms, whether Romantic or Scientific or merely cynically tyrannical, by now worldwide. In the 19th century the three chief Romantic and Illiberal enthusiasms in politics were in succession, I have observed, nationalism, socialism, and syndicalism. Admittedly, nationalism, socialism, and syndicalism have by far the best songs—Deutschland über alles; Arise, ye prisoners of starvation; There once was a union maid. True liberalism has only “A Man’s a Man, for a’ That.” It’s hard to think of others. Well, surely Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” which despite its title is nothing like scornful of community. The community comes out of Howie Becker’s world.
If you thrill instead to the illiberal songbook of top-down nationalism, socialism, and the syndicalist workers’ party, perhaps, I suggest again, you will thrill to die Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. And certainly you will favor the moderate, communitarian version, a middle-path of routinized statism, regulating now farmers’ subsidies or children’s playtime and women’s reproduction, in aid of the French or American or Evangelical general will. True liberalism has mostly been on the defensive since the hirst articulations three centuries ago of equality of permission for all adults, taking responsibility for their own pursuit of happiness. As Shklar said, “It is . . . difficult to find a vast flow of liberal ideology in the midst of the Catholic authoritarianism, romantic corporatist nostalgia, nationalism, racism, proslavery, social Darwinism, imperialism, militarism, fascism, and most types of socialism which dominated the battle of political ideas” already in the 19th century. These were applied at scale in the 20th century by the new social engineers, with the approval of most voters. And now in the early 21st they are to be re-applied. As the kids say sweetly, “Let’s try socialism,” as though it hasn’t been tried. The adults say sourly, “We need a strong Leader,” as though that hasn’t been tried. And the lovely, middle-path quasi-liberals say, “Let’s try a little more statism,” as though that, too, has not been tried and tried and tried massively everywhere for the past century, from Italy to India.
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Liberty is liberty is liberty. The liberties do not imply each other automatically, but they do support each other. It is therefore imprudent to chop liberty up and let one or another liberty slip away because of its exercise by someone we think we don’t like—some of those queers, businesspeople, or immigrants. In the United States since the 1930s the rejection of bedroom liberty by the Republicans and of boardroom liberty by the Democrats, with parallels in other democracies, has undermined the wholeness of equality of permission. In particular the clerks are contemptuous of equality of permission if exercised in the mere, low, vulgar economy. Trade, yuk. Mutual benefit, ugh. How awful is “consumerism.” Yet ordinary people, regularly if not all the time, judge equality of permission in economic activities to be the most important part of liberty, the liberty to buy for nourishment or to move for work or to innovate for advancement. In the novel suppressed in the old USSR, Forever Flowing by Vasily Grossman—a Jewish Ukrainian novelist and journalist, who during the 1950s became courageously a liberal ex-communist—one of the characters, a member of the Russian intelligentsia, confesses that “I used to think liberty was liberty of speech, liberty of the press, liberty of conscience. But liberty is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: You have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it’s a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to.”
That’s how a tyranny such as the Chinese Communist Party survives, if it does, by making an arrangement with ordinary people that permits economic equality to endeavor, with a little Party corruption on the side, and therefore achieves prosperity in the ordinary business of life, as an artist or lathe operator—in exchange for giving up to the Party all their other liberties. The clerisy of self-defined liberal intellectuals, as Grossman’s character admits, imagines itself to care more than ordinary people about the liberty of press or speech or worship or even voting. Maybe it’s true in regular time. But it seems often not to be so in the crisis, considering the last full measure of devotion given by ordinary people for what they appear to believe is a new birth of liberty, at Gettysburg or Tiananmen Square or Donbas.
Shklar distinguished her liberalism, a rationally justified fear of the state, from a liberalism of natural rights in Locke and a liberalism of personal development in Mill. Locke’s rights-talk is unconstrained, eventuating in the hundreds of rights proposed in the failed Chilean constitution of September 2023. The 200th right enforced by the state, the right to have strawberry jam today and strawberry jam tomorrow, tries earnestly to implement the utopian equalities of opportunity and of outcome. Outside family and friends, I repeat, the result is an illiberal Hell. And Millean personal development, which is satisfactorily liberal in one’s personal project of Bildung, or teaching one’s children to read, regularly turns highly illiberal in the state’s project of Kultur. Public schools in the U.S. in the 1950s were intent on producing patriotic, anti-communist citizens. Now in Sweden especially the masters are intent on producing radical environmentalists. Good ideas?
Shklar notes that “neither one of these from the patron saints of liberalism [viz., Locke and Mill] had a strongly developed historical memory, and it is on this faculty of the human mind that the liberalism of fear draws most heavily.” To her pair of patron saints may be added—in their lack of a strongly developed historical memory, at any rate about the actual as against philosophical history, or in their lack of scientific common sense about the actual results to be expected—two more:an equality of outcome in the historical-materialist Marx and an equality of opportunity in the social-contractarian Rawls. All the four non-fearful liberalisms-with-statism stride past the overwhelming historical and scientific evidence that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. They seem not to realize that “history is indeed,” as Gibbon scribbled in that banner year for our liberties of 1776, “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind,” chiefly, as political history or political science attests, arranged by a master holding an office enabling him to commit them. Lord Acton also said that “all great men are bad.” Shklar wisely recommended “the assumption, amply justified by every page of political history, . . . that some agents of government will behave lawlessly and brutally in small or big ways most of the time unless they are prevented from doing so.” Consult the ACLU or the NAACP or the National Taxpayer’s Union or the Cato Policy Report or Reason magazine. Andrew Jackson, expanding less coercive proposals to the same end by earlier presidents, arranged during the 1830s for a relocation of native Americans from the U.S. southeast to far Oklahoma, on the Trail of Tears. The Supreme Court said he couldn’t, but he did it anyway. About the historical state’s fondness for war and torture and ethnic cleansing, Shklar said, “The liberalism of fear is a response to these undeniable actualities, and it therefore concentrates on damage control.” “For this liberalism [of fear, or of equality of permission] the basic units of political life are not discursive and reflecting persons, nor friends and enemies, nor patriotic soldier-citizens, nor energetic litigants, but the weak and the powerful. And the freedom it wishes to secure is freedom from the abuse of power and intimidation of the defenseless that this difference invites.”
I have praised by extensive quotation from her 1989 essay, you see, Judith “Dita” Shklar, as stunningly percipient, against the sweet but culpably naïve confidence of her quasi-liberal contemporaries that a bigger and stronger state is a swell idea. Her colleague Stanley Hoffman called Dita “the most devastatingly intelligent person I ever knew” at Harvard.
But Shklar, like Homer and Mill, occasionally nods, in ways relevant here. She sometimes adopts uncharacteristically, if en passant, a little of the illiberal liberalism of her times. In the same glittering essay she defined cruelty as “the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter.” Uh oh. The “secondarily emotional pain” is the problem. It’s hopelessly difficult to justify. I can claim to be emotionally pained by “verbal rape” if someone argues aggressively with me for an opinion I don’t like. Even a bad husband’s verbal abuse is not on a par with beating her up physically. The turn devalues actual, physical rape and physical beating. We had better, in a true-liberal society, define aggression as physical. Sticks and stones.
And again, in line with a dogma among the modern clerks, Shklar merged “the instruments of coercion [using] military might in its various manifestations” with an alleged “coercion” in economic deals among non-enslaved people—having an option of exit, not present when the masters reach for their guns. Like Orwell, Shklar never quite understood economics. She posited, along with her statist colleagues such as John Kenneth Galbraith, an ”economic power, chiefly to hire, pay, fire, and determine prices.” The physically coercive power to try to poison and then to succeed in imprisoning and then to boldly murder Alexei Navalny is said to be on a par with the “power” to offer him a paid job in a restaurant, or then to threaten to fire him, or to try to persuade Navalny’s supporters to pay a price for xerox machines above what other suppliers offer. True, since early Marx and late Mill, and since New Liberalism took hold, many economists, and many more non-economists, have believed in such a hobgoblin. But deals among non-slaves are not the physical coercions imposed by the masters on the socially dead enslaved. “Wage slavery” is a category error.
Equality of permission in markets, to be sure, does not mean, as the man o’ independent mind understands, that we can achieve heaven on earth, the Land of Cockaigne; or that everyone can be equally rich or happy; or that any of the utopias of equality of outcome or of opportunity or of wholly offset externalities can be achieved, a heaven on earth. No: “Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine; / A Man’s a Man for a’ that:” Equality of permission achieves merely, as the true-liberal political scientist John Mueller puts it concerning U.S. “capitalism” and democracy, “pretty good” results. More: they result in aa 20- to 30-times Great Enrichment per person, and reduced damage to human dignity from inherited rank and the insolence of office.
Persuasion is not coercive, contrary to what some recent and misled quasi-liberal or frankly anti-liberal philosophers have taught. The political philosopher Steven Lukes, for example, in line with Philip Pettiit, believes that persuasion is “domination.” Domination, Foucault also said, is therefore ubiquitous. Like water for a fish or air for a human, the domination, not being physical, is tricky to discern, except by the clever clerks. “To govern, in this sense,” Foucault declared, “is to structure the possible field of action of others.” True enough. But then: “The relationship proper to power would not therefore be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power [why is that, my dear Michel?], but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government.” Government by persuasion is violence. Becker’s liberal world is coercion. Uh huh.
We are all economists now. Under economism it is said that we must, for our own good, be ”incentivized“ or “nudged” or “planned.” Yet an employee in a free society gives explicit permission to be bossed. A voting citizen does so highly indirectly, and meanwhile the state has its cudgels out. The modern economists and their followers left and right favor additional coercions or undignified tricks laid on us by our masters, commissars, Führers, parents, husbands, administrators, and proud social engineers. Prominent in this line recently, for example, are the economist Daron Acemoglu and the political scientist James Robinson, in their many eloquent and scholarly yet relentlessly anti-liberal and state-loving publications. True liberals, like true Christians, love the person, not the state or the church. Acemoglu and Robinson love the state. In their 2019 book The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty, for example, they urge a fuller empowerment of Leviathan, to increase what they call, startlingly, “liberty. “ They view with equanimity that the modern Leviathan, in the words of the Declaration of 1776, has “erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” The liberals of 1776 did not approve. Acemoglu and Robinson do. In the book and in a more recent book by Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, a bigger and stronger state serves a slavish conception of “liberty.” Acemoglu and his co-authors merge true liberty, defined since ancient times as a lack of physical coercion by a master, into a “freedom,” defined nowadays as an ability to acquire lots of goods and services. That is, they merge Berlin’s negative liberty into his positive liberty. But we already have words for positive liberty—wealth, riches, income, capabilities, lots of goods and services. We need a separate political word for negative liberty, or else the merging justifies by mere definition a new Leviathan, overriding equality of permission in order to coerce us to become happy slaves or perpetual children. Without preserving the distinction between state coercions and an equality of permission, the political philosopher renders untestable the true-liberal hypothesis—that liberty correctly defined has in fact led to the positive ‘liberty” of riches. And it has achieved, I observe again, a pretty good approximation of equality at the start and at the finish of life’s race.
The word “freedom” in English has during the past century diverged from what both freedom and liberty once exclusively meant, namely, non-slavery to physically coercive masters. The recent merger in the word “freedom” of the old idea of non-masters and the New-Liberal idea of state-arranged non-poverty is the characteristic error of quasi-liberal political philosophy after utilitarianism. One sees it nowadays in utilitarian political philosophy influenced by the economics of Paul Samuelson of MIT and his brother-in-law Kenneth Arrow of Stanford and Harvard, such as in the political philosophies of John Rawls and Amartya Sen. A higher budget line, the Samuelsonian economist assures you, makes you “free.” You’re “free” to fly to Paris if you’re rich in stuff. Never mind if your liberty from physical coercion by a master is at the same time nullified. The master coerces you to fly to Paris, perhaps to install you in the Bastille, or he coerces taxes from you to subsidize an ill-advised Anglo-French Concorde airplane, in which you ride speedily, though in shackles. A slave with ample food and airplane rides to Paris is said in such a political rhetoric to be “free.” If enslaved people in the U.S. had plenty of corn to eat, and perhaps some tuition in blacksmithing useful after Emancipation, they were “free.” Oh, my. A child under hourly and coercive adult supervision, but oversupplied with food and housing and computer games, is more “free” than Huck and Jim on the raft.
Merging a lack of coercion by other humans into a lack of material income was accomplished in English by hiving off the Germanic one of the pair freedom/liberty, a pairing so characteristic of English, with its melded Germanic and Romance roots. The Latinate “liberty” still connotes on English tongues the right not to be coerced by other humans, what the Swiss liberal Benjamin Constant called in 1819 “modern liberty.” It is the right accorded to a non-slave, such as in Roosevelt’s first of Four Freedoms in his State of the Union address in January, 1941, the freedom of speech. The Germanic word “freedom” by contrast has come in recent English, I just said, to connote the right to have lots of stuff, even if achieved by illiberal takings from others or by childish dependence on parental subsidies or by slavish attendance on the state. In the third item in Roosevelt’s quadrivium, referring back to the New Deal, freedom is said to be wealth, riches, income, capabilities, ample goods and services, a material “freedom from want.”
The disastrous divergence of the Germanic from the Latinate word had not happened yet in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln in 1863 uses “liberty” and “freedom” to mean just what he says, for a nation conceived in Liberty (the sole capitalized word excepting “God” in all but one of the five extant copies written in Lincoln’s hand) dedicated to the proposition that all men (and women, dearest Abe) are created equal, and that a nation so dedicated should have a new birth of freedom. Freedom = Liberty. No slaves. No slave states.
Among the statist economists and fellow travelers such as Acemoglu, Robinson, Johnson, Lukes, Pettit, Stiglitz, Michel Sandel, Thoms Piketty, Mariana Mazzucato, Richard Thaler, the implied politics is alarming. All of them yearn more or less strongly for an activist state, or are well satisfied with the mega-states we now have. They ignore the evidence that a state strong enough to be activist or mega, not to speak of Maga, is well worth corrupting from K Street or seizing from a military barracks, as routinely it is. And anyway, as I quoted Smith saying, “in the attempting to perform [consumer nudging, industrial planning] which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient.” Hayek called it the knowledge problem.
Unsurprisingly, the politicians running states, such as senators Rubio and Warren, dote on the theoretical statists. Mariana Mazzucato serves as advisor to many states. The self-contradictory “libertarian paternalism” that for example Sunstein and Thaler recommend, treats adults like children. All the non-true-liberal philosophies infantilize, or frankly enslaves, in aid, I have noted, of the general will and the common wealth. The psychological road to serfdom is less obvious but more fundamental than the physical coercion it accepts. Our Daddy rules. Quoth James I/VI, in 1598, in “well ruled commonwealths the style Pater patriae was ever . . . used to kings.“
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The sweetest of the ruling metaphors of modern anti-liberalism is The Family. A famous speech in 1928 to the Swedish parliament introduced the term folkhemmet, the people’s “home.” It encapsulated an alliance, characteristic of the age, of conservative corporatists and progressive planners—thus the New Deal in the United States, or indeed fascism, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft, with Il Duce as the father of Lo Stato—consecrated sometimes by the holy water of a Christian socialism. That last emphasizes not Marx’s class struggle but to the contrary a unified society of (often formerly) Christian friends. Swedish politics ran on a theory of folkhemmet until its economic disasters early in the 1990s.
The faith in Gunnar and Alva Myrdal as good parents taking charge of your life from their offices in Stockholm reiterates the justifying myth in a slave society, the myth of the Good Master. One sees it articulated in St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, for example, or in the letters of Seneca to Lucilius. Seneca writes: ”Live mercifully with your slave, amicably even. . . . Don’t you know what our ancestors did to eliminate resentment towards masters and abuse towards slaves? They used the name ‘father of the household’ for the master and ‘members of the household’ for the slaves.” Yet when exercised over adults, such a paternalism diminishes in soul and often enough in goods both the “father” and the “son.” To call a Black man “boy” has the same valence, and when elevated to coercively enforced legislating, or lynching, has the same material result.
The insistent modern demand that the state take the role of loving parent arises of course from democracy. Mencken again, that undemocratic if sharp-eyed wit, declared that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Democracy was entailed by liberalism, an equality of permission gradually extending to the franchise. The sad paradox is that when fully extended it led to proliferating statism, a demand to be led to safety in the face of hobgoblins real and imaginary. Look at any recent presidential campaign in the U.S., a competition in false promises. As Mencken also said, “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods,” and “A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.” As true liberals ask of their statist friends, “Would you be happy if your neighbor ‘taxed’ you privately? How does it differ from state burglary? Oh, you say you gave permission when you voted. Ah, yes, and also for de lege segregation, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the War on Drugs.” Through coercive regulations and subsidies, our democracy, wholly admirable in giving liberal dignity to the voters, has also led to a reduction of the original and immensely productive equality of permission, and a reduction in the dignity of autonomy. In the ruck of special interests and under the popular belief that free lunches abound, and should be seized right away by state action—for you, and especially for me—the common people gotten what they wanted, good and hard, as in the history again of Argentina after Perón.
Having the vote and then looking with envious eyes on the rich has tempted people to prefer the apparently straightforward, zero-sum coercions of the state over the mere deals of the spontaneous order, harder to understand, though positive-sum. The first step in statism is to deny that deals are mutually advantageous, and to claim instead that trade is “unequal,” a matter of “surplus value”; of from the conservative side that it is “vulgar,” a matter of “consumerism.”
By contrast, the noble ideology and myth of equality of permission, even when it is not entirely plausible, such as “In America, anyone can make it with hard work,” produces, as I have noted, a real if necessarily rough equality of opportunity and of outcome. The statist promises to achieve them right away by coercion, but he can’t. A true liberalism is the only adultism on offer.
Let us as liberals, then, permit a dignified, adult equality of permission. Let us fear a larger and larger state. Let us put away most of the cudgels.
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey needs no byline. You can send her mail here.
Isonomia Quarterly 