The Challenge
My blogging habits are so desultory in part because of one simple and cowardly rule: don’t get crosswise of Daniel Larison or Will Wilkinson. Oops.
Now that I’ve gone and provoked him, Will (Can we just use first names here? It’s starting to sound like a war movie.) lays out a worthwhile challenge:
Well, what market progressives like me want to see from “free-market traditionalists” like Frost, but never get, is actual evidence that the world in which the brake has been appplied tends to be a world in which people are doing better than in the world in which the throttle was left open.
As it happens, this is exactly what Polanyi is arguing in The Great Transformation: the retardation of Enclosure gave British society the time it needed to adapt to the drastic change and form a sustainable free market, unlike on the continent, where sudden market transformation caused radical, violent responses. Make of his evidence what you will.
…The problem in my experience is that conservatives tend to argue defensively and ad hoc. The sense of “meaning” or “rootedness” or “identity” conferred by church or local produce or not listening to people speak Spanish tends to be granted however much weight is needed to trump the straightforward humanitarian goods offered by the roiling market. And conservatives are forever seeing their most precious prejudice as the last prop of our patrimony, the liberal free market system. And so, through an amazing dialectical alchemy, the defense of whatever is threatened by economic dynamism becomes its only salvation. If this form of argument could be made in a principled way, I could be persuaded by it.
I agree! Like Will, I am convinced of the humanitarian benefits of the market, and while I am intuitively inclined to value some intangibles that Will would dismiss, I don’t expect him to be able to tell the difference between them and the bogus “senses of” things that he mentions. So if I’m going to convince a market progressive to see things my way, any special pleading for exceptions requires arguing in terms of human welfare, not vague and subjective appeals to cohesion or whatever. Fair enough. I think there’s still a case to be made, but I’m unfortunately not the guy to make it yet.
So where do I start? I’ve been told that Wilhelm Röpke is as good a place as any.
The issue here is a basic one: “a world in which people are doing better” HOW FAST? Is there something about efficiency itself which reduces optimality, even on efficiency’s own terms? Or at least narrows the conditions of possibility for optimality? Especially in some systemic way? How can we be sure that when we say efficiency we aren’t saying something else? Or is the moral language of efficiency, urgency, novelty, and speed no more or less complicated and burdensome than any other?
— James · Oct 9, 07:00 PM · #
I think efficiency isn’t really what matters so much as easier, more widespread access to food, health care, education, and shelter. Efficiency often aides in the pursuit of those things, but those are the main concerns, I think; once you have them, everything else is just a luxury. Some will use their excess spending power to purchase televisions, others to purchase mountaintop retreats, others to voluntarily fund community centers and youth basketball leagues. Seems like policy-makers ought to be primarily concerned with providing the former — the essentials; after that, people can manage procurement of luxuries — be they purely material or otherwise — any way they want for themselves.
— Peter Suderman · Oct 9, 07:20 PM · #
To much of conservativism seems to me to be a rationalization for protecting and enlarging the interests of the rulling class. The demand to protect tradtions, the calls for social order, the leeway given to the market at the expensive of the public good.
I believe in prudence and thriftyness and liberty and skeptisism and small government. But I also believe in equal oportunity and fairness. I don’t see why the former character traits can’t be combined with the later principals. An ideological dream team as it were.
Unless ideology is driven by psychological states.
— cw · Oct 10, 03:50 AM · #