Russ Roberts: evaluation

Transcript context

…In a sentence, where has classical liberalism gone wrong? It’s ironic. I’m going to cheat and answer in a few sentences. Our age, right now, may change, but our age right now is obsessed with inequality. And it disturbs me deeply that inequality is conflated with poverty. They’re not the same thing. A lot of people blame the condition of the poor on inequality as if the world is a zero-sum game. You press the person who says it — “Oh, of course I don’t mean that.” But I think there’s an implicit idea that the inequality comes at the expense of the poor. There are cases where that’s true, of course, where rent-seeking and other privileges that people have taken from the government — from government power — have allowed them to impoverish others. But most people who are poor are poor because they do not have the tools, the skills to contribute in the modern economy. They have circumstances that keep them from rising. I’ve been deeply saddened by the failure of people on so-called our side — the people who believe in smaller government — to think at all about that, to think at all about human flourishing by the people who are struggling. I think that has been a terrible mistake. At the same time, we’ve failed to make the case for freedom, and to the extent that even saying that seems foolish . . . It’s not literally true, but the last prominent politician, I think, who made the case for liberty and freedom in and of itself was Maggie Thatcher. Reagan, to some extent, also, but Maggie Thatcher did it relentlessly. That’s so out of fashion in our times. We’ve become so consequentialist. The idea that liberty is a principle worth defending in and of itself is really, really difficult. I find it strange that people tie small government to the Republican party. The Republican party doesn’t make the case for liberty. Republican politicians love to spend money. I like to say that the only difference between . . . Well, both Republicans and Democrats like to spend money on their friends. They just have different friends. Except they have one friend in common, which is the financial sector, so they both coddle the financial sector because that’s where the money is. We don’t have a political home for our ideas, and I think the intellectual home has failed badly for our inability to make the case, either for liberty in and of itself, and to understand how and why people who are being left behind by our economy, and what policies might help them. I think that’s an utter failure of our side, and it’s a tragedy. Last question: what is your next book or project?…

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