Elevator Talk, Redux

You know the rules. You have a brief elevator ride to explain your politics to a total stranger. (A Denver elevator, Boulder's aren’t big enough and Philadelphia’s are too big.) The door is closing, go!

I believe in personal freedom and individual empowerment. Both of these flourish in a bottom-up structure rather than top-down, command-and-control.

Right wing economists have long embraced this, calling it free markets, Adam Smith's invisible hand, or Hayek's distributed decision-making. But I am now seeing heightened interest on the left. Craig's list founder Craig Newark calls it "community," and New Yorker Magazine writer James Surowecki has written "The Wisdom of Crowds." Little-l libertarian blogger and UT law school professor Glenn Reynolds has highlighted the underlying technological advances in his "An Army of Davids." All these converge to expose the benefits of empowering individuals to make decisions with the facts they know.

I understand the temptation of the left to seek government solutions. The Federal government especially has massive resources and could wire every home for Internet or make us all buy hybrids or buy us all health care. All these solutions create and require centralized command-and-control, managed by some government bureaucrat who may or may not be competent, may or may not think like I do, and may or may not have my best interests at heart. I'd rather trust the 300 million consumers to try, find, and select the best programs than to have bright, educated people in Denver, Washington DC, or Turtle Bay dictate the answer.

The world laboratory of history has proven we Hayekians right. What I call "Classical Liberalism" after Ludwig von Mises's 1927 book, Liberalism, has raised nations out of poverty, empowered their citizens, and created massive wealth and innovation. Command and control societies, based on Marxism have sent affluent nations into poverty; stripped their people of rights, empowerment and personal freedom; and killed more than 100 million in the brutal police states that these societies require.

To achieve these goals, I vote Republican. While GOP politicians have disappointed me many times, they have consistently shown themselves to be better stewards of classical liberalism than the Democrats. I remain devoted to ideas and not party. Should some realignment or new movement create a Democrat party that espouses my ideals, I will join them. In my adult life, however, I have seen few examples of Democratic superiority on personal freedom. I tell my friends that "Republicans promise more freedom and frequently disappoint; Democrats promise less freedom and frequently succeed.”

Ding!

Elevator Talk Posted by jk at April 9, 2006 11:13 AM