Politics

This, as with all other things on this wiki, is a work in progress.

Basically, I'm a market liberal with Anglospherist Burkean tendencies, which is to say I'm:

  • all for political liberalism that's actually economically literate (including public choice theory),
  • pretty happy with the basic legal institutions we've inherited (the common law, etc.),
  • and humble with regard to institutional tinkering.

Hmm. That sounds too conservative. Here's another try: I'm an anarcho-capitalist but, unlike some anarcho-capitalists, I'm extremely reluctant to "smash the state" to achieve such ends. I'm way too incrementalist for that.

Right about now is when people usually get confused. "But," they say, "I thought you just said you're a fairly conservative libertarian? How do you reconcile your institutional conservatism with your radical, stateless utopian vision?" This is usually when I start hand-waving, and I try to slip in a reference to neutral institutional monism.

Broadly, "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" is the way many of my countrymen like to describe my politics, while many others use the word libertarian for this sort of thing.

Will Wilkinson wrote a great summary of something resembling my view in his Liberaltarianism: Back the Future.

Political topics elswhere on this wiki

Copyright © 2008, 2009 Edward O’Connor. CC BY-SA 3.0.

changed February 6, 2009