Libertarianism

Modern Liberalism and Libertarianism: An Economist's View
By Brad DeLong

Let me give you what I take to be an American card-carrying modern liberal economist’s take on classical liberalism--which I think is broadly an updated version of Adam Smith's take. It is, in short, that modern liberal economists are wanderers who have been expelled from the garden of classical liberalism by the angel of history and reality with his flaming sword...

It starts with an observation that we are all somewhat more interdependent than classical liberalism allows. It is not completely true that it is from the self-interest and not the benevolence of the butcher that we expect our meat. Self-interest, yes, but benevolence too: a truly self-interested butcher would not trade you his meat for your money but instead slaughter you and sell you as long pig. So this opens up a gap between the libertarian view and the world.

That said, and modulus this basic human--well, call it "sympathy" as Adam Smith did--modern liberal economists were very happy for a long time with classical liberalism. Yes, there were externalities, and increasing returns over a range, and market power--but the presumption was that market failures were tolerable and in a sense optimal because of the magnitudes of government failures that would attend any attempt to compensate for them. The near-consensus of economists was at least crypto-classical liberalism, along the lines of Colbert's exchange with Legendre in the reign of Louis XIV:

"What do you need to help you?" asked Colbert. "Leave us alone" answered Legendre. ("Que faut-il faire pour vous aider?" asked Colbert. "Nous laisser faire" answered Legendre).

Then starting in the late nineteenth century liberal economists were mugged by reality:

--on issues of income distribution--the Gilded Age--and how laissez-faire did not appear to be producing the reasonable distribution of the fruits of the social division of labor that economists had all expected...

--on issues of macroeconomic stability--the Great Depression was a big shock--and the argument that the Great Depression arose because markets were not free enough never acquired legs or force outside the theological...

--on issues of the persistence of "unfree" labor--Adam Smith expected the imminent collapse of slavery, but ending slavery took a war, and the market economy in America did not appear to be doing very much at all to undermine Jim Crow...
last and most recently, the fear of the increasing importance of "market failure"--the coming of the "information economy"--caused economists to worry that we were moving from a Smithian to a Schumpeterian world, and even if the presumption of laissez faire works for a Smithian world it is not at all clear that it works for a Schumpeterian world...

The upshot is what Keynes said eighty-four years ago:

It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive ‘natural liberty’ in their economic activities. There is no ‘compact’ conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately. We cannot therefore settle on abstract grounds, but must handle on its merits in detail what Burke termed “one of the finest problems in legislation, namely, to determine what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion”...

One way to understand Keynes's General Theory is that Say's Law is false in theory but that we can build the running code for limited, strategic interventions that will make Say's Law roughly true in practice. The modern Ametican liberal economist's view of libertarianism is much the same: libertarianism is false in theory, but it is very much worth figuring out a set of limited, strategic interventions that will make the libertarian promises roughly true in practice.