Machan's Musings - Another Liberal Duplicity
by Tibor R. Machan
The New Republic, that venerable left-of-center publication, just came out (dated February 28th) with its 90th Anniversary Issue. Its general theme is “To Liberalism! Embattled And Essential.”
By “liberal” is meant here not classical liberalism, which made the case for limited government, individual rights and the free market. No, instead we get the corrupted sense of “liberalism” that means making government the caretaker of society, empowering it to regiment us about, redistribute the wealth people create and otherwise subvert nearly all of the principles of the original liberalism.
There is too much in this issue to cover in a column, but one piece in particular is worth discussing. Senior Editor Jonathan Chait penned it and it’s called “Fact Finders.” It addresses the difference between so-called conservatives and modern liberals, especially as regards the issue of which side is wiser about the nature of government.
Basically Chait is defending a pragmatic liberalism, which is an unprincipled approach to governing a country, one that sees no limit—for example, principles of individual rights to, say, private property—to what the state may do to set things right. His prime example is that among conservatives who support Social Security reform some, the libertarians, actually want the system abolished, even if this has to happen slowly. And he correctly observes that the reasoning behind this hasn't much to do with the particular superior results of such reform (vis-à-vis the national economy, individual retirement benefits, or GNP). It has to do with the general idea that a free society—one without a bloated public sector-that is, one with a government of strictly limited scope—is superior overall to one wherein government meddles in everything.
The fault Chait finds with this isn’t so much that it’s wrongheaded but that it is, as he dubs it, an a priori rather than pragmatic approach to public policy matters. He is a follower of Jeremy Bentham, who argued that “there is no right which, when the abolition of it is advantageous to society, should not be abolished,” as if “advantageous to society” were a piece of cake to spell out.
Chait, sadly, caricatures the libertarian’s “a priori” approach, making it seem like a dumb-stubborn, mindless embrace of the free society. He quotes Milton Friedman, quite out of context, saying that “freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself,” as if this meant “Economic freedom, come hell or high water.” In fact, Friedman and most libertarians champion principles of freedom because history shows them that when upheld in a society, they are, in the main, better for purposes of reaching desirable goals than are the methods involving coercion.
Principles of political economy, not unlike principles in engineering and medicine, are what one comes to learn to be general guidelines of action based on extensive study, on empirical and/or thought experimentation, and so forth, not any kind of blind commitments. But let that go for a moment. Pragmatists don’t realize that pragmatism itself is a general approach and relies on its soundness based on what we have learned from similar studies.
What is interesting in Chait's essay is that no mention is made of how most modern liberals are themselves "a priori" supporters of various civil libertarian ideas, such as freedom of speech, due process in the criminal law, fairness in the administration of the law, etc. Here it is conservatives who have been more pragmatic—if prior restraint works, let's use it; if giving up habeas corpus for a while achieves greater security, go for it; if censorship achieves some good, it's fine, etc. Modern liberals, however, have, in the main, opposed this—that is, after all, what the ACLU is all about.
I wonder why Chait fails to discuss this internal conflict within modern liberalism and, indeed, within conservatism—why is pragmatism so good when it comes to some policies but should be avoided when it comes to others? At least libertarians tend to have a coherent approach—they see liberty as a good idea across the board, whatever projects people embark upon. They trust the lessons they discern from history and the study of human nature, namely, that free men and women will deal with problems better than those who are regimented about by others.
Chait hasn’t, nor have others in The New Republic, managed to challenge this truly principled (“a priori”) approach in the slightest, and for good reason—it is, after all, the stance of all of the practical sciences in which general principles are relied upon to guide future actions, leaving changes to be made only once the principles have been shown to require reformulation.
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