What a Free Market Municipal Transit "System" Looks Like

Former Rob Ford chief of Staff Mark Towhey gained some notoriety in the 2010 mayor's race for a blog post he wrote prior to joining Ford's team where he advocated the city simply shut down the TTC and sell off whatever assets that anyone wants to buy.  For anyone familiar with internet libertarians, it is a familiar refrain of blind ideological faith in the free market to provide for all needs, and that government cannot do so.

Sometimes libertarians are operating in the realm of sheer fantasy with no actual real-world examples of the magical benefits they claim will happen out of their various privatization schemes, but in this case there is a contemporary example of a major city that largely left the free market to determine its surface local transit, Seoul, South Korea prior to 2004:

 

The likely libertarian excuse for all this will be the government controlling the fares and providing operating subsidies - of course the fact that the government found it necessary to control the fares to keep transit affordable to the people most in need of it, the working class & poor won't register with them.  Instead the price controls & subsidies will be some do-gooder activist government intervening apropo of nothing, lacking adequate faith that eventually the free market will cure all its own self created ills.

Nonetheless, even if we accept that fare controls & subsidies have some negative effects, the multiplicity of coordination problems and unethical competitive behaviour are inescapably the consequences of running transit as a for-profit business.  Each transit company still competes for passengers and has incentive to overcrowd, rush & avoid unprofitable passengers. 

All of this goes into why in 2004 Seoul found it necessary to greatly extend the level of government control over the surface transit system, taking control over schedules & routes in addition to fares (while leaving the private companies to still operate the system).

Some context about Seoul is important here - today it is a (groaning as I type this overused moniker) "World Class City" and biggest city in a prosperous rich-world democracy, but that is quite a recent development.  South Korea's income per capita rose tremendously in recent decades so the fact that its bus system was very nearly fully private is an artifact of a developing world governance structure & capability, it also takes place in the context of a society that mostly couldn't afford cars, and thus most people had no other options than transit, however unsafe & inefficient it was.  Once prosperity rose to the level of mass car attainability, use of this wild west bus system fell precipitiously (ibid):

The alternative is to realize that transit is a natural government function as roads & rails are natural monopolies - there's only so much land to build them on, and use is rivalrous, so each competitor on the network makes the network worse.  Government must govern these things if they are to work for the people who need them (rather than for shareholders).  The actual drivers & operators may not need be government employees but the system as a whole needs to be, well, centrally planned or it will be a disaster.  Public transit is a utility, a necessary and proper function of government.

 
This is really quite common for libertarian fantasies - you usually find that their fantasy system used to exist in the early stages of societal development and the government intrusive/managed systems were introduced to solve the obvious, real and pervasive problems that leaving whatever function to the free market created.  Liberal do-gooders and socialists don't win these arguments to have government intervene unless there are already big problems with the status quo.  That government runs transit in most places is no different from why every rich world society found it necessary to have government manage health care, the US being just the latest (and very late) example:  If you want these things to work, government must be involved. 

As usual libertarians, it has been tried your way, and it failed, which is why the government is in there to begin with.  

Incidentally the article I'm quoting is an excellent look at Seoul's stupendous transit system, and more importantly how it got that way, as opposed to "transit porn" pictures of the subway route maps without any context of how it was all funded and built.

Why Liberalism? Part 2

In part 1, I outlined a view of what liberalism is, and an understanding of what "ideology" is.  In part 2, let's look at some evidence for the views I'm promoting, in summary, the thesis that:

[Liberalism] does not start from a sacred writ that outlines all outcomes and presupposes all solutions.  It attempts to understand how real humans actually behave, and what motivates them and goes from there to find the best available policy options to bring about the desired outcomes in terms of widespread happiness and prosperity, of, as the title of this blog says, autonomy for all.

This piece looks at several issue cases where the liberal, libertarian and conservative dominant positions demonstrate the distinction I am describing.

Money and the Monetary System

The intro to part 1 covers this, but to re-iterate, the general right wing view on "money" is that it is something that should be holy and eternal, of fixed (or even hopefully) growing value and the supply limited by some natural law, like the gold supply.  This post is not the place to get into an extended discussion of why any attempt to make the monetary system work this way is doomed to fail, but I will summarize by saying the most important part:  It has been tried before and failed spectacularly and repeatedly.  The gold standard (or even gold and other precious metals themselves) were the monetary system well up to the early decades of the 20th Century pretty much everywhere.  Frequently gold standard advocates will claim that "fiat" currency is responsible for various economic catastrophes ignoring the myriad of crises, recessions and depressions that plagued the world while under the gold standard.  My favourite of this breed is to remember that the "Great" depression is named such, partly as a means to distinguish it from all the other depressions that had occurred within living memory of the early 1930s, most notably the Long Depression (1873-1879) which predated even the speciously often blamed Federal Reserve as cause for all economic ills.

An infamous moment occurred when Alan Greenspan once apologized to Milton Friedman on behalf of the US Federal Reserve for causing the Great Depression.  While anti-fed gold standard types may think to cheer this admission by a Fed Chair, Friedman's case against the Fed was that it did not create enough money when needed after the 1929 crash.  It stood pat and let the crisis develop.  For awhile, Friedman's view that monetary expansion via an arms length central bank can be employed to allay recessions was nominally accepted by right wing elites, it has never really been accepted by rank and file conservatives and libertarians who mostly want to abolish the Fed, and central banking generally.

The history of the 20th Century shows a progression of iterative steps away from the gold standard in response to the various problems it cause once those problems became acute.  Far from some sweeping liberal ideological statement of opposition to the gold standard issued by John Maynard Keynes from atop some mountain, a variety of hybrid experiments were attempted between the Great Depression, Bretton-Woods and Nixon's eventual full floating of the US dollar as a fully convertible  fiat currency legally mandated only to be usable in paying debts denoted in US dollars.

Right wing ideologues seeking to defend the gold standard or other forms of "hard money" policies often find themselves appealing to literal ancient history (like in Paul Krugman's debate with Ron Paul, with the latter citing Diocletian Rome as if we have anything like reliable records of economic conditions in that period) - this is because more recent economic history provides very little grist for their mills.

Liberalism does not "require" floating fiat currencies.  It does not dictate arms-length independent central banks as the arbiters of a nation's currency.  Instead, we are experimenting to find what works, iteratively and progressively in reaction to the evidence.

Markets and Capitalism Generally

The right wing view on markets amounts to their most salient and powerful infatuation with a simplistic, elegant theory that does not work out as intended when applied to real, living human societies.  There is an old joke about communism that goes "nice theory, wrong species" and this applies very much to the dominant right wing modes of thought about markets being perfect, self-correcting, rational and efficient.

A common right wing illusion is to assume that because liberals and other left wingers differ with their view on markets, that must mean we believe something close to the diametric opposite of them.   They want smaller government, so liberals must want "bigger" government as an end in itself.  They support deregulation so liberals must want endless arbitrary regulations. Hardly so.  Certainly there are such things as bona fide socialists, Marxists and anarchists who actively oppose capitalism and free markets.  Liberalism itself can even allow for these views (if one thinks the evidence supports them).  Yet liberals broadly do not oppose markets and capitalism to the degree that right wing ideologues support them.  Every small-l liberal party in the world, from the US Democrats, Canada's Liberals (and arguably, NDP in my broad definition of liberalism), Australia's Labor, Britain's Labour, and on down the list believe in employing market capitalism to some degree in pursuit of society's aims.  Every economy in the world is some mix of private and public spending, some balance between "socialism" and "capitalism."

Liberals support things like minimum wages and unions precisely because we recognize markets bring certain benefits but wish to limit the evident harms we empirically observed from the periods before such things existed.  There are some on the left who oppose such attempts to ameliorate the harms of capitalism precisely because they wish to see capitalism fail and be rejected by society and liberal harm reduction measures are contrary to that revolutionary goal.

I have written at length on the evolution of liberal thought on capitalism in my piece "One Liberalism Through the Ages" which details the creation of capitalism by liberals like Adam Smith, and the slow liberal realization that while capitalism was better than what it replaced (variations on mercantilism and feudalism) it still needed state intervention in various forms to achieve the real goals of liberalism.  Libertarians (many of whom call themselves "classic liberals" thinking this is some kind of insult to current liberals) have largely (or entirely in many cases) remained fixed on the ideas and form of capitalism liberals developed in the 19th century.  Conservatives too.  Liberalism looks at the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and say "businesses should be required to keep fire exits, extinguishers, etc etc" - right wing thought says "rational actors look at an unsafe work place and find a job somewhere safe, consumers will choose not to buy from businesses that have horrific fires" and so forth.  Their answer to any workplace complaint from wages to safety to harassment is to quit and work "elsewhere" under the assumption that a good alternative exists.  It must, their theory dictates it.  If it somehow does not, the individual is always to blame for not having worked or studied hard enough or having picked the wrong employment skills to pursue (like the cliche and glib assumption often appearing in comment sections that college grads having trouble finding good jobs must have studied "useless" subjects like the arts or humanities).

Taken to their logical conclusion, the right wing view amounts to:  "If you don't succeed in our chosen economic system, that's your problem, and your suffering is no concern to anyone but you."  This is backwards.  The economic system should most broadly serve humanity's needs and wants and if large numbers of people find it impossible to succeed under the chosen system, the system should be changed.  To right wing ideologues, it is humans who should conform to the dictates of the system.

Again and again right wing thought applies capitalism first principles and contrives whatever specious and cherry picked evidence they need to keep face in debates in support of unregulated, minimal (and flat) tax capitalism.  A century and more of experience with the problems such policies cause have not deterred them, as every crisis somehow ends up being the fault of government interference, from the "federal reserve caused the Great Depression" theory to the ones that attribute the 2008 financial collapse to Fannie, Freddie or the Community Re-investment Act.

Sex

A social issue to change the tone, and one where libertarians side more closely with liberals, but where conservatives have the holy dogma:  Sex is properly for procreation, not pleasure.  Pleasure from sex is typically incidental, and sometimes even actively sinful (particularly for women).  At best, pleasurable sex may be enjoyed only between married couples and even then contraception is discouraged.  Thus we have a long litany of conservative favoured laws prohibiting forms of non-procreative sex, sex between same-sex couples, and even banning contraception.  Lately conservatives have taken to conflating contraception and abortion and claim that the most effective contraceptives (the pill, IUDs) and the ones that women have the most control over (not requiring consent of a male to employ) are abortifacients and thus morally abhorrent.

In reality, most people want to have sex for pleasure at least sometimes and usually quite often if they can arrange it with partners they find appealing.  They don't however wish to have children nearly as often as biology would dictate and are happy to employ contraceptives to avoid this.

Conservatives evidently prefer that women suffer the consequences of recreative sex in the form of undesired children (and possibly disease).  They expect people to conform to their views of how we should behave sexually and oppose efforts to reduce the risks associated with the behaviours we evidently prefer to engage in.  Liberalism does not mirror conservativism.  It does not seek to enforce, coerce or do more than mildly encourage people to engage in recreative sex.  Liberalism seeks to accept people as they are, and craft policies to support them in their desired modes of action with as little risk and harm as possible.

Libertarians tend to be closer to liberals with respect to adult consensual sex (though I would note at least the last 3 US Libertarian party presidential nominees have been personally anti-abortion, and libertarian hero Ron Paul believed in state restrictions for abortion) but the distinction with liberals can be seen more clearly when it comes to prostitution.  To libertarians, prostitution is permissible so long as the prostitute is there by choice.  The liberal view on prostitution is that there really isn't one, at least not a single dogmatic one.  Liberals see the empirical reality that very few women willingly choose a career in renting their bodies except by harsh economic necessity and thus have complex views from support of prohibition, to various regulated schemes such as what you see in Amsterdam or New Zealand.  Again, rather than dogma there is an effort to maximize autonomy and minimize evident harms like disease, abuse, slavery and pimps.

Climate Change

By now it should surprise no one that conservatives are the least likely to accept the need for concerted action to avoid a climate change catastrophe.  Yet libertarians are generally speaking just as vehemently opposed if not more so.  Why is this so?  The evidence is abundantly clear and grows more compelling day by day.

In part their denial is a part of their denial of problems with free reign market capitalism.  Markets are perfect and should price everything that needs pricing.  The solutions to climate change all require activist government intervention in markets in some form - whether a carbon tax, a regulatory cap and trade system, sheer flat out government imposed limits on industry emissions or even just massive subsidies for otherwise uneconomically viable green energy technologies.   All of these are anathema to right wing economic holy writ.  So the need for them must be a liberal contrivance to implement their desired redistributive and government growing schemes on an unwitting society.

Conservative and libertarian reasons for denial change somewhat.  Religious conservative denialists cite various bible verses and exhibit certitude that God simply wouldn't permit such a thing to happen to us.  Libertarians simply have faith that if there was a problem, markets would have priced it, and if there's a need for a solution, some for-profit technology will be developed in time anyway.  That the people of Easter Island really did run out of resources and thus die off without finding a solution or alternative means of supporting their civilization doesn't seem to worry them.  It won't happen to us.  It can't.  The dogma says it won't.

As for liberalism, acceptance of the need for action on the climate problem is near universal, but the favoured solutions are a subject of considerable debate.  Again, there is no holy writ on how to solve the climate crisis.  In Canada, we somehow ended up at one point with the Liberal party in favour of a carbon tax, and the NDP advocating Cap & Trade.  In other places, Cap & Trade tends to be the favoured approach of the more centrist pro-business liberals.  Still others believe both schemes unworkable and simply want government to engage in a kind of "Manhattan Project" to develop renewable energy technology to the point of being cheaper than carbon based energy sources.  It is true that liberal policies in response to the climate crisis still seek to maintain or broaden economic equality, but this is consistent with my arguments here.  Liberals also, do not broadly seek to "undo" capitalism and seek some kind of revolutionary alternative economic system which does not yield dangerous levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

Here at last in the climate crisis we have right wing ideologues not just seeking to have humans conform to their views of how the world works, but frankly they wish to have the world itself so conform.  This is the ultimate danger of allowing right wing prescriptive and unchanging ideology to dictate human policy reaction to events.  Conservative intransigence on taxes, money or social issues lead to increased human misery, but these miseries end the moment the bad conservative policies are ended.  Humanity can rebound.  The climate crisis is a disaster that cannot be so easily undone.   It will not heal itself the moment we stop contributing to the problem, and adopt policies that react to the physical realities of the world we live in, rather than ignoring and denying them.

As Paul Krugman finished the post I started on with:

The bottom line is that we aren’t really having a rational argument here. Nor can we: rationality has a well-known liberal bias.

Why Liberalism?

In early January, Paul Krugman wrote something that actually cuts to the heart of perhaps the most important distinction between liberalism and other ideologies, particularly right wing ideologies like conservativism and libertarianism.  Discussing the idea of minting a platinum coin in order to circumvent the Republicans' ability cause a US debt default, Krugman writes:

For many people on the right, value is something handed down from on high It should be measured in terms of eternal standards, mainly gold; I have, for example, often seen people claiming that stocks are actually down, not up, over the past couple of generations because the Dow hasn’t kept up with the gold price, never mind what it buys in terms of the goods and services people actually consume. 

And given that the laws of value are basically divine, not human, any human meddling in the process is not just foolish but immoral. Printing money that isn’t tied to gold is a kind of theft, not to mention blasphemy. 

For people like me, on the other hand, the economy is a social system, created by and for people. Money is a social contrivance and convenience that makes this social system work better — and should be adjusted, both in quantity and in characteristics, whenever there is compelling evidence that this would lead to better outcomes. It often makes sense to put constraints on our actions, e.g. by pegging to another currency or granting the central bank a high degree of independence, but these are things done for operational convenience or to improve policy credibility, not moral commitments — and they are always up for reconsideration when circumstances change.

I submit that this pattern is not unique to the issue of monetary policy.  Krugman has hit upon a nearly ubiquitous theme that underlies the debate between ideological schools over the ages.  Whatever you call these sets of ideas (liberal, progressive, conservative, traditional etc.), and allowing for individuals who evade the norms while still realizing there are meaningful norms, you end up seeing that again and again, the ideologies of the right (though not solely, them, Marxism for example falls into this trap) start with a notion of what "should" be that is abstract and supposedly self-evidently correct, and then insist that policy and sometimes reality itself should conform to that ideal.

So, money should be permanent, fixed value, unchanging (or even growing in value over time) and never mind how the policies that come closest to meeting this ideal (gold standard) don't work very well for the real people and societies they're tried on, that's the ideal, and it should be adhered to whatever the costs.

Liberalism doesn't work this way.  It does not start from a sacred writ that outlines all outcomes and presupposes all solutions.  It attempts to understand how real humans actually behave, and what motivates them and goes from there to find the best available policy options to bring about the desired outcomes in terms of widespread happiness and prosperity, of, as the title of this blog says, autonomy for all.

First:  What is Ideology?

It's impossible to discuss ideology without first defining the thing.  People have a lot of notions about this, and I find most of them wrong.  But this is not the place to debate it.   For my purposes, ideology is simply your view of how the world works, and to some extent your desired organization for it, that best meets your goals for the world.  How do you decide whether tax cuts would be a good policy?  Or mandatory minimum sentences?  Or drug prohibition?  All this must be based on some view you have about how people think and act (either individually or in large groups) that tells you whether human responses to these policies will be desirable or detrimental to your pre-existing goals for societal organization.  If you think lowering taxes leads to increased economic activity and growth, and think "growth is good for society" than you are ideologically in favour of lowering taxes (absent other details like how much, and what government services might need to be cut and so forth).

Even if you think there is a hard, true "pragmatic" set of policies that "work" - you still need ideology to tell you what goals to have for those policies.  A hammer is good for driving nails, but without a plan for what to build, it does not itself build a barn or a doghouse.  Goals matter, and are intricately linked to ideology.  Two people agreeing a hammer is the best tool for building do not share "ideology" if one wishes to build a barn, and the other a doghouse.

Next:  What is Liberalism?

This is another major topic with many plausible perspectives.  Hopefully you need not wholly agree with my definition in order to follow the remainder of this essay.  I have previously borrowed the definition of liberalism supplied by political scientist Alan Wolfe, who supplies a definition I will summarize as "as many people as feasible should have as much autonomy as possible."  But I wish to extend this somewhat today, as that is merely a statement of goals and values - it doesn't specify how liberals approach this problem.  That is a vital and necessary part of what comprises a liberal.

In my last post at Open Left, I hit upon this other side of the issue.  I posit that what brought humanity out of the Dark Ages of ignorance, fear, witch burning and lethal leechcraft was what we now call "the scientific method" - the process by which those we call "scientists" examine evidence, posit explanations for phenomena, contrive repeatable experiments that could invalidate those hypotheses, and analyze the results, ready to modify their theories if the experiments provide a different result than the hypothesized outcome.  Science has no special name for this.  It is not called the "Davinci method" or the "Newton method" - there is no competing or alternative scientific method that tries to grow the field of human knowledge of nature in some alternative way.  It is simply the scientific method.  If you are not employing this method, you are simply not doing science, and anything you discover or learn is sheer happenstance and of dubious value until confirmed by someone using the scientific method.

Science does not claim to have a perfect understanding of anything.  It is always open to revision upon presentation of new evidence.  Even such things that are sometimes called "laws" (like thermodynamics, or gravity) are in fact merely highly regarded theories for which there is no current evidence providing any reason to doubt them.

Liberalism, in short, is that, but applied to ideology, as I wrote:

In the field of pursuing the ideal human society, liberalism is the science of pursuing human well being.  It combines the empiricism and rationalism of science with the goal of maximizing human happiness.  The process is iterative and the specific means change as well meaning ideas are found wanting, and as science improves our understanding of humans themselves and what it takes to make them happy.  There is no other school of thought that both seeks to improve the lot of all, and actually can do it.  The ultimate goal of liberalism is that we should not need the word "liberalism" because no one would need a special word to describe the self-evident way people determine solutions to societal problems.  That's what liberalism is, and why it must win or all humanity will fall back into ruin, scarcity, ignorance and fear.

That is the twofold definition of liberalism's means and ends I wish to employ and distinguish from the primary ideological schools of right wing thought.

This essay will be continued in a second post.

One Liberalism Through the Ages

This was originally published at Open Left, I am republishing it here as a starting point to further updates on these topics and themes. - D.

Last weekend Paul wrote: Moreover, by the 1870s, British liberals had become quite aware that their previous understanding of economic freedom was a hollow joke, producing vast legions of downtrodden urban poor, and so they began seeking another way to think about freedom, closer to that which slaves have always understood-freedom as a gaining of power for those at the bottom, not to be dominated from above, but to be lifted up by collective support for one another: in short, the New Liberalism of Britain, which 60 years later arrived in America in the form of the New Deal.  I've been meaning to write about this for some time, and now I promised Paul I would, so here's a first installment on the topic.  Understanding the transition liberals made from unfettered free market economics in the mid 1800s to the interventionist government model post New Deal is key to making sense of the ideological morass which humanity transitioned through in the past 400 years.  I know opinions differ on this subject, and many on the left see a meaningful distinction between progressivism and liberalism, or between classic liberalism and modern social liberalism.  I do not.  They're all liberals, even though there can be notable policy distinctions between various groups of liberals, there is still only one liberalism, and it is the same liberalism as began (or at least took form) with John Locke in the late 1600s. This is a daunting topic.  When I first became politically aware in my late teens, and pondered what "liberal" and "conservative" meant beyond the trite caricature presented by the contemporary political parties or newspaper discourse, I discovered that no one of any academic merit had particularly good (or widely accepted) answers to this.  For example, I have written of how Conservatives cannot define "conservativism."  If better read and smarter people cannot reach concurrence, forgive my temerity in making a run at it too.  Ideology is at the core of what drives politics and any improvement of our understanding of the topic is worthwhile.  The confusion about the topic allows a lot of people who aren't liberals (like libertarians who call themselves "classic liberals") to be confused for them, and others who should be allies to create unnecessary distinctions and look at one another with distrust over what are differences not in core ethics, but technical mechanics.  It is strange that we all generally able to spot liberal and conservative ideas intuitively yet seemingly no one can can agree on what these things are.  We are left with too many definitions that rest on the specific policy preferences of the ideological groups at different points in history.  Just as modern conservatives who love free trade are not really different from past conservatives who loved tariffs and mercantilism, today's liberals who want limitations on trade are not a different species from their Corn Law repealing bretherin of 1846.

In this iteration of the project, I'm going to rely mostly on Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe, a liberal who studies questions of ideology.  It is more of a reliance on appeal to authority than I want to rest this on, but congealing the sea of philosophers and developments into a coherent story is more than I can pull off this week. Ok, What is Liberalism then? To begin to show that "classic" liberals are just liberals operating in a different socio-political environment, we need a definition that could plausible cover both groups.  Wolfe provides a really good one:  "As many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take." In a radio interview Wolfe once gave, he highlighted the concept of autonomy as vital to liberalism.  It is distinct (ironically considering the etymology of the word) from "liberty" (or "freedom").  I have never liked the word liberty.  Perhaps it is because those who extol it most often seem to be referring to the liberty of a predator to consume prey.  What of the liberty of the prey not to be eaten?  Liberty and freedom are negative concepts.  They imply merely the absence of formal restraint (usually by the state).  However autonomy is a richer and more complete concept.  It is akin to the distinction Martin Luther King Jr. once drew between peace that was merely the absence of violence, and peace which contained the presence of justice.  Thus it is not merely enough to remove the chains that bind humanity, if they are left destitute in the street to wander aimlessly and hungry.  Autonomy requires the capacity to pursue goals.  It is still individualistic, but allows for the real support all of us need from without to make any of those goals a reality. A shorter definition from Wolfe's might be "As many people as possible should have as much autonomy as feasible."  Indeed, Wolfe has probably said as much, and likely uses the longer version as the word autonomy requires explanation.  Much more can be said about this, and I think there are even other valid (probably longer) definitions of liberalism possible, but this one satisfies my need.  For one thing it should be evident that conservatives cannot really claim to exist under this definition.  The long history of conservativism, as Phil Agre wrote in a famous piece, is one of hierarchy and inequality.  But what about libertarians?  How are they distinct from this? What Liberalism is not Well for one thing note that Wolfe's definition lacks any mention of an economic system.  Wolfe comments on the topic: The idea that liberalism comes in two forms assumes that the most fundamental question facing mankind is how much government intervenes into the economy. To me, perhaps because so little of the means of production lies under my control, this is a remarkably uninteresting subject. I think of the whole question of governmental intervention as a matter of technique. Sometimes the market does pretty well and it pays to rely on it. Sometimes it runs into very rough patches and then you need government to regulate it and correct its course. No matters of deep philosophy or religious meaning are at stake when we discuss such matters. A society simply does what it has to do.  Agree with that or not (I do), it is not surprising his definition does not require reference to economics.  In my own mental model of society, economics is the engine of the car.  Engines are obviously very important to the overall functioning of the car.  However, they are not the purpose of the car.  They are also able to vary significantly in theory.  So long as it can provide power to turn an axle, who cares how the engine does it?  In practice, car engines almost all work on the same principles, and the laws of physics limit the practicality of many alternative models.  So it seems with economics.  Capitalism may be the greatest economic system possible, or it may be the best we have tried so far, and others still untried will prove much better.  Liberalism can be agnostic on this topic.  If it employs capitalism, it will delve into the best way to tune and tweak that engine for maximum output, but it will remember that the engine is not the car, and what is good for the engine is not necessarily best for the car. Wolfe's definition also does not make reference to the State.  It does not specify a big state, or a small one.  Virtually every definition of libertarianism or conservativism seems to rest upon some goal of smaller government and a minimized state.  In short, for Wolfe, the state should be as big or small as it needs to be to provide the most autonomy for the most people.  The economic system should be the one that does the same. Let me provide a non-Wolfe source to bolster this claim, Francis Fukuyama, discussing the views of Adam Smith: Smith is, however, no straightforward partisan of liberalism. He says that the prototypical bourgeois virtue of prudence earns only our "cold esteem"; his analysis, in the Wealth of Nations, of the deadening effects of the division of labor on the worker in the pin factory served as the basis for Marx's concept of alienation. For Smith, liberal commercial society is clearly second best, to be preferred only because the best regime is incapable of realization. A society in which virtue is placed front and center - a theocracy, for example - produces unexpected and counterproductive consequences, including hypocrisy and moral lassitude in the orthodox, and fanaticism and opposition in the heterodox. Smith preferred a "free market of religions," in which the need to attract followers promotes active belief, and the diversity of sects keeps fanaticism in check - something not unlike the actual condition of sectarian Protestantism in the United States. If religious belief, nonetheless, tends to erode over time, there are other sources of moral behavior.  (Emphasis mine) For some the claim that Smith is a liberal is contentious, and certainly libertarians often see him as one of them, but here we see even Smith is actually not primarily concerned with economics, but morality.  He arrives at his economic conclusions by eliminating other options that do not bring the type of moral society he envisions. Adding More History Still, we are not yet ready to explain why contemporary libertarians fail to meet Wolfe's definition.  We return to Wolfe for a brief synopsis of the development from classic to social liberalism: In the 18th century, legacies of feudalism and the rules of mercantilism created a situation in which free markets could both allow people greater control over their lives and at the same time spread that capacity to others. Smith, although claimed today by libertarians, was a liberal, indeed one of the great liberal thinkers, not because he made such a lasting contribution to economic theory but because he developed a moral philosophy respecting both freedom and equality. Under conditions of contemporary capitalism, by contrast, individual autonomy is threatened by poverty, economic instability, and concentrated corporate power. Using government to control economic fluctuations, as Keynes argued, gave society the capacity both to improve the ability of any one person to become more autonomous as well as to extend the same notion more broadly. Keynes, a member of the British Liberal Party, was never a socialist. He, like Smith, was a liberal because he too respected both freedom and equality.  You have to consider Smith's vision of capitalism in contrast to what it displaced, the mercantilism and even legacy of feudalism which dominated life.  Capitalism was simply better than those in providing autonomy.  A feudal peasant is simply born into a caste from which he can almost certainly never escape.  The mercantilist worker may draw some sentimental happiness from the success of her nation in the zero-sum competition with other nations, but her lot does not really change whether or not her nation secures that choice colony in the New World. Flash forward to a world in which feudalism has shrivelled to nearly naught, and mercantilism has begun to give way to capitalism.  Where are liberals?  They've won a major battle, but now must re-evaluate what they have really accomplished and where to go from there. This is the slow march Paul describes at the start.  After all capitalism was new.  It hadn't been done before.  Smith and other liberals who followed him had high hopes, but the results did not pan out as well as desired.  Better than feudalism?  Sure.  Good enough?  No. Now we're ready to arrive at our answer for the libertarians:  Yes, in many ways their policy preferences today map very well to the policies pushed by liberals like John Bright and Richard Cobden in the UK, Jefferson and Madison in the US or William Lyon MacKenzie in Canada.  The classic liberals.  However the difference is that those men did not have the extra 150 years of experience with the reality of capitalism.  Libertarians have stuck to a set of beliefs that liberals abandoned because they weren't serving the true goals of liberalism.  Rather than assume libertarian thinkers are unaware of this history, we must conclude that they either do not share the same goals as liberals, or lack the rational capacity to reach the correct conclusions about the empirical policy record. While in regrettable individuals it is sometimes the latter reason, most often the difference is the rejection of autonomy by libertarians, and generally all forms of positive liberties.  The mere absence of enforced state monopolies and divinely empowered noble figures dominating life had not proved sufficient to create a society of general autonomy, and so liberals have looked to various ways through the State to provide it.  Libertarians have resisted these.  Liberty outweighs autonomy for them. While that's defensible on many philosophical grounds, it is not what liberalism is about, even if it amounted once to what liberals of a certain era were about in specific policy terms. Libertarians today can worship markets and reject positive liberty if they want, but they're 150 years late to the classic liberal party.  It's a free country, they can call themselves what they want, but they're just revealing that they never understood what liberalism was really about to begin with when they employ the term.  Liberalism didn't betray its roots by embracing the welfare state, that was the natural response to the results of an early iteration of liberal policy real world experiment. There is one liberalism that has pursued the same broad goals through different means. In my next attempt at climbing this mountain, I will try to elaborate more on the specific progression of thought and events along that road for liberals in several nations.

Newtown: Another Expose on Conservative Ideological Bankruptcy

While liberals debate various forms of gun control, improvements to the psychiatric care system, and other actual measures to make slaughters like Newtown less likely, the abject bankruptcy of conservative thought is something to behold.

The Tea Party suggests more George Zimmermans are the answer.  Armed vigilante squads patrolling school zones.

Gun "academic" John Lott suggests abolishing even more gun laws, specifically gun-free school zones.

Libertarian law Professor Glenn Reynolds approvingly cites a pro-gun man who later shot and killed his wife in a botched (?) puerile gun stunt.

Supposed "reasonable" conservative Eugene Volokh says to arm the teachers.

Libertarian individualist Megan McArdle proposes a creative collectivist solution:  Train seven year olds to rush adult shooters and overpower them.

Is there anything one needs to say in response to such stupidity?  They can't honestly believe this egregious nonsense.  This is the utter and complete bankruptcy of conservativism and right wing thought in general.  It is incapable of responding to this, and thus can only provide risible self-satirizing ideas to cover its shame.

I wrote about this some time ago, and this is more of the same.  Conservativism has no useful answers to the problems of society.  They simply wish to leave problems to fester, where action would impose the least inconvenience or costs on themselves.  If some problem magically solves itself, they might be ok with that, but for anything else, we are simply left to endure what we must.   They simply don't really believe problems can be solved. 

There shouldn't be 40% of Americans (and 30% of Canadians) willing to call themselves "conservatives" in the face of this.  This is shameful, and frankly disgusting.  The Emperor has no clothes.  People with ideas this monstrous need to experience sustained criticism and even scorn for refusing to rethink such bad ideas in the face of their self-evident horrific failure.  Teach children to rush at mass murderers?  Encourage more vigilantism?  What has to go wrong in your life that you even could entertain these thoughts, never mind publish it to millions in evident seriousness?

The Main Issue of Ayn Rand Accepting Medicare isn't Hypocrisy

With the elevation of Paul Ryan, various Rand stories are getting some more play and I'm fully supportive of efforts to highlight his profound links to the noxious author, particularly since he has made recent efforts to distance himself at least from portions of her image (in particular her atheism, and I'm sure her being pro-choice doesn't help either).  One story in particular wasn't understood properly when it first broke.  Hopefully I can help it along to its proper place in historical context. - D. 

In 2011, news broke that notorious libertarian ("objectivism" was what her school of thought was called to be precise) Ayn Rand had accepted Social Security and Medicare in the 1970s after she was diagnosed with lung cancer (unsurprisingly she was a cigarette-cancer connection denier).  Among liberal circles, a lot of attention was paid to the hypocrisy angle of all this.  A person who spent her life railing against collectivism and dependency accepting the benefits of the very programs her beliefs called "evil."

To the defenders of Rand, the common defence is that Rand had paid into these programs through her involuntarily seized taxes, and if she was going to be forced ("at gunpoint" as libertarians always say) to pay for these programs, why shouldn't she at least get something back from them?  Actually, I don't really disagree with that.  Liberals didn't support the Bush tax cuts, but I doubt many liberals gave back the government the extra taxes they would have had to pay under the Clinton rates after the tax cuts passed.  You're not typically morally obligated to martyr yourself for your beliefs. 

A Failure of Ideas, Not the Individual

No, the really important fact that this episode reveals is not Rand's hypocrisy, but the utter failure of her ideas.  Even she couldn't live without the social safety net.  Here's how the woman who persuaded her to take part in socialism explained it to a fellow objectivist in 1998 (emphasis added):

“The initial argument was on greed,” Pryor continued. “She had to see that there was such a thing as greed in this world. Doctors could cost an awful lot more money than books earn, and she could be totally wiped out by medical bills if she didn’t watch it. Since she had worked her entire life, and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it. She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.”

McConnell asked: “And did she agree with you about Medicare and Social Security?”

Pryor replied: “After several meetings and arguments, she gave me her power of attorney to deal with all matters having to do with health and Social Security. Whether she agreed or not is not the issue, she saw the necessity for both her and Frank. She was never involved other than to sign the power of attorney; I did the rest.”

Ayn Rand was at that point a very successful author with several best sellers that continued to sell well.  No, she wasn't a billionaire or anything, but she was certainly not hurting for cash in ordinary people terms.  This site claims* that the NY Times reported her estate as being worth $500,000 at her death in 1982.  An online inflation calculator says that's worth $1.2M today.  Most people would be thrilled if they were told they'd be worth that much in retirement. Yet even so, Rand looked into the giant gulping maw of the for-profit medical industry and blinked, fearing her cancer would bankrupt her.

That's the failure here;  Rand needed society's help.  Rand ran headlong into the very premise of why Medicare was created in the first place:  The for-profit insurance market is very very bad to the elderly and particularly to those already stricken with serious diseases like cancer. 

Naturally, Rand showed no signs of rethinking anything in the face of her own personal failure to survive in the world she would see created.  If prominent intellectuals sitting on piles of royalties for perpetually successful books can't survive unaided by Big Government in Randland, who can? 

* - that author actually uses that figure of $500,000 to claim Rand didn't need to take Medicare but I think the quoted part above shows the person closest to her deciding to take part clearly thought fear of medical bankruptcy was a primary motivating factor.  Also, while it's possible $500,000 would have been enough to cover her medical bills to death in 1982, her estate would have been worth a lot less had she remained off Medicare.  Further, 1974 Rand would have no way to know how long she would live.  Finally, a big part of the safety net is not just the literal fact of avoiding medical bankruptcy, but having the sense of security that you won't.  I would bet heavily that Ayn Rand slept a little more soundly after going on Medicare knowing she wouldn't die a pauper under any circumstances.