(2016-08-05) Bowman Im A Neoliberal Maybe You Are Too

Sam Bowman: I’m a neoliberal. Maybe you are too. There is a emerging and growing group of people, particularly coming out of the libertarian movement, that lacks a useful descriptive term. These are people who are libertarianish — but they are fundamentally different to the mainstream libertarian movement when it comes to important values and approaches, and frankly lots of libertarians hate them for being, in their eyes, too statist or leftist.

We like markets — a lot. We think that markets are by far the best way of organising most human affairs that involve scarce resources

This means that markets and market-like systems are desirable in many, many places they’re not present at the moment — healthcare, education, environmental policy, organ allocations, traffic congestion, land-use planning.

We are liberal consequentialists.

There are no inherent rights that override this.

We care about the poor. (Liberaltarian)

We care about the welfare of everyone in the world, not just those in the UK.

We base our beliefs on empirics, not principles

quantitative empirical research is what we look for. We try not to be dogmatic

We think the world is getting better

We believe that property rights are very important

Predictable and formalised ownership of scarce resources is extremely important.

But we’re comfortable with redistribution, in principle

Because we’re consequentialists we don’t think that property rights are morally significant in and of themselves — they’re a useful rule that allows the economy to function properly but there is no intrinsic value to them. People don’t really deserve the talents they’re born with any more than they deserve to have been born in a rich country

justifiable, if it’s done without depressing economic growth too much