Some of you may not have been following it, but for the last few months I’ve been writing a series of essays for Liberalism.org. My goal is to make the case that classical liberals and modern liberals have more in common than either tribe tends to admit, and that what they share is worth defending together. Three essays are now up, with more coming soon.
The first one, “The Enemy is Power, Wherever You Find It,” anchors the series in the ideas of Henry Simons. Simons was a free-market economist at Chicago in the 1930s whose distinctive contribution had less to do with the standard apologetics for capitalism than with a question that comes before them: how does a free society keep any single institution, whether corporate, governmental, ecclesial, or union, from accumulating enough power to dominate the rest? Markets earned their place in the liberal order, on his view, because they happened to be among the few institutional arrangements human beings have devised that resist consolidation. Once you see it that way, a lot of liberal political economy reorganizes itself around the question of what other institutions do that work, and where they fail.
The second, “The Power of Wealth,” asks why classical liberals should care about wealth inequality. I’m not making the standard modern-liberal case from distributive justice or fairness. My argument runs through what happens when wealth converts into political power. Once private fortunes grow large enough to capture the institutions that are supposed to constrain them, the classical liberal commitment to limited government has nothing left to push against. Eric Schliesser wrote a sharp response to the piece that I’m still working through, and that I’ll be returning to in future essays.
The third, “The Power of Public Unions,” just went up today. It applies the diagnosis to a domain where classical liberals and modern liberals typically arrive at very different conclusions. The case studies are teachers unions and police unions. The argument is that the standard countervailing-power defense of unions doesn’t translate from the private sector to the public sector, because in the public-sector case the union is bargaining with politicians it helped elect, against a taxpayer constituency that isn’t in the room. The costs, predictably, fall on the diffuse and unorganized: poor and minority kids in the schools case, the victims of police misconduct in the policing case. Classical liberals have been making versions of this critique for decades. The argument I’m making to modern liberals is that they have the conceptual framework to recognize it too, the same framework they bring to pharmaceutical influence at the FDA or fossil-fuel influence at EPA. The piece is, among other things, an effort to get both wings to recognize each other on the question.
Several other essays are in progress. Zoning, the administrative state, and higher education are all on the list. I’ll flag them here when they appear.
In the meantime, here are few other recent Liberalism.org pieces worth a look:
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Radley Balko, “Federal Courts, Local Wrongs.” Balko’s specific subject is how federal courts have systematically narrowed the avenues for holding local police accountable, but the larger argument is about what federalism actually requires when local institutions go wrong. He has been writing the most careful work on this material for twenty years.
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Jacob Levy, “Liberal Neutrality and How to Fight For It.” On the much-maligned doctrine that the state shouldn’t take sides on contested questions of the good, and why the maligning has run ahead of the arguments.
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Lauren Hall on liberalism and the family. Hall has written some of the best work in print on intermediate institutions. The piece is a corrective to liberals of any stripe who treat the family as a leftover from pre-liberal politics rather than as one of liberalism’s load-bearing institutions.
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Sarah Skwire, “The Enemy of My Enemy Is a Really Big Dragon.” Skwire pulls literature into political argument better than just about anybody, and if this title doesn’t intrigue you, I’m sorry but I just don’t know what to say.
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Janet Bufton, “The Liberal Spirit of System.” Bufton gives a new spin on Adam Smith’s old warning about the “man of system,” and uses it to think through some profoundly important issues related to utopian thinking and liberal politics.
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Michael Munger, “Yours, Mine, or Ours? Liberals Need a Theory of the State.” Munger argues that liberalism has been getting by on too little theory of the state and proposes the beginnings of one. The central move is to treat technology as a moving part in the justification for state action: what the state needs to do depends on what voluntary association and the market can or can’t accomplish, and technological change continually shifts that line. The piece draws explicitly on Jason Kuznicki’s 2017 Technology and the End of Authority, which is the place to start for the longer version of the argument.
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Ilya Somin, “Immigration Restrictions Restrict Americans’ Liberties.” Somin returns to one of the central themes of his work: the question of who is allowed to live where is also a question of whose liberty is being constrained, including the liberty of native-born Americans who would like to associate, hire, rent to, or marry the people in question.
More soon.
