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The Liberal Party and social contract nonsense
Gerard Jackson
The striking thing about Australia’s Liberal Party is the extent to which many of its supporters, including some in Parliament, are divorced from genuine liberal principles. Liberalism* (meaning classical liberalism) is a doctrine wedded to small government and individual sovereignty. Keenly aware of how quickly the state can become despotic classical liberals made limited government one of their central tenets.
Nevertheless, it is a mistake to think that genuine liberals see government (the state) as a necessary evil. They fully understand that government makes civilisation possible. Genuine liberals are not romantics nor do they have any time for utopian fantasising.
They know that the basis of the state is always raw power, whatever the veneer. In the words of Professor von Mises (a committed Austrian liberal, 1881-1973): “The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion.” This is something that those who value their liberty should never forget and it is also why liberals fight to impose limits on the power of government.
Unfortunately the above is not something a great many Australian ‘liberals’ appear to give much thought to, even when they bother to think at all, which brings me to Christopher Pyne, Liberal MP and publisher of Options magazine. According to Mr Pyne: “The next challenge for the centre-right of politics in Australia is to contemporise and evolve the social contract”. Followed by: “But the social contract in Australia is at risk. Its capital has been exhausted”.
Mr. Pyne has been pushing this line for some years now. In Greater learning: an investment we have to make, (The Australian, 30 June 1999) he argued that we were all bound by a “social contract” and “we must rejuvenate its meaning and relevance”. This is the kind of claptrap that gets the likes of Pyne approvingly accorded the appellation ‘moderate’ by Australia’s leftist media, which is exactly how they describe him.
The problem, as Pyne sees it, is that the ‘information rich’ have accumulated wealth while the “information poor” have been left behind. Like every good interventionist these days, he sees education as the remedy for this alleged ailment that has put “the social contract at risk.”
He has therefore concluded that the existence of the social contract means that “education is a partnership between the individual and the government.” Because the individual is a junior partner who has had to rely on the capital of the state, the senior partner, and the opportunities it provides (sic) the individual now “has a responsibility to the community to capitalise on those learned skills.”
Nowhere in his argument does Pyne reveal the slightest recognition of individual sovereignty. Instead there emerges the idea of mutual obligation that taken to its logical conclusion, as so often happened in the last century, would result in the individual becoming the property of the state. This brings us to the notion of a social contract.
If by this concept one means the process by which people voluntarily decide to cooperate within a set of rules then the idea is basically harmless. After all, this is what the inhabitants of Providence, Rhode Island, agreed to in 1636 and which became known as the Providence Agreement. But the idea of a ‘mutual’ obligation or partnership between the individual and the state was mercifully missing. The settlers made it clear that the individual was not to be subordinated to the state.
These colonists were not expressing a new idea but one that had already firmly taken root in the consciousness of many thinking people of the time. In the words of Milton:
Our liberty is not Caesar’s [the state’s]. It is a blessing we have received from God Himself. It is what we are born to. To lay this down at Caesar’s feet, which we derive not from him, which we are not to beholden to him for, were an unworthy action, and a degrading of our very nature. . . . Being therefore peculiarly God’s own, that is, truly free, we are consequently to be subjected to Him alone, and cannot, without the greatest sacrilege imaginable, reduced to a condition of slavery to any man, especially to a wicked, unjust, cruel tyrant, . . .” (1651)
There is no room in this doctrine of liberty for a partnership between the individual and the state, the very concept of which is absurd. Unfortunately Rousseau’s General Will has been allowed to muddy the intellectual waters to a degree that statist ideas the likes of which Pyne are peddling are now considered ‘moderate’, particularly by journalists and many academics.
Though the General Will is never defined we are told it is infallible and always acts in the community’s interest. It is not difficult to see that this concept will give rise to three dangerous notions: 1. the state is an expression of the Will; (2) society is an entity instead of a handy label to describe its members; (3) the interests of the individual must be subordinated to the interests of the state.
Though Pyne made no reference to the Will the idea of the individual having an obligation to the community is an unconscious expression of points 2 and 3 and thus a clear denial of individual sovereignty. Now by claiming that the individual is in partnership with the state and has a responsibility to the community (society) Pyne is ascribing to the state (politicians like himself) special powers that over-ride individual rights, specially in the field of education.
This is pretty rich when one considers that the state, government, politicians or whatever you care to call it, can only provide resources through its powers of taxation. Hence, what you receive from the state is what it has already taken from you or from someone else. Having made you an offer you cannot refuse, spokesmen for the state glibly declare you are now a junior partner.
Education is a peculiar example of this kind of thinking. Not only are people forced to pay through the state for education, the likes of Pyne then have the nerve to tell them they are now under an ‘obligation’ to some entity called the community for having consumed their own resources. Real liberals have news for counterfeit liberals like Pyne. Every individual’s person is sovereign and that means they are free to use their skills and talents as they see fit. And that means not using them.
Pyne’s assertion that there is a “clear nexus” between his fictitious partnership and “sustained economic growth” is collectivist nonsense and is based on the implicit assumption that the role of self-interest is insufficient or even negative and thus market processes are either none existent or inadequate. In short, the spontaneous order has failed, though history teaches otherwise.
He summed up his own economic illiteracy when he stated that “The spin-off from this [state] partnership . . . [would] drive the national economy.” This is the kind of thing Mussolini would have come out with. For the umpteenth time: savings fuel an economy and entrepreneurship drives it. Everything else follows. Regrettably, we seem to have very little of the former in Australia while the latter tends to be punished rather than encouraged.
*In Australia liberal generally means conservative
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 1 August 2005