by: Professor Gilbert NMO Morris

Questions have been put to me concerning the beliefs guiding my positions as an economist and a thinker. I have been restrained in expressing such beliefs, owing largely to the reductive tendency in the public discourse. That is to say, as with all writing, once written and read, the author has as much power over his meaning as he would have over a thousand marbles sprawling downhill. The author comes to be at the mercy of a thoughtful readership. Amongst the ancient philosophers of Athens, this concern was less pronounced, as particular care was taken in the representation of disagreements publicly. However, in our epoch, the means are available by which those wanting to foment mischief need show no restraint in their preference for the ridiculous over the sublime in colouring one’s beliefs; no matter one’s subtly of expression.

To put the finest of points upon it, it was the case amongst the Athenians that in order to disagree with another, one had to master the other’s position, express it accurately and seek assurances that one adhered to the letter and spirit of the said belief, all before one took license in attacking it. This system of integrity is known now as “intellectual honesty”; which encompasses any undertaking a reader adopts to ensure the fairest possible rendering of someone else’s ideas or beliefs, together with errors in his own thinking.

The above said, I will opt for the plainest expression of my system of thought and belief, expressed here without hopes of subtly:

I am a Libertarian, Monarchist, Whig.

As a Libertarian, I find I am incapable of supporting any policy, which whilst it achieves its objective fails to render the government more efficient and less intrusive. Of course, I am familiar with all the common texts, read routinely by those responding to the name Libertarian. However, my inducement to belief has never arisen from mere theory. As such, I have been supplicated in my Libertarianism after a forensic analysis of the only “libertarian” society to have existed even before the concept of libertarianism was ever expressed.

The most explicit example of such a society was the Tiv nation of what is now Nigeria.

When they were first encountered as late as 1909 by Europeans, they were found to have no permanent government, which was also evidenced in the absence of courts or other institutions. Other tribal nations had Kings and additional institutions of the royal court. But amongst the Tiv, at different intervals, when there was an expression of distemper in the community, but before a crisis, the more respected elders would be called upon to constitute a temporary government. Once they dealt with the immediate issues in the society, they dissolved, kept no records and their decisions held in the community until the next temporary installation.

I was impressed by this and for 20-years, I have made researches into Tiv social anthropology, which repays to them my ever greater fascination and regard.

It has not escaped my notice that the Tiv nation’s concerns are less onerous than ours today; no less than our political issues are infinitely more complex than those of the Greco-Roman world, to which our civilization looks for guidance. What is compelling is that within the spirit of their social life, the Tiv found a means for prosperity in their own terms; which is the proper ambition within and for any nation based upon the principle of individual responsibility.

I believe in that.

You may wonder how it is that one committed - such as I am - to libertarianism can have any truck with Monarchy. I was born in the Bahamas in the crosscurrents of Colonialism, post-Colonialism and Christianity, with an established church of which Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II is the head. But whilst I have a regard for Her Majesty – as for anyone who meets a duty with dignity for decades running together – she is not my Monarch. I must confess that my monarch is not in fact a monarch. He is Lorenzo de Medici or “Lorenzo the Magnificent” (1449-1492). My admiration for Lorenzo - the defacto Prince of Florence in the 15th century – rests upon his apprenticeship to his distinguished father and his earned mastery of every aspect of Florentine life; which included raising and maintaining an army for defense of the principality.

Lorenzo was himself a master of language, (Latin in particular), a great patron of the arts, a poet, master of the family’s vast banking empire, a meticulous diplomat, administrator and the keeper of great secrets.

What was ‘monarchial’ about him was at a time when there was no political system or rule of law, he managed to cultivate political values and a set of rules, to which he himself adhered. By this means he authored standards to which others could adhere without disadvantage to themselves. This is meaningful to a libertarian because it is an example of self-governance and self-restraint, which is the essence that motivates the libertarian soul.

I believe in that.

My Whig is Abraham Lincoln, whose ‘whigism’ led him to two positions I find compelling: First, he maneuvered by law and by force to keep his nation together, bound to a founding values, steering his action within the nearest limits of the law, in echo of the highest principles of universal morals. Second, he kept his country out of senseless wars, standing apart from voluptuous foreign intrigues, and as a consequence managed a public debt that was less than 10% of GDP.

Lincoln – in true Whig asceticism - was never so impressed with his power that he sought to use it to advance some personal cause, small or large.

Additionally, I cannot fail – as with Lorenzo de Medici – to admire Lincoln’s talents, apart from his politics; particularly his craft at writing and his sense – so finely honed – for public expression attenuated to the sentiments of the day; either confirming the public’s perspective, or leading public sentiment to a place of more meaningful distinction.

I believe in that.

As it happens, these beliefs are those from which I never depart. They are not appetites, which come and go, or are available to slight influences. They are the bedrock beneath the positions I take; in defense of which, I am ruthless in pressing every cause from which they stand athwart.

This reveals that I am interested in moments of political and economic instability, together with the resolve of those persons who arise in the midst thereof - fired by genuine and unvarnished belief - who nonetheless establishes or confirms Libertarian principles of governance with ruthless proficiency.

There are other personages who stand forth as deserving of especial regard. Here are thirteen of them:

Anaximander (610c-546BC) a pre-Socratic philosopher whose work exceeds everything that followed him. He taught us the existential and ethical limits to all human action.

William of Ockham (1287-1347) He demanded that we maintain austerity in our arguments and a self-enforced principle against convenient false claims.

Paracelsus (1493-1541) He founded Chemistry by means of an exhaustless self-discipline, which saw him question himself in a manner uncommon amongst men. He motto was: "Let no man belong to another that can belong to himself."

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) His argument concerning the nature of government is a proper warning to all libertarians. He argued that the corruption of the politics was a permanent truth.

Sir William Wilberforce (1759-1833) Like Lincoln he forced his country by sheer will to recognize, confirm and adhere to the rights of man.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) He lived the American values more furtively than any signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) From his values he designed an economic system that has brought prosperity to more people than any other in the annals of human existence.

Fredrick Douglass (1818-1895) He forced himself into being as an example of the libertarian spirit without bitterness. His example demonstrates what it means to be a man of principle.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) All his life, without apology he maintained a child-like fascination with discovery. Moreover, his willingness to admit his failures meant that he lived by Anaximander’s principle and applied the logical principles of his best friend Kurt Godel. Einstein is our most meaningful example for raising disciplined questions about what seems obvious.

Gottlieb Frege (1848-1925) The finest mathematician we have ever known, who made it possible for us to make consistent statements in our claims to knowledge.

Kurt Godel (1906-1978) The greatest logician, who taught us the inherent logical limits of any claim we make, to whom every economist should adhere. His work marries Anaximander to Occam and Gettier below. In essence he said there is more that is true about a true statement than we can know, even when we claim the statement as true.

Ralph Bunche (1904-1971) He exercised diplomatic mastery in a hopeless situation by marrying ethics to policy, in an attempt to satisfy competing economic claims.

Edmund Gettier (b.1927) A logician who improved our capacity to think, in his work on “justified belief”, even if you have never heard of him.

These are the people I read constantly – daily, weekly, monthly – and whose thinking I reference most often in lectures and in my work. There are others who exert a powerful influence on my thinking about the operations of political society. First amongst them is The Great Kahn (1215-1294) who had a multi-various religious court and a cryptic foreign policy. Second is Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) - Prime Minister of France under Louis the 13th (Whose Mother, the Queen, was a Medici). Richelieu is what you must be committed to if you believe in the principle, my country, right or wrong. He said famously: “when I accepted my appointment, I determined whether I should save my soul and send my country to hell, or whether I should save my country and send my soul to hell." He concluded, “I opted to save my country.”

Of modern politicians, the finest and most effective – given all I have said here – was Prince Lothar Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859), who for me is the modern version of Lorenzo de Medici. Any American President confused about how to construct, not merely a world-view, but uncertain of the methods and means to bring it into force, such a leader may look to Metternich who was master of Europe from 1804 to 1848. His was the smallest nation in a feverish interstice of shifting alliances in the European political theatre. Yet, he managed the arc and movement of the priorities and pretentions of larger nations to a degree that kept peace in Europe for nearly 50 years.

Metternich saw politics as operating within a vast framework of status impulses gained though power, and power nexus from which status was sought.

As such, just as Adam Smith’s economics grew our of this ethics expressed in his Theory of the Moral Sentiment and his work on Justice, so to must the economist see economics as constituting a single component of a larger, morphing network of social forces; as Anaximander would have said, each in constant conflict with the other; at times supervenient only to become subvenient “according to the ordinance of time."

I believe in human value the primary content of which is the “capacity for choice”; in connection to which, in economic policies, I seek what confirms, maintains and advances that value itself or the conditions in which it may be realized.

In methodological terms, my approach to economic analysis begins with history. Following that is the application of the beliefs expressed herein; this followed by an exhaustless review of the potential impacts of policies, with care for the manner in which such impacts may be expressed to ensure the fairest, most precise exposition.

Within this process, as a principle attribute of Libertarians, I do not argue for anything. I argue against things.

By example, in an analysis of competing claims – in the spirit of Godel - I do not ask what is true and so what is false? Instead, I ask if “A” is true, what else must be true if “A” is true? Therefore, if a policy claims to advance “free markets”, what else must be true internal to such a policy for that claim to be true? This enforces a discipline, which prevents feckless evangelism, demanding that whomever makes a claim, inherently proposes a foundation and a framework. To put it finely, as I have written elsewhere: “In every idea there is an entire concept of life."

It is from and within this spirit that I say I believe in the power of seriousness, and I resist all forms of childishness – as St. Paul expressed it in I Corinthians 13 – so that I do not engage in political baiting, rancorous insipidities and empty jocularity in public discourse.

Finally, I believe in the power of discernment. That is to say, I believe in the brain’s capacity, aided by both logic and experience, to discover “common sense” in the manner that Thomas Reid (1710-1796) argued during the Scottish Enlightenment. This gives rise to a belief that there is a human and humane propensity in every person to-do-the-right-thing. For this reason, it is possible to hold people responsible no matter their creative or convenient excuses, which are on rash exhibition today in our entitlement culture.

For me this is the root of personal responsibility and the heart of the Libertarian ethic. From this flows the operational phenomena of fairness and personal resolve, which even when insistent can be exercised with grace.

The Self-made Man is the Symbol of American Possibility

By Gilbert NMO Morris

To what do we owe the chic, but serious intemperance of the (curiously named) “Occupy” movement in America, also exploding, if not metastasizing across the world?

In a word: Unfairness.

Liberal market capitalism – according to its romantic narratives – is meant to be elegant, as in Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. There the lead protagonist – Howard Roark - driven by the innate majesty of his singular vision, resists the world’s facile standards, not by disobedience to law or by devilish deceit upon those to whom he has obligations. Rather, it is he who demands, maintains and advances standards, which underscore the primacy of human value.

Liberal-market capitalism, in America, is the theology of the self-made man.

And for such a man, there are dangers from both political types in America: Conservatives and Liberals. Liberal spirits are in want of an idea of government limited in its power over citizens. It is mildly paradoxical that those most amenable to the notion of rights, are so often hostile to the prominence of individualism, which rights undergirds. Moreover, Liberal spirits must accept that the world they seem to imagine, in which all are provided for, anticipates the success of the very entrepreneur against whom they seem to bear so much antipathy.

The abovesaid being extant, if we hone our attention to the iterations of Liberal minded perspectives in America, for example, I must reject the notion that business begins with labour. Liberals must attune themselves to a true appreciation of the risks borne by those who tempt failure; daring to set out upon their own to win a fortune from fate.  

On the other hand, it is notable that much of the Conservative proto-paladin invective is directed at what they perceptive to be “Keynesianism”. And whilst I am not a proponent of Keynes’ views, it would be well to remember Keynes underlying motivation for his views. A high Victorian spirit, Keynes was concerned – as any aristocrat with a sense of noblesse oblige – for the distemper of the great unwashed (the masses). His was an economic theory – in large part – termed and tempered to drain the vitriol from the perception of the masses that their unhappy economic situation was owing to a selfish wealth class; cosseted and cloistered apart from the Dickensian misery in which they wallowed. 

It is consummate wisdom – which was held broadly once – to which Conservative must return: That “wealth” in its essence implies and extends a network of noble and ennobling habits. Consider a distinction between Mr. William Gates, Mr. Warren Buffet, and say Carlos “Slim” Helu, the three richest men in the world. Both Buffet and Gates have created thousands of very rich people with and in whom their wealth – as such – is inextricably leveraged and extended.

It is in the nature of self-made wealth that it deepens economic well-being apart from its initiator. By contrast Carlos “Slim” Helu’s record in this regard is apropos of his nickname.

That is to say, it is a practical principle that extreme wealth and extreme poverty may be arrived at in an economic system only by the deceit of the many by the few, and is what – in part – America arose in opposition to defeat. That I am wealthier than my neighbour is no cause for apoplexy, so long as the rules of acquisition are open to my neighbour, should he care to husband the risks along the path of opportunity.

As Mr. Walter Isaacson makes clear in his rightly celebrated biography of the late Steve Jobs, Mr. Jobs’ own perception of his greatest achievement was not any particular product. But in having created a ‘Darwinian nexus’ in Apple, Inc., in which the entrepreneurial spirit of creative collaboration between individuals could flourish.

Apple. Inc., is what America was meant to be.

Let me put the matter thus: When I defend liberal market capitalism, it is the entrepreneurial spirit, its impulse and impacts, which I defend and celebrate. I do not defend sun-roasted inheritors of antecedently earned riches, nor do I defend the hucksterism of “new money”, acquired by thinly allowed chicanery at great speed, with its foul adumbrations of the protocols of taste and fair-minded traditions.

   

Prospects for American Recovery: Cutting Spending Isn’t Enough

by Professor Gilbert Morris

There is a word missing from the “solutions” offered by both Democrats and Republicans to the searing economic crisis visited upon America by a combination of craven financial speculators, complacent regulators, feckless politicians and not a little bit of greed amongst many borrowers.

That word is “sell.”

It is only in the selling of surplus manufactures – as Adam Smith taught us – that new income enters the economic system, with the corollary effect of demonstrating, maintaining and advancing the  institutional and operations frameworks for national competitiveness.

So we must ask ourselves, what is America selling to the world?

The answer is, apparently, not much. It is critical that since the rise of countries such as China beginning in 1975, more recently India and now South Korea, the American political and commercial establishment have seemed frozen in their understanding of the meaning of China’s rise in particular and its implications for America’s manufacturing decline.

In the politics of the question, Republicans generally argue for cuts in spending, whilst Democrats insist that increased spending and new taxes – either targeted or benign – are a proper way forward. Both are wrong. A credible economist, whilst he or she may be committed to low taxes in principle (as I am, genetically), does not immediately fly to tax cut solutions, unless high taxes are the specific impediment to business development, competitiveness or growth.

Oftentimes, tax cut evangelists cite President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 tax cuts and the impact those cuts had on economic expansion.

However, the “positive” impact of the Kennedy tax cuts was because high taxes was the specific “pent up” cog in the wheel works preventing economic growth.

On the Democratic side, the demand for increases in taxes – however targeted or benign – seems unscrupulously insidious in the midst of an economic collapse born of a financial crisis. In my view, even payroll tax relief and infrastructure spending are little more than freshwater in a mirage.

If there is an intention to put America right, spending discipline is certainly necessary because confidence must be given to the markets and economic partners around the world. But if Americans are serious about correcting the increasing downward economic spiral, American manufacturers must be able to and begin to sell their products to the world.

If one reasons backwards from a commitment to an export-led economic solution, one will have addressed the structural impediments in the national economy that induce and sustain economic decline.  That is to say, an export-led solution means taxes are low or at least competitive. It means also that facilitation infrastructure is sound and efficient and it must mean that the American worker is educated, skilled and productive in comparison to the rest of the world.

The fact is if you cut taxes and spending to the bone, it will do nothing to correct the current lack of growth because none of it brings new income into the system. To the extent that the government wishes to “prime the pump” by putting cash into the system, it should concern itself with whatever is necessary to lay irons on the export-led track. If we look at the best performing economies in the world – China, South Korea, India, Brazil, Germany – we find that they have mastered the combination of education and skills development, which begets innovation and competitive production quality, which begets streamlined, efficient infrastructure, which begets international orders, leading to exports and thus new income.

There is a caveat; of the countries cited above, only Germany may serve as a true example for the US since it is a democracy with transparent, uncorrupted institutions. For instance, Americans will never be open to mistreating their own people the same way China would or, in some respects, Brazil. As such, wage levels and labor markets in general in such places are incongruent exemplars for America if it is to remain America. The solution to America’s current economic problem is competitiveness. Germany’s approach, specifically training of the labor forces, robust trade agreements, and increased exports is more compelling in this respect and is a third move beyond mere spending cuts or tax raising, if we care at all for intellectual honesty on this question.