According to Deirdre McCloskey and Art Carden’s new book Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich, the answer is that people accepted what they call “the Bourgeois Deal.” In a nutshell, the deal allows innovation that can displace traditional social and economic order in return for the widespread improvement in living standards that such innovation yields. The book explains that progress happens when humans (all of them, not just a few) have the liberty to work to better themselves. The resulting innovations and other “betterments” will provide spillover benefits to others. The authors argue that the catalyst for humanity’s rapid advancement over the past few centuries was liberty, and liberty alone.
McCloskey, an interdisciplinary professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Carden, an economist at Samford University, argue that the idea of liberty began in northwestern Europe. The old social order (in Europe and elsewhere) placed nobles, clergy, and military men at the top of the social hierarchy, while merchants, artisans, and farmers were on a low plane. This began to change, beginning in the Dutch Republic around the year 1500, as people started to think that it was good to produce, trade, and earn profits. Thus began not “capitalism” (a term the authors disdain), but “innovism” and, with it, the Great Enrichment. People with a head for business were free to produce and trade, gaining for themselves if they produced what others were willing to pay for, or losing when they did not.
Liberalism and statism / Enrichment thus comes from liberty. What extinguishes liberty is force, and the worst wielders of force are governments. Write McCloskey and Carden:
Big governments exercise more power over more people — people harmlessly chatting or strumming or knitting or dealing in the economy. We believe, and so should you, that the more involuntary masters the citizens have, the worse they do, materially and spiritually. With too many masters with too much power, they are reduced to children.
That is what worries McCloskey and Carden: the possibility that we are moving in the wrong direction, constricting the sphere of liberty. There are lots of people who have grand ideas for fixing what they think is wrong with society, and they intend to accomplish them through government. Some of these ostensible benefactors are “progressive” statists and others are “conservative” statists; where they agree is that government is the proper instrument for achieving their goals. Those who oppose their schemes are properly called “liberals,” and the authors refer to themselves that way. I applaud them for working to rescue a good word from a century of abuse while at the same time clarifying our political discourse.
The authors are unabashed optimists. They know that free people will innovate, cooperate, and peacefully solve problems. But they recognize the power of pessimism to undermine freedom. Their book abounds in challenges to statists and here is one of my favorites:
You view pessimism as more honorable than optimism. Pessimism says that you really, really care about the world’s poor and les miserables, and really, really want to do more, or at least coerce other people to do more.
That’s exactly right. The most intractable opponents of liberalism in America are wealthy urbanites and academics whose lives are filled with displays of their compassion, which invariably involve government coercion.
Defending liberalism / Much of Leave Me Alone is devoted to refuting the common objections that statists have drummed into people’s minds about the imagined dangers of a truly liberal society.
One of those criticisms is that if we allow “too much” economic freedom, the result will be moral and spiritual decline. Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel, for one, complains that markets “corrupt” things that he believes should be treated on a higher level than that of “grubby” commerce. (See “The Smart Philosopher vs. the People,” Fall 2012.) McCloskey and Carden respond with vigor:
Sandel worries that the market can crowd out the sacred. A corporate financing of, say, elementary classrooms might crowd out self-critical teaching about innovism. Yet Sandel does not inform his students that financing by the state might crowd out self-critical teaching about the bad results of, say, the unthinking patriotism taught to McCloskey as a child or the unthinking environmentalism taught to Carden.
Another reason why many people reject liberalism is that they believe that economic progress for some must come at the expense of others, specifically the world’s poor. Americans are told that our wealth should make us feel guilty because it impoverishes “the downtrodden.” The statists play on that guilt to extract taxes for foreign aid and economic development programs. Problem is, those provide little benefit, except for the jobs they create for the fortunate folks who get to run them.
McCloskey and Carden push back against the zero-sum notion that wealth for the few entails poverty for the rest. They write:
For one thing, as we argue, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of the Great Enrichment, considering that getting enough food to eat is a little more important for human flourishing than another yacht to a billionaire. For another, the Enrichment has not at all been limited to Europe and its overseas extensions.… Even many very poor countries, like Bangladesh, are now bettering at a rapid pace.
Another argument against liberalism is that it will lead to “unacceptable” inequality. The rich will get way too rich, which government must prevent. The authors respond that material equality is not an ethically relevant goal, writing, “What matters is absolute material standards of living, not anger that someone else might be doing better.” Statism thrives on envy but, say the authors, we must not let it get in the way of progress.
Innovism and exploitation / McCloskey and Carden devote several chapters to refuting mistaken ideas about the reasons for the Great Enrichment.
Many economists have argued that it is the result of capital accumulation, but the authors disagree. They point out that capital, while necessary for progress, is not sufficient. Capital has existed in most societies that are above bare subsistence, and yet no enrichment took off. There won’t be any noticeable progress unless capital can be used by people to try new ideas, and that requires the liberal Bourgeois Deal.
How about education? No, that isn’t the reason either. In England and elsewhere, the enrichment was not driven by “educated” people. Most innovators had little formal schooling; instead, they had practical knowledge acquired from their work as mechanics, artisans, and engineers. To give just one revealing example, the problem of calculating longitude was not solved by an eminent scientist, but by John Harrison, an English carpenter from rural Lincolnshire. Of course, McCloskey and Carden are not against schooling, but they see no reason why government should subsidize it.
Many statists are certain that the reason why the West got rich is because of its imperialistic exploitation of hapless native peoples. That belief paves the way for government programs to redistribute wealth internationally. While the authors have nothing good to say about the imperialism of Spain, France, England, Portugal, and other colonial powers, they show that imperialism had nothing to do with those countries’ economic advancement. Quite the opposite: imperialism absorbed wealth that could have been used more productively.
Another currently popular explanation for the wealth of some nations (especially the United States) is that it was the product of slavery. Among progressives in recent years, it has become fashionable to maintain that slavery was the cause of society’s wealth and because the unfairness of slavery still has lingering effects, government reparation programs must be undertaken. The problem with this thinking, the authors respond, is that enslaving others is no way to earn great profits, much less catalyze economic growth. “Slavery,” they write, “is a common if horrible human institution. If slavery led to Great Enrichment, it would have happened in the slave societies of Greece or Rome.”
Alternative deals / For readers who still might not be sold on the attractiveness of the Bourgeois Deal, the authors contrast it with four other “deals” that humans have had thrust upon them.
There was the Blue Blood Deal, where people had to obey, pay taxes to, and fight wars for aristocrats, who might end up protecting their subjects from the coercion of other aristocrats. There was the Bolshevik Deal, the essence of which was (and is), in McCloskey and Carden’s words: “Do your assigned task, turn over the fruits of your labor for distribution by the Communist Party, and above all, do not criticize the party. Obey… and at least we will not have liquidated you.”
Don’t care for those? There is also the Bismarckian Deal, which bribed the poor to behave themselves with promises of government-provided economic security, which is the essence of the modern welfare state. What it requires of the people “is to forsake the animation of adult life and become children of the government.” Or there is the Bureaucratic Deal, which reduces economic life to an endless game of seeking permission from government functionaries. Obey all the bureaucratic rules and regulations, pay your taxes, and you can stay out of jail.
Though today’s America offers vestiges of the Bourgeois Deal, it is diluted with a blend of the Bismarckian and Bureaucratic. The latter two appeal to a lot of people who can’t imagine how much better off they would be if we purely embraced the Bourgeois Deal. The point of this book is to persuade them.
Historically, the authors know, liberalism is not the norm. The United States enjoyed liberalism for about a century and a half, but in the last hundred years statism has (re)asserted itself. The COVID pandemic is just one example of the sorts of crises in which the governments of ostensibly liberal countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand assert extraordinary powers over the lives of ordinary people, who in their concern about the crisis are willing to accept the interventions — and remain compliant after the emergency wanes. Too many people have lost (or never had) the taste for liberty.
If liberal society is to be preserved, there is no time to lose in attempting to shore up its philosophical foundations. Leave Me Alone is an estimable effort at doing that. The book is an easy, engaging read that may lead some thoughtful statists to question their premises. If you know someone like that, give him a copy.
