Liberal ideas really do offer the hope of emancipation from poverty.
It says a lot for people’s sense of what the good society is that they often base their arguments about policy on the idea of helping people less fortunate than themselves.
But this is often true of people who, judging by their commentary on social media and elsewhere, think that the liberal arguments promoted by the Institute of Race Relations do the opposite.
The mystique of ‘progressive’ thinking can be persuasive because it cloaks itself in the supposed moral superiority of selflessness, while liberalism, in placing the individual at the centre of the freedom of societies, is mistakenly assumed to spurn it.
The real difference, however, is whether one trusts people, whoever they are, to exercise freedom for themselves (the very freedoms self-proclaimed progressives have no compunction in insisting on for themselves, as a matter of routine), and whether one genuinely believes that freedom actually matters.
It matters because of the way it works. And it is consequential because it is not merely theoretical.
Exactly two centuries ago, the Swiss-born liberal thinker Benjamin Constant delivered a lecture which vividly addresses the theory.
Philosopher Isaiah Berlin described him as ‘the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy’, and it’s true that Constant’s words and reasoning are as fresh and relevant these two hundred years later.
His lecture of 1819, On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns, begins with a straightforward setting out of the essentials of freedom as we still understand them today.
They encompassed ‘the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death, nor maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals’. It was the ‘right of everyone to express his opinion, choose a profession and practise it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for his motives or undertakings’.
Everyone had a right ‘to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion that he and his associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way that is most compatible with his inclinations or whims’.
Finally, Constant said, ‘it is everyone’s right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government, either by electing all or particular officials, or through representations, petitions, demands to which the authorities are more or less compelled to pay heed’.
But it’s especially in the confluence of the free market of ideas and the free market of goods and services that Constant touches on the scope of liberty to do good things for individuals – by enabling them to do them.
While acknowledging that ‘commerce makes the action of arbitrary power over our existence more oppressive than in the past, because, as our speculations are more varied, arbitrary power must multiply itself to reach them’, he goes on: ‘But commerce also makes the action of arbitrary power easier to elude, because it changes the nature of property, which becomes, in virtue of this change, almost impossible to seize.’
He singled out the notably liberating quality of what would later come to be called the free market when he said: ‘Commerce confers a new quality on property, circulation. Without circulation, property is merely a usufruct; political authority can always affect usufruct, because it can prevent its enjoyment; but circulation creates an invisible and invincible obstacle to the actions of social power.’
The effects of commerce, he added, ‘extend even further: not only does it emancipate individuals, but, by creating credit, it places authority itself in a position of dependence.’
Commerce, he noted, ‘inspires in men a vivid love of individual independence (and) supplies their needs, satisfies their desires, without the intervention of the authorities’.
In the light of our contemporary experience of South Africa in 2019, Constant might have been writing last week when he added: This intervention is … always a trouble and an embarrassment. Every time collective power wishes to meddle with private speculations, it harasses the speculators. Every time governments pretend to do our own business, they do it more incompetently and expensively than we would.’
Two hundred years on, how does Constant’s reasoning stand up against the evidence?
The answer is, unsurprisingly, well.
In a submission to parliament earlier this year, my senior colleague at the IRR, head of policy research Dr Anthea Jeffery, cited research by Canada’s Fraser Institute to show the ‘practical importance of individual property rights and limited state ownership and control’.
Jeffery wrote: ‘The Fraser Institute’s research shows that the countries which do the best in upholding private property rights and limiting state power are the “most free”, in the economic sense. They are also by far the most prosperous. Moreover, the poorest 10% of people in the most free countries have a much higher standard of living than their counterparts in the “least free” countries, where state ownership of land and assets is pervasive and private property rights are tenuous at best.
‘Between 1990 and 2010, for example, the annual average growth rate in GDP per head in the least free countries was a mere 1.6%. By contrast, the most free countries clocked up an average growth of 3.6%, or more than double. As a result, the least free countries had GDP per head of $5 200 in 2010, while the most free recorded almost $38 000 – almost seven times as much.
‘The least free showed life expectancy at 62 years in 2010, the most free at 80. So people in the richest countries – the ones where private property rights are upheld and respected – live almost 20 years longer than those in the poorest countries. Moreover, average income per head for the poorest 10% of the population in the least free countries in 2010 was $1 200, whereas in the most free it was nearly $12 000 – almost ten times as much.’
Liberal ideas, and the open, prospering societies they sustain, really do offer the hope of emancipation from poverty. So-called ‘progressive’ thinking that assumes the benevolence and effectiveness of state intrusion on individual liberty – interference, for instance, with our healthcare, property rights and pension savings – only promises more of the same.
Morris is head of media at the Institute of Race Relations.
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