Month: April 2008

Don proves his point

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

Part of what keeps a new progressive alliance from forming is that people mistake differences in ideas about how the world works for differences in moral principles. Left-leaning liberals look at the policies classical liberals support and assume that the motivation is to redistribute income from the poor to the rich. And classical liberals look at left liberals and assume that they are motivated by an envious desire to punish the rich even if it means making everyone worse off.

– Don Arthur at Club Troppo, 6 April. Italics added.

If it turns out that liberty really is more important than giving rich people back their money, tormenting welfare recipients and smashing unions, then perhaps classical liberals might consider breaking their alliance with conservatives and forming an alliance with other liberals — the kind of people Andrew sometimes calls ‘social liberals.’

– Don Arthur at Club Troppo, 2 April. Italics added.

This is one reason why ‘progressive fusionism’ is so unlikely in practice, whatever its attractions in theory. Though Don has read more by classical liberals than most classical liberals have, his intuition still says that it is ideological window-dressing for attacks on the poor. And classical liberals believe that whatever theoretical support for liberty exists in ‘progressive’ circles, their desire to reshape society according to their conception of ‘justice’ will lead to excessive state control.

The intellectual uses of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

In response to my implied criticism of Andrew Leigh for assuming that increases in inequality are bad and decreases good, but never specifying for what level of inequality would satisfy him, commenter Leopold responds:

one could turn the criticism around. Liberals believe in liberty – but how much liberty, exactly?

Leopold’s argument (I am paraphrasing here) is that preferences for greater equality or greater liberty are rules of thumb to be applied to specific circumstances, but there are cases where social democrats could accept less equality and liberals accept less liberty. We can’t always precisely calculate the final overall result of all these complex trade-offs to say what is the exactly right amount of equality or liberty. But this doesn’t invalidate the initial assumption that, all other things being equal, more equality or more liberty (depending on your philosophical position) is desirable.

I think Leopold’s point is reasonable. For example, I say that there should be less tax, and while I have clear pet hates among government spending programmes (eg FTB) that I think should be cut to reduce general tax rates, I never say exactly how much tax I think should be levied or what tax rates I would be happy with.

High-level political abstractions gives us intellectual tools that help organise our understanding of the world, but they don’t necessarily provide answers for specific problems. That requires far more detailed analysis.
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‘Progressive fusionism’ and classical liberalism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 24 Comments

According to Don Arthur, classical liberals don’t really belong with conservatives. Australian conservatives are ‘market friendly’, but they don’t rate individual liberty that highly so they aren’t really liberals. What keeps classical liberals with conservatives is less ideology than

social networks and personal loyalties. Most of Australia’s classical liberals are woven into organisations and social groups that bind them to conservatives. … As a result, realignment probably won’t happen until this generation of middle-aged classical liberals shuffles off the public stage and makes room for the next generation.

Social networks and personal loyalties do create ‘stickiness’ on both sides of politics. But within non-party politics, it’s still not clear to me that even on ideological grounds Australian classical liberals aren’t more likely to fit with Australian conservatives than Australian ‘progessive fusionists’; pro-market, socially liberal, social democrats.

Though some Labor governments could be described as ‘progressive fusionist’, party positions rarely map neatly onto intellectual life. ‘Progressive fusionism’ does not seem to me to be widely represented in intellectual circles (Andrew Leigh?, Nick Gruen?, Fred Argy?), because most progressives are either anti-market or economically illiterate (or indeed both). There are no progessive fusionist think-tanks or institutions. From a liberal perspective, progressives tend to have the same problem Don attributes to the conservative right, of missing out half of liberalism.
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Young Labor joins NUS opposing price control

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

While Liberal students search out biased academics, it is good to see that Young Labor is joining NUS in pursuing one of the big problems in higher education, price control.

As readers may recall, NUS is supporting an increase in the maximum student contribution amount so that amenities fees can be reintroduced. In the SMH this morning, Young Labor President Sam Crosby has an op-ed calling for HECS to cover textbook expenses.

Both the NUS and Young Labor proposals are typical of the ad hocery that plagues policymaking in higher education. Endless minor changes to the existing system aimed at particular problems add to complexity without fixing the underlying structural flaws. But they are at least recognising that price control creates problems and calling for change, albeit change that does not go nearly far enough.

What’s really going on is this. For political reasons, the maximum student contribution amount is set too low. As this Access Economics report on six universities (pdf) found last year, these universities are already losing money on Commonwealth-supported students in half of the 22 disciplines examined. This means that there is no scope for bundling – whether that is non-academic services or textbooks and other study aids.
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Education, not indoctrination?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 41 Comments

Not sexist! Not racist! Don’t tell Lot’s Wife!

Back in the 1980s, it was left-wing students who used to complain about lecturers expressing inappropriate political views. Due to an attack on him in the Monash student newspaper Lot’s Wife, my criminal law lecturer, the late Kumar Amarasekara, had to preface his often hilarious jokes with the above disclaimer.

As the SMH reported this morning, now it is the turn of Liberal students to complain about political bias. According to their ‘Education. Not Indoctrination.’ campaign they want (getting in on the fashionable language) ‘inclusive’ universities that ‘foster intellectual diversity’. Incidents of bias could include:

* a verbal opinion offered by a teacher or lecturer that is overtly political or ideological
* a method of teaching that is hostile to opposing views
* the use or presentation of one-sided course materials or textbooks
* the promotion of a particular political ideology by university authorities

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