Don’t Call Leftists “Liberal”; They’re Not!

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

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Collectivism, Daniel Klein, Governmentalization of Social Affairs, Intercollegiate Review, Kevin Williamson, Left wing, Liberalism, Modern Age, N-Gram Viewer, Neoliberalism, New Liberalism, Progressivism, Social Democracy, Socialism, Spontaneous Social Order, statism

Nor are statists, collectivists and socialists, but I repeat myself. The simple plea above is made by Daniel Klein in an essay appearing in the Intercollegiate Review and in Modern Age. He asserts that libertarians (and conservatives) fall into a semantic trap when they use the term as a pejorative for leftists. I have touched on the mangled, modern usage of “liberalism” several times on Sacred Cow Chips, but Klein brings some interesting empiricism into consideration and makes several points worth emphasizing.

First, Klein traces the historical record of appearances of certain words related to liberalism in published literature using the “n-gram viewer” on Google. He shows that the political use of “liberal” began around 1770. For the next 110 years, liberalism referred to a philosophy and policies associated with small government and individual autonomy. In the U.S., however, the term began to be co-opted by the political left in the late 1800s. Around the turn of the twentieth century, references to “New Liberalism” and “Old Liberalism” became more frequent. So the term was subverted in that time frame, a decade or two before the term “left-wing” came into use.

“The literature of the so-called New Liberals declaimed openly against individual liberty and in favor of state collectivism and socialistic reform.“

Today, the association of “liberalism” with the left is confined mostly to the U.S. and Canada:

“…when we step outside North America, we see that, by and large, liberal still means liberal (in the UK, usage is in-between). …

Where liberal still means liberal, such as in Europe and Latin America, leftists have no reluctance in calling their imaginary bogeyman ‘neoliberalism.’“

By way of suggestion, Klein reviews a few alternative labels for the left. In doing so, he notes that in general, the left supports the “governmentalization of social affairs”. For that reason, one of my favorite labels is “statism”. Oddly, Klein never mentions this as a possibility. (Klein concedes that the left supports liberty on a few issues, which happen to be issues upon which most libertarians are in agreement.) He does refer to the old standby “collectivists” in passing.

Klein likes the label “Progressivism” for the left, despite the positive associations some might make with that term. He argues with some merit that progressivism implies activist, goal-directed policy, as opposed to non-intervention and the spontaneous social order favored by true liberals.

“That collectivists should join together for what they imagine to be progress is perfectly fitting. For them the term progressive is suitable. By contrast, conservatives and libertarians look to, not progress, but improvement. …

Another fitting term for leftism is social democracy, which is standard in Europe. Social democracy is a compromise between democratic socialism and a tepid liberalism. The socialistic penchant is foremost, but a vacillating liberalism gnaws at the social democrat’s conscience.”

I fully agree with Klein that we should never refer to leftists as liberals. They are completely undeserving of the description, and doing so concedes a glaringly false premise. Every leftist I know advocates the increasing governmentalization of social affairs and a naive acceptance of an impossible proposition: that government can ever possess the detailed knowledge necessary to successfully regulate individual actors from above. And leftists are foolishly willing to place faith in the benevolence and wisdom of political agents and central controllers. Klein mentions a recent editorial by Kevin Williamson in National Review:

“Williamson ends the piece by quoting two leftist authors writing in The Nation, one decrying ‘unbridled individualism,’ the other ‘unfettered capitalism.’ Williamson concludes: ‘A ‘liberalism’ that is chiefly concerned with the many clever uses of bridles and fetters does not deserve the name. It never has.’”

Corporatists of the World Unite!

01 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by pnuetz in Big Government

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Benito Mussolini, Capitalism, Classical Liberalism, Corporatism, Edmund S. Phelps, Free Markets, Jason Brennan, Liberalism, Max Borders, Neoliberalism, rent seeking, Thayer Watkins, The Freeman

As a classical liberal, I’m fascinated by the ongoing confusion of the Progressive Left over the meaning of the word liberalism. To be “liberal” is to support individual autonomy, self-determination, and freedom from coercion by the state. True liberalism necessarily implies a minimal state apparatus because the state can only derive authority from its power to coerce. Confusion over the meaning of liberalism was covered in “Labels For the Authoritarian Left” on Sacred Cow Chips last year.

A similar confusion surrounds use of the word corporatism and its relationship to progressivism on the one hand, and liberalism on the other. I came across this excellent essay by Max Borders in The Freeman that begins with a discussion of the term neoliberalism. Lately this has been invoked as an derogatory reference to classical liberalism, except that the users don’t really understand the latter. In fact, as Borders points out, one prominent author describes free market advocacy as something more akin to cronyism, complete with state support and bailouts, which is contradictory on its face. But it is consistent with the doctrine of corporatism. Borders offers this quote from Thayer Watkins:

“In the last half of the 19th century people of the working class in Europe were beginning to show interest in the ideas of socialism and syndicalism. Some members of the intelligentsia, particularly the Catholic intelligentsia, decided to formulate an alternative to socialism which would emphasize social justice without the radical solution of the abolition of private property.

The result was called Corporatism. The name had nothing to do with the notion of a business corporation except that both words are derived from the Latin word for body, corpus.“

Sounds like innocent beginnings, but enforcing “social justice” within this framework demands a substantial role for the state and an intricate set of relationships between the state and private parties. That provides opportunities for accumulating economic power and wealth by manipulating any arm of government that legislates, adjudicates, purchases, licenses, regulates or levies taxes. That is, any arm of government! Such rent-seeking activity gives rise to a symbiosis between the state and powerful private economic actors, and that is the essence of modern corporatism as practiced by Mussolini, George W. Bush and Obama and their governments. Borders quotes economics Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps:

“The managerial state has assumed responsibility for looking after everything from the incomes of the middle class to the profitability of large corporations to industrial advancement. This system . . . is . . . an economic order that harks back to Bismarck in the late nineteenth century and Mussolini in the twentieth: corporatism.“

Borders closes with a discussion of Jason Brennan’s admonition: “Dear Left: Corporatism is Your Fault”, which dishes the bald truth.

“When you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules, these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us.“

Corporatism has nothing to do with the corporate form of business organization per se. Granted, limited liability is an artificial construct created by the state, and it is a hallmark of that form, so it’s fair to cite it as an example of corporatism. But corporatism in its systemic sense represents the larger web of non-market dependencies between the state and powerful economic actors, corporate in form or not. Both sides benefit from these relationships and, in many direct and indirect ways, compromise the integrity of the voluntary market mechanism and harm smaller actors who rely on it.

This is not a state of affairs that meets with the approval of classical liberals, free marketeers and fans of real capitalism, the so-called “neoliberals” of Leftist fiction. The Left purports to hate corporatism too, but they don’t understand its genesis and are fully oblivious to the real reasons for its progression. Instead, in their ignorance, they pass the blame onto “neoliberals”.