Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
January 14th, 2020
What more could one want? Well, a quite different conclusion, going beyond the conventional opinions of left and right. True liberalism is neither left nor right but perched above the usual spectrum. Mr. Appelbaum says that the approach of the true-liberal economists “failed to deliver on its promise of broad prosperity.” No.
Economism has in fact risen and fallen quite a number of times. The first Economist’s Hour was two centuries ago, during the rise of liberalism in Europe, such as the Blessed Adam Smith’s “liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice,” the “obvious and simple system of natural liberty.” The second was a century and a half ago, in the reaction to liberalism, such as the New Liberalism in Britain in the 1880s, then American Progressivism, British Fabian socialism, and of course Marxism. The third was the Post-War Keynesianism, confirming the anti-liberal “liberalism”—statism—as Americans understand the word.
The fourth (are you keeping count?) is the one Mr. Appelbaum worries over, the revival since the 1970s of the liberalism of Smith, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Tocqueville, Mill, Schumpeter, and Milton Friedman. It’s the one I myself am trying to re-revive, against gloomsters such as Mr. Appelbaum traumatized by the Great Recession and now Trumpism, in my own book last autumn, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All, and next autumn a book with Art Carden on the same theme, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World. I’m going to keep scribbling until wise and good-hearted people like Mr. Appelbaum get it.
Mr. Appelbaum claims that the liberalism I defend in such books “has come [since the 1970s] at the expense of economic equality, the health of liberal democracy, and future generations.” Oh, no. The shoe is on the other foot. It is the single-minded embrace of the State, exhibited in a judicious form in Mr. Appelbaum’s book, and in a Monty-Python form in Marianna Mazzucato’s books, that makes us poor and illiberal and undemocratic and unsustainable.
There are only two ways to get people to do what you want. The one is sweet talk, mutually advantageous exchange. The other is coercion. Left and right on the usual scale, a scale which Mr. Appelbaum adopts, merely argue about which direction to turn the massive coercion of modern states. We liberals say, “Come on folks. Do adults really need to be coerced, nudged, planned, inspected? Don’t you see that markets, like language and art and science, yield a spontaneous order that, in John Mueller’s phrase, is ‘pretty good’?” Mr. Appelbaum, with progressive communitarians such as Michael Sandel and Catholic conservatives such as Patrick Deneen, wants us “to rewrite the rules of the market." The only “we” in sight to do the job of making an imagined perfection the enemy of the pretty good is the State.
Don’t get me wrong. I agree with Mr. Appelbaum that “the single-minded embrace of markets” is voluntary idiocy. But the true liberals such as the much-maligned Friedman, and James Buchanan, and, well, your reporter, allow fully for the rest of life and love and liberal democracy. I call myself, for example, an Abrahamic liberal, acknowledging a duty to the wretched of the earth. It’s liberalism in the economies of China and India now, and Europe and the US once and future, that raised them up.
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