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View Full Version : David Boaz, P.J. O'Rourke, and George Will on the State of Liberty



Chris
05-31-2017, 05:16 PM
4 libertarians, if you include Russ Roberts, look at current politics.

David Boaz, P.J. O'Rourke, and George Will on the State of Liberty (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/05/david_boaz_pj_o.html). There's a podcast recording there if you prefer to listen. Here is a transcript of opening statements.


David Boaz: We talked yesterday about whether this is a short term or long term question. In the long term, I'm still very optimistic about the future of liberty, because liberty works. And socialism and central planning, and indeed factism[fascism?] do not. And so, I'm optimistic. In the short term, we have a lot more liberty than we did 40 years ago, in a lot of ways. A lot of New Deal regulations were eliminated. You and I remember that the draft was a real threat. And we were 21. And now it is not. That's a good thing. There's been a lot of liberation in terms of civil rights, women's rights, gay rights: all of that is good. Marginal [?factrates?] came down. And went back up a little, but not so much. Still we have apparently an out-of-control welfare state in most developed economies. And today we are seeing new threats from what could in some way be called right-wing, authoritarian populism: We're seeing it in France. We have seen it in other places in Europe. And, there were elements of that in the Trump movement. We thought the Republican base was Reaganite, which--pro-Libertarian; it's not quite perfect, but at least on free markets and free trade; it's supposed to be a good thing. It turns out the Republican base was perfectly willing to vote for a determined perfectionist. So, lots of new threats to deal with in the next few years. P.J.?

P. J. O'Rourke: I would essentially agree with David except that I wouldn't call it a right-wing, authoritarianism that we're going through. I think you see it all over the political spectrum. I think Bernie Sanders was an example of the same sort of thing from the Left. It's also at least in the debriefings[?] and interviews and so on that I have done with people who have voted for--I found very few people who voted for Trump. I have discovered a huge number who voted against Hillary. I can understand the conundrum myself. Actually, I, in the end, because I was in a swing state; and my vote conceivably did matter; my wife and I talked about this. We voted for Hillary because of the VIX (Volatility IndeX, stock market ticket abbreviation). Those of you in the financial industry know--the Volatility Index. The measurement of fear. I figured we could live through another 4 years, the 8 years we lived through. And I just didn't know what this guy was going to do. So, in the end, I voted for--I made the safe vote for the ugly status quo, versus the devil I didn't know. But I do think we are generally moving in the right direction. But--the alarms of the modern world, as I was talking about earlier today are such that they tend to drive people toward those who claim that they can fix things. They can run things. So, the strong-man, strong-person it is now--phenomenon: let's hope nothing goes horribly wrong in France, tomorrow. But we see that rise of authoritarianism. It reminds us just enough about the period between the 1st and 2nd World Wars, which was the absolute, most horrible, bottom-of-the-pit period in the rise of authoritarianism. There is just enough echo from that, you know, history repeating itself as farce, I suppose--let's hope it remains a farce. Just enough echo of that to put my nerves on edge.

Russ Roberts: George?

George Will: What this conversation needs is a good, robust pessimism. And I'm here to--I'm here to be the wet blanket at this moveable feast. I subscribe to the Ohio-in-1895 theory of history, so named by me for the little known fact that in Ohio in 1895 there were two automobiles; and they collided. When Earl Weaver was managing the Baltimore Orioles--he was a short, irascible, dyspeptic, Napoleonic little figure--and when he was out of sorts which he always was by the third inning he was the scourge of American League umpires. He'd come barreling out of the dugout, stick his chin in the chest of a much larger umpired and shout, 'Are you going to get any better or is this it?' This is it. We see it on American campuses and we know that what happens on campus doesn't stay on campus. We see on campus a rising generation of extremely badly-parented young people who really do not like the 1st Amendment; and when it goes, everything goes. We have a nation--it's been 60, 70 years now since Lasswell and some other political scientists diagnosed the fact that the American people are ideologically conservative--meaning libertarian--but operationally, liberal--meaning statist. This seems to me it has gone on and demonstrated what they argued 60 years ago. The American people talk like Jeffersonians, insist upon being governed by Hamiltonians--a large omnipresent, omniprovident welfare state. They are loss-averse, which is to say once they've got something, they are not going to give it up. Case in point: the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act has never been more popular than it is today, because people said, 'Well, we've got it, and let's keep it.' So, as I say, my role here is to shoot down any little ray of sunshine.

Russ Roberts: I'm going to pile on. And I'll let David and P.J. react accordingly if they wish. So, David, you pointed out marginal tax rates have come down, but government hasn't gotten any smaller. Government continues to get larger. The nanny state continues to be more intrusive. Economics gets, as you say, the welfare state and various regulations--some have gone away. The cost of this is that everything that is bad about the current system is blamed on markets, even though it's not a market process. So, the fact that United once dragged a passenger off a plane with Federal agents is an indictment of deregulation now. I've actually read things like that. Or that airline travel is so horrible because it's just cheap. Or, the health care system proves that markets don't work--when of course we've managed to remove almost every bit of market process that could be there to start with. So, on the facts I think it's a tough argument that the glass is half full. Do you want to push back against that?

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