Issue Position: Why I am NOT a Liberal (Economics)
Issue Position
For the true policy wonk, below is a compilation of excerpts I chose from an essay by freelance writer Barry Loberfeld called "Liberalism: History and Future."
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" in terms of both semantic usage and governmental policy, "liberalism" is most widely associated today with a single concept: the mixed economy, i.e., a state that is neither completely capitalist (laissez faire) nor totally socialist (totalitarian). It is, to be sure, a union of conflicting -- liberal vs. anti-liberal -- elements. As F. A. Hayek, the great twentieth-century scholar of liberalism, observed: If we have the redistribution of wealth, then what of private property? If we enact biased laws to effect economic (or "social") equality, then what of political equality? If we regard the collective as the essential entity (which Hayek called "anthropomorphism or personification"), then what of the primacy of the individual?
To be capitalist or to be socialist? -- that is the question. Precisely what is the mix of the mixed economy? When is it capitalist and when is it socialist? When does it protect property and when does it confiscate it? When does it leave people alone and when does it coerce them? When does it adhere to the ethics of individualism and when does it obey the code of collectivism? And just which is the metaphysical primary -- the individual or the collective (e.g., the nation, the race, the class)?
There is, of course, another conceivable direction for the mixed economy: the opposite one, i.e., a move towards ideological consistency, be it capitalist or socialist.
We'll examine the second possibility first. The name Ludwig von Mises gained currency during the demise of the Soviet Union because [of] his prediction that a socialized economy could only decline because its abolition of the market robbed itself of any means to rationally calculate prices and thus determine production. But the Austrian economist also made another stark prediction -- that a mixed economy could not help but move towards total control. His argument ran like this: Imagine that the first control mixed into the economy is a price ceiling on the sale of milk, since the politicians promised to make it more affordable. What invariably follows is that the marginal producers of milk go out of business; milk actually becomes less plentiful. Now the politicians can repeal this control -- or they can impose a new one on the "factors of production necessary for the production of milk ... But then the same story repeats itself" on a wider level. If the latter course is chosen, we logically head towards socialization of the entire economy.
Let's move from milk in theory to medicine in practice. For about a hundred years, America has been a nation of accumulating medical controls. Each new regulation was passed with the same justification made for the previous one: This measure will sufficiently correct the failings of the free market and thus save the free-market system. And the result? Today's "crisis in health care" -- as the welfare statists themselves call this iatrogenic disease. The more band-aids are applied, the more wounds appear! And with nothing but band-aids in their bags, these "liberals" (often the same aging advocates of past regulation) can now prescribe only covering the patient head to toe -- i.e., the final move to the outright socialization of all medicine. What this says about the microcosm of medicine is obvious; what it means for our mixed economy is ominous.
What limits the limited welfare state? Even with socialism discredited both theoretically and practically, state control over society grows. Do the apologists for government intervention imagine that we can move isotopically towards the electrified fence of totalitarianism without ever touching it?"
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If you have a few minutes, the video links below illustrate (it's startling, actually) how predictable and inevitable the current economic crisis was if we had just paid attention to sound economic principles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnekzRuu8wo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4LiIWdFkIU
Sadly, the reason why government tends to stray from such principles is becayse they are not immediately politically popular, even if the alternative is long-term detrimental.
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