She explains over and over that what most Americans call “liberalism” is an ugly morass of authoritarian beliefs and policies that threaten to slow or even reverse what she calls “the Great Enrichment.” Thanks to (true) liberalism in the last three centuries, ordinary people have enjoyed a huge increase in their standard of living, roughly 3,000%, she calculates. Lamentably, few people connect their prosperity and freedom to liberal philosophy and economic policies.

McCloskey writes,

I began to realize around 2005 or so that a liberal “rhetoric” explains many of the good features of the modern world compared with earlier and illiberal regimes — the economic success of the modern world, its splendid arts and sciences, its kindness, its toleration, its inclusiveness, its cosmopolitanism, and especially its massive liberation of more and more people from violent hierarchies ancient and modern.

But there are ominous clouds. She continues:

From the Philippines to the Russian Federation, from Hungary to the United States, liberalism has been assaulted recently by brutal, scare-mongering populists. A worry. Yet for a century and a half, the relevance of liberalism to the good society has been denied in a longer, steadier challenge by gentle or not-so-gentle progressives and conservatives. Time to speak up.

Indeed so and speak up McCloskey does. The book is a collection of 50 fairly short pieces written over the last decade (some interviews, some magazine articles, some book reviews, some short essays) that advance her argument that people should stop giving power to the enemies of liberalism. Naturally, there is a considerable degree of overlap between the pieces, but that isn’t a bad thing: many readers will take her point more fully for having heard it repeated and made from different angles. What makes the book especially effective, though, is her bright and open writing style. She can go from quoting Adam Smith to referencing a Dilbert cartoon in a breath. The chapters never sound like a professor’s lectures, but instead like conversations with a very learned, very earnest individual who asks for your attention.

McCloskey approaches the project of advancing the case for liberalism from a unique perspective. She grew up on the illiberal side, receiving the standard academic schooling for aspiring economists, which means obsessing over the many alleged failures of the free market while turning a blind eye to the harm that interventionist governments often do. In a delightful chapter entitled “Deirdre Became a Modern Liberal Slowly, Slowly,” she writes that as a student she favored “a pity-driven coercion in the style of Keynes, Samuelson, and Stiglitz.” One of her college roommates, an engineering student, read Ludwig von Mises as a diversion from his class work and “learned more of the economics of a free society” than she did in hundreds of class hours revolving around “Keynes and slow socialism.” Thus, she can say to progressives (my wording): “I was long in your camp, but now I see that I was mistaken. Please consider my reasons for having changed my mind.”

One more thing. In the book, Deirdre mentions on just a very few occasions that she was born Donald but decided that she wanted to live as a woman. She does not lean on the LGBT crutch to claim increased knowledge, but among some readers her change may give her more “street cred” as a critic of big government.

Devastating shots / McCloskey’s chapters extol true liberalism and attack statism across a wide front. One issue is the freedom to move and work. Conservatives will be discomfited by her sarcastic blast at policies that take away the liberty of people to immigrate and seek to better themselves. She writes:

Under High Liberalism, as under feudal hierarchy, I am to have a liberty to regulate, through the government’s monopoly of coercion, your behavior in ways beneficial to me or my assigns. I am to have for example a liberty to prevent your entry into my trade, forcibly backed by the police. My customers would be benefited by such an entry, but I can stop it, thank God. For example, I am to have a liberty to stop Juan Valdez from coming to my country to trade peaceably with me, by a law forcibly backed by ICE.

Progressives who favor immigration and hate ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) might smile at seeing their right-wing enemies smitten, but McCloskey is just as devastating when she takes on their pet ideas.

Conservatives will be discomfited by her sarcastic blast at policies that take away the liberty of people to immigrate and seek to better themselves.

What about inequality of wealth? Isn’t it obvious that the government needs to do something to even it out? No, she replies. Wealth acquired through commercially tested betterment (a more accurate way of explaining things than the term “capitalism,” she contends) is not only fairly earned, but also benefits the consuming masses much more than the business owners. She notes that those owners keep only about 2% of the social value of the gains they produce. She writes:

Look at your computer. Or Walmart. Two percent of the social gain arising from Walmart’s early mastery of bar codes and big-scale purchasing — great betterments compared with older models of retailing — left a lot of money for the children of Sam and Bud Walton. But the rest of us were left with the 98 percent.”

Instead of griping about wealth earned in business, she suggests that progressives ought to look at the consequences of statist policies:

You should indeed worry about inequality when it is achieved by using the government to get protection for favored groups. It is what a large government, well worth capturing in order to get the protection, is routinely used for, to the detriment of the bulk of its citizens.

Remember the furor over Thomas Piketty’s 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century? Egalitarians proclaimed it a masterful work that crushed opponents of redistributionist policies. McCloskey is unfazed by his assault on liberalism. She observes:

The only countries in which Piketty finds actual, substantial rise in inequality are the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. The three cases can be explained by government policies foolishly favoring the rich, such as making it crazy-difficult to build new housing in London, which drives up the price of existing housing, owned by the rich. “Capitalism” didn’t cause the disaster of London housing. A half-socialism did.

That’s just one of the numerous instances where she informs progressives that conditions they complain about are the results of economic interventions they are responsible for.

Piketty isn’t the only anti-liberal writer whom she criticizes. Others include economist Mariana Mazzucato, whose 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Private vs. Public Sector Myths itself receives a debunking, and historian Nancy MacLean, whose Democracy in Chains hatchet job on the truly liberal James Buchanan gets called out. (See “Buchanan the Evil Genius,” Fall 2017.)

Other progressive beliefs that fall before McCloskey’s scythe include: that the West became rich because of imperialism (colonies were actually an economic drain), that minimum wage laws help poor people (they were clearly designed to harm the poor’s chances for advancement), that we face a cataclysm unless we adopt draconian environmental policies immediately (the green manifestoes would cause needless harm, mostly to the poor), and that fairness for homosexuals requires much more government intervention (liberalism is best for them and all other groups).

Perhaps the biggest of all illiberal misconceptions is that we can rely on good, competent government to solve all manner of social ills. McCloskey warns readers that such governments are very rare. Government power attracts those who see it as a means to get what they want by taking from others. She wants progressives and conservatives (especially economists) to remember that fact when they claim that the way to solve some problem is to enact a law or create a new government program.

Conclusion / Why Liberalism Works is an argumentative tour de force, but I must register a couple of minor dissents.

On education, McCloskey correctly notes that government-run schools badly serve poor communities. Instead of arguing for a separation of schooling and state, however, she favors a system of vouchers funded by taxpayers. Why do we need to have even that much state involvement? I don’t think she has considered how well a purely voluntary approach to the funding of education for the poor would work and how vouchers open the door to government meddling at the behest of the special interests she so regularly denounces.

Similarly, when it comes to dealing with natural disasters, she says that taxpayers should pay for cleanup and recovery to help the unfortunate victims, even after noting that the most effective immediate help after Hurricane Katrina came from Walmart and Home Depot. Why must government step in where insurance, free enterprise, and charity are ready and able? Elsewhere, she advises us to “stop digging in statism” and I’d suggest that it would help in that respect to get the state out of the relief business.

Back in the 18th century, Samuel Johnson advised a friend, “Clear your mind of cant,” meaning sanctimonious and hypocritical notions. As much as any recent book I can think of, McCloskey’s will help readers clear their minds of cant. This book would be an ideal gift for any progressive or conservative who is willing to listen to challenging counterarguments.