Category: Liberalism

Goddess of the Market

~ Andrew Norton ~ 60 Comments

It’s rare for PhD theses to be turned into good books, but I am glad to report that with Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right Jennifer Burns has beaten the odds. Her book is readable and interesting throughout.

200px-Ayn_Rand1

There was one paradox of Rand’s work and legacy that particularly caught my eye after last year’s discussion of liberalism and the emotions. Rand thought that the emotions should always come from rationality; even sex was to be inspired by a recognition of shared values rather than physical attraction (a convenient idea for a woman in love with a much younger man). It sounds like an extreme version of the liberal emphasis on reason and rules over prejudices and passions. Continue reading “Goddess of the Market” →

Australia’s statist right-wingers

~ Andrew Norton ~ 24 Comments

This morning The Australian published my contribution to their What’s Right series, based on the political identity survey many of you contributed to earlier in the year.

Perhaps my main achievement is getting a newspaper to print the terms ‘classical liberal’ and ‘libertarian’ rather than blurring them with ‘the conservatives’. Unfortunately, however, when it comes to electoral politics ‘conservative’ is not such a bad catch-all term.

Various surveys over the years have asked voters to rate themselves on a 0 (left) to 10 (right) political scale. In the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2007 I classed the right as people putting themselves 7-10 on the scale and looked at their opinions on various issues. They were about 20% of the sample.

Social issues Continue reading “Australia’s statist right-wingers” →

Classical liberals and political parties

~ Andrew Norton ~ 65 Comments

Commenter Ute Man asks

At what point would Andrew Norton abandon the Liberal party …. Surely the Abbott inspired lunacy that encouraged Barnaby Joyce to publically voice his CEC conspiracies was a breaking point for anybody who even pretended to be rational. … Surely, at this point, it is impossible for the “last classical liberal” to deny the four-square conservatism (or idiocy, I can’t decide) of Abbott and his unannounced, unfunded policies to continue to support this party. Or are you just another prisoner to tribalism?

I’ve had many questions like this over the years. After all, in the thirty or so years that I have been a Liberal supporter the party has stood for the Australian Settlement minus the White Australia policy (Fraser), vacuous soft-right progressivism (Peacock), suburban conservatism (Howard), free-market liberalism (Hewson), upper-class conservatism with bad jokes (Downer), everything-depending-on-what-day-of-the week-it was (Nelson), market-leaning social liberalism (Turnbull) and now Tony Abbott’s big government conservatism. At the state level, the party often seems to stand for nothing at all, or at least there is no theme I can extract from their ad hoc point scoring against Labor.

Clearly for those – like much of the Australian Left – who see politics as self-expression, as part of showing what kind of person they are, this ideological variety would be intolerable. Indeed, with this view on politics involvement with any major party would be impossible, since both major parties are ‘broad church’ institutions incorporating a wide range of interests and beliefs. Which group is most dominant, or at least most obvious, will change over time with their numbers in the party, their skill, the political cycle, and luck. Continue reading “Classical liberals and political parties” →

Paternalism vs liberalism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 22 Comments

The Australia Institute‘s proposal in Something for Nothing to regulate working hours according to their version of a balanced good life highlights some differences between paternalism and liberalism.

Paternalists are confident that they know what way of living is best for each individual. Having found a few studies identifying harmful health or social effects of long hours at work, authors Richard Denniss and Josh Fear assume that all over-work must be bad and therefore should be regulated.

Liberals, by contrast, typically believe that there are many different ways of living a good life. Liberals are less likely to miss the other meanings and goals of work, and more likely to tolerate people making their own choices about life priorities. If somebody thinks that their job is more rewarding that going home at 5pm, there is no reason for the state to second-guess that judgment.

Paternalists tend to doubt the capacity of people to improve their own lives. Continue reading “Paternalism vs liberalism” →

Conservatism from Deakin to Howard

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

George Brandis’s Deakin lecture is now online, courtesy The Australian.

One of his points was that John Howard was the first Liberal leader to expressly incorporate conservatism into the party ideology, describing the Liberal Party as the heir to both the conservative and liberal traditions in Australia, and himself as a social conservative and economic liberal.

So far as I can recall that it a correct observation about party rhetoric. What I am less sure of is that Howard – despite his own occasional claim to the contrary – was actually an unusually conservative Liberal prime minister.

Important elements of Liberal ideology from Deakin to Menzies owe more to conservative than liberal thinking, even if neither Deakin nor Menzies ever labelled them as such.

The stand-out example of this is the White Australia Policy. Take this passage from Afred Deakin on the WAP (quoted in Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty): Continue reading “Conservatism from Deakin to Howard” →

Liberalism and the emotions

~ Andrew Norton ~ 36 Comments

In response to my left sensibility post, Dave Bath suggested that

Are most self-identifying rightards best characterized by a lack of sensibility, if not sense? Could they be described as suffering some kind of social autism?

People with autism or Asperger’s typically have difficulty in reading and appropriately responding to other people’s emotions. I know of no evidence that this is particularly common among right-of-centre people (though Tyler Cowen has a sympathetic chapter on the issue in his latest book, prompted by a suggestion that he might have Asperger’s). But liberalism does, I think, have a more constrained and sceptical view than other political philosophies on the role of the emotions in public life. Continue reading “Liberalism and the emotions” →

Is the market the ‘greatest dissolver of the bonds of family’?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 35 Comments

Unhappily, the democratic Left also now embraced the other dimension of the 60s revolution, the abandonment of social responsibility and the pursuit of self-interest at whatever cost. This eventually provided the opportunity for the neo-liberals, in association with another force on the Right, the neo-conservatives, to make further great headway among the Western working class by supporting the values of social conservatism. By doing this, the neo-liberals managed to disguise from both others and themselves an obvious truth, namely that the untrammelled market was the greatest dissolver of the bonds of family and community.

Robert Manne yesterday, in another of The Australian‘s What’s Left series.

But how obvious is Professor Manne’s truth about the market and families? There is certainly no direct relationship in our current society – those with most market experience, people with jobs and money to spend, are more likely to be in couple or family housesholds. And the period of ‘neoliberal’ policy has coincided with a fall in the divorce rate. In 2008, it was at its lowest point since the liberalisation of divorce law in 1975.

It is nevertheless true that the unmarried or separated proportion of the adult population is high by historical standards. There are a number of proximate causes for this, which are interconnected in a complex web of cause and effect. Continue reading “Is the market the ‘greatest dissolver of the bonds of family’?” →

Classical liberal nay-saying

~ Andrew Norton ~ 61 Comments

You’re becoming a nay-sayer. This is the second voucher type scheme that you’ve argued against and you are still pro-conscription on student unionism.

– Sinclair Davidson, 23 July 2009

A constantly negative person isn’t much fun to be around. But being a policy nay-sayer is, for a classical liberal activist, part of the job description. There are endless suggestions for more government spending and regulation, and so there must also be endless criticisms of those proposals.

Most classical liberals join in the nay-saying. But perhaps where I differ from the others is that, as I argued in my big government conservatism article a few years ago, I believe that pressures for big government come from within centre-right politics, as well as the usual suspects of left-wing ideas, interest group rent-seeking, and politicians’ vote-buying.
Continue reading “Classical liberal nay-saying” →

On Liberty at 150

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

The 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, along with the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, has been getting plenty of attention. But there was another still-famous book published in 1859 that doesn’t seem to be getting anniversary celebrations – John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

I try to rectify this in the current issue of Policy. At the end of my article, I try to explain why Mill, despite probably being the most read and cited liberal philosopher, has an uneasy place in the classical liberal canon, but still deserves to be there:
Continue reading “On Liberty at 150” →

Economic liberalism and the opportunities for political favours

~ Andrew Norton ~ 27 Comments

Today John Quiggin published a post on ‘probity and economic liberalism’, arguments from which have also been appearing in the thread to this post of mine.

In response to the argument that economic liberalism reduces the scope for wrong-doing, Quiggin offers evidence which I think is in itself pretty much irrelevant: that various governments that introduced some liberal policies also had scandals. But as social scientists often point out, correlation is not causation. All governments eventually have scandals of some sort, and by Quiggin’s standard every ideology stands condemned.

The Latham argument I agreed with was that to the extent government either withdraws from activities or sets neutral rules of the game the scope for political favours is reduced. Because classical/neo-liberalism provides no ideological justification for industry policy and advocates cutting taxes over most forms of government spending it seems to me that it must, to the extent it is successful, have a prophylactic effect on political favours.
Continue reading “Economic liberalism and the opportunities for political favours” →