Here's a guy doing serious thinking. A generation or two hence his ideas may trickle down as weak beer, be received common dogma, the stuff "everybody just knows".
I wonder if any of the Gore supporters hereabouts have the intellect or the interest to relate his stuff to our current election.
A few snips from David Henderson, "Anti-Liberalism 2000", iea.org.uk
…the changing fortunes of economic liberalism - that is, the ever-shifting balance within economic policies between liberalism and interventionism.
Here as elsewhere, I use the term ‘liberalism’ in its European rather than its American sense. Hence a liberal is taken to be one who emphasises the value of individual freedom, and who therefore judges measures and policies, economic as well as political, primarily with reference to their effects on freedom. Economic liberalism favours policies that promote and enlarge economic freedom, both for their own sake and because they make for greater prosperity.
… the anti-liberalism of today…… informal new millennium collectivist alliance…businesses and business organisations, unions, NGOs, commentators and public figures, political leaders and public officials in some government departments at any rate, and UN agencies. One reason for the strength of the alliance, and its breadth of membership, is that its doctrines incorporate three highly appealing interrelated concepts: human rights, corporate social responsibility, and sustainable development. All three appear, and are presented, as proof against doubts or objections: who could want to deny or restrict human rights, to prefer that corporations should act non-responsibly, or to advocate development that was unsustainable? Yet all these principles, as now interpreted, have a collectivist content.
From a liberal viewpoint, extending the list of ‘positive’ social and economic rights, whether through legislation or by adding to the long succession of UN declarations and resolutions on the subject, is not a sign of progress. At best it has no point, since (to quote Hayek) ‘It is meaningless to speak of a right to a condition which nobody has the duty, or perhaps even the power, to bring about’. At worst, it may do actual harm, by misdirecting attention and by lending impetus to proposals for regulating the world in the name of higher standards.
…. They are part of the alarmist consensus on threats to the environment and the dire effects of globalisation; and with few exceptions, they accept a dual-aspect anti-liberal thesis. Aspect One is that business should now join with governments, ‘civil society’ and international agencies in rescuing a world beset with problems, dangers and sources of injustice, where the power to decide and act is passing from governments to corporations. Aspect Two is that this implies a radical rethinking of the role and functioning of business and the working of a market economy: capitalism has to be made anew. I am now in the course of finishing an essay on this subject, entitled ‘Misguided Virtue: False Notions of Corporate Social Responsibility’. Working through the background reading for this, the writings of those who favour CSR, has proved a truly depressing task.
.. the market-oriented reforms of recent decades are to be seen as ‘reactionary’, a turning back of the clock of progress. I think there is truth in the idea of a reaction, but not in the assumption that this has meant regress. In the former Communist countries, and in China also, there has been a reaction against the belief that state-directed planning is superior to an economic system that rests on private property, and that progress consists in the gradual elimination of market-based economic activity. There are good reasons for viewing this particular reaction as one of the most hopeful events of the twentieth century. In the rest of the world, there has likewise been a reaction against monopoly state enterprises, exchange controls, licensing systems and restrictions on entry, and controls over prices and interest rates. These shifts in opinion have not been inspired by a wish to recreate a supposedly golden past. Rather, they have arisen from two main sources: first, some harsh lessons of experience ; and second, technical and economic changes which have altered the menu of choice. It is possible that as time goes on there will likewise be an\ equally strong reaction against the century-old accepted view that the state should be a monopoly supplier of free or heavily subsidised health and education services,. This could result from a growing conviction that better results might be achieved, in these areas as elsewhere, through widening the domain of markets, competition and free choice. To react against a model that has outlived its usefulness is not a sign of unenlightened resistance to change. ...
… are the unceasing and determined efforts of pressure groups; the support that often comes to them from disinterested outsiders; and the continuing sway of pre-economic ideas and assumptions. Today these influences are joined with the broadly-based alliance, from NGOs to CEOs, of those who accept the alarmist consensus, focus on perceived disparities, and wish to see the world more closely regulated in the name of sustainability and justice." |
