Joseph Stiglitz has a new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, which contrasts question of freedom and unfreedom and in which, wrote John Cassidy, “he seeks to reclaim the concept of freedom for liberals and progressives. I’ve been discussing that thing with a couple of the candidates supported by Blue America, Jen Perelman (FL) and Jerrad Christian (OH), so I decided to read Cassidy’s piece, which included an interview with Stiglitz, in yesterday’s New Yorker.
“The current conservative reading of what freedom means,” he told Cassidy, “is superficial, misguided, and ideologically motivated. The Right claims to be the defender of freedom, but I’ll show that the way they define the word and pursue it has led to the opposite result, vastly reducing the freedoms of most citizens… “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.” Stiglitz saw the right’s conception of freedom a cover for “the ability to escape taxation, regulation, and other forms of government compulsion.”
Stiglitz begins… with the American plague of gun violence. He notes that there is a simple reason why the United States has far more gun deaths than other countries do. It has far more guns, and, thanks to a tendentious reading of the Second Amendment by the courts, including the Supreme Court, many Americans now regard owning a gun, or even a closet full of semi-automatic rifles, as a constitutionally protected right. “The rights of one group, gun owners, are placed above what most others would view as a more fundamental right, the right to live,” Stiglitz writes. “To rephrase Isaiah Berlin’s quote… ‘Freedom for the gun owners has often meant death to schoolchildren and adults killed in mass shootings.’”
Gun violence and the spread of diseases by people who refuse to abide by health guidelines are examples of what economists call externalities, an awkward word that is derived from the fact that certain actions (such as refusing to wear a mask) or market transactions (such as the sale of a gun) can have negative (or positive) consequences to the outside world. “Externalities are everywhere,” Stiglitz writes. The biggest and most famous negative externalities are air pollution and climate change, which derive from the freedom of businesses and individuals to take actions that create harmful emissions. The argument for restricting this freedom, Stiglitz points out, is that doing so will “expand the freedom of people in later generations to exist on a livable planet without having to spend a huge amount of money to adapt to massive changes in climate and sea levels.”
In all these cases, Stiglitz argues, restrictions on behavior are justified by the over-all increase in human welfare and freedom that they produce. In the language of cost-benefit analysis, the costs in terms of infringing on individual freedom of action are much smaller than the societal benefits, so the net benefits are positive. Of course, many gun owners and anti-maskers would argue that this isn’t true. Pointing to the gun-violence figures and to scientific studies showing that masking and social distancing did make a difference to covid-transmission rates, Stiglitz gives such arguments short shrift, and he insists that the real source of the dispute is a difference in values. “Are there responsible people who really believe that the right to not be inconvenienced by wearing a mask is more important than the right to live?” he asks.
Yesterday, Christian, who’s running for an Ohio seat held by a knee-jerk MAGA-supporting Republican, Troy Balderson, told us that “Individual freedom is crucial, though using it to diminish the importance of the common good overlooks the benefits we derive from unity. Throughout history, our collective efforts— whether through farmers sharing resources or communities uniting during crises— have been essential for our survival and success. By working together, we have not only survived but thrived. Protecting our community and holding onto our freedoms involves creating an environment where everyone’s health, safety, and security are prioritized. This sometimes requires supporting rules that not everyone may agree with, but such measures are often necessary. I want future generations to know their grandparents longer. I don’t want us to see diseases like polio return and watch our children suffer because we forgot the lessons of the past; vaccinations are crucial. Our shared history reminds us how interconnected we all are. This discussion is less about limiting individual actions and more about ensuring that everyone has the freedom to live without fear of harm. Embracing this understanding shows us that the most valuable freedoms are those that enhance the well-being of the entire community, making us all stronger and safer.” Please consider contributing to his campaign here.
During Cassidy’s interview, Stiglitz told him that he supports “tighter financial regulations, international debt relief, the Green New Deal, and hefty taxes on very high incomes and large agglomerations of wealth… [P]olicies that expand people’s opportunities to make choices, such as income-support payments and subsidies for worker training or higher education, enhance freedom. Adopting this framework in The Road to Freedom, Stiglitz reserves his harshest criticisms for the free-market economists, conservative politicians, and business lobbying groups, who, over the past couple of generations, have used arguments about expanding freedom to promote policies that have benefitted rich and powerful interests at the expense of society at large. These policies have included giving tax cuts to wealthy individuals and big corporations, cutting social programs, starving public projects of investment, and liberating industrial and financial corporations from regulatory oversight. Among the ills that have resulted from this conservative agenda, Stiglitz identifies soaring inequality, environmental degradation, the entrenchment of corporate monopolies, the 2008 financial crisis, and the rise of dangerous right-wing populists like Donald Trump. These baleful outcomes weren’t ordained by any laws of nature or laws of economics, he says. Rather, they were ‘a matter of choice, a result of the rules and regulations that had governed our economy. They had been shaped by decades of neoliberalism, and it was neoliberalism that was at fault.’”
Cassidy noted that “Stiglitz’s approach to freedom isn’t exactly new, of course. Rousseau famously remarked that ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.’… Stiglitz cites Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, delivered in January, 1941, in which the President added freedom from want and freedom from fear to freedom of speech and freedom of worship as fundamental liberties that all people should enjoy.”