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Increasingly, I come to hold that a serious concern for liberty will take an eclectic approach rather than rely on adherence to a self-contained ideology.
By the latter I mean a vision and attitude (a posture in deliberations) that does not recognise
- the inevitability, and
- legitimacy of heterodox partisans,
let alone
- the admissibility of a strong influence or position of power of such partisans within the government structure of a free, an open-access society.
When the appreciation of freedom as a central value takes the form of a liberalism, i.e. fortifies itself as an ideological stronghold, we observe the following typical features: Next to an ambition to be able to dominate virtually all issues with a purportedly valid explanation, and the attendant hermetically intolerant posture vis-à-vis other opinions, another distinguishing mark of such ideologies is that they tend to ignore that liberty does not only generate benefits but also produces costs.
The acknowledgement that liberty produces benefits as well as costs is not liable to debase the importance of her; to the contrary, it moves freedom away from gray theory and closer to where she belongs: reality.
As for the costs of liberty, I have recently scribbled down the below early thoughts:
Democracy is an instrument to control the price of freedom. Freedom creates costs. Productive costs and unproductive costs. Usually, the total cost of liberty will consist of both productive and unproductive costs. Democracy can help reduce the contribution of unproductive cost to the total cost of liberty.
If political contestability is reduced, unproductive costs are likely to increase. Reduced political contestability (less democracy) enhances the chances of some group(s) to instrumentalise the coercive powers of the state to engage in projects that are desirable to them but generate excessive amounts of unproductive cost.
The important thing to note, especially for libertarians, is that in a well working democracy, we may expect to hold down the cost of liberty, especially the unproductive part of it, but we will never be entirely sure in minute detail what the productive and unproductive costs are and how large their share is.
In fact, costs and benefits are categories subject to differential perception and weighing, so there will always remain a residual of costs that are real to some of us and imaginary to others.
It is quite possible that some of the items that make up the cost of liberty are more expensive than they would be under unfreedom.
A recurrent source of high costs of liberty is apt to be found in the intense
- political experimentation
that is a consequence of
- the accessibility of political power to a wide range of aspirants from all walks of life
whose open competition determines the transient personnel and stages of governmental dominance in society, instead of the commanding heights being enduringly usurped by an entrenched elite.
But comparative studies do seem to underscore quite impressively that free societies protected by vibrant democracy (mass political participation) tend to be considerably less burdened with the costs of maintaining the incumbent order than systems that curtail pluralism and open political competition.
Why?
Firstly, (1) free societies are more productive owing to the availability of more wide ranging options for acting out personal autonomy and initiative, and secondly, (2) they afford better opportunities to resist systematic abuse. Combining (1) and (2), in civil society, much that would be attempted under the aegis of the state is filtered out or accomplished more efficiently by spontaneous responses among the members of the population.
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