Category: Liberalism

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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Win trip to Tokyo, meet Nobel Prize winner

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

As Jason has already informed Catallaxy readers, the 2008 Mont Pelerin Society Essay Competition is on. The prizes are pretty good – trips to the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Tokyo over September 7-12 this year, plus US$2,500 for first prize, $1,500 for second prize, and $1,000 for third prize.

Speakers at the conference include luminaries such as Gary Becker, James Heckman, and Vaclav Klaus. He’s not so famous, but I am also looking forward to hearing the prolific but consistently interesting Edward Glaeser (and of course I am also looking forward to my first trip to Japan).

To get there, you have be less than 35 years old and to write in 5,000 words maximum by 30 April your answer to:

In The Constitution of Liberty Hayek says that “we are probably only at the threshold of an age in which the technological possibilities of mind control are likely to grow rapidly and what may appear at first as innocuous or beneficial powers over the personality of the individual will be at the disposal of government. The greatest threats to human freedom probably still lie in the future.”

Has Hayek’s gloomy warning been borne out by events, or has technology become more a force for liberating people from government?

Liberty and Society seminar

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

The CIS Liberty and Society seminar is coming up again. It’s a weekend live-in seminar on classical liberal ideas for university students and recent graduates. It covers political philosophy, economics, law and social policy. It’s a bit like a good blog with high-quality comments – there are lots of opportunities for discussion with the lecturers and other students.

You don’t have to be a classical liberal to attend – a few conservatives and social democrats are good for keeping the debate lively – but you have to be interested in the ideas, do the reading, and of course be civil to everyone.

The next one is in Sydney over the weekend of 11-13 April, with 14 March the deadline for applications. It’s free, and the CIS will also pay most of your travel expenses if you live outside of Sydney and need financial help getting there.

The contradictions of conservatism?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

I just don’t see how you can say that economically people should be as free as they can to do the things they want unhindered by the State, but socially the State should be telling them what’s best and how they should structure their lives. It would actually be refreshing for a conservative to just say, “yeah, there is an ideological contradiction, but so what”.

– commenter Christian last week.

It has often been claimed that social conservatism and economic liberalism are contradictory. Christian seems here to be saying there is a logical contradiction on display, but I think conservatives can fairly easily side-step this criticism. It would only be valid if conservatives defend markets as institutions of freedom. But there is also a utilitarian defence of markets, which is that economic freedom is good because it produces more wealth than any other system. Social democrats could defend markets for the same reason.

At least on the surface, another version of this criticism is harder for conservatives to escape. Continue reading “The contradictions of conservatism?” →

On what can classical liberals and conservatives agree?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 36 Comments

Why are Australian libertarians suddenly so keen to collapse the ‘broad tent’? You don’t see many social conservatives trying to reform the tax-code according to the Summa.

– John Heard today.

Political alliances between different ideologies shift with the times. For most of the second half of the 20th century, liberals and conservatives were united against communism and its fellow-travellers. A lot of differences could be overlooked when there was a united view on what was perhaps the most important issue in world politics, at least from the perspective of liberals and conservatives.

As many people have commented, there have been more overt tensions between liberals and conservatives since soon after that glorious month of November 1989 took away their common cause. But there is still something of a liberal-conservative camp – if not quite a single tent, to modify John’s metaphor. This is partly because there are many people who, in the context of contemporary politics, are on the liberal side of economic debates and the conservative side of social debates. But it is also because there are some issues on which ideologically distinct classical liberals and conservatives can still agree. Here are a few:
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A bloggish debate briefly continues – against Peter Whiteford

~ Andrew Norton ~ 60 Comments

At the risk of adding day 7 to the bloggish debate, I want to respond to Peter Whiteford’s comments at Andrew L’s blog. Whiteford says:

My reaction to Andrew N’s first post may seem casual, but it is where is the evidence that Australian public schooling is the sort of disaster that you seem to imply that it is. Are Australian intellectual elites all drawn from private school backgrounds? Does everyone who went to a public school get an inferior education? Does everyone who went to a private school get a superior education? What is the variation in educational achievement by type of school attended, and what other factors apart from type of school have influenced these outcomes? Evidence please.

Actually, I barely mentioned these conventional public-private debates – and not at all in the first post. As a classical liberal, I think there are inherent political and social problems with monopoly education, regardless of how well public schools teach the 3Rs. I was trying to bring out the philosophical differences between Andrew L and myself, which in fact did happen.

He’s happy with state indoctrination (though eventually conceding that public education doesn’t make much if any difference to civics); I’m not. A preference for live-and-let-live in a pluralistic society, rather than trying to get everyone to believe the same things, is one of the oldest ideas in liberalism, and still one worth arguing for in my view.

Consistent with this, surveys of why parents prefer private schools show that values-type issues are high on the list. This is not to say that government schools don’t incuclate values of some sort, but these aren’t necessarily the values parents want taught. We could hardly expect a single system to reflect the diversity of Australia, and it doesn’t.
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Should the Liberals adopt ‘progressive liberalism’?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 50 Comments

A recurrent critique of the Liberal Party is that it is more a conservative party than a liberal party, and that it should become more liberal. This critique has a libertarian version (for example my article on ‘big government conservatism’), and also a ‘progressive’ version, which has found its way into book form twice since the early 1990s: Christopher Puplick’s Is the Party Over?: The Future of the Liberals (1994) and Greg Barns’ What’s Wrong with the Liberal Party? (2003), which I rather unkindly reviewed for Quadrant.

After the 24 November defeat, it was the ‘progressives’ who moved first to fill the ideological vacuum left by Howard’s departure. In The Age at the weekend, Victorian Liberal Senator Judith Troeth told us that:

the party has an opportunity to reinvent itself and recapture the inclusive and progressive liberalism that once made it electorally strong. (emphasis added)

While some aspects of ‘progressive liberalism’ are in my view worthy, as John Roskam rightly points out it is not an election-winning strategy for the Liberal Party. Can anyone name an election the Liberals won because they were more ‘progressive’ than Labor?
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Social democratic liberal conservatives vs conservative liberal social democrats

~ Andrew Norton ~ 41 Comments

Back in 2005, Nick Gruen wrote a useful post about the components he liked of the three ideological elements of our political culture: liberalism, conservatism and social democracy. In practice, all major political parties tend to be a mix of the three, but with differing emphasis.

I’d call Labor conservative liberal social democrats; social democracy placed as the noun because that I think is the party’s animating force. People join Labor because they want more equality. Some can be quite conservative and others quite liberal on social issues, and Labor has in the past proven itself capable of major liberal economic reforms. Rudd proclaims himself an ‘economic conservative’. But these ideas complement or modify the party’s social democracy, rather than being the core of what Labor is about.

Under Howard, the Liberals have been social democratic liberal conservatives. For him, conservative ideas were most important – family, Queen and country, so conservatism is the noun. While I think the argument that Menzies was more liberal than Howard is nonsense, this is not because liberal ideas are what drove the former PM, but because he largely took as given the large social changes of the last 40 years.
Continue reading “Social democratic liberal conservatives vs conservative liberal social democrats” →