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Keynes' Invisible Hand, and Smith's
In Economics and the Indeterminacy of Freedom (2) - The Invisible Hands of Adam Smith and Keynes, I have noted that both adherents of laissez faire and of dirigism refer us to benignly teleological impersonal mechanisms when the question is raised whether the good they mean to achieve with their policy prescriptions is actually feasible and how it is to be brought about. In a word: both camps rely in their justifications of the proper policy on some form of invisible hand - engage in a certain type of action and this will set in motion an opaque process of implementation capable of bringing about the anticipated improvement.
Delivering the Things We All Want
While reading this article by Bill Mitchell on Democracy in Europe Requires Eurozone Breakup, I was struck by this line:
[I]f you were to design it [The Masstricht Treaty, IGTU] on principles where the role of government was to maximise the well-being of its citizens then there is no way you would have come up with the Eurozone.
Source. Emphasis added, IGTU
The idea of the public good ( = the common weal), seems to me to be another absolute point of reference that both camps have in common - the laissez faire crowd and the dirigistes. By "absolute" I mean, the category is invoked to reassure the audience that something is being proposed that DOES as a matter of fact unconditionally enhance what is good to everybody.
No Such Thing as the Public Good (the Common Weal)
This is a rhetorical trick that both sides frequently use to present their cause as furthering outcomes that every reasonable person is expected to indubitably endorse.
The truth of the matter is that neither of the two camps is in possession of the key to the public good, nor is anyone else. For the simple reason that there is no such thing as the public good.
Both sides advertise their convictions and deem to be proving their doctrine in terms of something that has no real existence.
Fuzziness of Sociological Categories - The Common Weal and Freedom
Social phenomena are of extraordinary complexity. Almost inevitably, a simple, low-performance tool like a single word is incapable of mapping mathematical chaos onto a semantic foil.
Like the term 'the common weal', the category 'freedom' is hopelessly over-specified, by which I mean: it embraces an overload of particles of meaning, perhaps better: contributory meanings that invite, among other problems, incompatible interpretations either by virtue of different interpreters taking different stances or by dint of being equivocal and plurivalent to any interpreter to begin with.
This is not to say that there is no way in which the terms can be used responsibly. But they must be used carefully as they inevitably suffer from a lack of definition ('fuzziness') that rules out broad semantic concurrence as in a term like FC Liverpool. We can never define such a term (like freedom or the public good) in a way everyone would fully agree with. What is more, I may give a pretty workable definition of freedom by using certain aptly descriptive criteria. While this sketch may allow me to sensibly discern much of what distinguishes a free society from an unfree one, that bundle of criteria (robust conditions of freedom) can never be specified tightly enough to give us unequivocal answers to many of the concrete social policy issues over which we tend to argue.
If we wish to talk about freedom - and the common weal, for that matter, which is a contributory meaning of freedom, and vice versa - we must build into our meta-theory of freedom, an account of the fuzziness of the term, and the important implication that people build freedom around its fuzziness and stumble on liberty, her possibilities and problems by taking very different approaches towards her.
PS - Freedom Does Not Prejudge the Common Weal (CW) - Nor Are Partisan Notions of CW Automatically Compatible with Freedom
In his very good introduction to MMT, J. D. Alt uses this formulation in promising us a better world of maximal government spending, where we are
There is a complete symmetry between laissez faire supporters and the dirgistes, in assuming naively that the common weal, and the elements that may be considered to be adding to it, are quasi-objective givens that only need to be discovered and picked up, as it were. The problem that I see with liberal visions of a non-interventionist best society remain virulent in dirigist blueprints for the common weal. We are free to disagree. And disagree we do.
Liberals are not entitled to rope freedom in for their claims of the public good, as freedom does not contain information from which to unequivocally deduce any such common weal. Equally, the dirigistes are not entitled to disregard freedom in their conceit that projects they favour are necessarily commensurate with the public good.
To approximate the squishy concept of the common weal as best we can, we must remain free to disagree, argue, and compromise, and maintain a political infrastructure that supports a genuine culture of dissension.
Conclusion
The institutions of freedom may be viewed as performing two functions - a facilitative function and a correctional function.
In her facilitative function, she enables us to organise ourselves voluntarily, individually and/or collectively (as in a firm or the market) and therefore substitute personal initiative for central leadership as in a tribe, extended family (Sippe) or a command society. Economically, we enjoy efficiency gains from the accommodation of more creativity, personal thrust, competition and complementarity. There is not just one discoverer, there are millions of discoverers. there is not just one entrepreneurs, there are millions of entrepreneurs.
The correctional function ensures that whatever mistakes we make as a collectivity, these mistakes remain always open to arraignment and revision. We, as a multitudinous community of free and equal human beings, can always make an effort at turning around maldevelopment. We are under protection when we challenge the extant order.
If we wish to talk about freedom - and the common weal, for that matter, which is a contributory meaning of freedom, and vice versa - we must build into our meta-theory of freedom, an account of the fuzziness of the term, and the important implication that people build freedom around its fuzziness and stumble on liberty, her possibilities and problems by taking very different approaches towards her.
PS - Freedom Does Not Prejudge the Common Weal (CW) - Nor Are Partisan Notions of CW Automatically Compatible with Freedom
In his very good introduction to MMT, J. D. Alt uses this formulation in promising us a better world of maximal government spending, where we are
paying ourselves to create things - public goods and services - we all benefit from in profound ways.
Source. Emphasis added.He cites projects - Green dreams - that precisely do not fulfil his promise of universal concurrence: like the removal of traditional forms of energy generation in favour of "renewables".
There is a complete symmetry between laissez faire supporters and the dirgistes, in assuming naively that the common weal, and the elements that may be considered to be adding to it, are quasi-objective givens that only need to be discovered and picked up, as it were. The problem that I see with liberal visions of a non-interventionist best society remain virulent in dirigist blueprints for the common weal. We are free to disagree. And disagree we do.
Liberals are not entitled to rope freedom in for their claims of the public good, as freedom does not contain information from which to unequivocally deduce any such common weal. Equally, the dirigistes are not entitled to disregard freedom in their conceit that projects they favour are necessarily commensurate with the public good.
To approximate the squishy concept of the common weal as best we can, we must remain free to disagree, argue, and compromise, and maintain a political infrastructure that supports a genuine culture of dissension.
Conclusion
The institutions of freedom may be viewed as performing two functions - a facilitative function and a correctional function.
In her facilitative function, she enables us to organise ourselves voluntarily, individually and/or collectively (as in a firm or the market) and therefore substitute personal initiative for central leadership as in a tribe, extended family (Sippe) or a command society. Economically, we enjoy efficiency gains from the accommodation of more creativity, personal thrust, competition and complementarity. There is not just one discoverer, there are millions of discoverers. there is not just one entrepreneurs, there are millions of entrepreneurs.
The correctional function ensures that whatever mistakes we make as a collectivity, these mistakes remain always open to arraignment and revision. We, as a multitudinous community of free and equal human beings, can always make an effort at turning around maldevelopment. We are under protection when we challenge the extant order.
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