@ytk031
That Thom Hartmann lecture was very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
If you google the phrase “free market as institution” with the two quotation marks, you will find only one case. Is this expression unnatural? Should we put “a, an or the” before “free” and/or “institution?”
“The free market as an institution” and it returns 17,900 results.
Until I hit page two and then it says: “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 13 already displayed.” When you show the omitted results it then show 25. It sounds fine, but I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly established set phrase.
Thank you, Mattc.
I feel that the usage of the definite and infinite articles is the most difficult in English, although I know that there is the rule of “law” as institution there.
I think that generally outside the US, libertarian refers to libertarian socialist, or a kind of political anarchism. This position doesn’t advocate the removal of the government, but rather the removal of coercion from society. So, as much as possible, society should be organized around voluntary co-operation. The people who work in a factory should be able to make their own decisions about what happens in that factory, and so on. Society is not organized hierarchically with the people at the top giving orders to those below. However, society is organized. It’s not a state of chaos, as is usually associated with the word anarchy outside the context of politics.
Inside the US, libertarian seems to mean more advocating the reduction of government and more or less leaving people to fend for themselves. The government would be there simply to prosecute people who commit assault or murder or theft, and to protect private property. Perhaps I am misunderstanding American Libertarianism though.
As for the term liberal, I don’t really think the Austrian school represents classical liberalism. I don’t know why the word liberal is used as it is today in the US. Perhaps simply because people dislike the words socialist or social democracy. However, one can be a classical liberal and still advocate some level of basic public service. I don’t think having public health insurance or something like that is outside the liberal tradition.
It is probably useful to note that neo-conservatives are often called neo-liberals outside the US. I think this neoliberal tradition is the one associated with the Austrian school.
Wikipedia has a well cited article on Classical Liberalism, I’m unaware of any economist or philosopher that was associated with classical liberalism that pushed any real belief in public health insurance.
Bortrun, your second paragraph seems about right. From my favorite guy I’d call maybe one of the classic classical liberals Mr. TJ:
A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. – Thomas Jefferson (1801)
I uhhhh, I agree…
Let us throw in some of his anti-religious quotes and then you have a man after my own heart… 
I shouldn’t say anti-religious, I should say “pro-freethinking”…
blindside70, I said that public health insurance is not outside the liberal tradition. The liberal tradition is more than just classical liberalism. I think I made a mistake in my terminology though. I tend to use the term classical liberal to refer to someone who is a liberal, but who has not embraced neoliberalism, but neoliberalism is actually an attempt to return to what is traditionally called “classical liberalism” or liberalism as it existed when it was first developed. So I should probably not use “classical liberalism” like that. I should probably just use the term “liberal”, but then there is confusion between its American meaning and its international meaning.
To be honest, when I hear people in America use the term “liberal”, I don’t really know what they’re talking about. Nobody ever defines the term, they just use it. It seems to be almost an insult. Perhaps I should read Mr. Krugman’s book
Anyway, I think a fair definition of modern liberalism is the range of views advocated by the various members of the Liberal Internaional. http://www.liberal-international.org/
I think though that it’s important to note that when liberalism came into being it had bigger fish to fry than dealing with public health insurance - and that sort of thing wasn’t on anybody’s radar in those days. And also, we didn’t have a wage labor economy when liberalism got going. A neoliberal is someone, I think, who wants to return to the days when the state did not deal at all with people’s basic social wellbeing. I don’t think the members of the LI advocate that sort of position.
I just checked the wikpedia entry for liberalism and it constrasted classical liberalism and social liberalism. Perhaps that is where the American term “liberal” comes from. The wikipedia article seems to jive with my understanding of modern (non-neo) liberalism, which is that it emphasizes free markets, open borders, private property, and provision of social welfare, etc…
You may need to clarify TJ for some people. I’ll assume you mean Thomas Jefferson:-) I’m certainly not an expert on him, but I have read other things by him where he talks about other functions of government, like preventing the rise of a new aristocracy through inheritance taxes and so forth. I may be wrong, but I do not think at all that Thomas Jefferson would be a neoliberal. Perhaps I have misunderstood the neoliberal (neoconservative) movement, but I find it really horrifying. I don’t understand its appeal at all. I don’t think Enlightenment political thinking is best represented by the neoliberal movement.
Not taking “from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned” doesn’t address the situation where people are forced to labor under conditions where they can barely earn enough bread to stay alive. Yes, I’m sure they are happy that the government doesn’t take what little bread their labor earns, but presumably they would also like their government to ensure that they are paid a living wage and that they are not forced to labor under unsafe conditions, etc. Surely the protection of life requires making sure that people have the resources needed to stay alive, and the protection of liberty requires ensuring that people are not forced to labor under slave-like conditions just for the privilege of staying alive.
For example, one of the ideas I strongly support is a Universal Basic Income, an idea which many people, including Thomas Paine, have had.
Anyway, I find the American political discourse interesting but difficult to understand. I have not studied a lot of American history, so there is probably something lacking in my understanding of the background to these arguments. Just to get back to the public health insurance question, it is absolutely beyond my comprehension why someone would be opposed to it. The fact that so many Americans are opposed to it is very interesting to me. It reinforces my suspicion that there is something fundamental to American political thinking that I simply do not understand. I’m not sure if they are opposed to the principle of public health insurance, or if they just think that the government will not do a good job with it.
Anyway, interesting discussion. It’s a point of view that I rarely hear. I agree with the “pro-freethinking” comment anyway
Keep it up, guys. I’m learning such a lot!
@mattc
Thank you for your information. I found the following descriptions in the article you mentioned. I suppose DERIVATIVES have ENLARGED the crisis. Although AEI fellow Peter J. Wallison and others “believe the roots of the crisis can be traced directly to sub-prime lending by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” Paul Krugman does not agree on that and refers to the SIMULTANEOUS growth of the residential and COMMERCIAL real estate pricing bubbles.
"Essentially, investment banks and hedge funds used financial innovation to enable large wagers to be made, far beyond the actual value of the underlying mortgage loans, using derivatives called credit default swaps and synthetic CDO. "
“Economist Paul Krugman argued in January 2010 that the simultaneous growth of the residential and commercial real estate pricing bubbles undermines the case made by those who argue that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, CRA or predatory lending were primary causes of the crisis.”
http://bit.ly/c5QEVx
What is AEI?
“Among the prominent former government officials now affiliated with AEI are former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, now an AEI senior fellow; former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities; Lynne Cheney, a longtime AEI senior fellow; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, now an AEI senior fellow; former Dutch member of parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an AEI visiting fellow; and former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, now an AEI visiting scholar.” American Enterprise Institute - Wikipedia
It’s the American Economic Institute, isn’t it?
E stands for enterprise. What an enterprise!
“The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is a conservative think tank founded in 1943.”(Wikipedia)
That’s very enterprising… I still think E stands for economic.
It might be supposed to provide jobless politicians with income maintenance programs.
David Frum, AEI SPLIT: Conservative’s Position ‘Terminated’ By Major Think Tank http://huff.to/aYwTdq
“Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum has resigned from the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, Frum announced on his Web site Thursday afternoon – a move which suggests the conservative movement has cut ties with Frum over the straight talk he has been providing all week.”
“Following the passage of health care reform in the House, Frum made waves with a column for CNN.com declaring that health care had proven to been “Waterloo” for the GOP, not for Obama as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) infamously suggested.”
Barack Obama http://twitter.com/BarackObama
“Republicans have promised to roll back health reform so that insurance companies can go back to denying you coverage when you get sick.”
The American Enterprise Institute is kind of an infamous ultra-conservative think tank. David Frum is actually a Canadian who moved to the US and worked for the Bush administration. He’s kind of an unusual guy. I don’t think his ideas are very welcome in Canada, but now it appears that he’s not conservative enough for his new friends. He must be in kind of a lonely position.
I think terms like infamous think tank and whose ideas are not welcome in Canada are more a reflection of one’s own views than of any objective reality.