Liberalism is equality of permission

GUEST POST: Time and chance happeneth to all

Since 1700 there have been only three new ideas about politics. The earliest of the triad was liberalism, invented during the eighteenth century in the Netherlands and in Britain and some of their offshoots. It was the entirely novel idea that no adult should be a slave, or a child, or a subject, coerced physically to obey any other person.  Liberalism proposed to bring an end to the ancient reign of king, master, husband, priest, bureaucrat. Thomas Jefferson declared in 1776 that all men – and women, dear – are created equal. Yet to his death in 1826 and beyond, he kept in slavery even his own Black children. Uh oh. Relatively liberal masters, such as Jefferson and Abraham Kuyper and Slim Janie Smuts, clung to a myth of ‘They’re not ready for liberty’, which held back the liberal idea. Yet once articulated, it slowly grew, liberating the chattel slave and married woman and Black African, 1776 to 1994. 

The other two ideas in the triad were nationalism and socialism, both born in the nineteenth century and growing vigorously in the twentieth. They are the opposite of liberalism, a ‘statism’, the worship of an imagined General will, or God’s will, or the Nation’s will, to be imposed on individual people top down. It’s Rousseau’s idea, as against Adam Smith’s idea of ‘the obvious and simple system of natural liberty’. Everyone is to have a master in the State. Ancient hierarchy is reinstated as modern coercion by the bureaucracy or the secret police.

The role of the state should of course be to prevent force and fraud by private citizens.  But above all the state should not engage in force and fraud itself. Public force and fraud have names: nationalism and socialism. If, on the contrary, you think you like nationalism and socialism, maybe you’ll like … national socialism?  Nationalsozialistische partei. ‘Everything in the State’, declared Mussolini, ‘nothing outside the State, nothing against the State’.  ‘The whole of society’, declared Lenin, ‘will have become a single office and a single factory’ – one guess who’s the CEO –and, he added hopefully, ‘with equality of labour and pay.’.  The recent ‘democratic’ versions of fascism and communism are the populisms of Donald Trump and Julius Malema.

Liberalism loves individual people and gives each an equal permission to run her own life. It has yielded a Great Enrichment of 3,000 per cent per person since 1776, coming not from state schemes but from individual inventiveness. Rooibos tea. The Pinotage grape. The CT scan. The heart transplant. The prepaid mobile phone. Cenocell. Cameras to determine stumping in cricket.

The tyrannical extremes of statism understand the world ‘liberal’ far better than many people nowadays who call themselves liberals. Xi Jinping, for example, has been busy  courting ‘the global south’. You know who you are. India. Brazil. South Africa. He is trying to get them on nationalist grounds, for example, by way of the old communist claim to be against imperialism, to turn away from the Ukrainians. The global south is to turn away from this decade’s central battlefield for liberalism. The turn, and a Putin victory, would be very lovely for the tyrants.

The tyrants understand that liberty is liberty is liberty. They know that liberty in the bedroom is the same as liberty of the boardroom, that liberty for, say, homosexuals or women seeking an abortion cannot be separated, without slipping into tyrannical statism, from the liberty to start your business or to dismiss an employee stealing from it. The tyrant therefore starts by pulling liberty apart. He is helped in this by what Lenin is supposed to have called the ‘useful iditols’ who call themselves social liberals but economic statists, or economic liberals but social statists. The Law and Justice Party in Poland advances fascism by attacking a free press, and monopolising TV. Then it can go after the gays. Then it can pack the courts. 

The would-be tyrants say that liberalism is ‘Western’ or ‘Northern’ or ‘imperialist’, and therefore you in China or South Africa need not pay attention to it. ‘A free press?  Open election? No, those are Western ideas, not good for the Central Kingdom or a true Ubuntu.’

But the desire to be a liberated adult is universal. We humans spent hundreds of thousands of years in hunter-gatherer bands in which tyranny was quickly checked.  Walk away if the headman in a Khoesan band goes too far. Or, for that matter, throw a rock at his head. But the coming of agriculture after the last Ice Age in nine different locations from New Guinea to Central America made for permanent masters, the ones with swords and horses who could lord it over you because you had to stay close to your crops. One of the few correct insights by Rousseau, the fount of European socialism, is that property is based necessarily on coercion. Once established, though,  it yields efficiency and innovation. Rousseau didn’t get that, and modern socialists don’t, either.

True, there is another universal desire, which is to be led like a little child. We all grow up in families, which in their good versions are like the ideal of socialism, ‘From each according to her ability, to each according to his need’. Good families achieve an equality of outcome, or at least an equality of opportunity. (In their bad versions, they are more like the worst of fascism, what the Party man O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four was delighted to imagine as the future of humanity, ‘A boot on a human face, forever’.)

But for larger societies than a family or a group of friends, equality of outcome –equality at the end of the race – kills incentives to work for others and therefore for all. St. Paul said rightly, ‘He who does not work should not eat’. 

Better, some say, ‘equality of opportunity’. Start the race on the same line. But it is impossible, too. As St. Paul also said, people have varied gifts, and are born in varied places, and have varied luck. If we trade or converse we get the benefit of the variety.  One can support public financing elementary education, yes, but comprehensive equality at the starting line is a hopeless ambition. What, drive nails into heads until you forget your learned English? Deface beautiful people? Hang weights on the fastest runner’s legs?

No. What is possible and doable this afternoon, and immensely fruitful tomorrow, is not a socialist equality of outcome or a faux-liberal equality of opportunity, but a true liberal equality of permission. No restrictions on deals between workers and employers. No leaning this way or that for employment at Eskom. No import tariffs.  Women allowed to do any job. No state enforcement of occupation licensure.

Equality of permission is the core liberal right to run the race – though, as Ecclesiastes says, ‘time and chance happeneth to all’. The result, says the economic history, has been in fact a closer approximation to actual equality of outcome and of opportunity than all those other systems we have tied from time to time.

‘Liberalism is equality of permission’ was first published on Our Long Walk. Support more such writing by signing up for a paid subscription. The image was created with Midjourney v5.2.