4. A Tourist’s Guide to Liberty

4

NORMAN BARRY

A TOURIST’S GUIDE TO LIBERTY

I SEEM TO MEET A LOT of libertarians these days: in pub (bar) conversations, bus stop chats and lawn mowing encounters with the neighbors. Political discussions in England usually begin and end with a harangue against the once-revered National Health Service. But I was on a long train ride from Edinburgh to London a few weeks ago and fell into a desultory conversation with an American visitor. We talked a little about his forthcoming trip to Stratford for Shakespeare, I told him that Tom Stoppard is the only Right wing playwright who has ever lived and he wondered whether he would get to see Buckingham Palace. Then it turned out that he had recently been a student at Grove City College and had been taught Austrian economics. I am not sure who was more amazed, him or me, but we both were soon exchanging names and book titles and experiencing that joy that comes from unexpected agreement in unlikely circumstances. I have forgotten the guy’s name but he might be famous one day.

Of course, libertarian ideas are as far as ever from seriously influencing politics and despite the alleged death of socialism we in Britain, and Europe especially, are still living in semi-collectivist societies. But at least the ideas are alive and there are many more like-minded people around. It is a lot different from the early 1970s when I began my personal odyssey in search of liberty. At that time everybody I ever met said they believed in liberty but it meant one thing only—sex. The 60s had been and gone and still people didn’t see the intimate connection between freedom in the bedroom and the gyrations of the stock market.

I did not have a bad education at the University of Exeter. Marxism had not made its ruinous comeback; that was a feature of the dreadful 70s. I was taught political theory by a man who got his modest anti-Marxism from Karl Popper, so although I might not have learned a lot about liberty I got some sensible philosophy and could spot nonsense quickly.

I knew socialism to be just that but I hadn’t worked out precisely why and I certainly did not know of a feasible alternative. Just showing that the nationalization of the means of production, distribution and exchange doesn’t work wasn’t enough when the enemy could go on about the “alienation” caused by the division of labor in capitalist society and hold up pictures of Che Guevara as if he were a rock star. But I was never taught the meaning of freedom, still less the efficiency properties of markets. The economists at university were a lot brighter than historians, political scientists or sociologists and weren’t so obviously Left wing, but they didn’t know how to market their product. I took a course in economics and knew that demand curves sloped downwards to the right but did not really understand why rent control causes homelessness and the minimum wage unemployment. Since these policies were introduced by people who had the interests of the underprivileged at heart they must be OK. It seemed then, and does today, that all kinds of intellectual error are absolved if you have the right motivations. I was to learn later that everybody is a utility maximizer and that, on the whole, the right motivation, or virtue, is a menace to freedom and prosperity. Socialism was also not very funny. It had much more to do with dour Calvinism than that laughter-driven, pleasure-soaked nirvana the Left always promised. Everything came a little late for me and the realization that not only did libertarianism have the best ideas it also had the funniest jokes came the last of all. I guess I got the taste for humor from the aforementioned Tom Stoppard and his brilliant parodies of Marxism and logical positivism.

I started graduate work knowing little about freedom and, like most libertarians, did all the groundwork myself. I picked up the dangers of socialism, Keynesianism and inflation initially from casual reading and personal experience of state education and the National Health Service. My early research was in political theory in the Oxford analytical tradition. That is not as bad as people think and although its leading exponents were Left wing they did manage to separate their values from the analysis. An early, and remaining, influence was the legal positivist, H.L.A. Hart. His The Concept of Law is a magnificent piece of philosophical reasoning and his intellectual opposition to Ronald Dworkin, who has done so much to distort the common law tradition while pretending to be faithful to it, was instructive. His substantive moral and political views were similar to Dworkin’s but he never claimed that they were derived from his understanding of law. This was another reason for my distrust of “morality,” which has turned out to be a license to do anything that costs someone else money. And then I got my first serious academic job.

I was still not a libertarian but a good candidate for instruction. The job was in about the worst place in the world outside sub-Saharan Africa. It was at the Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Its permanent political and historical problems have been boring the rest of the world since at least 1690. That was when the Prods licked the Micks at the Battle of the Boyne. In Belfast, it could have been yesterday.

No libertarians there then, though I am told there is an Austrian economist at Cork University in the Irish Republic. But this was Belfast, an outpost of the British welfare state. However, the strange thing was that I learned something about liberty there quite by accident. A graduate student was researching the question as to why Catholics had, then, moved away from Irish republicanism and into “civil rights.” Had they been Americanized, I wondered? The answer was obvious. Most of the local governments then were controlled by Protestants, who distributed public sector jobs (of which there were many) and public housing, to their supporters. I said to the student, if there were no public sector at all there would not be so much trouble here. The student had never imagined there could be no public sector and, until that moment, neither had I. But it dawned on me that if people lived with little politics there would be fewer venues for their natural fractiousness. At the same time, the “liberals,” with their absurd idea, derived from Rousseau, of the “perfectibility of man,” were piously bewailing the fact that the public schools in Northern Ireland are divided into Protestant and Catholic. If children went to mixed schools, the liberals said, they would learn to love each other and see their common class interests. I thought that was naive and patronizing. The religious groups paid for the schools, anyway, through their taxes, so why should they not choose which ones they wanted? In fact, the classrooms were the safest places in the province precisely because the schools were separated.

So I suggested everything else, including police, should be separated and the inconvenience that brought about would lead the two rival sects to make deals and begin to co-operate naturally. That would be much more just and efficient than forcing them to love each other. I later learned from reading the philosopher David Hume that, if left alone, even the most divisive of people will develop conventions which will enable them at least to get through the day. It is when democracy and egalitarianism are used to compel people to iron out their natural differences that the trouble starts. So, by a combination of personal experience and a little bit of reading I was ready for liberty. After about a year in Belfast, I returned to England to face a different kind of turmoil. The 1970s was an absolutely dismal decade during which Conservatives and Labour took turns at trying to socialize the country. What they did was to hand it over to the trade unions. Strikes were frequent, social disruption a regular occurrence, the rule of law was breaking down, inflation was rampant and completely ineffective regulations were passed all the time. There was a lady called Margaret Thatcher in the Conservative Government of 1970–74 but she was at that time just another rent-seeking politician.

But after my experience in Northern Ireland I was anxious to know more about libertarianism and I was already aware that true freedom was about more than sexual liberation and there was more to it than the fashionable civil liberties: it had to include free markets. In my new post, at the then Birmingham Polytechnic, I was surrounded by the children of the 60s, disaffected and spoilt brats who despised capitalism yet lived parasitically off its fruits. At that time all productive people were being enervated inexorably by an ever-oppressive state. It was an age of general despair. But there were two very important books for any beginner to libertarianism. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was well-known. It was even mentioned by my undergraduate teachers as a kind of eccentric text that rejected the compatibility of economic planning with personal liberty. Look, they would say, we have had economic control and the welfare state since the 1940s without concentration camps or even the direction of labor: conveniently neglecting the minor but irresistible inhibitions on personal choice that were already taking place and were threatening to worsen as the economy visibly wilted.

But there was another book which was less familiar, even to classical liberals. I refer to John Jewkes’s Ordeal by Planning. This contained none of the heavy metaphysics and portentous verbiage of Hayek’s work but was a detailed account of the errors of the early days of planning by the 1945 Labour Government. It is a beautifully written analysis of the missed targets, artificial shortages and miserable outcomes of that non-communistic, but still socialistic, episode. Jewkes’s book was published in 1947 and things were to get much worse as the post-war era unfolded. There were some erstwhile classical liberals, Lionel Robbins in particular, whose early opposition to economic planning in the 1930s had been muted by the war experience. It had worked, they said, and could be a model for post-war reconstruction. But Jewkes had worked in government during the war and knew it wasn’t successful even in the most propitious circumstances. It was certainly not working in peacetime. Also, the intelligentsia ignored the success of post-war Germany which had achieved a remarkable recovery using market methods. Jewkes, in fact, was close to the German Ordoliberal thinker, Walter Eucken, and wrote the introduction to an English translation of one of his books.

By the 1970s there was a certain hope for the resuscitation of classical liberalism. I had already absorbed Hayek’s later classic, The Constitution of Liberty and the allure of Mill’s On Liberty was beginning to wane. An important work, Samuel Brittan’s Capitalism and the Permissive Society, was published in 1973. It was the first attempt by a British author to show that economic and personal liberty had a common intellectual source and that much-valued personal freedoms would be quickly lost if the freedom to exchange and the right to accumulate property were attenuated. Brittan is an interesting and prolific writer. A long-time Financial Times columnist, his previous books had been dour and orthodox accounts of the various Keynesian experiments in post-war British economic policy. Now he was introducing readers to Friedman and Hayek and incorporating political philosophy into economic analysis. A lot of slick libertarians these days are quite dismissive of the compromises that Brittan has made, and I for one have never gone along with the modest redistribution that has sullied the rigor of his pure economic analysis, but I would never underestimate the contribution he has made to classical liberal thinking in Britain. He has always resisted popular fads like business ethics, indeed he gave my own highly critical book on the subject a very favorable notice in the Financial Times. It is worth commenting in passing on the sad decline of that newspaper (despite occasionally publishing my articles). However, its new chief economics correspondent, Martin Wolf, is a free market advocate and an admirable successor to Brittan. For all its faults, the Wall Street Journal still believes in capitalism and publishes informed and committed writers.

But we are still in that dismal era, the 70s, and I thought I was the only libertarian in the country. That is not too far from the truth because although there were economists who believed in free markets there were few writers who bought the whole package—serious anti-statism and personal liberty. There has always been the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and no account of British freedom can ignore the sterling work it does to keep the flag flying in the least favorable of circumstances. The organization regularly published Milton Friedman and Hayek and kept a barrage of really sophisticated and clearly written papers against the latest government folly. It also has the necessary playfulness. I remember in particular a publication by Tony Culyer and Michael Cooper, The Price of Blood, in the late 60s, which recommended a market in that precious human commodity. It offended everybody, especially Britain’s foremost welfare thinker, Richard Titmuss. Culyer and Cooper are not libertarians but they demonstrated the power of economic thinking. The IEA was early on to public choice and produced important work by Jim Buchanan, Gordon Tullock and William Niskanen. People were slowly beginning to understand the destructive effects that “politics” has. As a politics undergraduate student I had been educated to believe that it was a beneficial activity that kept us free of totalitarianism. I later discovered that only markets can do this and that the emphasis on pressure groups and voting is simply rent-seeking by professors of political science. In 1989 I wrote a pamphlet, The InvisibleHand in Economics and Politics, for the IEA on this very subject. It elicited a letter from Milton Friedman who had used exactly the same title for a piece he had published in Singapore. But it was an appreciative note and he didn’t claim property rights in the name.

Back to the 70s: having immersed myself in Hayek I was led on to Mises, the Austrians and Murray Rothbard. Of course, I had to take in Ayn Rand but was never enthusiastic. I could get the intellectual substance, in economics and philosophy, from nicer people. She didn’t sound at all like a barrel of laughs and the stories I later heard about her “show trials” of deviants confirmed my suspicions. But I do claim to have found her only joke, about a positivist philosopher in Atlas Shrugged. It isn’t very funny and I am not revealing the exact source. And was the building blown up in The Fountainhead, that bad?

It was 1978 and I had nearly completed my first book, on Hayek. There have been hundreds of books and papers since, most of them better than mine. But I was first in the market. Gerry O’Driscoll had written on his economics but my book was then the only synthesis of his philosophy, law politics and economics. My publisher, at Macmillan, knew Hayek’s at Routledge, Kegan and Paul and arranged a meeting, in July with the man himself (on a brief trip to England). We had a delightful cup of tea in that bastion of nineteenth century classical liberalism, the Reform Club in London. And yes, he did take some snuff. When my book came out in 1979 he sent me a delightful letter, and an outline of The Fatal Conceit. I know all the problems that strict libertarians have with Hayek but I felt I had arrived.

I had already done a few very minor papers before but the publication of my first book gave me confidence to offend my Marxist colleagues. They thought they were so anti-establishment and unconventional but they couldn’t have been more orthodox. Libertarians were the real outsiders. And, I must confess, I got utility from shocking the Left. They began to look very old-fashioned as I would blithely recommend the abolition of all welfare, all economic intervention, a free market in addictive drugs, competing police forces and everything else in the litany of freedom. I especially enjoyed demonstrating the efficiency (and virtue?) of blackmail contracts. But surely, the blackmailer would come back for more, they would say. No, I would reply, contracts would be enforced by free market courts. But some Left economists were quite smart. One said, albeit reluctantly, that blackmail contracts made the parties better off and therefore were Pareto efficient. He eventually became a libertarian.

There were other important things in the dire 70s. The most important was my first trip to America. I knew all about the damage to capitalism and freedom caused by Roosevelt, and analyses of the depredations of Johnson’s welfare state were beginning to seep through, but the country still seemed to be the last best hope for a world in which the Left was tightening its grip. I also wanted to see some Broadway musicals, for these and liberty were parts of America’s many contributions to civilization. So I arrived in New York in early July 1976. I had corresponded with American libertarians but never experienced the country. Not knowing where to go I looked up Laissez Faire bookstore in the New York phone book and found my way to its, then, Mercer Street shop. And what a wonderful experience that was. I had never seen so many books on liberty. But I had to be careful: we still had exchange control in socialist Britain and I was only allowed so many dollars. I bought a few books and saved enough money for a number of good shows. None had a chorus line of beautiful girls singing “A is A” but I did find out that Rand had done a New York play once. I was pleased it wasn’t being performed.

New York, the home of American Leftism, did seem a wonderfully free place. I bought copies of the National Review (I didn’t know then how awful neoconservatism was) and regularly read the Wall Street Journal. I even took a tourist trip around the stock exchange. I was also invited to a July 4th party. I had to point out to the host that as a good conservative I didn’t normally commemorate armed uprising against lawfully established authority, but I would make an exception in America’s case. However, I never was a conservative and I reestablished my libertarian credentials with an eloquent defense of the Articles of Confederation.

Closer to home, the other event of the 70s that had long term significance was Britain’s entry into Europe, the European Economic Community (EEC), as it was then called. I was never an admirer of European integration despite the EEC’s original free market credentials. I was very much impressed by Ludwig Erhard’s (the great post-war German free market leader) critique of its inexorable tendency toward centralization. Britain had entered the EEC under the Conservatives in 1973 but the 1974 Labour Government had a referendum in 1975 on whether we should stay in. Many of their supporters feared that the EEC was a capitalist plot. Although I knew about rational choice theory and the irrationality of voting, I played the democrat. The polling booth was on my way to work and voting would not involve too great a cost. I voted to stay in mainly because I was terrified of British socialism. It really did look as if we were headed for the Gulag. And the Europeans seemed so much freer—and richer. Now I am associated with the Euroskeptics and write long articles on the benefits of “competitive jurisdictions” and against Europe’s regulatory socialism and centralization. It is no surprise that the Labour Party and the other socialists are now all very pro-Europe. It took them a long time to realize it but the (now) European Union is not a capitalist plot but a socialist project and a rent-seeker’s paradise. I am not really a Euroskeptic but a firm believer in withdrawal—for Britain and every other freedom-loving European country. Europe now is like we British were in the 1970s.

But at last the 80s came along—the much-maligned “decade of greed.” It was good for me and the rest of the world. For a few months I really thought that capitalism and freedom were becoming popular. It was the best modern example of Bernard Mandeville’s famous paradox of “private vice and public virtue.” For everybody was for the first time concerned with getting rich and behaving selfishly. As Mandeville said, back in 1705: “Each part was full of vice/But the whole an earthly paradise.”

I know libertarians have written at great length about the errors of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher but for me, having been raised on welfare and socialism, those two brought a new beginning. Mrs. Thatcher defeated the trade unions, privatized much of the economy and began an (unsuccessful) cutback on welfare. And she also once famously said: “There is no such thing as society.” Of course, nothing much changed in the US and the UK in many areas but psychologically the era was very significant.

And it was good for me, too. I wrote a textbook on political theory which had a definite libertarian stance. There was no other text that had Rothbard in the index, though Nozick was creeping into some. There was an up and coming young political theorist from Oxford who gave it a terrible review in The Times Literary Supplement. He said it was just free market propaganda and would not be used. That was twenty years ago and the book is now in its fourth edition. One Left wing student said he was very suspicious of it but at least he now understood people like Rawls and Dworkin. He obviously hadn’t noticed that I had criticized them on the way. The original hostile reviewer now has a prestigious position in legal philosophy out in California.

And I did write some genuine libertarian stuff, On Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism in 1986 and The New Right in 1987. I also began to notice the possibility of picking up some rents (I am a normal person) and saw that welfare and business ethics were likely to be fashionable subjects: so I began to write about them from an explicitly libertarian perspective. I genuinely believed in my anti-welfare state and pro-business stance but it was nice to make a little money too. So I wrote a book on welfare and many defenses of business.

Business ethics began to thrive as the Soviet system and other socialist regimes began to fall apart. However successful capitalism is it could always be criticized morally: and otherwise unemployable philosophers had to be found work. So I ended up defending various hate figures of the 1980s, Michael Milken in particular. I have found the villains of the early twenty-first century very reprehensible and I have attacked them—but on good capitalist grounds. A new, pro-market newspaper, The Business, published one of my articles, which was basically a defense of Gordon Gekko and an attack on Enron.

Back in the early 1980s I became a libertarian for real. I left the state and got a job in Britain’s only private university, Buckingham. Like Hillsdale and Grove City (and unlike Harvard, Yale et al) we don’t receive a cent from the state and are permanently struggling. It is not a hotbed of libertarians; most staff regard it as just a job and would soon rejoin the state if a better opportunity came along. But I did meet the great libertarian economist, Martin Ricketts. He really can do the high class technical wizardry of modern economics and also discourse on Austrian subjectivism at the same time: almost in the same sentence. We produce brilliant and original libertarian solutions to every conceivable problem every night in the pub (bar) on our way home from work. But we use the same theory; it really does have great fecundity. Martin is a splendid replacement for the apostate John Gray, who was once a very close friend (I was best man at his second wedding) but he has since departed, for who knows where. More lese-majesty, I suspect. Whatever career sacrifices I might have made by going private I do get utility by simply saying loudly that I do not work for the state: so I am just as well off.

A lot has changed since I began this intellectual adventure over thirty years ago. The Soviet menace has disappeared and most really existing forms of socialism have taken a battering. In Britain the present Labour Government is the first one in my lifetime that doesn’t make me think I will wake up in the old East Germany by the morning. But much remains the same. The state is as strong as ever and, in Britain especially, rent-seeking by the civil service has reached new heights: administrators, office coordinators and outreach workers multiply daily. And we still have the National Health Service. What began as a kind of vacation from my regular work has become a serious business.

Norman Barry was professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham, U.K.