Mark Littlewood | Why Classical Liberals Always Lose

Why do classic liberals always lose?

Classical liberals want freedom, toleration and economic prosperity under the rule of law. Why then do they always lose? Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs Mark Littlewood makes a case for why classical liberals are always right.

Mark Littlewood is the Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Formerly chief press spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, Mark frequently appears on television and radio including BBC Question Time, Newsnight, Channel 4 and Sky News.

#liberals #liberalism #classicalliberalism

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[lllULTIMATEMASTERlll]

Yeah. I agree with essentially all of this. For the most part, these findings are not controversial among people educated on the topic.

However, I think the more interesting question is one that was not addressed in the talk. HOW MUCH intervention should there be (beyond the enforcement of property rights/personal liberties/etc)? Is it always true that the freer option is strictly better even among countries with already very high freedom? Or is there room for some economic intervention in certain areas? And what regulation tends to be harmful and what tends to be helpful?

I ask this because I’m not sure it would be wise to draw a line and say “yeah, if we look at the trend, it logically follows that the best country would be one with maximum freedom possible (something akin to what is called anarcho-capitalism).”

[sputnik]

Would've been interesting to listen to the Q&A that followed.

[DianelosGeorgoudis]

I belong to a small liberal party in Greece, but I found this speech very misleading and anything but scientific. To mention only a few misleading arguments:

- Classical liberalism is not mainly about the size of government, but mainly about liberal values, including values that have to do with the rights of the individual.

- There is little doubt that a liberalised economy will tend to be more productive, but the correlation between the size of government and average income is misleading as any statistic which mixes many parameters usually is. The significant statistic would be to compare similarly rich countries and study how the quality of life index correlates with the size of their government. Here one discovers that those countries with higher quality of living tend to have a larger government (as measured by public spending as a percentage of GDP). For example the quality of living in Europe is significantly higher than in the US even though average income in the US is significantly higher.


- Hong Kong and Venezuela as very special cases and to pick them as examples can only serve misinformation.

[daoshen]

The very base of this discussion conflates three distinct things. Classic Liberalism, Free Markets, and Capitalism. Whatever the history that lead us to this situation, actual science would isolate these things for the purpose of gaining "true" understanding. The Fraser Institute in specific, while there is much that i like about their work, is a right-leaning Libertarian group. The study supports this agenda.

I've heard this pitch before, that less government is a goal of Classic Liberalism, but this must be put into the perspective of the times where this thinking grew. Governments were generally small in those times (certainly with exceptions, but mostly short-lived), and very centrally governed (almost universally monarchies), with wildly different applications of wildly different law. We can let history speak for the results. In today's world, somewhat more common law with respect to business, and to a lesser extent individual human rights, is more universally applied. It is still a patchwork mess, but as with Democracy, it may be the best idea we have so far.

Given this climate, the question should be one of what the *right* size of government is for a given sphere of influence and time span. Least is *not* best. Given the series of abuses along with the boom and bust cycles seen during the rise of this current combination of Liberalism, Free Markets, and Capitalism, it probably never was. We should be thinking about what makes for sufficient governance instead, and understand that as situations change (and humanity evolves) the needs for governance change.

[ΣήθΔειμος]

Fundamentally, the issue is a utopianist naiveté, permitted by an abject failure of the education system to create a populous knowledgeable enough about politics, both in practice and theory, to have much of an informed opinion, coupled with the decline of religion and its attendant impact (as predicted by Nietzsche) both on the individual psyche and society at large.
Marx, most ironically, declared religion to be the opium of the masses, admittedly not too unfairly; however, in its absence, the role it can no longer play in the lives of the individual and those basic human needs attended to by it are sought out elsewhere.
No longer having the hope or expectation of the religious fictionalised utopia, that of the paradisal after-life, we now aim to create the same in the here and now, to make an ideal world of an intrinsically and existentially unideal reality.
Thus, the opium of the masses has become the socio-political movement, which, while ultimately futile in achieving those utopian ends, is still the thing we have which - were they possible - would be most conducive to them.

[johniversen]

This did not answer any of my questions.

[Johnjackjack]

Interesting you use average instead of median salary also don’t mention percentage of income mobility and lastly the first half of speech was just complaining like s child.

[stephenbarden]

Presumably, by your rationale, the governments of the World shouldn't have bailed out the banks after the financial crisis of 2007 to 2010. To a great extent, that crisis was caused by the sort of loose regulatory regime beloved of classical liberals. The banks' disastrous lending policies led to this crisis, and yet these apostles of the "keep government out of economic activity" were the first in line begging for government bailouts. You're not really classical liberals at all; you're hypocrites. It's a win-win situation, isn't it? Keep the government out if our decisions are profitable; if they're not, those mugs the taxpayer can bail us out. It's called socialism, but only for the rich, of course

[xxhellspawnedxx]

The whole notion falls flat on it's face. Growth requires resources, and we have a limited amount of resources within realistic reach, so consequently unlimited growth is impossible. Free market capitalism has an end date.

Furthermore, free market capitalism, especially one lacking regulation, tends towards deepening inequality and unfair exploitation of the workforce. For it to work at all, companies would have to be competing for the workforce, as a whole, i.e. we would need people to not need to work to live comfortable lives. It's only at that point, when a robust Universal Income is in place, that people truly can be free. Note that I'm making a differentiation here between "people" as a whole and "people who own/control capital". Economic freedom is only for the latter kind, while true freedom is for both categories.