Not to put too fine a point on it, but I am a Locke-Smith liberal.
What Kind of Liberal?
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TGIF: Where Socialists Go Wrong
Since socialism is "in" today -- even though many people who say they favor it have no idea what it is -- F. A. Hayek's last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), is worth checking out. Hayek, the late great Nobel-laureate economist of the Austrian school, begins this way: This book argues that our civilisation depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism. To understand our civilisation, one must...
TGIF: The Mythical Right to Medical Care
This clever video juxtaposes footage of Bernie Sanders and the late Milton Friedman to create a debate over whether the central government should take over medical care in America. Sanders condemns as a "national disgrace" the lack of a medical care guarantee for all -- rich, poor, and in between. Medical care, he insists, should be "a right of citizenship." Then, echoing someone in the audience, he changes that to "health care is absolutely a human right." The remarks by Friedman from the '60s and '70s chosen for the video address the efficiency problems with government-run medical...
TGIF: Year-End Downers
One always hopes to end the year on a high note, but politically speaking, at least, that is difficult again in 2022. One searches in vain for advances in individual liberty and setbacks for power. Sure, with the receding of the pandemic, life has returned to normal in many respects. But the ratchet effect that Robert Higgs identified still is the rule. After a rise in government power in response to a crisis (real or imagined), the drop-back is never complete because those who wield power have had their appetite whetted. The precedent itself presents a new threat. If the federal and state...
TGIF: The State Fuels Identity Politics
Anyone with an ounce of good sense knows that destructive identity politics is run amuck in America and elsewhere. All incentives these days seem to go in one direction: toward identifying oneself as a member of an aggrieved group supposedly due compensation through government action -- of course at the expense of people who had nothing to do with the grievance. The actual perpetrators (if any), like the actual victims, tend to have long departed this world. Where real victims and perpetrators are still on the scene, grievances ought to be handled on an individual basis with due process,...
Walter Grinder, 1938-2022
I note with great sadness the passing of my friend and former colleague Walter Grinder on Dec. 4. He was 84. Walter may be the most important libertarian that most libertarians have never heard of. Although he made important contributions to the literature of liberty (such as his work with John Hagel on the far-reaching destructive effects of state intervention in money and banking and his introduction to Albert Jay Nock's classic, Our Enemy the State), he devoted his professional activities primarily to keeping libertarian scholars and writers informed about a wide range of literature...
TGIF: Why Freedom Is the Goal
In online interviews and conversations I'm hearing intellectuals in the national conservative movement say that the liberal Enlightenment "project" has mostly failed because people need more in their lives than freedom. I've also heard this from a few people who have lately become disillusioned with leftism but yet are uneasy about libertarianism. My first response is to wonder whom these critics of classical liberalism, or libertarianism, its modern-day form, have in mind. Which important and widely influential liberal political, economic, or, social thinker even implied that freedom is the...
TGIF: On Liberty and Security
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Benjamin Franklin's famous words are often quoted because, alas, they are always relevant. Whether Franklin meant what libertarians take him to have meant has been challenged in recent years. See this disagreement between Benjamin Wittes and Leya Delray. In defense of her interpretation, Delray argues that Franklin shed light on his meaning when he quoted himself 20 years later. Whoever is right, for Franklin the word liberty on these occasions meant not individual freedom...
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