A Procapitalist Philosopher | Mises Wire

Most contemporary political philosophers view free market capitalism with suspicion, if not outright loathing, but one exception is Gerald Gaus, who taught for many years at the University of Arizona. Gaus was by no means a Rothbardian but rather worked within the framework of public reason set forward by John Rawls, though Gaus greatly modified it. In this week s column, I d like to discuss some of the arguments about property that Gaus makes in Public Reason and Diversity: Reinterpretations of Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2022), a posthumous collection of his essays edited by his student Kevin Vallier.

The arguments about property that I m going to discuss don t depend on the public reason approach and are of great value to those who take other standpoints. Two of these arguments share a common feature. They illustrate Gaus s contention that a great deal of contemporary political philosophy suffers from neglect of empirical facts. For example, philosophers assume that

under the guise of doing ideal theory according to which we assume perfect compliance with our preferred distributive principles, we are licensed to ignore the fact that, say, market socialist regimes would almost surely employ a great deal of coercion to prevent people from starting and expanding businesses, or that governments of such states, controlling all sources of investment, would almost certainly have tremendous political power that would endanger the basic rights of their citizens.

Gaus argues that Rawls is entirely right to give priority to liberty but that he fails to realize that manifest facts about the world show that a liberal political system requires strong private property rights and a free market. In brief, if you care about civil liberties, you must support the free market:

There is powerful evidence that extensive private ownership including private ownership of capital goods and financial instruments and institutions is for all practical purposes a requirement for a functioning and free social order that protects civil liberties. It is, I think, astounding that Rawls never appreciates this, and simply assumes . . . that well-functioning markets can be divorced from private ownership in the means of production. There has never been a political order characterized by deep respect for personal freedom that was not based on a market order with widespread private ownership in the means of production.

via mises.org

I wish I had heard of Gerald Gaus many years ago. It might have changed my view of philosophy as a possible profession for one such as I was. Ach, well.