Jacques Rousseau, a UCT ethics professor, asks in his piece on the Daily Friend this week what ‘classical liberalism’ means. Here is a quick look at what he gets right and what he gets wrong.
He might not remember it, but when I was briefly a student at UCT Rousseau gave me some thinking tools, shaped by a tradition called ‘philosophy’, that undergird my life and work. His latest article gives me another opportunity to think about the meaning of ‘classical liberalism’ and ‘libertarianism’.
Something in the battle of ideas has changed, according to Rousseau. In 2015 he called himself a ‘classical liberal’ but in 2020 he would not. That is because he thinks ‘classical liberal’ is now just another word for ‘libertarian’. He uses this piece by IRR CEO Frans Cronje to attempt to prove the claim.
Rousseau criticises Cronje’s style and knocks some Daily Friend readers, but I will avoid those slights as far as possible. What interests me is the content rather than the wrapping-paper. So, let me pry open the box and see what tools there are for thinking about South Africa’s plight. There are ‘four principles’ in question.
Race-based law
There are two ways to think about opposing race-based law; one may be called ‘libertarian’ and the other ‘classically liberal’. Rousseau suggests the first applies to the IRR.
The standard libertarian argument is that there is a universal principle according to which the law should never discriminate on the basis of race. By contrast the standard classical liberal argument is that because it is wrong to judge people by race the law should not do so, generically, but there may be circumstances in which race-based law is justified ‘in extremis’.
I am certain that BEE and all race-based law in South Africa must go, and have argued that repeatedly. In these arguments I customarily flag the libertarian approach as incorrect, preferring to seek truth from facts rather than contextless postulation.
Two relevant facts to consider are that, according to Stats SA, white South Africans earn about a third of national income, while the top 10% of BEE earners get roughly three times more than the white top 10% in absolute terms. In this context, BEE entrenches a well-connected rainbow elite while the majority get whacked by an inefficient, shrinking economy.
Based on these and other facts I am firmly against BEE and all race-based law in South Africa today. My thinking is explicitly not libertarian in the sense that Rousseau defines it on this topic.
My esteemed colleague Anthea Jeffery takes a similar, though much deeper, empirical approach in her masterclass book BEE: Helping or Hurting? The answer Jeffery finds in data and in detail is that BEE is hurting; it must go.
Rousseau knocks a libertarian straw-man version of the IRR, without attending to the facts. Is that because he is really for race-based law in South Africa today and considers all BEE opponents ‘libertarian’ in a case of ‘left pole‘ redefinition? I do not know; he does not state his position on BEE today.
Property rights
Cronje writes that property rights ‘form the building block of every free and open society and that the state should never have the power to take your property away’.
Rousseau then points out that it is standard among classical liberals to think property rights are not absolute rights, which is correct too. Apply a semantic scalpel carefully enough and the apparent contradiction can be resolved.
If the state expropriates your land for a public purpose and pays you market-related compensation then, in one sense, government took your property, while in another sense your property has been preserved, since your net assets remain the same.
But under a proposal by the EFF, seconded by the ANC, the South African government will have the right to take your stuff and, under conditions ‘not limited to’ examples provided, refuse to pay you back. This is called ‘expropriation without compensation’ (EWC).
Moreover, the conditions the Expropriation Bill envisages for EWC are unjust, and the burdensome process it would impose on land-grab victims is shockingly onerous.
One need only pay the vaguest attention to my devoted colleague Terrence Corrigan, the country’s leading writer on EWC, or Anthea Jeffery, who proposed a classically liberal alternative here, or just read our ‘Stop Expropriation!‘ submission to parliament, endorsed by hundreds of thousands, to realise that our arguments are not hard libertarian in Rousseau’s sense, but classically liberal in the conventional sense.
The principle of property rights that Cronje lays out, on any reading sensitive to this context, is fundamentally opposed to EWC while being consistent with basic ideas such as ‘eminent domain’, the confiscation of a drug such as nyaope, the imposition of fines for criminal activity, and progressive taxation.
So, again, the question becomes how Rousseau can call us ‘libertarian’ for opposing EWC when our method has, to the contrary, been classically liberal? Maybe the real issue is that Rousseau actually supports EWC and has redefined all its opponents as ‘libertarians’? He does not say.
Government interference
Cronje says the ‘government has no place interfering in your business or personal affairs…as long as your actions do not harm anyone else.’
On Rousseau’s inflexible reading, this principle would commit Cronje to opposing drunk-driving laws, a standard libertarian position, but not one easy to reconcile with Cronje’s discussion about alcohol and our bloody streets here.
Some libertarians really do oppose drunk-driving laws, just as they oppose laws about wearing seatbelts in cars or helmets on motorcycles, on principle. Some libertarians oppose speed-limit laws and the requirement of driving licences and medical licences and so on.
It is not uncommon for IRR members to debate, and disagree with, hard and anarcho-libertarians, including members of the Free Market Foundation (FMF) who hold these and other views.
Here is a practical example. In this debate, the FMF’s tenacious leader Leon Louw argued there should be no minimum wage, ever, anywhere, at any rate. He did this explicitly by referring to ‘first principles’ while putting statistics to the side.
By contrast, I argue that a minimum wage could be justly imposed, based on international evidence, if it was a small fraction of the current rate, roughly R1 200 instead of R3 500, without pricing people out of work.
Perhaps the biggest counter-libertarian example is the IRR’s Economic Empowerment for the Disadvantaged (EED) policy proposal to replace BEE. At the theoretical level, BEE treats race as a proxy for economic disadvantage while EED takes the ‘radical’ approach of treating economic disadvantage as a proxy for economic disadvantage.
At the practical level, an EED points system would pull state levers to incentivise gross fixed capital formation, high-employment business activity and upskilling workers regardless of race. That is a formula for national growth.
A libertarian think tank would, to my mind, never be able to come up with such a practical policy since any targeted incentives would be denounced as ‘market distortions’.
If Rousseau read our EED position, he might like it, but then again it is firmly non-racial so maybe he would not. I do not know. He does not say whether or not he supports race-based law in South Africa today.
Free speech
Rousseau has smart things to say about free speech in his Synapses article; it is short and well worth the read. If you like, you can also listen to this conversation I had about the subject on Two Crickets in a Thorn Tree with my colleagues, the ‘best Nicks in the business’.
I would elaborate on the principled arguments about free speech here too, except they are so badly eclipsed by Rousseau’s false description of the Daily Friend as ‘attracting the wrong crowd’.
That is just silly. Rousseau himself is attracted to the Daily Friend to the extent that he not only reads it but was happy to have it publish his writing. I hope he does so again. And next time I hope he resists the temptation to take snarky potshots at you or me, or other readers of the Daily Friend.
Classic conclusion
I would like to add to Cronje’s exemplary ‘four principles’ another classical liberal tradition, which is maybe more habit than principle. We have a strong habit of collaboration. While some people will only choose to work with those they consider ‘ideologically pure’, I think classical liberals have found another way. We work together inside and outside of the proverbial tent.
The upshot of that is that winning an argument very rarely comes down to semantics, and almost always comes down to demonstrating evidence. So, the real fifth principle that motivates our work is to seek truth from facts.
This is important in part because we define ourselves by non-racialism, but then again so does the ANC. To see what non-racialism means to us, or any political party, get evidence on what it does.
This work-ethic attitude towards fact does not make us wobbly, because we know where we come from and where we want to go. But it does make us curious.
I would be curious to know where Rousseau wants to go in the short and medium term, which is why I ask whether he is for or against BEE, and EWC? A few years ago, Rousseau thought ‘racial discrimination’ was ‘entirely justified’ in South Africa. Does he still think that?
In the absence of an answer, I cannot really tell what he means by ‘libertarian’ or ‘classical liberal’, and nor is it easy to judge what his own principles really are without seeing how he applies them to the great issues of the day. Let there be no doubt how important this political debate is, for terror reigns when good people do not speak up against it.
[Picture: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay]
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