Classical liberalism vs. libertarianism

John O. McGinnis writes,

Tocqueville recognized that civic mediating institutions and the habits they inculcated were essential to a free society. Victorian liberals supported aid to the poor but, as the late great historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has described, sharply distinguished between the deserving and the not-so-deserving poor. That distinction not only has good incentives for the poor but helps express the larger social values of honesty, thrift, and self-control needed for a liberal society.

Thus, classical liberalism offers a relevant critique of the modern libertarian movement, its wilder and younger brother. Libertarianism need not be so indifferent to the habits and morals of citizens, even as it ought to be less grudging in taking care of those who cannot care for themselves. Libertarianism cannot succeed as a governing philosophy if it is only a creed of low taxes and personal freedoms, important as these are to good society. It must, for instance, protect the associational rights that help sustain traditional virtues.

19 thoughts on “Classical liberalism vs. libertarianism

    • Cowen made the understandable mistake of wondering about the difference between the “classical liberal” vs “libertarian” labels without researching the etymology. We are simply talking about being liberal as Adam Smith would have understood it. McGinnis seems to be reframing the social conservative preoccupation with faith and family within a classical liberal context. I think Adam Smith would be offended by any suggestion that David Hume was not an exemplar liberal.

  1. There are no atheists in foxholes, and there are no Libertarians when neighborhood property zoning is under review.

    • Larry King interviewed Larry Flynt and Jerry Falwell in 1997 and the topic of Flynt’s brief religious period came up:

      KING: …You consider baptizing being part of manic depressive?

      FLYNT: …I have a message for those born again. If they just take a little lithium, they would be fine. They choose to go away and the voices would disappear…

      I think we should be careful about the sincerity of religious conviction in cases of extreme stress or chemical imbalance. Your foxhole mileage may vary.

      • “The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.” — Herb Caen

    • Naval Ravikant had a nice line about this phenomenon in a podcast he did with Joe Rogan which went something like “I’m a communist with respect to my family, I’m a socialist with my friends, with my city I’m a social democrat, with my state I’m a Republican, and a libertarian with respect to my nation.”

      I think that’s an entirely rational perspective to take.

  2. The Himmelfarb article is pretty good.

    The fundamental issue is that humans are status -driven. If the inequality spreads them out too wide they can’t function as designed (as evolved). Instead of cooperating constructively the losing classes’ motivation rationally flips to resetting the status ladder. At the individual level it is manifested in not working because there is no point and resorting to crime as a way to increase volatility of outcomes. At the collective level you get Lenin and Sanders.

    The Victorians tried to counter this via enforcement and moralizing.

    I think the path of least resistance for the future is compartmentalization. The widely unequal society will splinter into smaller sub-societies within which the status range is manageable (defined, for example, as the bottom 10% having a realistic shot of mating with the top 10%). Think the Mormons, the Amish, or a variety of other sub-cultures.

    Almost by definition migrating across these sub-societies will be more difficult, likely comparable to migrating between countries now. If you isolate them enough people will be productive and happy even in the lower wealth sub-societies. Think of Eastern Germans missing their country.

    How this effective separation can be achieved is unclear — a process that is evolving through its own selection now. Think Manhattan, San Fran, Orange County, London, Paris, Ivy Leagues, US Prison Gulag, red states vs blue states, etc. For the system to be stable the sub-societies will need to be stable enough for their members to resume having children. So perhaps some religion component will re-emerge.

    • I find it easy to believe that rich people can happily segregate into their own societies. However, I find it hard to believe that poor people can. It is conventional wisdom in the entertainment business that poor people will watch stories about rich people but rich people won’t watch stories about poor people. Poor people will know there are rich people. In fact, they will probably over-estimate how many and how rich they are.

      • Yep, so either physical separation (like in Elysium, or the border wall) or a religious cultural shift is needed to enable the poor to live constructive lives.

        Otherwise we’ll see a social/cultural/demographic collapse at the lower end of inequality spectrum. On one hand it might turbo-charge evolution, on the other it seems sub-optimal because of the large randomness component in success when network effects amplify outcomes.

      • The “watching stories about poor people” is a bit of a tangent off this post subject, but it’s interesting to think about.

        Two recent successful examples are Winter’s Bone and Slumdog Millionaire. Does “Les Miserables” count? Grapes of Wrath?

        There are a lot of culture-clash-contrast movies such as Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Trading Places, and recently, Parasite.

        In general you aren’t going to get a lot of stories about ordinary people being ordinary, or depressing tales of poor people caught in the daily struggle (though there are a few documentaries of that nature – “High on Crack Street – Lost Lives in Lowell” is a good example, and Dicky Eklund’s story was adapted into The Fighter with Christian Bale).

        Breaking Bad, The Wire have a lot of poor characters, and really any drama involving the drug trade does.

        So most of the ability to spin a yarn of compelling drama out of the lives of the modern poor involves the dramatic, violent-crime hazardous context of drug dealing and taking, where the entertaining “kill or be killed” tension and normal-ethics-relaxation of cop-vs-criminal films, war movies, or superhero stories comes into play.

        • Yes, people sometimes enjoy “slumming”. That Hollywood conventional wisdom should not be taken as a 100% all the time thing.

          It occurs to me that movies primarily about poor people can include scenes of them being “rich”, e.g., drug dealers at an expensive club. And, of course, the “culture-clash-contrast” movies have rich people and people acting rich.

  3. We need absolute libertarianism as our core value, the ability to make a local choice up to the limit of our uncertainty. If not then supply and demand wander off in uncorrected directions.

    Our freedom to pick the taco truck with the shortest queue, makes society work, it keeps the boundary conditions. We locate and build restaurants and grocery stores using taco trucks as a reference boundary.

    • This is a reaction to a different piece by McGinnis pleading for conservatives not to throw classical liberals under the bus. The criticism of McGinnis would feel right at home at the recent National Conservative Convention. The central theme is that a neglectful generation of parents allowed their spoiled generation of children to grow soft in the head. I’m amazed every time I come across conservatives and progressives that are oblivious to Judith Rich Harris’ “The Nurture Assumption”.

      • I read The Nurture Assumption (revised and updated edition) a few years ago and my impression is that Harris was dealing with things like temperament: shy, even-tempered, etc. But she wasn’t denying that, for example, of two similar kids raised in different households, one could become a shy, even-tempered Nazi and the other a shy, even-tempered Communist, largely because of parental influence, direct and indirect (e.g., the kid becomes friends with the kids of other Communists).

        I would LOVE to see someone take what is known now (the second edition is more than a decade old) and consider complaints like McGinnis’ in light of that knowledge.

        • The Nurture Assumption is restricted to personality traits but the counterintuitive implications are because these traits include political beliefs. Identical twins reared apart in adoptive families are twice as likely to share political beliefs as non-identical siblings. This is a hard pill to swallow for progressives with Blank Slate inclinations.

          The non-genetic contributions are even more counterintuitive as it’s almost all due to peer influence and almost none is parenting.

          For clarification, McGinnis seems to respect and appreciate classical liberals and is very much a believer in the big tent Republican plurality and is lamenting its demise. Classical liberals are secular but they are not antagonistic towards the traditional institutions of faith and family as long as they are not forced on others.

          I too would LOVE to see more research in this area or at least acknowledgement that this evidence is real and significant.

  4. “Libertarianism need not be so indifferent to the habits and morals of citizens”

    This is the kind of thing that drives me nuts. Because libertarians do not think that politicians should be the guiding forces of morality and good character, then libertarians think that morals and character do not matter?

    To the contrary, I’d say that because morality and good character matter, we certainly do not want to depend on the heavy hands of politicians to be in charge of those things.

    McGinnis says that a classical liberal government should
    1. encourage certain kinds of associations to counter the harm caused by individual freedom
    2. have something to say about the good life and character
    3. provide for those who cannot provide for themselves

    What percentage of current office holders that you know of on any level would you like to be in charge of these things?

    As Milton Friedman asked, “Where in the world do you find these angels?”

    • Growing up I strongly recall associating libertarianism with hedonism.

      Legalizing pot is the #1 issue that libertarians are associated with, and it’s telling that in the last presidential election, their best shot in a long time, all the major candidates talked about their pot smoking habits.

      It’s secondarily associated with sexual promiscuity (mostly desired rather then achieved by nerdy young libertarians). I remember reading an essay by a young Bryan Caplan basically saying he hated Christianity because it said there were instances were you shouldn’t have sex and he didn’t like that.

      Where did you go if you wanted to get high and get laid, but didn’t want to pay more taxes for government programs that didn’t benefit you…the libertarian party.

      I think that is the popular image of libertarians in the public.

      There is also a small L “Hank Hill-ish” leave me alone sentiment of libertarianism, but that probably wouldn’t call itself libertarian and would often be classified as a king of conservatism.

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