RedStateEclectic : Efficiency and Freedom (1/3)

Freedom enables humankind to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency. The individual can

exercise her own rationality freed from tutelage, and

build and benefit from a vastly expanded range of choices.

The individual becomes part and parcel of a comprehensive game of improved efficiency played by all members of society.

However, we should not assume that freedom is a machine producing a uniform efficiency-product.

A Spectrum of Efficiencies

Freedom is a changeable state of affairs that can assume - potentially and in reality - the form of many different alternatives, some of which may lie outside the area that some of us would recognise as proper freedom.

While no one can or should be stopped to say "this isn't freedom in my eyes," we ought to understand that there cannot be a uniform concept of freedom. There is, as it were, a whole stack of cards on each of which is more or less legitimately written "liberty." Politics is playing a deck of cards called "liberty."

What possible arrangement of liberty we may choose has to do with the concept of efficiency. For efficiency, one of the great pluses of liberty, can be achieved in different ways depending on the boundary conditions from which to work out the most efficient solution.

Competing Boundary Conditions - The Need for Political Management

This only goes to underscore the importance of responsible political participation and the inestimable significance of honest specialists of political representation.

For in a world of competing arrangements of liberty, not only is it important to

make good (i.e. more efficient) choices as opposed to bad (rather inefficient) one's, not only is it - simultaneously - important to

make choices faithful to popular will, while balancing vox populi against robust conditions of freedom, the latter being exempt from reversal owing to short-term political moods.

What is more, the good politician, the sensitive legislator must

uphold the credibility of a political landscape that encloses differing and competing, yet cognate concepts of liberty.

Politics alters the boundary conditions that determine the specific instantiation of an efficient outcome. Different political parameters, different efficient outcomes.

While conceptually perhaps subtle and hard to give a graphic account of, a society favouring income equality more than wealth and growth may have its set of efficient outcomes, just as a society with a preference of wealth and growth over income equality may attain efficient outcomes relative to its political boundary conditions.

Liberty's Ethical Multiplier

Commitment to a certain type of boundary conditions is a matter of ethical choice.

The right to ethical choice is surely an option characteristic of a free society, and hence disagreement on arrangements of freedom are inherent in liberty.

This being so, to be sure, there is still no reason to revel or languish in moral relativism. To the contrary, we need to defend and justify our best insight into desirable boundary conditions of freedom and efficiency against erroneous competing views, while being conscious of the need to respectfully tolerate others who may subscribe to an interpretation of freedom that is sufferably different from ours, or perhaps, at least occasionally, even better, as we may find out, if we compete with patience and an open mind.

The Economy - An Extensive Derivative of Permits and Taboos

The first sentence in the below quote from Thomas Sowell resonates strongly with me, as it makes it utterly clear that the economic system is incapable of creating its own preconditions, but depends on political acts and support organised by the state if an economic order is ever to be viably operative:

[W]hile economic systems of various sorts boast of their achievements in bringing goods and services to people, what makes them all economic systems is that they have systematic procedures for preventing people from getting goods and services, denying them access to natural resources, tools or equipment for production, and limiting their ability to work all the tasks they would prefer [...] [A]ll economic systems must use some method of denial.

Sowell, T. (1989), Knowledge and Decisions, Basic Books, p. 45

That is to say, economic systems are not economic systems but extensive derivatives of permits and taboos culturally produced, legally defined, and governmentally enforced.

[T]here are inherent constraints, given the limitations of nature and the unlimited desires of man, and economic systems are simply artificial schemes of administering the inherent scarcities.

[Large enough a class of, G.T.]

... scarcities ... exist independently of the particular economic systems, and would exist if there were no economic system at all and people simply fought over everything they wanted.

Economic institutions exist to introduce elements of rationality and efficiency into the use of inputs and outputs.

And so do political attitudes, convictions and determinations that frame the elements that our rationality is allowed to handle and the paths that are open to the malleable flow of efficient solutions.