I didn’t. What I suggested was that Friedman equated 19th century liberalism with the Austrian school of economics. I don’t believe Thatcher identified with Gladstone, except possibly with the length of time he served as PM.

Sir Keith Joseph, her first minister for industry, had toured Britain in the mid 1970s, extolling Adam Smith and his book The Wealth of Nations (1776), reminding audiences on how Britain had pioneered industrialisation without state planning or intervention – I went to one of those presentations. When he took up office in May 1979, after the Conservative election victory, he famously circulated a reading list to the senior grades of the civil service in his department, the list headed by The Wealth of Nations.

The trouble with all that was that Sir Keith was soon approving grants to industry, notably to British Leyland, the motor manufacturer, running into hundreds of millions. By the time British Leyland, renamed as the Rover group, was privatised in 1988, £3.3 billions of taxpayers’ money had been put into the company to keep it afloat and finance the production of Honda designed cars – arguably, the best cars that British Leyland ever made.

None of that was anything remotely like the economics of the Austrian school. Some twenty years on, civil servants were still talking about Sir Keith Joseph’s reading list.

Btw I don’t subscribe to any notion that Friedman was rather dim. I’ve had from American economists whom I respect, that he was a fearsome debater in professional forums in America although he was also deeply unpopular among many of his peers. I was told by one that I needed to understand that everything Friedman said or wrote was to promote a particular agenda. Friedman repeatedly upheld Hong Kong as a model of capitalism to emulate:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3532186.html

A past colleague – who was married to a young lady from HK and knew much about the place – reminded me that the sale of public land in HK was tightly controlled by the authorities, who also applied strict regulations to control development. In other words, there wasn’t as much laissez-faire in HK as Friedman liked to make out.

Please don’t call Milton Friedman a libertarian, it upsets me. He’s a dimwit compared to the Austrians.

Frankly, I doubt Mrs T had any very clear set of political aims beyond wanting to turn the clock back to pre-socialist times. She didn’t share Disraeli’s concerns about social divisions not did she share the interventionist inclinations of 19th century Liberals in Britain, exemplified by, say, Forster’s Education Act:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_Education_Act_1870

The rationale for that legislation to enable state support for primary education was clear enough:

“We have noted a substantial body of original research . . . which found that stagnant or declining literacy underlay the ‘revolution’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . . Britain in 1850 was the wealthiest country in the world but only in the second rank as regards literacy levels. [Nick] Crafts has shown that in 1870 when Britain was world economic leader, its school enrolment ratio was only 0.168 compared with the European norm of 0.514 and ‘Britain persistently had a relatively low rate of accumulation of human capital’.”
Sanderson: Education, economic change and society in 1780-1870 (Cambridge UP, 1995) p.61

Milton Freedom’s notions of “liberalism” relate more to the Austrian school of economics than to anything in 19th century Britain where the factory acts were soon regarded as essential by all except by the most dedicated exponents of laissez-faire without any restrictions.

On Mrs Thatcher’s politics, try Simon Jenkins: Thatcher and Sons (Penguin 2006). The fact is that the Thatcher governments of the 1980s were highly interventionist.

“People don’t understand Margaret Thatcher because they think she is a Tory, in fact she is a nineteenth century liberal” ~ Milton Friedman

I don’t agree that she governed like a 19th century liberal, but she certainly identified with them.

You’ll see what conservatism is under Cameron: they will be more “progressive”, because that’s the popular position, and they will above all work for the finance industry. No ideology required.

If so, that definition would certainly exclude Mrs Thatcher and her governments – privatisation of state-owned industries was not preserving the status quo, quite the opposite. Try instead:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism

Also agree with Tim J; conservatism can be described as a position, but not a philosophy/ideology because the point of it is only to maintain the status quo; it is the position of the idle (and idle-minded) rich.

What about the spectre of neo-liberalism?

“… you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.”

Wait a minute; now I’m confused…

This is complete tosh.

At present the British left are statists. Stalin & New Labour are just the ugly truth they don’t want to acknowledge.

The British left used to believe in low taxes, and small government. Lets hope they rediscover their roots.

http://www.quarterly-review.org/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/pond.pdf

Consider the historic legacy: the Tories/Conservatives concluded by the early 19th century that it was necessary to legislate to limit the hours that women and children could be permitted to work in factories for their moral welfare. In other words, as a matter of principle, Conservatives considered that limits to a laissez-faire industrial policy were necessary.
http://www.parliament.uk/about/livingheritage/transformingsociety/19thcentury/overview/factoryact.cfm

Winston Churchill was a minister in a Liberal government when he took through Parliament the Trade Boards Act of 1909, this provided for an administrative structure for determining minimum wages in particular industries. That was certainly inconsistent with laissez-fare but subsequent Conservative governments allowed the legislation to stand until the 1980s.

Conservatives have been particularly prone to support drug wars and restrictions on the sexual activities of consenting adults out of concern for public health, moral welfare and supporting families.

As a fact, Conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s spent billions of taxpayers’ money supporting the nationalised coal board, British Leyland and the Rover Group and in grants to attract inward investment to Britain for new manufacturing facilities to make silicon chips, computer printers, TV sets, and wings for Airbus and to persuade Nissan to build a car plant in Sunderland etc etc. That too was not consistent with laissez-faire.

Would JS Mill – or Libertarians – have regarded any of that as acceptable?

Credit for first implementing a national insurance scheme for personal healthcare costs goes not to Britain for creating the NHS in 1948 but to Count Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of the German Empire.

“The Health Insurance bill . . was passed in 1883. The program was considered the least important from Bismarck’s point of view, and the least politically troublesome. The program was established to provide health care for the largest segment of the German workers. The health service was established on a local basis, with the cost divided between employers and the employed. The employers contributed 1/3rd, while the workers contributed 2/3rds . The minimum payments for medical treatment and Sick Pay for up to 13 weeks were legally fixed.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck

Whatever else, Count Bismarck had no socialist inclinations whatever. Quite the opposite, in fact.

A spectre is haunting the blogosphere – the spectre of Libertarianism.
Nothing would please me more than to give in to its haunting charms. Libertarianism is neat, it is consistent and it is beautiful. Its economics are marvellously simple; a tid…

OTOH Libertarians, I think, tend to follow JS Mill:

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” JS Mill: On Liberty
http://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/one.html

The difference is that Burke places no explicit restrictions on the extent to which liberty needs to be limited whereas Mill is explicit in laying down the extent of, for him, acceptable limits on the exercise of power to restrict personal actions.

Well, Sunny did tell Mr. E today that he really ought to differentiate himself from Tim Worstall……

Damn it, when I have a pop at the libertarians who infest mainstream political parties and do affect the real world, Mr. E ticks me off for ignoring the thoroughbred libertarian ubermenschen of the blogs. When I kick off at the true believers instead, Tim Worstall ticks me off for ignoring the mainstream.

Anybody surprised that there’s confusion? I reckon there’s a lot of simultaneous cake consumption and retention going on here…

And not because having a genocidal maniac on your side is a bit embarrassing for the left.

What was it that Labour politicians used to call him before his denunciation by Kruschev – Uncle Joe?

Unity in a previous thread:
“That Franklin felt compelled to make that particular remark tells us pretty much everything we need to know about the mindset of organised religion”.

It sometimes can kick off a heated debate I guess – but Unity’s fondness for using Xth century quotations to simplistically and wrongly sum up huge, multi-faceted spheres of knowledge is a thought pattern best avoided. IMHO.

He would take us out of Afghanistan, scrap Trident and is in favour of curtailing the power of the executive and bringing real democracy to politics. He supports freedom of speech and would be in favour of a Bill of Rights and formalising our constitution. Intellectually he makes Cameron look like a…….whatever I’m allowed to say on this site to describe someone of limited mental capacity.

All in all I’d take my chances.

er, what?

do you know what Benn would do with the state? “Nationalisation” wouldn’t even begin to describe it…

So the ASI has been saying that income tax should start at the full time full year minimum wage: around £12 k a year at present.

Mr Worstall

You fucker! So when you said to me on this site that having income tax start at 13K was not conceivable (Who is going to pay for it blah, blah) you were doing it for arguments sake? Twat!

OK, we’re talking a grand but I can live with the 12k mark.

As for the OP, good read firstly and for the most part I agree with Unity on his definition.

Libertarians are not a bad lot on the whole – much as hippies are fine and dandy until they want you to join their lifestyle and you see it really isn’t for you. I just see them as a set of people who just want the world to revolve around them and fuck anyone else. But I must admit that this could be because Tories have painted themselves with the same flag too oft and made it look decidedly filthy.

As for the joke in No 2, that isn’t even funny! I cannot see any “real” libertarian voting strongly FOR the Iraq war.

What I do see clouding the whole political philosophical argument is that once in power – or yearning for power – each party have tweaked a little bit in the centre of their philosophy and the vast majority of it they have become the same. This leads to the question of the voter “Who do I vote for because they are, literally, all the same?” Therefore they do not vote.

To me, which is really irrelevant, a Tory is a person/people who still have an agricultural mindset of landed gentry in modern clothing, and a Libertarian is a person who would have the mindset of small towns folk who believe in local farmers and purveyors of goods who live locally.

I was thinking about Douglas Carswell, Dan Hannan and the like. They sit with the Tories because that’s the only way anywhere near power, and they do so holding their noses, surely?

And with their fingers in their ears if they have any sense.

You yourself, would you not prefer a Tory government to a Labour one, on the grounds that in some minimal or residual sense they are less anithetical to libertarian aims?

Absolutely not. I’d far rather have Benn in charge than Cameron. And I’d have anyone that promised to stop telling me what I have to do.

D’oh.

That really doesn’t help all that much: for you’re defining libertarians as those inside political parties called “Libertarian”. As far as I’m aware, the UK one has only been running a year hasn’t it?

If we widen the definition a little: would you agree that the Adam Smith Inst are libertarian….or to use as above what I call the English equivalent, classical liberals?

Policies do move from the ASI into mainstream politics: rail privatisation wasn’t one that worked all that well, that has to be admitted, but it did start off there. As did the London Congestion Charge (actually, Alan Walters started it but the ASI was shouting about it for years). For the past few years we’ve been shouting about how appalling it is that the income tax system reaches so far down the income scale. Part timers on minimum wage pay income tax for the Lord’s sake.

So the ASI has been saying that income tax should start at the full time full year minimum wage: around £12 k a year at present. UKIP has adopted this (I think you can guess how that happened) and the Lib Dems have a version don’t they? Even Oxfam has put out a report suggesting very much the same. I think I’ve even seen Polly say it’s a good idea.

a) Example-based (and intermittently cretinous) policy with reasonably sound proposals for implementation, and a well-considered strategy for selling said solution to the voting public, or

b) Furious denunciation of government generally and wild promises of infinite jam for everyone based on some dead bloke’s highly-contentious dogma.

If you encounter a) you’re definitely talking to a supporter of one of the major parties, and you should prepare yourself for some dipshit Third Way guff with only mild chances of success. If it’s b), you’re talking to a libertarian and you’d better be ready for a lot of condescending waffle about the Christlike wisdom of the markets, backed up with squarely fuck-all proposals for selling the moon on a stick to the public beyond a lot of question-begging and pottymouth blah.

The difference, of course, is that the major parties have to worry about crafting policies that sound reasonable to millions of people and will work within the framework of public services that actually exists in reality. Libertarians have no such concerns, being essentially far too deranged and fractious for public consumption, as their electoral performances on both sides of the Atlantic conclusively prove.

I mean no offence to libertarians in saying this – they are generally correct about Labour’s authoritarian wheezes, although their tendency to launch into the Help, help, I’m being oppressed! routine from Monty Python and the Holy Grail every five minutes is comically unhelpful. I’m generally in agreement with bloggers like Jim Henley or IOZ, but I think it just helps if we’re prepared to call a spade a spade here.