I have two anecdotes along the lines of the post, one amusing, one not.
My English wife and I came to Yes, Minister late, maybe in the 1990's. My wife had a socialist streak in her from her upbringing, but she was rational enough to become more and more wary. One day she asked me if I thought the series was libertarian. I thought a second, and naively said "no, it's just about how the bureaucracy lives"!
There was a low level academic website I participated in for quite some years. I tried to give reasoned arguments, always soto voce, against many policies desired by the posters, especially in education and taxation. The arguments were ignored. Or the response was that of a two-year old -- I want more. It became more and more like talking to a brick wall, especially after Trump's victory.
I take from this last that David's idea of narrow casting classical liberalism to an audience would work only if the audience is not totally committed to the opposite already.
My basis for viewing Yes Minister as by libertarians, in addition to the contents, is that some of the same people worked on my father's Free to Choose.
I expect that most people are not "totally committed" to any political ideology, that most take for granted the position that is standard in their environment but have not incorporated it in their thinking thoroughly enough to automatically reject ideas that undercut it. I expect a lot of Labour Party supporters enjoyed Yes Minister.
Your first paragraph is news to me and completely amusing! Glad to hear it.
Of course you're right in your second paragraph. I just had the bad luck of falling into a snake pit of over-credentialed people. It wasn't "most people".
Yes Minister hasn't made the English any less statist. Quite the reverse, I would say. UK today is even more statist with State regulation of everything, even ordinary speech, to the extent unthought of in 70s.
Chile may be the richest, but it is not the most liberal country in South America. I think, that distinction is held by Paraguay; still relatively poor but growing the fastest in the region. People from Chile are investing here.
Chile does not even appear to be the richest, unless David is using a different metric, or reference year, than the source for Wikipedia's tables. When I look at nominal GDP per capita in 2025, it's Guyana (32330), then Uruguay (22069), then Chile (17020). When I look at GDP (PPP) per capita, it's still Guyana (94258), Uruguay (37060), and Chile (35146).
Guyana's numbers look very unusual. My understanding is that they discovered an oil field in 2015, but it still seems high. I've long known Uruguay to be doing well, and Chile to be competitive. I can't get any of those fancy box charts for any of the three, so it's hard for me to tell how diversified they are; I expect Guyana's heavily oil-based, Uruguay and Chile less so.
Guyana's GPD is almost entirely from oil and natural gas export and its population is extremely low, hence the unusually high GPD/capita number, even on a PPP basis. It does not mean much. In Uruguay, it's the financial sector. Uruguay's GDP is also somewhat misleading, as most of it comes from the banking sector, where rich Argentines and Brasilians park their savings outside of reach of their own government. Other than strong deposit and investor protections, Uruguay is quite un-libertarian, having draconian taxes, import tariffs and state-enforced monopolies (or duopolies).
GDP measures the value of "stuff". If one wants to compare countries the best metric is GDP at CURRENT International dollars, which is a measure at current relative prices. Those tell you at what rate you can convert one flavor of stuff into another. Aggregate GDP measures care not about the sources of the "stuff", whether it's one stuff or many stuffs.
By the way, the contribution of the financial sector to Uruguay's GDP is 5% [Switzerland 9%, US 8%].
The parasites' livelihood and self-respect depend on getting hold of other people's money; whereas those other people are focused on earning an honest living and don't have time to spare fighting the parasites day in and day out.
Targeted benefits, diffused costs, or whatever that saying is.
Spanish language works: I don't read Spanish either, but the important Spanish modern liberal was Ortega y Gasset. His work, particularly The Revolt of the Masses [La rebelión de las masas], 1930, still deserves study. The Spanish edition is available on-line in Latin America, including in public form at no charge. It was originally a series of newspaper articles published in 1929. The English translation, first published two years later, was authorized by Ortega.
To whet appetite, here is a brief citation about -- us:
[Classical] Liberalism – it is well to recall today – is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence is the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so anti-natural. Hence it is not to be wondered that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.
This sounds like a major demarcation criterion. Ortega would have hated to be on the wrong side.
Reminds me of reports on the founding meeting of the Mt Pelerin Society where Ludwig von Mises stormed out of one session, saying: You're all a bunch of socialists!
It is also interesting to ponder why libertarianism, which promises to deliver the individual from his bondage to the State, has not swept the world and why it remains a marginal movement even in America and virtually non-existent elsewhere.
Tentatively, we may say that libertarianism is the idea and the philosophy of the Frontier, which is prominent in America and its memory but hardly exists in old settled countries with their teeming millions. People of the Old World are able to appreciate the utopian nature of life in dense cities without a government.
There is the problem identified by Dostoevsky as well. Man not only wishes to worship but he wants his neighbor to worship along with him. This is big in the old world where emotions run high on this and not on drug legalization or privatized roads.
Exactly! This is a highly effective strategy, as it prompts people to reflect on the root causes of the many problems generated by statism in their countries. In fact, nowadays we can quite easily find libertarian media outlets—mostly on the internet.
By the way, the internet (or rather, the virtual world) has become the most fertile ground for spreading classical liberal and libertarian ideas in these distant nations. It is no surprise that authoritarian governments (usually those with a socialist bias) reject these technologies, such as social media and blockchain. After all, it was the advent of these tools that led to a decentralization of information. Through the internet, the State is gradually losing its monopoly on "truth".
However, it is worth noting that many governments (correct me if I am wrong)—I believe nearly all of them in Latin America—employ a powerful Soviet manipulation tool commonly seen in authoritarian regimes: propaganda. State propaganda, widely disseminated by the legacy media (the old "yellow journalism"), possesses an almost 'mystical' power to shape public perception and the opinion of the masses.
I am not certain if this is the case in Chile and Argentina, but it is glaringly obvious in many Latin American countries that, even when electing more right-leaning leaders, they still routinely use the entire state apparatus to manufacture true propaganda utopias. The catch? They do it using taxpayers' money! These utopias are broadcast, believe it or not, during prime time, all day long, throughout television programming on every single network, and even across the internet. This whole absurdity is widely sanctioned by the constitution itself, which allows the use of public funds (taxpayers' money) to project the image that the more interventionist, authoritarian, and suffocating of individual liberties a State is, the better off its citizens will be. I am not exaggerating here; the incredible part is that I am actually oversimplifying a highly complex reality."
"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."
David, you are once again assuming that people are rational independent agents who peruse available "free information" and choose what seems the most true to them. I don't think this is accurate.
Instead, I think most people have a tribal identity and then are drawn to and absorb whatever information they think bolsters this identity, regardless of its factual or logical quality, and that this is not usually a conscious process.
Keep in mind also that the way information flows, especially in the last couple decades, is not neutral; personalized algorithms expose people to information based on the financial goals of a few large tech corporations. This often involves keeping individuals outraged or in some other kind of extreme emotional state, based on whatever information those companies bet (usually correctly) will outrage them personally. This has an effect of pushing new information into tribal gravity wells, framing otherwise neutral things as tribal affronts, etc.
I think David is aware of people who let tribalism override the cost of finding the most accurate answer from the available information, given that he discusses "rational ignorance" in the second paragraph. (If the cost of processing more information outweighs the predicted benefit, other factors - including tribalism - may dominate.)
Your next point about filters has occurred to me before, and comes off as a different type of challenge. As in, it's one thing for people to choose on their own not to assimilate more information, and another thing for that assimilation cost to be imposed on them by other people, namely, by withholding certain information. I'm not even talking about outrage factories, either; I'm talking about keeping certain information completely secret. Everything from how Greg is picking tech stocks to CakeCo's secret batter recipe to how China is programming its drones.
I've pointed out this problem to David before, asking him how he thinks secretly held information can be expected to affect a free market. I recall looking for a discussion of it in TMoF, and not finding one. Possibly because I didn't search for the right terms.
He has another book, Future Imperfect, that may deal with the secret information issue. Wish I could remember; I have only read the first third of it or so, and it was close to two decades ago at this point. I recall it was interesting though.
Yes Minister wasn't written by libertarians; Antony Jay was a fairly conventional Tory, and Jonathan Lynn's a Labour-supporting moderate socialist. It comes across as much less libertarian-coded if you're British.
After reading what David wrote about Yes, Minister, and after reading your comment, I went to the Wikipedia article on the series. What you say is right, but there is a specific point, not overly emphasized, but consistent with my original impression, that the authors were aware that they were using Public Choice Economics, a point explicitly endorsed by one of them.
Using Public Choice Economics is pretty damned close to being a classical liberal!
Not necessarily. The Yes Minister public choice critique of the civil service largely came to prominence in the UK in the 1970s with Tony Benn (a far-left Labour cabinet minister with similar views to Jeremy Corbyn) who said the government was controlled by the civil service which acted in its own self-interest. What he wanted to do about it was always a hand-wavy mixture of workers co-operatives and making the government "more democratic" through having a lot of committees, but the criticism was left-coded in Britain until part way into Thatcher's premiership.
Libertarians seem to have two major preoccupations. First is rollback of the state, its regulations, essentially economic freedom.
The second is advancement of sexual revolution and furthering of Mills experiments in living in any and all forms. This may be called libertine-ism.
However, the 19C, liberals were not preoccupied by rollback of the state. In fact, they were engaged, by and large, on expansion of the state. It is true, however, that the state was much smaller in 19c than any now.
The 19c liberals were reformers first and foremost. They were for Education, for Sanitation, for Factory Laws, for reform in this and that, and most reforms naturally increase the power and size of the state.
Maybe I'm missing something here, in which way is Chile libertarian? Drug laws, check. Sex laws, check. Speech laws, check. Occupational licensing, check. Speed limits, check, etc. Free markets have nothing to do with libertarianism outside they are incidentally enabled.
It's something that has bothered me since Obama/Trump1/COVID/GWOT/Israel, intellectuals whom nominally were libertarian seemed to have given up on the liberty/NAP part for "a more comfortable prison".
Certainly in the vast corpus of Chesterton, you can find a few lines suggestive of liberalism but you will find many more lines which go directly opposite. For example, he wrote, while some things can be said for socialism, nothing can be said for capitalism.
Chesterton was a master of paradoxes but his loyalty went to the bedrock Catholic principles
of solidarity and subsidiarity. To call him a libertarian is to empty the term itself of all meaning.
"As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals." (GKC What's Wrong with the World)
A libertarian is fundamentally and essentially a person who does not accept any authority external to himself.
A person like Chesterton who expressed traditions as democracy of the dead and wrote eloquently on families (a topic virtually abhorred by doctrinaire libertarians) and how people (not individuals) rule themselves is virtually an antithesis of libertarianism.
Reading your comments on this topic I conclude that much of the problem is your bizarre view of libertarians. There are doubtless some libertarians who are enthusiasts for same sex marriage and odd pronouns but it is hardly a defining characteristic. Insofar as there is a libertarian position on the subject it is that it is not up to the state to determine what is marriage or who is married to whom, it is up to each individual to decide what couples he considers, and treats, as married.[https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2005/12/gay-marriage-both-sides-are-wrong.html]
I don't think families are a topic abhorred by libertarians; I am very happy with both the family I grew up with and the family I am now part of. I get the feeling that you have generalized recklessly from a small sample of libertarians. Perhaps extrapolated recklessly as well.
Going on to Chesterton, you write "The liberal term Chesterton imputes of himself as rather like "liberal" in "liberal education" "
I do not see how you can make that reading consistent with the post I quoted or with (from memory) "I am still a liberal. It's those people who are not liberals" (the Liberal Party).
Chesterton was a Distributist; he believed the existing distribution of land ownership was a result of historical theft, which is how a libertarian argues for redistribution of land. He was a Catholic; there is nothing unlibertarian about choosing to accept an authority, only to having one imposed on you. I used to know a libertarian Jesuit.
As to his view of capitalism (from the chapter on Chesterton in The Machinery of Freedom):
But to Chesterton capitalism did not mean private property and individual liberty. It meant what he believed he saw around him, a society dominated, economically and politically, by capitalists, in which most people worked for large companies, bought from large monopolies, and read newspapers controlled by a few millionaires who were, by a curious coincidence, the friends, supporters, and relatives of the ruling political establishment. He accepted much, perhaps too much, of the socialist critique of the then current state of England, while arguing that the socialists’ cure went in precisely the wrong direction.
"Insofar as there is a libertarian position on the subject it is that it is not up to the state to determine what is marriage or who is married to whom, it is up to each individual to decide what couples he considers, and treats, as married."
But this is precisely what I have said. The libertarian does not accept external authority. He defines it himself.
Chesterton had preoccupations rather orthogonal to people who call themselves libertarian. Small government, rollback of regulations, private roads, minarchism, anarcho-capitalism, drug legalization are not his topics.
PS As for regulations, they tended to be proposed by liberals of his day.
English liberalism of Chesterton's time is poorly mapped to American libertarianism. And Chesterton himself was a pretty eccentric liberal. Certainly not in any political or economic sense. His Distributism is generally regarded as socialism-lite, quite opposite of libertarian conception.
Nobody reading Utopia of Usurers could suspect that they were reading a libertarian writer.
As I said, you can pick many more. But the liberalism he is writing of is hardly classical liberalism, far less "libertarianism".
You should note the kind of vituperation he directs against Manchester Liberals, the closest analog to libertarian. He regards them as barely human.
See this quote from What's wrong with the World:
". My main contention is that, whether necessary or not, both Industrialism and Collectivism have been accepted as necessities—not as naked ideals or desires. Nobody liked the Manchester School; it was endured as the only way of producing wealth. Nobody likes the Marxian school; it is endured as the only way of preventing poverty. "
He equates the Manchester Economists (i.e the classical liberals) to Marxists, no less.
The liberal term Chesterton imputes of himself as rather like "liberal" in "liberal education" .
This quote-mongering isn't how one can profitably read Chesterton.
One can easily find 100 quotes where he vilifies capitalism (even worse than socialism) and capitalists (Model Employers).
He is a Distributist, not a free-marketeer. He takes government as given, like English liberals but unlike American libertarians. As a social conservative, he is off the charts. Even against divorce, he wrote Superstition of Divorce.
If one reads Chesterton, one soon realizes that he didn't in the least shared fetishes of American libertarianism. You can't imagine him writing for same-sex marriage or pronouns., for example.
Excellent food for thought!
I have two anecdotes along the lines of the post, one amusing, one not.
My English wife and I came to Yes, Minister late, maybe in the 1990's. My wife had a socialist streak in her from her upbringing, but she was rational enough to become more and more wary. One day she asked me if I thought the series was libertarian. I thought a second, and naively said "no, it's just about how the bureaucracy lives"!
There was a low level academic website I participated in for quite some years. I tried to give reasoned arguments, always soto voce, against many policies desired by the posters, especially in education and taxation. The arguments were ignored. Or the response was that of a two-year old -- I want more. It became more and more like talking to a brick wall, especially after Trump's victory.
I take from this last that David's idea of narrow casting classical liberalism to an audience would work only if the audience is not totally committed to the opposite already.
My basis for viewing Yes Minister as by libertarians, in addition to the contents, is that some of the same people worked on my father's Free to Choose.
I expect that most people are not "totally committed" to any political ideology, that most take for granted the position that is standard in their environment but have not incorporated it in their thinking thoroughly enough to automatically reject ideas that undercut it. I expect a lot of Labour Party supporters enjoyed Yes Minister.
Your first paragraph is news to me and completely amusing! Glad to hear it.
Of course you're right in your second paragraph. I just had the bad luck of falling into a snake pit of over-credentialed people. It wasn't "most people".
Yes Minister hasn't made the English any less statist. Quite the reverse, I would say. UK today is even more statist with State regulation of everything, even ordinary speech, to the extent unthought of in 70s.
Chile may be the richest, but it is not the most liberal country in South America. I think, that distinction is held by Paraguay; still relatively poor but growing the fastest in the region. People from Chile are investing here.
Chile does not even appear to be the richest, unless David is using a different metric, or reference year, than the source for Wikipedia's tables. When I look at nominal GDP per capita in 2025, it's Guyana (32330), then Uruguay (22069), then Chile (17020). When I look at GDP (PPP) per capita, it's still Guyana (94258), Uruguay (37060), and Chile (35146).
Guyana's numbers look very unusual. My understanding is that they discovered an oil field in 2015, but it still seems high. I've long known Uruguay to be doing well, and Chile to be competitive. I can't get any of those fancy box charts for any of the three, so it's hard for me to tell how diversified they are; I expect Guyana's heavily oil-based, Uruguay and Chile less so.
Guyana's GPD is almost entirely from oil and natural gas export and its population is extremely low, hence the unusually high GPD/capita number, even on a PPP basis. It does not mean much. In Uruguay, it's the financial sector. Uruguay's GDP is also somewhat misleading, as most of it comes from the banking sector, where rich Argentines and Brasilians park their savings outside of reach of their own government. Other than strong deposit and investor protections, Uruguay is quite un-libertarian, having draconian taxes, import tariffs and state-enforced monopolies (or duopolies).
GDP measures the value of "stuff". If one wants to compare countries the best metric is GDP at CURRENT International dollars, which is a measure at current relative prices. Those tell you at what rate you can convert one flavor of stuff into another. Aggregate GDP measures care not about the sources of the "stuff", whether it's one stuff or many stuffs.
By the way, the contribution of the financial sector to Uruguay's GDP is 5% [Switzerland 9%, US 8%].
This sounds about right. Do you think David automatically factored in economic "monocrops"? Or was there a handy reference for these?
The parasites' livelihood and self-respect depend on getting hold of other people's money; whereas those other people are focused on earning an honest living and don't have time to spare fighting the parasites day in and day out.
Targeted benefits, diffused costs, or whatever that saying is.
Spanish language works: I don't read Spanish either, but the important Spanish modern liberal was Ortega y Gasset. His work, particularly The Revolt of the Masses [La rebelión de las masas], 1930, still deserves study. The Spanish edition is available on-line in Latin America, including in public form at no charge. It was originally a series of newspaper articles published in 1929. The English translation, first published two years later, was authorized by Ortega.
To whet appetite, here is a brief citation about -- us:
[Classical] Liberalism – it is well to recall today – is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence is the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so anti-natural. Hence it is not to be wondered that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.
--Ortega y Gasset, The Rise of the Masses, 1932.
The language of majority and minority is liberalism but is it libertarian?
Libertarian writers dispense with these concepts and are entirely focused on the individual and its relation with the State or government.
This sounds like a major demarcation criterion. Ortega would have hated to be on the wrong side.
Reminds me of reports on the founding meeting of the Mt Pelerin Society where Ludwig von Mises stormed out of one session, saying: You're all a bunch of socialists!
Didn't Mises maintain that traditional morality and religion, even if held voluntarily, were coercive?
It is also interesting to ponder why libertarianism, which promises to deliver the individual from his bondage to the State, has not swept the world and why it remains a marginal movement even in America and virtually non-existent elsewhere.
Tentatively, we may say that libertarianism is the idea and the philosophy of the Frontier, which is prominent in America and its memory but hardly exists in old settled countries with their teeming millions. People of the Old World are able to appreciate the utopian nature of life in dense cities without a government.
There is the problem identified by Dostoevsky as well. Man not only wishes to worship but he wants his neighbor to worship along with him. This is big in the old world where emotions run high on this and not on drug legalization or privatized roads.
Exactly! This is a highly effective strategy, as it prompts people to reflect on the root causes of the many problems generated by statism in their countries. In fact, nowadays we can quite easily find libertarian media outlets—mostly on the internet.
By the way, the internet (or rather, the virtual world) has become the most fertile ground for spreading classical liberal and libertarian ideas in these distant nations. It is no surprise that authoritarian governments (usually those with a socialist bias) reject these technologies, such as social media and blockchain. After all, it was the advent of these tools that led to a decentralization of information. Through the internet, the State is gradually losing its monopoly on "truth".
However, it is worth noting that many governments (correct me if I am wrong)—I believe nearly all of them in Latin America—employ a powerful Soviet manipulation tool commonly seen in authoritarian regimes: propaganda. State propaganda, widely disseminated by the legacy media (the old "yellow journalism"), possesses an almost 'mystical' power to shape public perception and the opinion of the masses.
I am not certain if this is the case in Chile and Argentina, but it is glaringly obvious in many Latin American countries that, even when electing more right-leaning leaders, they still routinely use the entire state apparatus to manufacture true propaganda utopias. The catch? They do it using taxpayers' money! These utopias are broadcast, believe it or not, during prime time, all day long, throughout television programming on every single network, and even across the internet. This whole absurdity is widely sanctioned by the constitution itself, which allows the use of public funds (taxpayers' money) to project the image that the more interventionist, authoritarian, and suffocating of individual liberties a State is, the better off its citizens will be. I am not exaggerating here; the incredible part is that I am actually oversimplifying a highly complex reality."
"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."
David, you are once again assuming that people are rational independent agents who peruse available "free information" and choose what seems the most true to them. I don't think this is accurate.
Instead, I think most people have a tribal identity and then are drawn to and absorb whatever information they think bolsters this identity, regardless of its factual or logical quality, and that this is not usually a conscious process.
Keep in mind also that the way information flows, especially in the last couple decades, is not neutral; personalized algorithms expose people to information based on the financial goals of a few large tech corporations. This often involves keeping individuals outraged or in some other kind of extreme emotional state, based on whatever information those companies bet (usually correctly) will outrage them personally. This has an effect of pushing new information into tribal gravity wells, framing otherwise neutral things as tribal affronts, etc.
I think David is aware of people who let tribalism override the cost of finding the most accurate answer from the available information, given that he discusses "rational ignorance" in the second paragraph. (If the cost of processing more information outweighs the predicted benefit, other factors - including tribalism - may dominate.)
Your next point about filters has occurred to me before, and comes off as a different type of challenge. As in, it's one thing for people to choose on their own not to assimilate more information, and another thing for that assimilation cost to be imposed on them by other people, namely, by withholding certain information. I'm not even talking about outrage factories, either; I'm talking about keeping certain information completely secret. Everything from how Greg is picking tech stocks to CakeCo's secret batter recipe to how China is programming its drones.
I've pointed out this problem to David before, asking him how he thinks secretly held information can be expected to affect a free market. I recall looking for a discussion of it in TMoF, and not finding one. Possibly because I didn't search for the right terms.
He has another book, Future Imperfect, that may deal with the secret information issue. Wish I could remember; I have only read the first third of it or so, and it was close to two decades ago at this point. I recall it was interesting though.
Yes Minister wasn't written by libertarians; Antony Jay was a fairly conventional Tory, and Jonathan Lynn's a Labour-supporting moderate socialist. It comes across as much less libertarian-coded if you're British.
After reading what David wrote about Yes, Minister, and after reading your comment, I went to the Wikipedia article on the series. What you say is right, but there is a specific point, not overly emphasized, but consistent with my original impression, that the authors were aware that they were using Public Choice Economics, a point explicitly endorsed by one of them.
Using Public Choice Economics is pretty damned close to being a classical liberal!
Not necessarily. The Yes Minister public choice critique of the civil service largely came to prominence in the UK in the 1970s with Tony Benn (a far-left Labour cabinet minister with similar views to Jeremy Corbyn) who said the government was controlled by the civil service which acted in its own self-interest. What he wanted to do about it was always a hand-wavy mixture of workers co-operatives and making the government "more democratic" through having a lot of committees, but the criticism was left-coded in Britain until part way into Thatcher's premiership.
Libertarians seem to have two major preoccupations. First is rollback of the state, its regulations, essentially economic freedom.
The second is advancement of sexual revolution and furthering of Mills experiments in living in any and all forms. This may be called libertine-ism.
However, the 19C, liberals were not preoccupied by rollback of the state. In fact, they were engaged, by and large, on expansion of the state. It is true, however, that the state was much smaller in 19c than any now.
The 19c liberals were reformers first and foremost. They were for Education, for Sanitation, for Factory Laws, for reform in this and that, and most reforms naturally increase the power and size of the state.
Maybe I'm missing something here, in which way is Chile libertarian? Drug laws, check. Sex laws, check. Speech laws, check. Occupational licensing, check. Speed limits, check, etc. Free markets have nothing to do with libertarianism outside they are incidentally enabled.
It's something that has bothered me since Obama/Trump1/COVID/GWOT/Israel, intellectuals whom nominally were libertarian seemed to have given up on the liberty/NAP part for "a more comfortable prison".
Certainly in the vast corpus of Chesterton, you can find a few lines suggestive of liberalism but you will find many more lines which go directly opposite. For example, he wrote, while some things can be said for socialism, nothing can be said for capitalism.
Chesterton was a master of paradoxes but his loyalty went to the bedrock Catholic principles
of solidarity and subsidiarity. To call him a libertarian is to empty the term itself of all meaning.
"As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals." (GKC What's Wrong with the World)
A libertarian is fundamentally and essentially a person who does not accept any authority external to himself.
A person like Chesterton who expressed traditions as democracy of the dead and wrote eloquently on families (a topic virtually abhorred by doctrinaire libertarians) and how people (not individuals) rule themselves is virtually an antithesis of libertarianism.
Reading your comments on this topic I conclude that much of the problem is your bizarre view of libertarians. There are doubtless some libertarians who are enthusiasts for same sex marriage and odd pronouns but it is hardly a defining characteristic. Insofar as there is a libertarian position on the subject it is that it is not up to the state to determine what is marriage or who is married to whom, it is up to each individual to decide what couples he considers, and treats, as married.[https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2005/12/gay-marriage-both-sides-are-wrong.html]
I don't think families are a topic abhorred by libertarians; I am very happy with both the family I grew up with and the family I am now part of. I get the feeling that you have generalized recklessly from a small sample of libertarians. Perhaps extrapolated recklessly as well.
Going on to Chesterton, you write "The liberal term Chesterton imputes of himself as rather like "liberal" in "liberal education" "
I do not see how you can make that reading consistent with the post I quoted or with (from memory) "I am still a liberal. It's those people who are not liberals" (the Liberal Party).
Chesterton was a Distributist; he believed the existing distribution of land ownership was a result of historical theft, which is how a libertarian argues for redistribution of land. He was a Catholic; there is nothing unlibertarian about choosing to accept an authority, only to having one imposed on you. I used to know a libertarian Jesuit.
As to his view of capitalism (from the chapter on Chesterton in The Machinery of Freedom):
But to Chesterton capitalism did not mean private property and individual liberty. It meant what he believed he saw around him, a society dominated, economically and politically, by capitalists, in which most people worked for large companies, bought from large monopolies, and read newspapers controlled by a few millionaires who were, by a curious coincidence, the friends, supporters, and relatives of the ruling political establishment. He accepted much, perhaps too much, of the socialist critique of the then current state of England, while arguing that the socialists’ cure went in precisely the wrong direction.
"Insofar as there is a libertarian position on the subject it is that it is not up to the state to determine what is marriage or who is married to whom, it is up to each individual to decide what couples he considers, and treats, as married."
But this is precisely what I have said. The libertarian does not accept external authority. He defines it himself.
Chesterton had preoccupations rather orthogonal to people who call themselves libertarian. Small government, rollback of regulations, private roads, minarchism, anarcho-capitalism, drug legalization are not his topics.
PS As for regulations, they tended to be proposed by liberals of his day.
English liberalism of Chesterton's time is poorly mapped to American libertarianism. And Chesterton himself was a pretty eccentric liberal. Certainly not in any political or economic sense. His Distributism is generally regarded as socialism-lite, quite opposite of libertarian conception.
Nobody reading Utopia of Usurers could suspect that they were reading a libertarian writer.
As I said, you can pick many more. But the liberalism he is writing of is hardly classical liberalism, far less "libertarianism".
You should note the kind of vituperation he directs against Manchester Liberals, the closest analog to libertarian. He regards them as barely human.
See this quote from What's wrong with the World:
". My main contention is that, whether necessary or not, both Industrialism and Collectivism have been accepted as necessities—not as naked ideals or desires. Nobody liked the Manchester School; it was endured as the only way of producing wealth. Nobody likes the Marxian school; it is endured as the only way of preventing poverty. "
He equates the Manchester Economists (i.e the classical liberals) to Marxists, no less.
The liberal term Chesterton imputes of himself as rather like "liberal" in "liberal education" .
Your quote,
"You should note the kind of vituperation he directs against Manchester Liberals, the closest analog to libertarian"
fits perfectly with David's quote,
"As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals."
He doesn't like Liberals. Were you trying to counter that? I'd call it an own goal.
This quote-mongering isn't how one can profitably read Chesterton.
One can easily find 100 quotes where he vilifies capitalism (even worse than socialism) and capitalists (Model Employers).
He is a Distributist, not a free-marketeer. He takes government as given, like English liberals but unlike American libertarians. As a social conservative, he is off the charts. Even against divorce, he wrote Superstition of Divorce.
When your own cherry-picked quote works against what you claim, you aren't good at quote-mongering and need to learn to code.
If one reads Chesterton, one soon realizes that he didn't in the least shared fetishes of American libertarianism. You can't imagine him writing for same-sex marriage or pronouns., for example.
Here Chesterton is talking of technocratic tendency of the liberals of his period as opposed to the democratic and populist thing he calls liberalism.