Peter Radford — Liberty To Do What?

Peter Redford further exports the observation of Dani Roderik and Sharun Mukand about conflict among types of rights being endemic to liberalism. They write:

Liberal democracy rests on three distinct sets of rights: property rights, political rights, and civil rights. The first set of rights protects owners and investors from expropriation. The second ensures that groups that win electoral contests can assume power and choose policies to their liking – provided these policies do not violate the other two sets of rights. Finally, civil rights guarantee equal treatment before the law and equal access to public services such as education.

Property rights and political rights both have powerful beneficiaries. Property rights are of interest primarily to the elite – owners and investors. They may be comparatively few in number, but they can mobilize material resources if they do not get their way. They can take their money elsewhere, or choose not to invest – imposing substantial costs on the rest of society.

Political rights are of interest primarily to the organized masses – the working class or ethnic majority, depending on the structure and cleavages in society. Members of the majority may be comparatively poor, but they have numbers on their side. They can threaten the elite with uprisings and expropriation.
The main beneficiaries of civil rights, by contrast, are typically minorities that possess neither wealth nor numbers....

Theories that purport to explain the historical origins of democracy have overlooked this asymmetry among claimants for different types of rights.

This accords with Radford's observation:

How many times do we come across, in this avid nation of ours, some foolish comment that our social policies must not restrict commerce? How many times do we hear some politician arguing that we must become more business friendly? We scarcely can move an inch without tripping over someone cajoling us with fears that limitations on liberty are actually limitations on prosperity. As if prosperous was purely an arithmetic reference and had no qualitative content.

This is Condorcet’s fear alive and well. We seem to have reduced liberty to some small prop for the making of profit. Liberty is simply, in this ghostly shadow of what it once was, a veil behind which profits can be amassed without reference to the fabric of society as whole. And certainly without reference to any larger interest than that of the individual, or individuals, engaged in making that profit.

The invasion of the economic lexicon and way of thinking into domains where it has absolutely no right being is to blame for this diminution of our liberty. Or at least the severe limits placed on our understanding of what liberty means.

Then Redford asks how this happened:

Which is why we ought to search for the causes of this distortion: where did the idea of liberty get so reduced? 

The answer, I suggest for our purposes, sits squarely within the libertarian screeds that pour forth from Chicago.

This may be true for the contemporary version of neoliberalism, but this version of liberalism actually began with classical liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frédéric Bastiat, and David Ricardo, for example. This was a bourgeois liberalism.

So Thomas Jefferson could write the famous words of the Declaration, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," without perceiving any contradiction as a slave-holder.

The Radford Free Press
Liberty To Do What?
Peter Radford