For the distinction between making and taking, see the previous post.
PERSONAL FREEDOM AS THE NATURAL GROUND OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM
Stephen Balch has identified the “anti-taking” ideologies as “classical liberal or libertarian” (2014, 16n.16). He has also spoken of “pro-maker rights theories, such as those of John Locke” (315). In passages like the following, he certainly seems to be endorsing classical liberalism or libertarianism as the moral argument of his book:
At the great anomaly’s heart lies the diminution of the part force plays in the distribution of status and goods. That signal "achievement"—if it can be called such, a lot turned on luck—gave birth to a ‘World-Safe-for-Making (the underlying meaning of bourgeois constitutionalism, wherein, through a variety of normative and institutional practices, coercive power was contained in scope, increased in predictability, policed against private abuse, and when publicly employed, generally to serve, not subvert, industrious behavior. Spared senseless exactions and arbitrary demands, science, invention, manufacture, commerce and banking gradually became career paths of choice for society’s best and brightest. Because of this, when further powered by science, the World-Safe-for-Making (WSM) sparked a tremendous explosion of productive behavior and consumable wealth, the second ‘Cambrian’ (after agriculture) of human history. Unquestionably a major metaevolutionary turn due to a new keystone (311).
When he speaks about “the diminution of the part force plays in the distribution of status and
goods,” I’m reminded of James Payne’s History of Force, which
makes the Lockean libertarian argument that declining violence means increasing liberty,
and that the only justified use of force is as the reactive forcible punishment
of those who initiate force.
When he speaks of
the Western bourgeoisie as the makers, this evokes Deirdre McCloskey’s argument for liberalism as the celebration of the “bourgeois virtues.”
But then I wonder why Balch is not more vigorous in affirming the classical liberalism or libertarianism of WSM. The answer seems to be that while he can give WSM one or two cheers, he can’t give it three cheers because of its “critical weakness” in failing to separate “property rights” from “personal rights.” He explains this failure as arising from John Locke’s assertion of “property rights as an outgrowth of personal rights” (320). He cites paragraph 6 of the Second Treatise, where Locke explains the law of nature as a no-harm principle rooted in the equal liberty of human beings: “that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.” He also could have cited paragraph 27, where Locke grounds property ownership in self-ownership: “Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.” A man makes something his property by mixing his labor with it. Elsewhere Locke identifies “labor” as “human industry,” which suggests that what he calls “labor” is what we today would call “human capital.”
I have argued that Locke’s rooting of ownership in
self-ownership is confirmed by the evolutionary neuroscience of
interoception—the neural self-ownership of the body.
The “critical
weakness” here, Balch says, is the failure “to separate the liberties of commerce
from the emancipation of individuals in their intellectual, electoral,
behavioral, and moral capacities" (320). The
WSM would be better off, he suggests, if it protected economic liberty but
repressed personal liberty (the “intellectual, electoral, behavioral, and moral
capacities”). But I don’t see how that
would work. For example, if intellectual
liberty were suppressed, that would have made the Scientific Revolution
impossible, and yet Balch insists that the WSM would have been impossible without
modern science.
Balch identifies four ways in which WSM has been weakened by its promotion of
personal liberty (178-180, 317-320; 2014, 16-18). (1) The disarming of the makers—particularly, the waning of the tradition of trained middle-class
militia—makes it unlikely that people would ever again rise up in arms to
defend their liberties from tyranny. (2)
Modern mass democracy has favored the expansion of the modern welfare state,
which has become a new taker regime, although the “take” is not just for
a few takers but widely distributed among many. (3) The personal freedom of thought and
speech has given too much power to intellectual elites who attack the liberal
social and political order by elevating taking over making. (4) The personal freedom to choose hedonistic lifestyles--such as pursuing sexual pleasure without producing or caring for children--weakens our moral character and lowers our genetic
fitness.
Although I see some
truth in all four of these points, I see no reason here to conclude that the WSM
has been, or will soon be, destroyed by its promotion of personal liberty. Ultimately,
this comes down to a question of empirical evidence. Is there any evidence for a trade-off between
economic freedom and personal freedom, as you argue, so that as personal
freedom goes up, economic freedom goes down?
On the contrary, it seems to me, that in most countries, higher personal
freedom is correlated with higher economic freedom. I see evidence for that in the Human Freedom Index.
In the Human Freedom Index, for each of 87
indicators of freedom, countries are scored on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 represents the
highest level of freedom. The scores for each of 12 subcategories are
averaged. These are then averaged for personal freedom and economic
freedom. The final score for freedom in general is the average of these
two, so that personal freedom and economic freedom are weighed equally. The Human Freedom Index 2025 ranks countries based on data for 2023.
Here is a sampling
of the rankings, with the scores for Personal Freedom (PF), Economic Freedom
(EF), and Human Freedom (HF).
1.
Switzerland
(PF: 9.77, EF: 8.28, HF: 9.15)
2.
Denmark
(PF: 9.75, EF: 8.02, HF: 9.15)
3.
New
Zealand (PF: 9.51, EF: 8.33, HF: 9.02)
4.
Ireland
(PF: 9.54, EF: 8.05, HF: 8.92)
15. USA (PF: 9.15, EF: 8.10, HF: 8.71)
19. UK (PF: 9.12, EF: 7.88, HF: 8.60)
162. Sudan (PF: 3.97, EF: 4.00, HF: 3.98)
162. Yemen (PF: 3.19, EF: 5.08, HF: 3.98)
164. Iran (PF: 3.36, EF: 4.37, HF: 3.78)
165. Syria (PF: 2.31, EF: 4.62, HF: 3.27)
The United States ranks at 15th in Human Freedom, 22nd
in Personal Freedom, and 5th in Economic Freedom.
I don’t see any
confirmation here of Balch's prediction that increasing personal freedom is
correlated with decreasing economic freedom. On the contrary, economic freedom and personal freedom seem to go up or down together.
There are a few exceptions, however. For 2023, Singapore ranks #2 in economic freedom out of 165 countries (score: 8.50), but only #84 in personal freedom (score: 7.19), which gives Singapore an overall human freedom rank of #51 (score: 7.73). Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) shows the same pattern of high economic freedom but low personal freedom: #1 out of 165 in economic freedom (score: 8.55), but #88 in personal freedom (score: 7.05), with an overall human freedom ranking of #53 (score: 7.68).
Having been a British colony, Hong Kong was returned to Chinese authority in 1997, and beginning around 2012, China imposed severe restrictions on personal freedom in Hong Kong. For the year 2012, the Human Freedom Index ranked Hong Kong as #1 in human freedom, #1 in economic freedom, and #18 in personal freedom. So there was a big drop in personal freedom from 2012 to 2023.
Would Balch have to say that Singapore and Hong Kong today have achieved the most desirable form of the "World Safe for Making," because they have high economic freedom but low personal freedom, and so they are free from the social weaknesses that arise from too much personal freedom?
The problem, however, is that both Singapore and Hong Kong show what Balch regards as the greatest social weakness of modern liberal societies--a low fertility rate. Singapore's total fertility rate is 1.26. Hong Kong's is 1.44. This is well below the replacement level of 2.1. By comparison, the fertility rate for the U.S. is 1.79.
I don’t
understand why Balch thinks the “demographic transition" is a threat to "human species survival" (183, 188). Obviously, with over 8.3 billion people alive
today, the world is not underpopulated. Even
those free societies with low birth rates can have growing populations as long as
their freedom attracts immigrants. That was Locke's argument for open borders and evolutionary group selection.
Parents investing in a small number of children is a prudent
reproductive strategy in certain ecological conditions. It can be explained by an "embodied capital theory of life history evolution" (Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan). There are many trade-offs in
parental investment. One of them is the
tradeoff between the quantity of offspring (investing in a large number
of offspring but with each receiving little investment) and the quality of children (investing in a lesser number of
offspring but with each receiving a lot of investment). In a bourgeois liberal society, many parents will choose quality over quantity.
I see no evidence of
any weakening in the natural desire for parental care in America or elsewhere. The Pew Research Center has reported that the
percentage of American women ages 40-44 who are mothers rose to 86% in 2016
from a low of 80% in 2006 and close to the high of 90% in 1976.
Presumably, Balch would support governmental programs for raising fertility rates. But there's no reason to believe that such programs work. Strangely, he claims that
Italian Fascism and German National Socialism were “genocratic utopias” in supporting ethnic genetic interests, as argued by Pierre Van Den Bergh and Frank Salter (57, 102, 133, 186)? But Salter has complained that the drop in
the total fertility rate for native Germans continued under the Nazis, and that
none of the “ethnic states” has ever raised the fertility of their ethnic
group. As I noted in a previous post, despite Victor Orban's vigorous "pro-family" policies, Hungary still has one of the lowest fertility rates for any country.
IS THE WELFARE STATE A NEW TAKING REGIME?
Another way in which personal freedom subverts economic freedom, according to Balch, is through the expansion of the modern welfare state into a new kind of taking regime. He worries about the "'taking-favoring' redistributive creeds like social democracy" that promote the modern welfare state. He muses:
The heightened power . . . that the "world-made-safe-making" gave the propertyless led to a conceptual inversion, a means of preventing state redistribution become one for advancing and legitimating it. The triumph of personhood over property secured slavery's demise, full equality of women and other historic achievements, but it also transformed property from the cynosure of freedom into a political parceled entitlement.
. . .
It's true, that unlike yesteryear, today's "take" is not just for the mighty but widely distributed among (as well as taken from) all-and-sundry. With votes to bestow on politicos, some of the masses have become net "taking" winners, a plus perhaps in the scales of justice, if not necessarily for social productivity and individual autonomy (2014, 18).
Against this, I have argued that a capitalist welfare state can be compatible with individual liberty in securing both personal freedom and economic freedom. Here what I argue is similar to what Friedrich Hayek recommended in Part 3 of The Constitution of Liberty, which was entitled "Freedom in the Welfare State."
The most extensive welfare states in Europe are in the Nordic social democracies--Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland. Although they are sometimes identified as democratic socialist systems, they are not really socialist in any strict sense. Rather, these are all capitalist welfare states in that they combine social welfare programs with largely free-market capitalism.
This is indicated by their Human Freedom Index rankings for Human Freedom (HF), Personal Freedom (PF), and Economic Freedom.
HF PF EF
Denmark #2 #2 #9
Finland #7 #9 #15
Iceland #11 #11 #23
Sweden #12 #6 #35
Norway #16 #4 #48
This compares favorably with the U.S.--#15 (HF), #22 (PF), and #5 (EF).
With the possible exception of Norway, there does not seem to be any correlation between a high ranking for personal freedom and a low ranking for economic freedom.
To me, this indicates that the capitalist welfare state belongs to the "World Safe for Making." It is not a new taking regime.
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