FT.com / Columnists / Samuel Brittan - A fresh look at liberalism.
Samuel Brittan writes:
Many socialists and social democrats regard the negative definition of freedom as far too narrow and ask whether someone can be really free if he or she has not enough to eat or is deprived of the opportunity of a decent education. The confusion arises from the attempt to derive all public policy from one central goal. Freedom is not the same as prosperity, equality, self-government or any other desired state of affairs. These goals may sometimes be complementary, at other times competitive.
Of course those goals are competitive. There is no issue concerning rights where conflict does not arise.
But when rights relate to fundamental pre-conditions for survival then the reason why social democrats believe there is one central guarantor is simple: there is only one such guarantor.
Brittan implies there might be two, the second being the market. But that is not true. By definition the market requires failure - include failure to command sufficient resource to survive. History is littered with examples. Just before John Stuart Mill's wrote On Liberty in 1859 the British government had allowed the potato famine to happen in Ireland because the market demanded it.
If a person believes, as I do, that each person is of equal worth then the only guarantor that they will have opportunity to explore the opportunities that gives rise to is the state.
It will not always get that process right. The state is made up of human beings who will make mistakes. And of course it is possible that the state will restrict the chance to explore the opportunities life offers when basic need has been met too significantly on occasion. I accept that is a risk because I also believe the market has a clear and important role in letting people make choice to fulfil their potential. The boundary between market and state is just one of the problems of competitive goals.
But I'd always argue that it is better to get this balance between the state and market a little wrong on occasion that than not try to ensure basic standards for all.
Which is why Brittan is wrong. He's not a liberal at all. His view of liberalism is promotion of the freedom to take advantage for some at direct cost to, and even at direct risk to, others. And that's not acceptable. Because that's not freedom. That's the exact opposite: it is the promotion of the climate of fear.
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How could you believe, Richard, that the potato famine was in a “free market” – certainly not one of the sort campaigned for by the liberal-anarchist real left of the nineteenth century. Indeed the very fact that it was riddled with landlordism means it was possibly the worst example of a genuinely liberal “free market” you could have picked upon.
Jock
Except it’s only in free market liberal’s dreams that we get anything but such abusive markets
Without intervention all market’s abuse
Which was exactly my point
Richard
Actually the left-ish leaning mutualists and individualist anarchists of the nineteenth century that concluded that “state intervention is what differentiates capitalism from the free market” and that exploitation is only possible when the owners of capital and land are able to enrol the power of the state in their favour over labour.
In other words, it is intervention (because it is necessarily on behalf of one group against another, and usually in favour of the most powerful against the weakest) that causes exploitation.
Maybe have a look sometime at the very definitely left-wing Kevin Carson’s work that I mention several times in this post.
Today my newspaper tells me that it’s “Bonus time in the city as banks payout £40bn”. It seems the Chancellor’s tax on bankers excesses has failed to reign them in.
It does appear that trying to fit the nebulous template of Mill’s ‘Harm Principle’ to the situation is not going to result in any solution – except for the bankers.
Perhaps if we go back a little further in time a look at the writings of Thomas Hobbes ( Leviathan 1668) and his concept of ‘The Fool’ we get somewhere. For Hobbes the fool was an individual who asked the age-old question; why should I be moral if it benefits me not to be? His answer to the fool was somewhat weak – one should always be prudent and gambling is not prudent, moreover you will always be found out and excluded from societal interaction.
However his ultimate solution is much mort dramatic and effective. The creation of the all-powerful Leviathan to force people, with the power of the sword, to obey the ‘golden rule’ to do to others as you would be done to. In other words to behave morally. If such morality dissolves we will end up back in the state of nature and in a situation of endless violent conflict, all against all.
Is the establishment of a global Leviathan the only way to stop neo-liberal free-market greed? (by greed I mean taking more from the communal pot than is required or deserved) or are we heading for a life that is, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”? If so I hope we can restrict to the bankers!