… is from page 355 of the original edition of Walter Lippmann’s sometimes deeply flawed but profoundly insightful and important 1937 book, The Good Society:
Though liberalism has often been identified with indifference, inaction, and nonresistance, it should now be evident that this is mere confusion. A doctrine which is opposed to all arbitrariness must mean the determination to resist arbitrariness, to check it, to cut it down, to crush it, wherever and whenever it appears.
DBx: Yes.
Lippmann here expresses, in a way different than did Bastiat, the importance of attending to the unseen no less than the seen. If policymakers look only at the seen, they ignore the unseen, and thus are led to arbitrarily treat that which is seen differently from that which is unseen – “arbitrarily” because typically nothing of relevance distinguishes that which is unseen from that which is seen other than the mere fact that the latter grabs attention while the latter doesn’t.
It’s easy to ‘see’ the workers and firms whose jobs and bottom lines are protected by tariffs; it’s more difficult to ‘see’ the workers and firms – and consumers – who are harmed by those same tariffs. Thus, when we true liberals oppose protective tariffs we are accused of indifference to the lot of ordinary workers and businesses. But this accusation is deeply mistaken: We true liberals are more attentive than are protectionists to the lot of workers and businesses; we see not only those workers and businesses who benefit from protectionism but also those workers and businesses (and consumers) who are harmed. What we liberals, therefore, don’t see is any good reason for government to favor one group at the expense of the other. Such favoritism is arbitrary. And arbitrary government is bad government.
