What in God’s green fuck does “laissez-faire capitalism” even mean?
You do realize that no classical liberal anywhere, at any time, has ever advocated that “capitalism” be completely free to do whatever the hell it wants to do, right? You can search in vain through Locke, Smith, Hume, Ferguson, Montesquieu, Constant, Say, de Tocqueville, von Humboldt, Goethe, Mill, Bastiat, Gladstone, Cobden, Spencer, Lecky, Acton, von Mises, Hayek, Nozick, Rawls and de Jasay, for the contention that “capitalism” ought to be completely free to do whatever the hell it wants to do, and you won’t find it. The most you’ll find is thought-experiments around the topic. All those writers agree that capitalists must work within a structure of rules and laws of some kind. The contention is only regarding the nature and coverage of those rules and laws.
The contention that classical liberalism does advocate that “capitalism” be completely free to do whatever the hell it wants to do is precisely the Marxist strawman I’ve been talking about.
You can’t even see how quasi-religious Left-wing ideology has hoodwinked you into a distorted view of your own core political philosophy. You are dancing to the tune of Comintern propaganda from the 1930s, and you don’t even know it.
Look, here’s the deal: classical liberalism is an experimental political philosophy that holds the Good Life to be discoverable, and wishes to set the “ground rules” for it to be discovered.
All other forms of politics are what one might call Grand Plan politics, with Populism (the “man with a plan”, the demagogue) at the Centre, Mob Rule on the Left and Authoritarianism on the Right, with the extreme Left and Right coinciding in Totalitarianism (because Mob Rule is actually impossible, and Authoritarianism has no immunity to the whim of the ruler).
How can the Good Life be discovered by a social process? By assuring certain kind of limited “negative” human rights to individuals, so that they may freely discuss, freely associate, freely form all sorts of experimental groupings, in the pursuit of the Good Life as they see it. How is the freedom limited? By a concomitant duty. What is that duty? The duty we all have to refrain from interfering with each other. When is that duty abrogate? When an individual or group is demonstrably (falsifiably) causing harm, has caused harm, or is likely to cause harm. From this flow logically all the basic rights: to life, to freedom of speech, to property, to assembly, etc.
As you can see, there’s a lot of free play in this idea. There’s room for a “conservative” wing (e.g. Nozick, de Jasay) and a “progressive” wing (e.g. Rawls). Why is there this free play? Because there’s some degree of elasticity to the concept of “harm”, because new technology opens up new possibilities for harm, and because it’s an open and arguable question what the State can do beyond maintaining the basic “ground rules”. “Conservative” or Right-wing liberals (libertarians) are more concerned with maintaining the “ground rules” and they emphasize seeing how little government we can get away with while still maintaining a civilized society that is free to seek the Good Life. “Progressive” or Left-wing liberals are more concerned with seeing to what degree government can be used as a tool to help people, to oversee public goods problems, etc., over and above maintaining the “ground rules”. There’s a natural, healthy tension between these two “poles” of liberalism. “Right” and “Left” aren’t really appropriate because “Right” traditionally meant “in favour of special privileges due to ancestry, caste, social position, etc.” and no classical liberals are in favour of any of these. But the terms will do.
But despite disagreement, both libertarian and progressive liberals hold the “negative” rights as core values, and intelligent progressives (such as Rawls) are well aware that there’s (not just a tension but) an outright contradiction between those basic rights and any mandate to attain a specific outcome (any specific outcome attained by fiat law will necessarily involve treating people unequally), so progressivism understands that there’s a trade-off, while libertarianism holds that the trade-off isn’t worth it in the long run. Again, this is an ongoing, viable argument in which it’s often possible to see both sides.
Both libertarians and progressives will also hold to the core idea of falsifiability: unlike quasi-religious ideologies, which draw their concepts of harm from the over-arching structure of ideological reasoning, which involves 1) a source of “power”, 2) social relations involving “oppressor/oppressed” groups defined by their closeness to or distance from the source of “power”, and 3) human behaviour being wholly determined by oppressor/oppressed group membership, classical liberals stick to the idea that the burden of proof is on the person who would propose to relieve themselves of the duty not to interfere. For that burden of proof to be discharged, it must be necessary to point to actual concrete, specifiable harm done by (or highly likely to be done by) living individuals or groups; you cannot persecute people on the basis of some bad word defined in terms wholly internal to some apriori ideological mind palace.
All quasi-religious ideologies like socialism, fascism, communism, the social justice movement, are completely alien to classical liberal thought. You can’t “import bits of” any of these ideas, because they are all corrosive. Why? Because they are all Grand Plans, they believe they have already discovered what the Good Life is, so there’s no need for a social experimental process to discover it, therefore there’s no logical need for the “negative” human rights. If they’re kept, it’s only on a whim that can be reversed tomorrow if someone reinterprets the Holy Text of the ideology impressively enough.
Is that plain enough English for you?
