New at Reason

November 22, 2006

Jacob Sullum confounds the wisdom that Milton Friedman was a "conservative economist."

Comments

Larry A|11.22.06 @ 10:28AM|#

At NYT "liberal" means "person who thinks like we do." Therefore anyone else is "conservative." (See: Wrong)

|11.22.06 @ 10:54AM|#

Uh, yeah Larry, remember when the pro-war New York Times kept calling all of those protesters "conservatives?"

|11.22.06 @ 10:57AM|#

That fact that your ideology was once considered progressive or liberal, back before the Civil War, does not mean it is still liberal. Once your program has been adopted by the govenrment and endorsed by society at large, and has spent several decades being more and more firmly entrenched as the status quo, your great-great-grandsons don't merit the label "liberal" for continuing to advocate for it 150 years later.

Once upon a time, inherited monarchy was considered a progressive ideology, because it allowed society to move beyond bloody civil wars every time the rule died. It isn't considered progressive anymore, because times change.

|11.22.06 @ 11:22AM|#

Sorry, Mr. Sullum, you ARE a conservative.

|11.22.06 @ 11:44AM|#

Once your program has been adopted by the govenrment and endorsed by society at large, and has spent several decades being more and more firmly entrenched as the status quo

So, by the 70s and 80s, Democrats were already quite "conservative"? Were opponents of welfare reform downright "reactionary", then?

The funny thing to me is that outside the US, the most common meaning of "liberal" is exactly the one you're suddenly railing against. In the broadest sense of the word, most Republicans and Democrats (and many people around the world who are into the whole democracy and private enterprise thing) are "liberal".

Sorry, Joe. You guys just don't own "liberal", except in one debased sense peculiar to the United States that reads "SEE: Democratic Party".

|11.22.06 @ 12:53PM|#

I can't wait for the Cathy Young article: Some people say Friedman was a conservative; others say he was a liberal. Both sides have some good points. The end.

Actually, I think the whole flap is over the fact that "conservative" and "liberal" do not have fixed meanings (in that they change over time) and do not have consistent meanings (in that for different people, they mean different things).

For example, in the 90's I thought of conservatism as Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich defined it: small government. Period.

Now, the term generally means (to most people) the same thing as "neoconservative," meaning unswerving support for Iraq, the War on Terror, and the Bush administration in general. Then there's the modifiers "social" and "economic". Then there's the classic definitions of conservative vs. liberal being whether you were for or against the status quo. This definition serves very little purpose - there are some things I like about the status quo and some things I would change - so what am I?

Can't we just accept that the term is ambiguous and always changing? Friedman believed in small government and ideas I would most accurately label as libertarian. In the 1800's, he would be called liberal. In the current generation, "liberal" means huge, invasive government (except on a few issues). He defies categorization on the liberal/conservative spectrum.

|11.22.06 @ 2:12PM|#

Can't we just accept that the term ["conservative"] is ambiguous and always changing?

It, like "liberal", only describes eternally changing positions in the context of a synonym for "Republican" or "Democratic", respectively.

|11.22.06 @ 3:10PM|#

Eric,

Taking a global view, virtually every Republican in Congress qualifies as "liberal," as do Democrats, libertarians, Greens, Social Democrats, and Reform Party types. We would all end up in the same mass grave in Burma, Zimbabwe, or Syria.

It's easy to forget that, when you only look at domestic American politics. Thanks for pointing it out.

|11.22.06 @ 5:01PM|#

Joe:

I'd exclude a healthy portion of Greens from the broadest definition, to be fair, but absolutely so.

(Of course, when, say, European socialists carp about "hyper-liberalism", they're using the narrower definition of a collection of ideas that folks like Friedman expounded.)

|11.23.06 @ 10:28PM|#

joe wrote:
"Once your program has been adopted by the govenrment and endorsed by society at large, and has spent several decades being more and more firmly entrenched as the status quo, your great-great-grandsons don't merit the label "liberal" for continuing to advocate for it 150 years later."

So, the defining criteria for conservatism is 'adopted by the government and becomes status quo'. Criticisms then of anything adopted by the government that have been in place for some time then would be 'liberal', regardless of the nature of the policies in question. This strikes me as a definition of 'reactionarionism' rather than liberalism. Under this definition criticisms of an all volunteer military or the war on drugs and also on state sponsored social safety nets would all be considered 'liberal' movements.

Todd, I think your criticism of Cathy Young is a little off-base. While she does try to present the argument from both sides, sorting out the nuances, she usually leans towards one side in her conclusions.

|11.24.06 @ 11:58AM|#

hungry ghost,

Actually, conservative refers to efforts to maintain the existing set of power relations, while liberal refers to efforts to alter those relations to give more power to the powerless.

The adoption of a set of policies or ideas by the government and society at large can be considered evidence of an altered set of power relations becoming the "status quo," but is not always so. There is such a thing as a liberal government, working to undermine or soften an existing set of power relations. Redistributive programs like the EITC, for example, undermine the established set of power relations between the poor and the rich.

|11.24.06 @ 8:43PM|#

Joe,
Okay, but I was responding to your quote. Your most recent definition here fits in with how modern liberals define liberalism (which is fine though it's sort of a definition by 'last word.' We got the last word in on it so we get to define it). And I also appreciate how definitions shift over time. I would agree that classical liberals do not get to define and own the meaning of "liberalism" for all time any more than they get to define the word "silly." In turn, this will happen to your modern definition of the liberalism or any other term. That being said, I wonder if there's something of a difference between a shifting sense of meaning that happens slowly over time ('silly' being my example here as it once meant 'pleasant') and the definition of a political term that is quite consciously grabbed a hold of, some would say even absconded, and then is used to mean the opposite of its most recent definition. I don't object much to these slow changes in meaning of fairly general words over time but I do have some resistance to word changes that seem to be deliberate steals that come with an agenda. Perhaps libertarians should now start calling themselves 'progressives' and then after a decade or two we could start bombing wikipedia with our ideas of what is actually meant by 'progressive.' Then when we have these arguments we could say, "well, actually 'progressive' means......"

Btw, your own definition of 'liberalism' does not fully capture the word's current meaning in scope. Part of the classical definition of 'liberalism' is still included in dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Lastly, following your comment that liberalism is about altering power structures and offering power to the powerless then we could say that at least some of Friedman's positions could come under this definition as well. An all volunteer and professional army most graphically gives power back to the poor who at least now have a choice of whether they want to sign up to get killed by the Kong or seek out other opportunities. The War on Drugs disproportionately affects the poor and minorities. Lack of school choice hurts blacks and hispanics the most - and support for school choice is fairly high in their communities. A negative income tax would have provided one of the best incentives for moving out of poverty I can think of if it were ever enacted. A general support for civil liberties enables the powerless to have their voices heard. Etc.