Charlotte Gore of The Guardian on liberty is more than just free speech and privacy. The battle for economic liberalism against establishment tyranny must go on:
Liberty central has given a voice to writers and thinkers who sought to revolt against the encroachment of the government against our privacy, our dignity and our hard-won rights. They argued as passionately as possible that the relationship between the government and the people had become inverted and corrupted. Our rulers had forgotten that they were supposed to be our servants, not our masters.
The election came and went, and with the new coalition government has come promises to put right these wrongs. So, time to pack up the laptop and start enjoying these newly restored liberties, right? Sadly not. There’s another kind of liberty – one that needs us to champion that least fashionable of causes: economic liberty. People’s day-to-day lives are impacted by it more profoundly than any CCTV camera or snooping council official.
Governments make the decision about how much of your money you should be allowed to keep for yourself. They do it through taxes on your income, and they even charge your employer for the privilege of giving you a job. Then they decide how much of a cut they want when you buy things. They try to discourage you from smoking and drinking by raising the price to beyond the limits of what many people are prepared to pay, causing hardship on those who have no choice.
It all adds up, and before you know it even someone on a modest £20k-a-year wage can find that nearly half of what their employer pays for them ends up on the way to the Treasury – and that’s just the cash. Economic liberty is also concerned by the rules about what you can do with the money you have left. It’s difficult when you’re left with so little, but if you can get a loan or get enough savings together to go into business for yourself, suddenly the controls upon you and the demands on your money from the state become more onerous still. Trade remains the most regulated human activity of them all…
The rules politicians have put in place have made it difficult to get into business and stay afloat, when in reality merely surviving at all in a competitive environment would be challenge enough for most. Surely, any sane society wants more economic activity? More businesses means more jobs, and more competition means lower prices and better products. But every rule, every regulation – they all cost money, directly or through having to employ people or use time on meeting these demands. Why does this matter? Why should normal people care for the problems of business owners?
Every worker, factory, shop and office that sits idle represents resources not being used, because there’s no one out there that believes they can make money using them. We shrug our shoulders and blame capitalism, or we blame the bankers, or we blame international competition, or we insist that it is those evil business owners who abandoned such resources in the first place. But if you really want to point the finger of blame, I recommend looking in the mirror. It’s almost impossible to do anything without the government having something to say, charge, or demand of you. We’ve done this, every time we’ve demanded “something must be done”. What’s true in the world of personal freedom versus security is true of economic freedom, too. We’ve gifted politicians enormous control over our economy and the nation’s wealth.
I understand why it’s happened. People crave security and stability, without really comprehending what they’re giving away to get it, or who specifically pays the price for it, or what it ultimately costs us in terms of opportunities lost – such as millions of people wasting their lives on the dole.
Before the last century, economic liberalism, especially free trade, used to be the great cause of the left – because it championed the rights of the people to live free of the tyranny of an establishment that assumed too much control and caused so much harm in doing so. It is a cause, however unfashionable, that needs fighting again. It just needs the left to remember it doesn’t exist purely to divvy up the spoils collected by the Treasury for its friends, and to remember, once again, that liberty is more than just free speech and privacy.
{ 6 comments }
Nice article…but then you read the comments, and get depressed all over again…
I understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t think you should be depressed. It’s a good sign that The Guardian is printing a column like this and that people on the left are commenting. Not all comments there are depressing. The conversation with the left has to be started somewhere. I’m not surprised that there are some snarky comments… I didn’t expect readers of The Guardian to just automatically agree with everything she wrote.
I’m happy to see this, especially in Britain, because I’ve often thought that today’s left was led astray by statists and needed to go back in the direction of its anarchist roots. This isn’t to say that they should all be anarchists now, but get the mainstream left moving back in that philosophical direction… or the idea that peaceful voluntary exchange and association is good and can benefit populist interests as much as it benefits someone obsessed with gun rights… and to realize that politicians may talk a good populist game but rarely back it up and usually represent the interests of the powerful and well connected, not what’s in the best public interest.
i agree. anything that riles the traditional guardian readership is manna from heaven.
Liberty central is a strange idea. The Guardian is a hard-left newspaper, it always has been. I think that they only have liberty central so they can claim that they are doing something for liberty. It’s there to be side-lined, but so the Guardian can claim to support left-wing “social libertarians”. If you don’t believe me read the rest of the comment-is-free section for today.
one comment in that link by AllyF is particularly luminous on the problem:
————————-
“If you’re with me so far, you must accept that your right to earn and spend money does not extend to depriving me of the right to earn and spend my own money. Agreed?
If the way you choose to earn and spend money has the effect of exploiting me, diminishing my own freedom, then society has a moral obligation to restrict those choices at a point of agreed compromise between your liberties and mine. ”
————————-
I see this philosophy as commonplace and erring in two ways
1) Assumption that the there is a static sized pie, and if you get a bigger slice, then I must have gotten a smaller slice.
2) Unevenness = Unfairness. If the other person freely agreed to work for a wage, there is an assumption that because bargaining power is uneven, and information asymmetric etc.etc. there is inequity. No two people in any agreement will have the exact same information ever (im not talking about fraud or lies). Each Agent in an economy acts with his/her own information w/o a requirement of giving the entire life story. No explanation should be demanded either
Living in a very leftist town, I find that most lefty’s love all the things they think government can do for them so long as someone else is paying a majority of the bill. They will tell you how much they disdain the wealthy, but have no problem living off their continued financial prosperity. Few liberals, if any, ever question how much of a tax burden they themselves would have to bear, should there be less wealthy people to pay for the services the liberal desires of government. In the US, should Obama’s desire of income naturally redistributing from the top 5% to the bottom 50% actually happen, his entire budget scheme will fall to pieces since the new income that flows to the bottom 50% will be far short of the taxes it would have generated at the top. Obama needs the top 5-10% to continue making most of the income gains, as they have in the past, to pay for his new programs and the ones created by his predecessors.
For the last three years, my country commission has raised the property tax millage rate by 14%. Every year I go to the meetings and find liberals and conservatives yelling at government together and pleading for them to not raise the rate and for the government to either cut further or get their money from some other tax on some other group. Its there that I realized how important it is for people to feel the cost of their government no matter how small their income. Over the last 40 years, one very negative result is the shift in the tax rate tables to remove lower income Americans from paying income taxes to the point that now over 50% of Americans do not feel the cost of their government. I think that this is a very dangerous thing and will only expedite our collapse as the non-payers demand more and more from the payers.
Comments on this entry are closed.