fatvegan

I was reading the beginnings of a book by some Liberal party member the other day. He was talking about free markets, and freedom and letting people make the most of their lives. He said that the best society is what "free and equal people make of it." Which is a nice sentiment. He railed for a few pages on the horror of collectivism, which is everything that is not liberal. So socialism, communism, welfare states and any form of government intervention to achieve equality is collectivist.

Obviously, he didn't like collectivism because it didn't respect the individual, and because it was the work of Satan. And, importantly, because it values the society over the individual. I find this very interesting. If there's one complaint I have of economic liberalism, it's that it sacrifices the individual for the economy and "society". Individuals aren't to be free because they should be free, but because that's how we build our happy model world. We have to treat everyone the same way, because anything else is privileging some at the expense of others. It isn't a pragmatic belief, that responds to issues as they arise. It's a global vision, amazingly out of touch with human history.

My main love of the welfare state stems from it's unwillingness to value the society over the individual. We don't do it because we have some grand vision. We do it because we care about people. About individuals. Because we don't think it's valid to protect some happy ideology by allowing people to be miserable. We improvise. We're content to implement messy solutions. The welfare state doesn't appeal to grand ideologies at all. It's appealing to ideas of common decency and human traditions of mutual concern. It's about treating each person in the society as an individual and not a behavioural model.

The irony is, we use state power to crush individuals' attempts to insulate themselves from economic insecurity. The economy works best when everyone is powerless. All the textbooks will tell you. So the state intervenes to make everyone powerless. Unions violate our grand vision, so we legislate them away. Except that you can't intervene to eliminate corporations because they're the engine rooms of the economy. So you don't quite make everyone powerless and equal.

If anything is collectivist and naively ideological it's the dogma of the free market.