Rebooting Market Liberalism in a Populist Age Samuel Gregg

The German market liberal Wilhelm Röpke summed up this responsibility in a 1956 essay written in a festschrift for another liberal economist, Ludwig von Mises:

[Economics] has a humble but all the more useful mission. Amidst the passions and self-interest of politics, it must assert the logic of things, it must bring to light all the inconvenient facts and relationships, must put them in their proper place with dispassionate justice, must prick all the soap bubbles, must unmask illusion and confusion, and must defend before all the world the proposition that two and two make four. It should be the one science par excellence which disillusions, which is anti-visionary, anti-Utopian, and anti-ideological. Thus, it can render society the priceless service of cooling off political passion, of combating mass superstition, of making life hard for all demagogues, financial wizards, and economic prestidigitators.

At no time is the commitment to truth underlying this mindset more vital than in times of economic populism like our own. For free marketers who do not shirk this responsibility, it may mean unpopularity and even foregoing possibilities for career advancement. But, as Röpke stated, to do otherwise would be to betray the sanctity that lies in the truth of science to the political passions and the social emotionalism of our era.

Whether from the left or right, today s economic populists are urging us to embrace demonstrably false ideas and thus flawed policies. But they are also employing rhetoric ( market fundamentalist ) designed to marginalize those who look behind the policy sleights-of-hand and reveal truths that contradict populist narratives: that, for example, we already live in highly regulated economies; or that underlying every industrial policy are special interests seeking favors as well as legislators inclined to bestow such privileges for reasons that have little to do with the general welfare.

Populist waves come and go, but the economic damage that they inflict lasts. So too does the harm that they do to the liberal constitutionalism that places principled limits upon government power, including in the economy. Reminding us of these deeper truths is the wider and indispensable service performed by market liberals in our present age of populism.

via lawliberty.org

Truth.

Samuel Greg.