Labour-market flexibility, deregulation of the service industry,
pension reforms and greater competition in university funding is not
anti-equality. Such reforms shift financing from taxpayers to the users
themselves and, as such, tend to eliminate rents. They tend to increase
productivity by basing rewards on merit rather than on being an
insider. They tend to open up opportunities for younger workers who are
not yet well-connected. Pursuing pro-market reforms does not imply
facing a trade-off between efficiency and social justice. In this
sense, pro-market policies are “left wing”, if that means reducing the
economic privileges enjoyed by “insiders”.…If the European left wants to be able to say honestly that it fights
for the neediest members of our society, it must adopt as its battle
cry the pursuit of competition, reforms and a system based on
meritocracy.
Amen. This is from an excellent op-ed by Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi writing in Vox. My only complaint is that they write as if this is new. In fact, liberalism, meaning classical liberalism, has never been conservative. It began as a movement of the left against feudalistic, conservative insiders and it remains so today.
Question for our hosts – and not a trick one either: in one word, how would you describe your politics: left or right?
Remember: the original right-wingers were the monarchists.
Sorry, for years libertarians have been explaining to liberals that the latter’s pet policies will simply lead
to regulatory capture and rent extraction, and liberals only accept these insights long enough to shoehorn
them into some anti-corporatist populism and learn nothing.
Hey, if they want to substantially reduce government’s power and with it, the rent seeking, welcome aboard.
Tom. One word: Ambidextrous.
BGC, very interesting comment.
I disagree with this. The market process is certainly amoral, but markets are not. Markets are made up of people, and they reflect the morals of the people involved. Leftists aren’t mad at the market process, they are mad at the market participants for not sharing their morals. So they use government to rent-seek, and gain more support for their causes than they would otherwise have. Their actions must be hypocritical, or else they would pursue their moral goals without the use of government.
“By contrast, the left is completely un-interested in the successful and massive poverty alleviation going on in China and India because this is achieved by abstract impersonal amoral markets.”
That ‘massive poverty alleviation” is in fact massively partial, to the extent that there are regular labour riots in China. It’s also balanced against massive poverty creation in the US, where what was once a prosperous economy has been strip mined to the extent that debt and bankruptcy are becoming regular experiences for average working Americans.
And let’s not even mention the ecological holocaust that’s happening in China.
The left position – in this century, at least – is simply that actions have consequences and that only fools and crazy people build economic systems that ignore them.
Arguing from ideology is always weaker than arguing from empirical experience, because reality isn’t interested in who’s a liberal and who isn’t, but only in consequences and experiences.
The right can always argue that because *some* people get richer, reforms are good.
The left position is that wealth redistribution is always more creative and prosperous than wealth concentration, because concentration promotes complacency and laziness, while distribution creates opportunity.
It’s the conservative right that has been missing the point here. And there are now thirty years of evidence to back up the fact that given reformist policies, wealth concentrates among the ownership classes and starves the rest of the population of opportunities for creative economic participation.
The authors in this case are repeating the same discredited fallacies. People can choose to believe them, or not, but given the weight of evidence, it’s hard to see their argument as anything other than pseduo-rational hand-waving.
i like it
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