Simon's World

Libertarianism and power

For various reasons I’ve been rethinking classical liberalism. It’s an idea that on the surface of things promises all good things – personal liberty and a booming economy to boot. When I lived in Poland, the bloated, listless state bureaucracy and dynamic private sector made it seem like the ideal way forward. However, once you start looking at it, the underlying idea becomes somewhat problematic.

First of all, you have to ask yourself what kind of vision of society you have. Laissez-faire economics view society as a collection of individuals related by ties of commerce (understood as any exchange of value, such as work for cash, and so forth). However, even a perfunctory look at society shows that the links are of a very varied nature – even discounting such instinctual relations as love and friendship, it is easy to see organizations (i.e. power structures) that have little or nothing with money (various social causes that have aims only very loosely related to the marketplace). What they all have in common is that they always aim to change the world in some small way – in other words, they all aim to exercise power.

In turn, you have to ask yourself why people view wealth in such a positive light. The three obvious reasons, the “instinctive” ones, are material security, the ability to purchase goods and services and financial independence. Without getting into long treatises, these all translate into power – the power to control one’s own life and that of others (by buying their services, for instance).

Therefore, it is easy to see that the whole of society can be seen as a complex of power structures, and not the rational machine that classical liberals hold it to be.

Second, I have a bit of a problem with economics as a prescriptive and not descriptive discipline. Obviously, for various reasons, a descriptive science of economics is useful. Conclusions drawn from analyzing the mechanisms of the economy are useful for achieving specific aims. However, the aims are what really counts here, and you have to have a consensus on these before you can look for ways of achieving them.

Third, the concept of personal liberty and economic growth have to be examined to see what, if anything, is meant by them. Let’s take personal liberty: “instinctively” we measure the level of personal liberty as the possibilities open to us at a given moment. A person who has more possibilities of action is more free than one who has fewer choices. It doesn’t seem very hard to see that personal liberty is simply an expression of personal power, and with society being a field of competing power structures – small and large – personal liberty isn’t something that can be seen only as the freedom from government regulation. To simplify things immensely, your free-market boss limits your liberty at least as much as the government, and perhaps much more so.

Next, economic growth is obviously the rate at which wealth is accumulated. But is it necessarily a goal to be striven for? That seems questionable – you have to ask yourself what a high rate of growth leads to. People being able to buy more things and more services? Up to a certain level this makes sense, but what beyond that? In classical liberalism, there is no “desirable” level of wealth. However, a common sense approach would suggest that it wouldn’t be desirable for EVERYONE to own a 130-foot yacht, or for EVERYONE to be able to lead a life of leisure. So there are limits to the desirable level of general wealth, clearly showing the inadequacy of economic growth as a goal in itself.

For me this puts too many holes in classical liberal dogma to make it viable. Please note that this is not a manifesto but a critique – I’m not proposing anything in its place. Maybe another day.

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