A Loose Thread in Classical Liberalism?
In terms of my natural emotive instincts, I tend to have a great deal of individualistic tendencies, so libertarianism has sometimes seemed like a natural fit for me that I’ve oddly rejected. And one of my main reasons for rejecting it, I now think, is what I perceive to be its denial that wealth is a form of power. This relates to a musing Will Wilkinson recently had on whether classically liberal government could be under-girded by a classically liberal calibration of the moral sense. Here he is quoting Gerald Gaus:
The problem isn’t so much the weakness of formal, paper constraints, but the weakness of formal constraints that are not reinforced by our moral sentiments. If a formal rule is seen as merely conventional, and therefore revisable by the relevant authority, and not as moral, there may be little resistance to overriding it in order to meet the demands of weightier moral rules. I found this passage especially illuminating:
[I]f the basic normative commitments of classical liberals were widely conceived of as moral rules, then there would be much deeper resistance to government-made rules that seek to cancel or override them. The problem is that the opposite seems nearer the truth: for many citizens, their understanding of the moral norms related to fairness endorses government-made rules overriding the conventional rules of property. The welfare state reigns supreme not because the state and it allies have tricked the rest of us in a power grab; it reigns supreme because in the eyes of most citizens it conforms to the egalitarian fairness norms that have evolved with humans (Fong, Bowles, and Gintis, 2005). Classical liberals who convince themselves that the New Deal is best explained as a power grab by Roosevelt and his allies are manifestly deluded: it was (and still is) very widely seen as demanded by our sense of fairness.
Here’s the thing. One of the key aspects of classical liberalism, at least from my perspective, is its innate skepticism towards the accumulation of power under single individuals, or small groups of individuals, precisely because such an accumulation poses a threat to individual liberty. And if wealth is power, then classical liberalism, in a weird self-contradictory way, actually agitates against the accumulation of wealth. Now, I doubt most everyday Americans consider themselves classical liberals in the concrete philosophic sense, but they are certainly influenced by it through historical and cultural osmosis. So, contra Wilkinson and Gaus, when they endorse wealth redistribution (the stirring of the economic pot, as it were), perhaps they’re actually acting in congruence with classical liberalism, broadly speaking.
I would anticipate two responses from libertarians to this notion. The first response would be to simply stick their fingers in their ears and shout, “No, no, no! Wealth is economic power, not political power, so it doesn’t count!” Needless to say, I highly doubt most Americans are inclined to make such a distinction. If you’re watching your kid’s school go to pot, or a loved one waste away in the hospital due to substandard care and a lack of insurance, while the schools and hospitals in the rich part of town are going off like gangbusters, you recognize that the operative issue is not the political machinations of the technocratic bureaucracy (which after all holds sway in both parts of town), it’s money. Economic power counts very much.
The second (less caricatured) response, which I hear often from intelligent and well-meaning economic conservatives, is that if it weren’t for the interference of the nanny state, a truly unregulated free market would produce vast numbers of entities with relatively equivalent levels of economic and political power, all competing with one another and thus all keeping one another in check. Well, rather like how Americans now see socialism, this conception of capitalism strikes me and other leftists as something that only works in theory. At the very least, it would require a sort of perfectly platonic movement of people, goods, services and ideas through time and space. So, in the real world, what the unregulated competitive free market actually gives us is a slow slide into economic feudalism; a small number of entities controlling vast amounts of economic (and thus political) power, and acting exclusively in their own self-interests. Which, at that level, implicitly means acting against the interests of everyone else.
Which brings me back to this idea of the self-contradictory (perhaps self-destructive?) nature of classical liberalism, and my suggestion that libertarians such as Wilkinson may be in an even tighter spot than they realize.
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On a related note, Wilkinson also suggests that the welfare state is inherently nationalistic. From the same post:
I’m not so sure that our egalitarian sentiments are all that close to a pure expression of egalitarian sharing norms. First, there is the artificiality of nationalism, and the modern welfare state is nothing if not an expression of economic and moral nationalism. To see co-nationals in a vast pluralistic territory as part of a common tribe in which even an attenuated form of ancient sharing norms apply requires an incredible, imaginative, “unnatural” expansion of the circle of affinity.
First off, I’m not sure the artificiality of nationalism is necessarily a bad thing (which sort of seems to be Wilkinson’s connotation). The nation-state isn’t perfect, but its existence has as much to do with practicality as it does with uglier tribal instincts, so it isn’t in-and-of-itself a bad thing. Nor is it as if supporters of the welfare state define their support through those uglier tribal aspects of nationalism; “Of course I want a welfare in America, but I couldn’t give less of a flip about Canada or Zimbabwe!” We tend to apply our support through the framework of the nation-state simply because that’s the most practical and immediate option.
Secondly, and granted this is pretty subjective, I disagree that there’s anything incredible or “unnatural” about extending one’s sense of community, and thus the resulting egalitarian sharing norms, to one’s fellow citizens in the nation-state. Imaginative maybe, but again that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is especially true if you’re particular nation is grounded in the (rather imaginative) sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, which tend to be rather hostile to definitions of the community/tribe based purely on kinship or spacial relations.
In fact, if you take the Declaration’s sentiments to their natural conclusion, wouldn’t they include every individual across the entire globe in the same community? Say hello to the socialist dream of the global brotherhood of man.
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