Chapter 2
THE AUTHOR’S LONG-TIME CLASSICAL LIBERALISM
Many authors on the Left have over the past two centuries
argued that “capitalism” (a market economy) has fatal flaws. Among other things, they have called for a broad
redistribution – sometimes a total equalizing – of wealth and income. In my opinion, they have been wrong. As an economic system based on the personal
incentive to prosper, a market economy resulted in a vast middle class as many
millions of people joined in the creation of wealth. Nor was it flawed by its lack of
“redistribution.”
This is one place I differ from the writings that have come
from the Left that stress many of the points I will be discussing. I see the challenges caused by globalization’s
opening of the
Indeed, the principal significance of the present book is
that the author is a long-time opponent of socialism and a philosophical
defender of an individualistic society.
It is as such that he has become convinced that world economic
conditions have so radically changed that a complete reexamination of
free-market theory is needed. This will
not be just another book advocating what the Left has wanted for
generations. It will be an urgent
inquiry into how a society centered on individual freedom can bring together a
flourishing market and labor-saving technology, on the one hand, and a broad
provision of income to an economically displaced population, on the other.
To assess the author’s standing as someone who believes strongly
in individual liberty, it will be valuable for readers to have personal information about me. This will be especially useful to readers who
are close to me philosophically and who, accordingly, see themselves variously
as free market advocates, classical liberals, conservatives or
libertarians. Such readers need to know
that I am a friend – while also knowing that I have for many years called upon
supporters of an individualistic free society to think beyond the closed
ideological system that has seemed to me to limit them without their realizing
it. When I urge them to rethink much of the system of thought that has been
second-nature to them (and in large measure to me), it is not to move them away
from individual liberty as the central principle of society. Instead, it is to point toward a more
sustainable philosophy of a free society in light of the fact that changing
conditions will make destructive many of the ideas they and I have thus far
held so dear.
During
all of my adult life I have been a classical liberal (which is not to be
confused with what has passed under the name liberalism in the
Many
readers won’t consider themselves classical liberals. If you are one of them, you won’t start the
intellectual odyssey from the same place I do.
Just the same, you will be able to join the discussion soon enough. It will be worth your while to “stay the
course.”
I can best explain classical liberalism in personal terms. During early boyhood, I lived in
No doubt
I didn’t understand it in those terms at age eleven, but as I grew older I took
on more awareness of the philosophy’s components, including its name. I especially studied it when I found the
philosophy under attack. When in college
most of my professors were deeply alienated against all that I revered, and
advocated more or less openly a socialist alternative, I found Ludwig von
Mises’ treatise Human Action and studied it until the cover stripped
off. Mises was a leading member of the
I served
two years in the Marine Corps after three years of pre-law, and during those
two years wrote the first draft of my book Emergent Man, which I rewrote
after getting my law degree at the
So I
started and have remained a classical liberal (subject to the qualification, if
it is one, which I will mention soon).
An important additional aspect of my intellectual orientation can be
seen, however, in my experience when I attended the graduate school of business
administration at
As I
pursued my studies, I came to believe that they wouldn’t suffice because they
would leave in place, with of course some hoped-for mitigation, the booms and
busts that I believed so greatly threatened the long-term acceptability of a
market system. Instead, what made most
sense to me as creating the needed monetary framework for a stable market
system was Milton Friedman’s monetarism, which proposed that an independent
central bank control the quantity of money and increase it gradually in keeping
with a legally-set rule to match the growth of productivity in the economy.
With that it mind, it seemed to me that capitalism need not have a fatal
flaw. This satisfied my most pressing
intellectual question and freed me to pursue my original intention of law
school and to make my later explorations of other aspects of classical liberal
thought.
A
significant thing about my brief time in Mises’ seminar was that although I was
passionately devoted to a free society, I wasn’t willing to accept even Mises’
thinking in the way a disciple does.
Even then, an unthinking assimilation of ideas did not seem my idea of a
reasoned process. Alongside all that I
found valuable, there were ideas in Mises’ thinking that I didn’t agree with,
and this led me to submit papers to the seminar that were at odds with what
seemed the otherwise unanimous opinions of the splendid people who participated
around the large conference table. Mises
was then an elderly man (he was born in 1881 and it was then 1956 and early
1957), was unfailingly gracious, gentle and dignified, and treated my heresies
without the slightest rancor. Although I
was not then and have never been a “disciple” of him or the
My
differences with the doctrine have led me sometimes to think of myself as a “neo-classical liberal,” thus further
complicating the semantic picture. This is the qualification I mentioned
above. For at least forty years, it has
seemed to me that free market thinking is often learned as if by rote, and as a
closed system based on axioms. As such,
it has an answer for everything regardless of otherwise disconcerting facts,
just as any complete theoretical system based on deductive premises does. (The
central problem with such a method, which I will discuss in detail in Chapter
13, is that the premises must be such as to encompass all the wisdom of the
world and all the intricacies of human life, which is clearly impossible.) Although I used an axiomatic method in my
first book, Emergent Man, I later
wrote a monograph The Principles of Classical Liberalism and then a book
exploring in detail the philosophy’s specific ideas, and these works examined
several weaknesses and even fallacies in the theory while at the same time
expressing a close identification with the overwhelming thrust of what it had
to say. The neo comes from the fact that I stood outside the most commonly
accepted system of its thought, feeling it needed extension and some amendment.
As I
placed it in historical perspective, I saw that classical liberals had been
forced onto the defensive early in the nineteenth century by the rise of the
world Left. In that defensive posture,
they ceased to question their own doctrine and to extend it into subtleties
that had not been thought of by its founders. Had it not been for that
insularity, it is likely that they would have addressed, in ways more
compatible with individual choice and the limitation of government power, the
many practical issues that people have faced and that have long been left by
default to the social and economic agenda of the American Left.
Because
of all this, the pure doctrine should not, in my opinion, be taken as the final
truth. What was needed was for it to
continue to be intellectually alive, refining, extending and even correcting
its thought in response to further thinking and a changing world. It could and must do this in a way that is true
to its core values. A failure to do
these things would be the surest way to serve it poorly.