“Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato”—Benito Mussolini

 Mussolini's fascist slogan, translated as "everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state," is the underlying theme of an article published by Mariana Mazzucato on Time Magazine's Web site as It's 2023. Here's How We Fixed the Global Economy.

This utopia, straight out of the fascist playbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, and possibly even owing an intellectual debt to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, will have its own Albert Speers bringing forth the next generation of fascist architecture. One wonders why this splendid utopia has not been brought forth in the past, as Bellamy's book projected; and why so many of the attempts to achieve heaven-on-earth have succeeded primarily in bringing hell-on-earth to the world in addition to the domestic population.

We only need to look to California, our own little laboratory of utopian social engineering, to observe the results of efforts that Mazzucato would endorse. Escalating homelessness, a failing high-speed rail project, and a power grid, due to an emphasis on renewables, that is inadequate to meet demand are just the high points for a state that is losing large numbers of businesses and citizens due to high costs, taxes, and regulations.

It leads one to wonder, who is it that really ignores empirical data? How is it that success stories like Hong Kong (created by John Cowperthwaite and described by Milton Friedman) and post-World-War-2 Germany (the German Wirtschaftswunder, heavily influenced by the economic liberal and Mont Pelerin Society member Ludwig Erhard) are ignored. And why is it that failures like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, North Korea, etc. are also ignored. At this moment, I believe it is due to our imaginations—our imaginations that make it possible to believe in a return to the Garden of Eden.

The Myth of a (Classical) Liberal or Libertarian Utopia

Cover via Amazon

In reading online articles and blogs it is common to find references to a "libertarian utopia."  These references are both supportive and derisive, distorting what I will claim is the idea of true liberalism.  Hayek is even referenced in this Freeman article bemoaning the fact that "we lack a liberal Utopia."  The problem with this phrase first became clear to me when I read the following words:

Contemporary socialists – "light" totalitarians in mindset and vocabulary – go wrong when they imagine that liberals are busily planning the perfect society, the best that is possible in the world, but of opposite sign to their own. [emphasis in original]¹

The reality is that there is no liberal Utopia.  Liberalism and its modern-day progeny, libertarianism, are processes rather than destinations.  In the same sense that the scientific process leads to the discovery of laws of nature, liberalism leads to the discovery of that society that best conforms to human values.  Such a society defies planning, as planning implements the values of a small elite.  It also stifles the wide-ranging experimentation – through trial and error – that is necessary to discover the institutions and businesses that are necessary in building a society that supports human values.

Of course, one may wonder, "What are human values?"  I tend to think, as did Ludwig von Mises, that most people prefer prosperity over poverty, freedom over slavery, and life over death.  There are, and always will be, predators who prey on those who live peacefully and productively.  The latter will use freedom to create the cost-effective defenses that maximize the cost of predatory behavior, eventually discarding the unwieldy blunt instrument of the state.

What is needed then is a total commitment to the free market and its concomitant competition as discovery procedure by which society progresses.  There can be no fear of unacceptable outcomes, as outcomes will reflect human values.  Yes, in some areas of the world those outcomes might be repulsive to modern westerners, but eventual progress in those regions is not going to be accelerated by murdering, threatening, or lecturing the population.

What is most important is to embrace the idea that liberalism – the free (or freed) market – is the platform upon which progress depends.  The end state defies prior description, but we can have confidence that it will conform to human values.

^*In the body of the post an unmodified reference to "liberal" is a reference to "classical liberal."
¹Revel, Jean-François, Last Exit to Utopia, (2009 New York, Encounter Books), 54.