The three languages of politics

Libertarianism

””” Kling argues that our political discourse is dysfunctional because we look at the world through lenses that our political opponents do not share.

Liberals see the world as a battle between victims and oppressors.

Conservatives see the world as a battle between civilization and barbarism.

Libertarians see the world as a battle between freedom and coercion.

Liberals first. In their eagerness to empathize with the victim, they can turn the victim into an object rather than an independent actor.

Conservatives dehumanize in their own way. In their zeal to preserve civilization and the American way of life, they demonize those that they see as a threat to civilization.

My tribe, the libertarians, has a special set of blind spots all our own. We often romanticize the power of economic freedom. We struggle to imagine that some people are poorly served by markets, that some transactions involve exploitation of ignorance and that the self-regulation of markets can fail. We overestimate the ability of people to use their freedom. As I suggest in the second half of this essay on exploitation, we overestimate the power of individual agency.

In our zeal to de-romanticize government, we often ignore the good that government does especially in cases where freedom might perform badly. Our worst mistake is to defend the freedom of business to do what it will in situations where government has hampered or destroyed the feedback loops of profit and loss that make economic freedom successful.

I fear too many libertarians for example, defend Wall Street simply because it is the punching bag of liberals, forgetting that Wall Street helps make the rules that exempt the largest banks from the market discipline of profit and loss.

Perhaps our biggest weakness is that we ignore the complexity of poverty and growth. We presume that economic freedom will always lead to good outcomes — yet the economic landscape and corrupt situation of Eastern Europe and Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union should give us pause. We think educational freedom and eliminating the minimum wage will end poverty, and it might. I think it certainly will help. But we ignore the role of culture and family in holding back the most disadvantaged. Incentives may help, but they rarely solve every problem perfectly. We could use a little liberal empathy for those who have a tough time. We should be more humble about what economic freedom can achieve. “””

References:

• The Three Blind Spots of Politics, Russ Roberts