Liberalism: What’s Going Right
(posted by Kevin Carson)
In “Libertarianism and Liberalism: What Went Wrong,” I tried to describe some of the features of conventional libertarianism and conventional liberalism that inhibit an anti-authoritarian coalition between them. In this post, I’d like to mention some promising trends within liberalism that offer hope for common ground with libertarians.
At the most modest level, I’ve been encouraged in some ways by Obama’s insurgency against Clinton, who personifies the most objectionable features of establishment liberalism. Obama’s preference for working with the market mechanism instead of through the administrative state (purportedly resulting from the influence of Austan Goolsbee on his economics staff), seems on the whole to be a positive sign.
Of course Obama and Goolsbee are a mixed bag. The positive note is tempered somewhat by Goolsbee’s part in the NAFTA flap. Assuming there’s some fire behind that smoke, his fondness for NAFTA suggests he conflates “markets” way too much with the existing corporate system. His idea of “democratizing markets,” as Daniel Koffler describes it in the link above, relies heavily on subsidies to higher education, which sounds too much like both the New Labour and New Democratic approach: accepting corporate domination and meritocracy as given, and using education as a social engineering tool to turn everyone into managers. The danger is that Goolsbee’s affinity for “markets” will translate, not into taking big business off the government teat, but into simply splitting the difference with the Reagan/Thatcher version of banana republicanism: in other words, the DLC model of kinder and gentler neoliberalism.
I also confess to being a bit sick of Obama’s whole Oprah/New Age/”Law of Success” shtik about everybody just getting along, and transcending partisan differences, and all that happy crappy. I might be in a bit more conciliatory mood after the bleeding heads of every billionaire and Fortune 500 CEO in America are mounted on pikes along Wall Street. We’ll just have to wait and see. As for Oprah’s recycled version of the old “name it and claim it” gospel, I care a lot less about whether the board rooms “look like the rest of America,” than about the power those boardrooms exercise in the first place.
Still, there’s the possibility that with Obama’s more genuinely left-wing (as opposed to liberal) voting record, and the influence of Goolsbee’s market-friendliness, he might just manage to combine them in a novel way that promotes egalitarian goals outside the conventional liberal box. The combination of pro-market and left-leaning rhetoric, taken at face value, offers at least a hope of the kind of thing Jesse Walker mentioned (”How to be a Half-Decent Democrat“) as a way for Democrats to attract libertarian votes.
Don’t be a slave to the bureaucracy. Look, I don’t expect you to turn into a libertarian. But there are ways to achieve progressive goals without expanding the federal government, and if you’re willing to entertain enough of those ideas, you’ll be more appealing than a “free-market” president who makes LBJ look thrifty. You could talk about the harm done by agriculture subsidies, by occupational licensing, by eminent domain, by the insane tangle of patent law. And no, I don’t expect you to call for abolishing the welfare state — but maybe you’d like to replace those top-heavy bureacracies with a negative income tax?
Consistently applied, what this suggests is essentially the geolibertarian approach of replacing the administrative and regulatory state with Pigovian taxation of negative externalities and economic rents, and replacing the welfare state bureaucracy with a basic income funded by taxation of rents and externalities.
Although Obama’s departures from establishment liberalism are modest at best, the same tendencies show themselves much more strongly elsewhere within the traditional liberal camp.
RFK Jr. is a good example. He refers to markets in a positive way, but (unlike Obama and Goolsbee) sharply distinguishes the free market from corporate capitalism. In fact he demonizes the corporate economy in terms of free market principles.
You show me a polluter and I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and load his production costs onto the backs of the public.
…. Free markets, when allowed to function, properly value raw materials and encourage producers to eliminate waste – pollution – by reducing, reusing, and recycling….
The truth is, I don’t even think of myself as an environmentalist anymore. I consider myself a free-marketeer.
Corporate capitalists don’t want free markets, they want dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush the competition by controlling the government.
Let’s not forget that we taxpayers give away $65 billion every year in subsidies to big oil, and more than $35 billion a year in subsidies to western welfare cowboys. Those subsidies helped create the billionaires who financed the right-wing revolution on Capitol Hill and put George W. Bush in the White House.
Even better, Dean Baker has explained how the conventional “liberal” vs. “conservative” scripting on economic issues gets everything exactly backward:
Political debates in the United States are routinely framed as a battle between conservatives who favor market outcomes, whatever they may be, against liberals who prefer government intervention to ensure that families have decent standards-of-living. This description of the two poles is inaccurate….
It is not surprising that conservatives would fashion their agenda in a way that makes it more palatable to the bulk of the population, most of whom are not wealthy and therefore do not benefit from policies that distribute income upward. However, it is surprising that so many liberals and progressives, who oppose conservative policies, eagerly accept the conservatives’ framing of the national debate over economic and social policy. This is comparable to playing a football game where one side gets to determine the defense that the other side will play. This would be a huge advantage in a football game, and it is a huge advantage in politics. As long as liberals allow conservatives to write the script from which liberals argue, they will be at a major disadvantage in policy debates and politics.
The conservative framing of issues is so deeply embedded that it has been widely accepted by ostensibly neutral actors, such as policy professionals or the news media that report on national politics. For example, news reports routinely refer to bilateral trade agreements, such as NAFTA or CAFTA, as “free trade” agreements. This is in spite of the fact that one of the main purposes of these agreements is to increase patent protection in developing countries, effectively increasing the length and force of government-imposed monopolies. Whether or not increasing patent protection is desirable policy, it clearly is not “free trade.”
It is clever policy for proponents of these agreements to label them as “free trade” agreements…, but that is not an excuse for neutral commentators to accept this definition….
Unfortunately, the state of the current debate on economic policy is even worse from the standpoint of progressives. Not only have the conservatives been successful in getting the media and the experts to accept their framing and language, they have been largely successful in getting their liberal opponents to accept this framing and language, as well. In the case of trade policy, opponents of NAFTA-type trade deals usually have to explain how they would ordinarily support “free trade,” but not this particular deal. Virtually no one in the public debate stands up and says that these trade deals have nothing to do with free trade….
Testify!
March 18th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Amen!
March 18th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Damn, Kevin. You write so well and persuasively, I’m coming to believe I’ve always been a bit more “left” than I had thought.
I keep trying to tell critics of libertarianism — and I’ve said or written this dozens of times — that there is a reason virtually no CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are libertarians.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Hey Kevin,
I really like that RFK Jr. quote, even though he is (like McCain) a crackpot about thimerosal. Basically, we have allowed the Republicans to monopolize the free-market rhetoric for too long. I’m all for the adapting the free-market rhetoric. It’s a great metaphor, the American people eat it up;)
Don’t get me wrong. If progressive goals can be accomplished with a lighter touch involving less bureaucracy, then I am all ears. However, I am a pragmatist and yet to be convinced by by the likes of Goolsbee. I found Obama’s healthcare plan especially wanting. It’s great to say “we’re offering people choice”, but if you are allowing people to opt out, there is the nasty little problem of adverse selection.
As for the negative income tax, it does bear investigation. It cuts away a lot of bureaucracy involve in mean-tested welfare and is less likely to trap people into being dependent on it. I’ve come a long way towards accepting this idea in the form of the earned income tax credit.
March 19th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Thanks, Dain.
Mona,
If we can also get people on the left to decide they’re more pro-market than they thought, we’ve got a basis for common action.
Your point about Fortune 500 CEOs is a good one. But believe it or not, I saw an article several years ago about Atlas Shrugged reading circles in corporate management–that’s right, those James Taggarts all see themselves as John Galt.
Angelica,
I admit to having leaned toward the crackpot position on thimerosal myself, although I’ve mostly been convinced now it was a false alarm.
Democrats would clean up if they’d just start demonizing Republicans in terms of their own “free market” rhetoric and constantly harping on the theme of big business as welfare case. And I think a lot of libertarians are starting to realize that the Democrats couldn’t possibly be any less libertarian on economic issues than the party that *talks* about “free markets” all the time. Stalin talked about workers’ power, too, I think.
On reducing bureaucracy, the most pragmatic approach is (on the libertarian side) probably to remove privilege first and *then* see how much the secondary intervention can be reduced (pretty much the consensus that emerged in the thread on mortgaged-backed securities). On the liberal side, the coplementary position is first to remove the forms of state intervention that create the problems before considering *additional* intervention to correct it. In the case of healthcare, that would mean voiding out drug patents, removing regulatory barriers to cooperative insurance and delivery of service (e.g. “lodge service”), and pruning back at least the most economically restrictive aspects of the licensing system–and then seeing how much of a problem lack of coverage is.
Liberals and libertarians can’t convert each other, but we may be able to agree on setting the priorities for immediate action and leaving aside the more contentious stuff for when we’ve accomplished what we’ve agreed on.
March 19th, 2008 at 11:06 am
“I found Obama’s healthcare plan especially wanting.”
Yes, it’s ironic when wages are stagnating or taking a nose-dive that America should be offered healthcare. Greaaaat! Having looked at the website of the National Association of Manufacturer’s, where they have reports from the government as well, I can assure you the (clear thinking) American bourgeoisie want a national healthcare plan.
What you lot should be aiming for, though, is increased wages. Amp up the wages, beat down the taxes. Make your own bloody medical decisions (no pun intended).
March 19th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Daniel,
My wages could be doubled, and there’s no way I could handle a three-day stay in the hospital, let alone a truly catastrophic illness or injury without my medical insurance. So is that what you say to all those without insurance? Well, fight for a raise and you can afford to pay your medical bills. ??
March 19th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Two beautiful words, my friend — “mutual aid.”
March 19th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Kevin, about these guys:
All I can say of them is: pfffft. But in the real world, large corporations do not support decentralized govt. They have legions of CPAs, lawyers and lobbyists to make sure that all the laws and regulations ultimately work to their benefit — and serve as barriers to entry for those who cannot afford said legions of professionals. And, they can pay for loopholes that won’t unduly “burden” them.
Ayn Rand, as you likely know, did not consider herself a libertarian — indeed, she despised libertarians for the thought crime of not buying into her life-encompassing philosophy of Objectivism.
March 20th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Thanks for that.
You’ve been convincing me that I’m more left wing than I thought, or rather, you’re reminding me of the path which led me towards libertarianism and helping me think about that even more.
I’m hoping to convince UK liberals of the same sort of thing, although I’m not nearly so eloquent. UK liberals in theory support markets, but are suspicious after Thatcher, who is unfortunately idolised by many libertarians in the UK (or pseudo-libertarians I suppose) and tend to support managed markets (and a particular bug bear of mine right now the ‘informed choice’ that is no choice because the government appointed expert knows best).
On the James Taggarts seeing themselves as John Galt - I can believe that. Atlas Shrugged really made me realise about big business and its collusion with government. Unfortunately many seem to take it to be a simple paean to the businessman.
March 20th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
(Sorry I’m always a day or two late to these discussions.) With respect to CEOs’ heart-of-hearts politics, allow me to join the speculative fun! I think many CEOs *are* libertarian in their heart-of-hearts; they would rather do business in an ethical system, one in which no government bails out *any* business, no one has systemic advantages, everyone is treated the same under law, there is a genuinely meritocratic market, government is incorruptible, etc. (I wish I could remember the name/url of a study that showed that nearly all corporate executives who off-the-record admit that their firm has bribed officials in developing countries wish they didn’t have to do so; that they could do honest business.) But if there is a possibility that *anyone* can get special advantages, a manager will naturally want to see that *her corporation* is the one that gets it, or at least that hers isn’t left relatively disadvantaged by others getting special advantages. It’s a collective action problem. All would be better off if government were incorruptible, but none individually has an incentive to refrain from taking advantage of government’s existing corruptibility or individually move to make government less corruptible. I don’t think CEOs are evil; I think they’re stuck in a real problem.
March 20th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
The general population is quite unlibertarian. How do CEOs compare to them? Judging from what I’ve read from Bryan Caplan, I would guess they are more libertarian on average but quite a bit less than us.
March 20th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Judging from what I’ve read from Bryan Caplan, I would guess they are more libertarian on average but quite a bit less than us.
More libertarian how? Are they crusading against the regulatory state in general? Why do companies like Anheuser-Busch donate to the Partnership for a Drug-free America? (Hint: Keeping pot-distribution illegal is a wise decision for their bottom line.) They file amicus briefs supporting affirmative action programs in court, because they can afford legions of lawyers to make themselves look good on paper, while the small-business person can be destroyed by even one discrimination suit.
March 20th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Are we talking about the libertarianness of the world corporate executives would rather be in, or the libertarianness of their actions as *corporate executives* (i.e., what actions they are taking as representatives within a collective economic actor towards a libertarian world)? Officers within a corporation have institutional and legal obligations that may differ from the course of action they would prefer to take (and be in the position to take) as a matter of all-things-considered morality. Suppose in a given case, Corporate Officer’s institutional and legal obligation is to take course of action X. Suppose that X is not a heinous act, but is an unlibertarian action and/or has unlibertarian consequences. Corporate Officer would rather live in a world in which he were not institutionally/legally required to, as representative of the corporation, do X; and in fact would rather live in a world in which no persons (human or corporate) were *allowed* to do X. Corporate Officer decides to plug his nose and do X, thereby keeping his job and source of income for those dependent on him; and in his life as a private citizen, donates time and money towards making a more libertarian world in which X is not an option. Is Corporate Officer immoral? I don’t think so.
March 20th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
TGGP and Mona,
I suspect TGGP is alluding to Caplan’s book The Myth of the Rational Voter. With all due respect, when I hear that book mentioned I reach for my gun.
I don’t believe that corporate executives are, in fact, more libertarian than the general population. What corporate executives do is TALK more about “free markets” than the general population. And frankly, if the population takes the executives’ talk at face value, they’ve got VERY GOOD REASON to hate what they’ve been told is the “free market.” If the free market meant what those people meant by it, I’d hate it too.
Corporate executives are libertarian in the way that Elliot Spitzer is against prostitution.
All the “free market” talk of corporate executives and neoliberal politicians, and their pet journalists like Tom Friedman, means about as much as Stalin’s allusion to the symbolism of the socialist and workers’ movements of the nineteenth century. What they are is statist thugs who want to enrich themselves, but who can’t get away with just saying “we want to rip you off, so hand it over.” So they misappropriate the rhetoric of genuine libertarianism to create the illusion of some principled basis on which to sell their looting to the public. Their filthy tongues should burn in their mouths every time they use the language of “free markets.”
And by and large, this is exactly what Caplan means by “economic literacy” in making policy: putting policy in the hands of looters who TALK about free markets. The public is “irrational” because they don’t like looting, but most of them lack the conceptual framework for understanding that it’s not really the “free market” they hate. But if they hate what they consider the “free market,” it’s largely the fault of the looters who’ve misappropriated the term.
What people hate, by and large, is unfairness. And people know it when they see it, all the corporate hogs at the welfare trough, even if they don’t know exactly what to call it. They may be thinking largely in terms of the ruling class’s conceptual framework, but they still know something stinks. It’s a bit like the way Huck Finn didn’t know enough to question the slavers’ conceptual framework on “property,” but said “all right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
Brutum Fulmen,
You may be right about the private motivations of some corporate executives. But I would guess that most of them have internalized the standard Tom Friedman concept of “free markets.”
March 21st, 2008 at 3:02 am
Most people don’t crusade at all. I suspect they would approve of scaling back the regulatory state more than a member of the general public. Perhaps a response to an opinion poll is not a good enough falsifiable measure, in which case I’d ask that you suggest something better.
Oddly enough, I had just finished reading this post arguing that Elliot Spitzer was acceptably anti-prostitution from a voter’s perspective. Why is prostitution and drug-dealing illegal in the first-place? Because the general public is very, very unlibertarian. I’m not an activist and I hold out no hope for libertarianism’s prospects. I don’t try to not offend the general public by holding them responsible. In as far as I am willing to consider the term “exploited” to be of any use, do I consider them to be exploited by the State and thus victims? Sure, but being a victim doesn’t make one blameless. I’ve given arguments of a Carsonian bent about how actually existing capitalism is different from libertarianism, but that only goes so far when people fundamentally disagree on issues like individual autonomy and the desirability of pareto improvements and harms (I suppose that’s more utilitarian than strictly libertarian, but a lot of unlibertarian things follow from it). Liberals, conservatives and libertarians all like to believe that deep-down people hold their (the ideologues) beliefs and just need the wool pull from over their eyes, but that’s wishful thinking.
March 21st, 2008 at 1:58 pm
It seems like in my area there is a growing segment of small progressive/liberal business owners (particularly younger folks) and farmers (CSA/organic) who are using the word “fair trade” to describe their business practices. They only deal with certified fair trade vendors, often don’t use credit, require full transparency of labor/environmental practices, sometimes require paying “up front”–so producers (particularly in agriculture/food) can gauge more accurately demand, etc.
I am sure that there are different types of fair trade–some models better than others. Obviously the term itself connotes a moral critique of what is conventionally understood as the “free market,” –but it more closely approximates my idea of free trade–meaning free individuals/groups trading with one another with each being fully aware of the nature of the transaction and each being able to “walk away” if need be.
Just curious what folks that about that.
March 21st, 2008 at 3:58 pm
“Liberals, conservatives and libertarians all like to believe that deep-down people hold their (the ideologues) beliefs and just need the wool pull from over their eyes, but that’s wishful thinking.”
I’m increasingly sympathetic to this notion. In the last couple years I’ve started coming over to the Jeffrey Friedman (of Critical Review) perspective, which one could call purely empirical quasi-libertarianism.
Actual public opinion is sorely overlooked by ideologues of all stripes (and I’m one too!). The public actually has no ideology whatsoever, apart from certain faint cultural traits and de facto attitudinal dispositions stemming from the institutions they live and work in.
Regarding Caplan vs. Carson, if Carson believes that the public opinion research is in error because people are ACTUALLY being asked what they think of the “free market” as it exists in a state capitalist system, then his suspicion is correct. But I see no evidence that people are criticizing the PHONY free market, but certain abstract axioms that Carson, myself and most other libertarians would agree are legit.
So Caplan is on point in my opinion, though I come down on Carson’s side on overall prescription and his more illuminating analysis of political economy.
March 21st, 2008 at 4:04 pm
On the fair trade coffee thing.
I’ve heard that by keeping coffee prices, and ultimately farmers’ wages higher than they’d be without the encouragement offered by fair trade folks, they act to bring more coffee growers into the market, dissipating the gains.
March 22nd, 2008 at 7:27 am
Dain: “they act to bring more coffee growers into the market, dissipating the gains.”
I don’t think that this dynamic is at odds with the goal of “fair trade”. Fair trade systems often focus on economic structure and agricultural practices (worker-empowerment and ecological maintenance, for example). Both of these should improve the welfare of the workers/communities in various ways (not just wages), and if regular/fair market act in the context of these policies, that’s fine.
On “libertarian CEOs”: I bet that corporate executives are much more aware of economic policy issues than the general public. I’m skeptical that a fair comparison can be made between those two groups.
March 22nd, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Another thing about fair trade coffee is that I don’t see anything intrinsically more special about coffee growers that have agreed to join a co-op. Apparently individual farmers and various others who don’t want to to do that are at a disadvantage. It isn’t an unjust disadvantage, as the fair trade thing doesn’t involve coercion, but I just don’t see some of these farmers as more worthy than others.
March 23rd, 2008 at 12:03 am
That seems to be the position of Philip Converse.
I think it is the greater awareness that leads to more libertarianism views (relative to the general public, of course). If we all shared the same factual beliefs, our values would still result in different policy preferences though.
To me, “fair” seems a rather meaningless word, like “good”.
March 23rd, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Yes TGGP, Philip Converse. I damn near cited him in that post.
He’s the basis - along with Lippman, Weber and Hayek - for Jeffrey Friedman’s particular libertarianism, which I tend to pull out of my pocket when conversing (pun) with certain intellectuals who will have none of this ideologically driven libertarian “nonsense”.
March 28th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
These quotes are gold! Thanks.
April 11th, 2008 at 9:46 am
David Friedman says that Goolsbee is “a pretty good economist”:
“I have been reading webbed articles by Austan Goolsbee, widely described as Barack Obama’s economic advisor. Most of them are pretty good; he’s obviously a real economist in the Chicago style, someone who sees economics as a powerful and exciting tool for explaining the world. And he generally favors markets, incentives, and the like.”
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2008/04/pretty-good-economist.html