The Liberal Trilemma

MANY PEOPLE are looking for the reason to explain the Greek/Euro mess. Edmund Conway in the London Daily Telegraph has as good a reason as any. The current crisis, he writes, puts politicians face to face with the Rodrik Trilemma, conceived by Dani Rodrik of Harvard. Here’s the concept as Rodrik describes it in his blog:

I have an "impossibility theorem" for the global economy... It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.

Let’s just say that if you combine all three ingredients you get Greece.

But the trilemma problem is not a universal problem. It is only a liberal problem. That’s because in the United States, at least, only liberals want to maximize the power of the state. In liberal speak “democracy” and “national sovereignty” are codes words for the slogan “All Power to the Liberals.”

Liberals acquire and maintain political power by distributing privileges and bounties to their supporters. When you decide to do that, you inevitably press the pedal to the metal on “democracy” and “national sovereignty.” And that means that you are bound to sacrifice individual and national prosperity (“global economic integration”) on the altar of politics. Sooner or later, you hit the wall. Just like Greece.

In other words, under liberals, democracy means the out-and-out conversion of the limited constitutional state into a patronage state.

When you get a single political party wedded to the patronage concept, you get the United States. When both political parties are patronage parties, then you get Thailand and riots in the streets. Here is a telling report from Bangkok.

The central problem is that Thailand is torn between two rival camps, each led and directed by rich and powerful factions. Though ostensibly divided by ideological differences, in reality the anti-government Redshirts and the pro-government Yellowshirts are best characterised as competing patronage networks, bound together primarily by personal loyalties and emotional attachments.

Nominally, liberals are not too keen on national sovereignty, if it means cold wars on Communism or global wars on terrorism. But the opportunity to acquire political power is too tempting to ignore. So they have replaced real wars with the “moral equivalent of war,” making every issue into a domestic political war. They are keen on spending trillions of dollars to win gussied up national wars on poverty and wars on hate. In the 1970s we had an energy crisis that required a national project to convert to syn-fuels. Now they have invented a global warming crisis that requires a national project to convert to “green energy.” What does that mean? It means government spending on subsidies and privileges to reward favored elite constituencies and crony capitalists in the energy sector.

When it comes to global economic integration liberals are all in favor as long as it puts global commerce under control of a global political elite. Otherwise what’s the point?

Rodrik Trilemma? If you ask me it’s a simple dilemma. You want political power? I guess you don’t like global economic growth. You like a free economy? Then you’ll insist on limited government. What is so hard about that?

For conservatives, the Rodrik Trilemma is meaningless. Conservatives don’t want to plunder the state to service special interests. Democracy for conservatives is merely the election of practical men and women to write practical laws to secure the blessings of liberty. Conservatives don’t want to deploy national resources into moral equivalents of war that divide the nation. They just want to use national power to apply occasional sharp blows to the heads of thug dictators and militant anti-Western terrorist networks. All of this can be done with limited government and a national sovereignty powered by a defense budget of about 5 percent of GDP.

I listened over the weekend to President Peyton R. Helm of Muhlenberg College tell his graduating class not to retreat into a subculture like Fox News or MSNBC where everyone agrees with them. Then he told them a parable about wonderful government programs and antisocial reluctance to pay taxes. Hey Mr. President down there in that liberal echo chamber. What do you think of British Prime Minister Cameron’s simple concept: There is such a thing as Society. It’s just not the same thing as the State.

I used to think that once conservatives had shown liberals what limited government could do that everyone would go home and live happily ever after. But after the experience of the Bush years and the young Obama administration I have become sadder and wiser. Liberals won’t ever stop preferring power over prosperity. Not until the American people present them with a Tea Party Dilemma: Get back to limited government or we revoke your hall passes.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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