Conservatives and Classical Liberals

Andrew Norton blogs on what are the areas of common agreement between conservatives and classical liberals.  A summary is:

•  school choice: conservatives do not put the some normative emphasis on choice as classical liberals, but they want the right to educate their children according to their faith.
• anti-discrimination law: classical liberals, who support freedom of association and an independent civil society, think conservative groups should be able to organise themselves in ways that discriminate on the basis of sex, sexuality, lifestyle or religious beliefs. Classical liberals may think that such discrimination is obnoxious and personally have nothing to do with the institutions that practice it, but also believe that it is none of the state’s business.
• law and order: the state’s primary job is to protect its citizens and their property from violence and theft; and in high-crime times that means lots of police and full jails.
• scepticism about the state’s competence: social democrats have huge faith in the state; even when it has stuffed up for decades they still think that with more public funding or some other fix it will all come good. So while conservatives do not have the same ideological opposition to state intervention as classical liberals, they are far more open to the idea that the state’s failings are more fundamental than the size of the budget.
• scepticism about the welfare state: Conservatives and classical liberals both tend to believe that the welfare state creates and entrenches some of the problems it was set up to solve. So they tend to oppose higher welfare benefits as that will encourage people to go on to them, and tend to support compulsory activity in exchange for welfare support (though to be fair some social democrats have come around to this view as well, and some classical liberals oppose it).

Andrew also touches on areas where conservatives and “social democrats” have more in common, such as “protectin” families from the market.  We see this in NZ with the ridicolous bans on shopping on Good Friday due to an alliance of union friendly MPs and religiously conservative MPs.

And of course there are also the areas where social democrats and classical liberals havign common interests – such as civil freedoms for gays.

Ultimately Andrew concludes conservatives and classical liberals should work together when they have common cause, and not be upset when they disagree on other things.  I couldn’t agree more.