After reading this comment by “Ian B” in reply to another post, I fired off an email asking him if he’d mind, ever so much, if I could reproduce it in a blog post of it’s own, such was the level of, “Yes! Yes!” I felt.

This explains so much:

I am, perhaps, primarily interested in social liberalism, i.e. everyday freedom. I am also an economic liberal, but that came later when I thought and then studied a lot about economics. But I think a central argument for economic liberalism is simply this: you cannot have general freedom, that is, independence of action, without economic freedom. Economics- money, finance, work, trade etc, are such a major part of life that anyone who seeks a general or social freedom cannot hope to attain that if their economic life is rigorously controlled by the government. It’s simply useless to hope for any real devolution of power when that which has so much power in your life- your money- is controlled by someone else.

The flipside of that argument is that, in order to control money and trade, the government has to control everything else, because everything else is intertwined with the economic market. This is why we are increasingly moving back to a society in which- rather than being free to do all which is not specifically prohibited- we are only allowed to do that which is specifically authorised. Regulation extends into every nook and cranny of our lives. The hope of then “devolving power” in anything more than a tokenistic way is hopeless.

So I contend that you can’t be a social or political liberal without being an economic liberal, and vice versa.

Amen! Thanks Ian