Freedom and the Social Contract

Freedom and the Social Contract

John Mauldin posted a hodgepodge of thoughts today touching on freedom and the social contract. He (or his sources) summarized the Enlightenment view on three areas of human freedom:

1. Political freedom (voting the incompetents out, separation of powers)
   


2. Social freedom (freedom of worship, sending one’s children to the school of one’s choice, creating a union, etc.)
   
   
3. Economic freedom (the ability to create a business, hire or fire employees, etc., regulated by contract law between acting parties).

What the philosophers of the 18th century argued was that the Church had to move out of the political sphere, and the State out of the other two.

Sounds good to me. He describes how these different freedoms may manifest themselves:

In Hong Kong, . . . we enjoy one of the freest societies in the World: we have total social freedom, total economic freedom but yet very little political freedom. Still, I believe this compares extremely well with what we have in France, where the church of Marxism has invaded the State and the educational system, destroying both, while the obese State has invaded the social and economic sphere, leaving entrepreneurs without oxygen. As Tocqueville expected, we have moved towards a strange and benign “molle dictature“ [soft dictatorship].

Then he explains how he thinks different societies can successfully adopt very different strategies for liberty:

[T]here are lots of good things – justice, wealth, individual liberty, social stability, security, equity – and we cannot maximize all of them at once. Trade-offs among these ultimate values must be made and that is what politics is about. Societies create a set of trade-offs by negotiation (and by the way democratic elections are not in themselves a mechanism for making these trade-offs; they are simply a mechanism for transmitting information to the agents who are negotiating the trade-offs; so it is a fallacy to presume as many do that only via democratic elections can a society achieve a “true” bargain) . . . .

Among the societies we describe as democratic capitalist there are vast differences in the bargains and hence in the nature of economic activity. America tolerates levels of instability, crime, inequality and pernicious religious zealotry that Europeans and Japanese consider absurd, but it gets in return a much more dynamic entrepreneurial system of wealth creation. Japanese willingly accept levels of social conformity that Westerners consider bizarre, but achieves a high level of social stability and tremendous success in economic areas (such as high precision manufacturing), where self-disciplined social cohesion is a plus.

Here's a good t-shirt on the subject.