How to Save The (Third) World

I recently spent a week in Chile as a guest of the Centro de Estudios Libertarios, interacting mostly with Chilean libertarians. Chile is the most free market country in Latin America and the richest but lately has been becoming a little less of both, so one topic of conversation was how to reverse that, more generally how to make Chile more libertarian (most Chileans would say more liberal¹). I then spent another week in Argentina, which is becoming more libertarian, again associating mostly with libertarians, so the same topic came up there in the context of how to keep it doing so.

I have thought a good deal about the question in the American context. At a broad level the answer is the same. Since voters are rationally ignorant, what the government of a democracy finds it politically profitable to do depends in large part on free information, what everyone knows, true or false. To change the political outcome, change the mix of free information. Different people, with different interests and abilities, can do that in different ways.

Some of the applications of that approach are the same in Chile as in the US but not all. Chile is one of a substantial group of generally similar countries and both the most liberal — in the Chilean sense — and the richest. That fact by itself is some evidence for liberalism, so making Chileans more aware of it is one way of making them more liberal. Movies, television shows, novels set in other Latin American countries and giving an accurate picture could do it, which provides one approach for Chilean libertarians with the relevant talents to use.

Another approach is to make libertarian ideas available in attractive forms, movies or TV shows that people will enjoy watching, books, essays, blogs they will enjoy reading. The slow way is to create them, the fast way is to use what already exists, make it available to the Chilean population. My standard example is the television series Yes Minister. It was created by British libertarians, demonstrates in entertaining ways some of the reasons governments do the wrong things, and was massively popular.² Creating it required talent and effort but that has already been done. Yes Minister is available on Amazon in Spanish in Spain and some Latin American countries, also in some countries on Netflix or Apple TV. I do not know if it currently is available in Chile or Argentina but if not it could be. Making it available in Spanish and publicizing it would let libertarianism in Latin America benefit by the talent and effort of British libertarians. Another British example would be books by C. Northcote Parkinson, originator of Parkinson’s Law, who is good at using humorous essays to make serious points.³ Those are examples I happen to know of but there must be many other works conveying a libertarian message in an entertaining form not currently known, perhaps not available, in Chile.

I am told that the choice in Chile is between bad public schools, very expensive private schools, and partly public schools that are less expensive than the private schools but not much less bad than the public. I presume that all of them, like almost all US schools, follow the same pattern: Choose from the large number of things worth learning a largely arbitrary subset and make all children pretend to learn it. Children enjoy learning things they are interested in more than things that adults have decided they should be made to learn. That plus the widespread availability of the internet suggests a tactic for spreading ideas: create online classes, games, stories in things kids are interested in and embed your ideas in them. History and economics are the subjects that first occur to me but science fiction and fantasy can, often do, contain ideas relevant to libertarianism.

Humans classify other people as ingroup or outgroup, “us” or “them,” in multiple ways. The same person who is in your ingroup as a fellow fan of the same football team might be in your outgroup as a supporter of a different political party; which way you think of him affects how you interact with him, including how willing you are to listen to him. One friend of mine from my medieval hobby is professionally involved in regulatory issues; I am more willing to take his arguments about those issues seriously when they disagree with my views than I would be for the same arguments from a stranger.

That suggests that one way to get people to take libertarian arguments seriously would be to have them offered by someone they see as a member of their ingroup, especially a prominent and respected member. G.K. Chesterton was both a libertarian and a prominent Catholic apologist, someone well-read Catholics are likely to have heard of and think well of. Libertarian ideas presented in quotes from his essays are likely to get a more sympathetic hearing from Catholics than the same ideas in quotes from me or my father. The same approach should work for other writers and other groups; a libertarian argument from George Orwell should be more likely to get through to a socialist than the same ideas from Ayn Rand.

It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of. (George Orwell, “Grounds For Dismay,” The Observer, April 9, 1944)

I do not read Spanish; someone who does should be able to find prominent Spanish speaking figures with libertarian views worth quoting, perhaps Borges, who described himself as a classical liberal, perhaps O’Higgins or San Martín, liberal revolutionaries in Chile and Argentina.

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1. In Chile and Argentina, as in much of the world outside the US and Canada, “liberal” means classical liberal. “Libertarian” seems to be used in those countries either as a link to usage in the US, where the enemies of liberalism stole its name and classical liberals call themselves libertarians, or to signal more extreme versions of liberalism. In this post I use “liberal” and “libertarian” interchangeably.

2. so popular that it was followed by a sequel, Yes Prime Minister.

3. One statement of Parkinson’s Law is that the number of people employed by a bureaucracy increases at a constant rate independent of whether the work increases, decreases, or whether there is any work at all. The two bureaucracies he used as evidence, with numbers, were both creations of the British government.