redbloodedamerica:

Do Libertarians Care About the Poor?

Deirdre McCloskey:  You know I got into economics when I was a socialist because I wanted to help the poor and I stayed wanting to help the poor; except that our policies unlike the policies of our friends on the left, and some on the right, actually helped the poor, instead of just signaling that we’re virtuous. 

Matt Kibbe: You call yourself a “Christian libertarian.”   What on earth is that all about?  

McCloskey: Well, you could also call it a “bleeding heart libertarian”, or liberal, as I prefer.  I think we ought to take back the ‘L’ word.  But in any case it means that you care about the poor.  And, of course, really most libertarians do.  If they’re kind of Randians, they tend to get off on “I’ve got mine, to heck with you.“  But if they’re not, they, you know I got into economics when I was a socialist because I wanted to help the poor and I stayed wanting to help the poor, except that our policies – unlike the policies of our friends on the left and some on the right – actually helped the poor, instead of just signaling that we were virtuous.  And that’s what I think is so great about capitalism.  That it makes the poor better off.  Substantive equality increases, and certainly the absolute flourishing of formerly poor people, like the ancestors of you and me are made much better off.  

Kibbe: Now you have argued that capitalism – and maybe you’re not even comfortable with that word – but that capitalism isn’t about capital accumulation.  It’s about creation and discovery.  

McCloskey:  And that’s the big problem with the word capitalism, because it misleads people.  Even people who are very open-minded and want to understand it keep thinking it’s about capital flows.  My friend, Yanis Varoufakis, who was the Finance Minister of Greece for a while in a somewhat turbulent tenure in that office, he believes that flows of capital is what capitalism is all about.  And no, it’s not.  

Kibbe: And I think a lot of people think that oddly enough, that capitalism is a top down system.  

McCloskey:  I know they do because that’s, I think I can explain that but look John Mackey, the founder and owner of Whole Foods, speaks of conscious capitalism.  He and I are on the same wavelength.  I want people to understand that capitalism needs a conscience.  And it doesn’t have to be supplied from the outside because most capitalists – if you want to call them that, I hate the word – want to be good, want to be humans.  And so they’re just going to automatically try not to be that character in the Simpsons, the guy who owns the nuclear plant. Mr. Burns.  They’re not trying to be Mr. Burns.  And indeed even if they’re trying to be Mr. Burns, if they get power supplied cheaply then that’s at least an improvement on that score.  

Kibbe: How do we translate the power that we see in markets and innovation into language that connects with young people?  So many young people today, you’ve seen the polls, they’re flirting with “democratic socialism.”  

McCloskey:  Yeah, yeah I know they are.  Well, I’ve got a theory which relates also to your question just before, which is that if you’re a child who’s grown up in a middle class household in say the United States, you’re in a socialist society –it’s called a family.  It’s called a loving family.  And income arrives somehow mysteriously from heaven, and then mom is the central planner who doesn’t give daddy ten times more food or something than the other people.  There’s a kind of egalitarianism about it, and when such a child realizes there are poor people – I can speak from my own experience, I was a socialist once – her natural inclination is to bring everyone into a family.  And we need to get them beyond this analogy to the family because the problem with the analogy to the family is that there’s a father in charge.  There’s the good czar who takes care of us all.  There’s the modern social democratic state that takes care of us.  And the temptation is to give away all your freedoms in order to be secure.  

And that’s a terrible temptation that we need to argue against all the time, because you and I believe that a flourishing human is one who’s free, and is independent, and is not sort of this baby crying for her mother.  If a child grows up on a farm or participating in a small business, she learns where meat comes from.  She learns market prices, she learns profit and loss, and it’s very easy to explain economics to her and she’s a natural liberal.  But if you grow up where your daddy and mommy go off to the office vaguely.  So each generation we have to teach this.  This is the trouble.  

People come out of adolescence natural socialists in a modern economy.  So we’ve gotta keep arguing against it and showing them, just as you said, that the bottom up thing that they want is what the so-called “capitalism” provides.  

Kibbe: My progressive friends talk a lot about his broader definition of citizenship, and the responsibilities that come with it.  And I have argued that liberty is a responsibility but they slip into more authoritarian language like duty.  And that always rubs me the wrong way.  I feel like there’s a fundamental difference between responsibility, which you are free and obligated to pursue, versus someone telling me that you have to do this or that.  

McCloskey:  That’s a very good point.  There’s a very interesting history of the word responsibility.  Historian Ed Rice has looked into this and with great insight. The word responsibility didn’t take on its modern meaning until around 1800, and now it’s become a big word in our culture.  Responsibility, people talk about it all the time.  So it’s part of the modern world.  This historian Ed Rice talked about how it came with capitalism, and that’s not quite right because capitalism has existed since the caves.  But this bourgeois revaluation that I talk about, this new ideology in which you admire business people and inventors instead of being frightened by them or sneering at them, that all comes to fruition about 1800.  And that’s when the word responsibility comes big in our society.  

The standard spectrum from left to right is only a quarrel about how to use state power.  On the left they want to use it for what they conceive of as redistribution or for forcing people to do this, that and the other.  And on the right, for marshal glory and other things they want to force people to do, like stopping smoking pot; whereas we liberals are up here.  We don’t want to have a debate about how to use state power.  We want state power – there has to be a state I think – but we want the state power to be modest and small, because all the creativity of the society, almost all of it, comes from individuals, from people, from folks, from people who under the spread of liberalism have been gradually liberated to have as the English say, "have a go."  And that’s what explains modern economic growth.  Not capital accumulation, not exploitation, but giving more and more people the right to open a business, the right to enter an occupation.  And there’s the danger of falling back into this kind of feudal or socialist system.  In the United States, 1,000 occupations require a state license. This is crazy.  

Kibbe: I view it as a market opportunity though.  I think there’s an underserved market for this vast cut of humanity.  I call them the “liberty curious.”  Particularly young people.  And that’s why we’re talking about this.   Because I think there’s a different set of ideas, classical liberalism, freedom, liberty, whatever; however we want to brand that stuff.  But I think there’s people we reach through technology, through video, through social media.  

McCloskey:  Yeah.  All of these beautiful tools we have.  But of course it’s crucial.  We’ve got to get people to understand that you and I want the poor to be better off.  And we regard a free enterprise system as absolutely the best way to accomplish it; not because theoretically on a blackboard you can show it, but because in the last two centuries it’s worked.  It’s not state action.  It’s not industrial policy or building of canals subsidized by the government that’s made us rich.  It’s human ingenuity encouraged through freeing people to do what they want.