{"id":40334,"date":"2017-10-01T03:00:19","date_gmt":"2017-10-01T07:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=40334"},"modified":"2017-09-30T16:03:00","modified_gmt":"2017-09-30T20:03:00","slug":"deirdre-mccloskey-on-the-rise-of-economic-liberty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/10\/01\/deirdre-mccloskey-on-the-rise-of-economic-liberty\/","title":{"rendered":"Deirdre McCloskey on the rise of economic liberty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Samizdata<\/em>‘s Johnathan Pearce<\/a> linked to this Deirdre McCloskey article<\/a> I hadn’t seen yet:<\/p>\n

Since the rise during the late 1800s of socialism, New Liberalism, and Progressivism it has been conventional to scorn economic liberty as vulgar and optional \u2014 something only fat cats care about. But the original liberalism during the 1700s of Voltaire, Adam Smith, Tom Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft recommended an economic liberty for rich and poor understood as not messing with other peoples\u2019 stuff.<\/p>\n

Indeed, economic liberty is the liberty about which most ordinary people care. <\/p>\n

Adam Smith spoke of \u201cthe liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice.\u201d It was a good idea, new in 1776. And in the next two centuries, the liberal idea proved to be astonishingly productive of good and rich people, formerly desperate and poor. Let\u2019s not lose it.<\/p>\n

Well into the 1800s most thinking people, such as Henry David Thoreau, were economic liberals. Thoreau around 1840 invented procedures for his father\u2019s little factory making pencils, which elevated Thoreau and Son for a decade or so to the leading maker of pencils in America. He was a businessman as much as an environmentalist and civil disobeyer. When imports of high-quality pencils finally overtook the head start, Thoreau and Son graciously gave way, turning instead to making graphite for the printing of engravings.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the economic liberal deal. You get to offer in the first act a betterment to customers, but you don\u2019t get to arrange for protection later from competitors. After making your bundle in the first act, you suffer from competition in the second. Too bad.<\/p>\n

In On Liberty<\/em> (1859) the economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill declared that \u201csociety admits no right, either legal or moral, in the disappointed competitors to immunity from this kind of suffering; and feels called on to interfere only when means of success have been employed which it is contrary to the general interest to permit \u2014 namely, fraud or treachery, and force.\u201d No protectionism. No economic nationalism. The customers, prominent among them the poor, are enabled in the first through third acts to buy better and cheaper pencils.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Indeed, economic liberty is the liberty about which most ordinary people care. True, liberty of speech, the press, assembly, petitioning the government, and voting for a new government are in the long run essential protections for all liberty, including the economic right to buy and sell. But the lofty liberties are cherished mainly by an educated minority. Most people \u2014 in the long run foolishly, true \u2014 don\u2019t give a fig about liberty of speech, so long as they can open a shop when they want and drive to a job paying decent wages. A majority of Turks voted in favour of the rapid slide of Turkey after 2013 into neo-fascism under Erdo\u011fan. Mussolini and Hitler won elections and were popular, while vigorously abridging liberties. Even a few communist governments have been elected \u2014 witness Venezuela under Chavez.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Samizdata‘s Johnathan Pearce linked to this Deirdre McCloskey article I hadn’t seen yet: Since the rise during the late 1800s of socialism, New Liberalism, and Progressivism it has been conventional to scorn economic liberty as vulgar and optional \u2014 something only fat cats care about. But the original liberalism during the 1700s of Voltaire, Adam […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7,10],"tags":[1080,484,198,320,267,817,507],"class_list":["post-40334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","category-liberty","tag-adamsmith","tag-competition","tag-equalrights","tag-freetrade","tag-justice","tag-laissez-faire","tag-thomaspaine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-auy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40335,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40334\/revisions\/40335"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}