Classical Liberalism

Classical liberalism is equivalent to libertarianism, at least in its non-anarchic versions. The adjective “classical” became necessary in the 20th century when “liberal” was adopted by people whose political views were quite different than those of traditional liberalism. Classically conceived—think of John Locke—it’s the idea that government has no rights that are not delegated to it by its citizens, and that no one has the right to initiate coercive force for any reason. Government’s only legitimate role is to respond in kind to those who initiate forcible coercion. This amounts to the idea that its function is to keep the peace by protecting citizens from others who would violate their rights. Theft and fraud are considered forcible coercion, breeches of the peace, since they involve doing things to someone that could not be done without forcible coercion if the victim was aware of what was happening. In its pure form liberalism denies the state any legitimate role in making people do what they ought to do, beyond forcing them not to initiate forcible coercion. It sustains a neutral legal framework within which persons peacefully pursue the good, no matter how they conceive it. In my view, this is not because we do not know what people ought to do, but because we know that we ought not initiate violent coercion to make them do it.

In its original form liberalism is a coherent pacifism: never resort to violence except in response to violence. This contrasts with the familiar but incoherent pacifism that deplores the use of military force against foreign aggressors, yet enthusiastically welcomes the use of police powers against our fellow citizens as a means to realizing real or imagined goods.

Another way to conceive classical liberalism is as a commitment to moral equality: no one is morally privileged; no one may do to another person what that person ought not do to him. If one person insults another, the victim is morally entitled to respond in kind, i.e., with insults. If one person punches another in the nose, the victim is entitled to punch his attacker in the nose, or inflict equivalent bodily harm. If one person tries to kill you, then you are entitled to use lethal force in self-defense as necessary, even if doing so kills him. No one is entitled to harm others in the expectation that he is immune to retaliation in kind. Thus, we advocate a kind of moral reciprocity. We are, however, obligated to do what we can to avoid retaliating mistakenly against the innocent, and not in anger impose harsher retaliation than is justified. Thus, we ought to hire "public servants" to investigate and punish crimes on our behalf. We are citizens governed by our own consent, not subjects. Herein lies the origin of legitimate government. Thus, the justification of a minimal government with strictly delineated powers.

The classical liberal contends that we have natural moral rights to which governments are subject as they grant or deny legal rights. We also believe that basic rights are, at bottom, negative, not positive. This is the difference between a right not to have something done to you, and a right to have something done for you. For example, the right against others that they not take your possessions without your permission is a negative right; the right to be given things is a positive right. There can be any number of negative rights, since to avoid violating them one need only leave their bearers alone. Positive rights, in contrast, quickly come into conflict and there must be some higher power, i.e., government, to adjudicate among them. So, for example, we all say that there is a right to life, but classical liberalism construes this as only a negative right: you have a right not to be killed unless you do something to deserve it, like trying to kill someone who does not deserve to be killed. So long as you don’t kill undeserving people, you respect the right to life. Others think of this as a positive right: not just a right not to be killed, but a right to be provided with whatever it takes to be kept alive. Thus, the conflict of rights: the way is open to forcing other persons to provide what’s needed, despite their right to choose how they use their property or skills. By proliferating positive legal rights, governments increase their power. It may well be that morally someone ought to provide what’s necessary for someone, but we deny that it is morally permissible for government to enforce most moral obligations. Here I disagree with libertarians who contend that we have no moral obligations to help those in need, and that to do so is supererogatory. Classical liberals recognize that there are moral constraints on the pursuit of what’s morally good. Therefore, we advocate a much greater reliance on non-violent, non-governmental social sanctions to motivate people to behave decently.

The Unites States Constitution established a liberal form of government. It is not a pure form; it grants to the Federal government some powers that classical liberalism would deny it. For example, we see no reason for a government monopoly on postal services. But classical liberals/libertarians typically accept that in virtue of the narrow range of enumerated powers it grants the Federal government, it’s acceptable for a non-ideal world. We have a stake in safeguarding the Constitution from those who want to accord government further powers it ought not to have. We want to conserve this traditionally liberal form of government and thus we become, in this sense, conservatives. We are sensitive to the fact that the government has acquired, with or without popular approval, a multitude of powers dramatically at odds with its constitutional limits. I think quite a few Republicans who acquiesce to being called conservatives have this view.

Real conservatives, such as one finds in Europe, have a distinct ideology. They want to use the power of the state in an illiberal way, to safeguard or promote traditional ways of life, or to make the citizenry virtuous. Many Republicans are impure examples of this ilk—though none want monarchy—and probably most embody some incoherent mix of this and traditional liberalism.

Old-style liberals are opposed to government’s disposition to undermine and destroy society’s mediating structures, such as the family, churches, businesses, and other private institutions, in the course of concentrating power in itself. This is no more justified than the use of government’s coercive power to preserve and protect traditional culture. In this context liberals of my stripe make common cause with conservatives. We share the conviction that government ought not to undermine the traditional family, and other ancient social structures, because doing so harms people, but we equally deny that government has the right to promote, let alone mandate, them. It must be neutral on this, as on other matters.

Similarly, classical liberals/libertarians share conservatism’s suspicion of ‘rationalism in politics,’ the idea that we can now, by conscious reasoning, straightforwardly improve things, in contrast to relying on what tradition, the ‘invisible hand,’ has produced. Thus, we share great respect for the common law, over against legal innovations intended to have good consequences or to defend non-existent positive moral rights. And we share a keen awareness with conservatives that actions intended to bring about good ends very often have unintended bad consequences that outweigh whatever good they might achieve. In this regard it’s a constrained, somewhat pessimistic, even tragic, view of human nature and the human condition. Human nature is not going to be improved by grand schemes designed to change it, e.g., socialism. The traditional liberal, like conservatives, favors ‘muddling through,’ carefully making incremental changes for the better while accepting various evils as difficult to erase without making things worse in unexpected ways. The Left’s utopian convictions about human perfectibility by human effort, not divine intervention, helps explain why so many Christians oppose it. A further affinity is that Christians are aware of the fallenness of humankind manifest in the disposition “to be as gods,” sitting in judgment over others and forcing them to do what one believes they ought to do.

Admittedly, this conservative stance many libertarians take leads to a tension insofar as the free market is both a traditional institution libertarians champion and a source for rapid, and accelerating change, not all of it conducive to human happiness. However, libertarians believe that the negative effects of economic freedom are mitigated when government is denied any role in the economy.

Classical liberalism rejects paternalism. We may be morally obligated to try to protect people from themselves, but the use of violent coercion to that end--assuming we are dealing with normal adults—is not morally justified.

Classical liberalism is often characterized as focusing on freedom as the supreme political value. In a sense this is true. However, it can also be characterized as a commitment to limiting the freedom some claim to employ force against their fellow human beings.

The Left, at least rhetorically, regards equality as the supreme political value. A classical liberal believes every citizen ought to be treated equally under the law, i.e., no differential treatment without relevant differences. We typically support the goal of equality of opportunity, but believe it is up to private individuals and institutions, not government with its monopoly on violent coercion, to aim for it. But we deny that equality of outcome, i.e., equity, such as equal wealth, has any moral significance. And, of course, government cannot justifiably act to bring it about. We think the Left, and many others, confuse inequality with need, with which we are morally obligated to concern ourselves, though not by forcing others to contribute to alleviating it.

It’s worth pointing out here that traditional liberalism regards the Left as oblivious to economic reality. Those on the Left believe that there is objective economic value, so there can be such a thing as a ‘fair price’ or a ‘just wage.’ We adhere to a subjective concept of economic value: the economic worth of a thing or a service is entirely a matter of the price it can fetch in a market where things are voluntarily exchanged. When that occurs both participants in the exchange are, in their own estimation, better off, even if both may well have preferred something better. Legal interference in economic transactions between consenting adults cannot be justified. And we deny that except in cases of overt incompetence such as childhood, insanity, or severe retardation, government has any right to gainsay an individual’s judgment as to what is in his interests. Classical liberalism leaves open to individual choice what economic arrangements the citizens freely devise, but it assumes that people not unjustly interfered with by government will tend to evolve free markets and thus improve human well-being by increasing wealth (vastly, as history shows.) That rational economic calculation, e.g., deciding what to make, how much to make, and what to charge for it, is impossible outside a free market is decisively supported both by theory and history. Classical liberalism supports capitalism as the product of a free market, but we reject the crony capitalism in which corporations and the state act symbiotically to undermine the free market, thereby concentrating power in the hands of government and the oligarchs that are its allies.

Classical liberals in principle favor open borders. If a Guatemalan and I arrive at an agreement that he will come work in my yard and live in my garage for a price, my government violates my rights, as well as his, when it forcibly prevents him from entering the country or deports him. I think many people have the idea that the government actually owns the country and has a right to determine who can be in it when, of course, it doesn’t. Most of the country belongs to private individuals and institutions. (There’s no justification for the Federal government owning vast tracts of land, as in the West; all it needs is space for some office buildings and military bases). On the other hand, open borders conjoined with generous welfare benefits funded by money coercively extracted from citizens, is catastrophic. Similarly, traditional liberalism holds that there ought to be free trade, with no tariffs. However, I think we are rightly somewhat sympathetic to the use of tariffs as a weapon against countries that violate trade agreements and systematically steal intellectual property. And we agree with the Left that government has a proper role in regulating businesses to protect customers and employees from fraud. But it has no right to legislate minimum wages or working conditions, or to make anti-trust laws.

Most traditional liberals are moral absolutists, rather than consequentialists. We believe that human beings have fundamental rights, prior to any legal rights governments grant, and these trump attempts to realize any good or prevent any evil. We hold that very often a person has the right to do what’s wrong. Many appear to find this conceptually challenging. We ought to try to get people to do what’s right and not do what’s wrong, but there are moral constraints on the attempt, the most significant is that the resort to violence is never permitted except in response to its initiation. However, some prominent classical liberals, such as Hayek, von Mises, and Richard Epstein, are consequentialists (utilitarians), defending the limited, liberal state on the basis of its good consequences. Others, like me, agree that the Left’s attempts to bring about the good are often counterproductive, and sometimes disastrous on a grand scale, while liberalism in its traditional mode maximizes utility. even if this is not its fundamental moral jusitification. As the last few centuries have demonstrated, classical liberalism has been the greatest boon to human well-being in history. But we believe that the non-liberal state violates human rights and cannot be justified, even if it did have overall good effects.

We classical liberals do not see democracy as an unalloyed good. We believe that unconstrained majority rule inevitably leads to the violation of the rights of individuals and minorities. We regard the constitutional republic, where democracy is constrained, as an imperfect, but best feasible, form of government.

Classical liberalism makes for a certain type of society, one that it free and open insofar as individuals on their own or in conjunction with others pursue the good, however they envision it, so long as they keep the peace. However, this means that classical liberalism is not a social theory, but a morally grounded political theory in which any number of disparate visions for society can be peacefully pursued.