ALL INCREASE IN THE INTEREST IN LIBERTY HAS BEEN IN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM: BECAUS

ALL INCREASE IN THE INTEREST IN LIBERTY HAS BEEN IN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM: BECAUSE IT”S MORAL, AND LIBERTINISM (ROTHBARDIANISM) ISN’T

(reposted from a comment to Boettke)

As far as I know, all movement toward the libertarian spectrum over the past decade has been toward the Classical Liberal values, which are of psychological and normative construction, rather than toward the anarchic, economic and empirical.

Morals move political orders, not utility. If utility moved political orders the protestant countries would have spent, not engaged in austerity. But humans will suffer great losses to punish the immoral. We could not have evolved as a species otherwise.

Economic universalism was one thing under homogenous polities. But, particularly after Rawls, and the postmodern assault on the west, academia, in no small part because it appealed to the new broader customer base, and its willingness to pay for access to universities, proposed universal morality instead of recognizing that moral codes reflect reproductive strategies, and that no universal moral code is expressible in politics across morally heterogeneous peoples. Not unless we invert Pareto and simply agree to punish the most moral people and fund the least moral peoples. (Which is what we do, which is why redistribution is dysgenic, and politically factionalizing.)

So until economics re-incorporates morality into the study of political economy, economics (particularly the aggregation ‘dishonest socialism’ of the Keynesians) will remain a tool of state expansion and friction creation rather than a ‘science’ which corresponds to long term reality.

We do what we measure. A fortune 1000 company can burn its brand value for short term profits. A people an burn its normative capital for short term consumption. But in the end, the ability both the brand and the polity to survive competition long term is harmed by that consumption of accumulated capital.

We have to put morality back into economics.

This is what Mises got wrong – or at least, never managed to get right.