Replies

Libertarian economic theory can be traced back to Adam Smith. Conservative Social theory traces back to Edmund Burke.

What many people do not know is that Adam Smith and Edmund Burke were good personal friends, and their theories were intended to work together, not be regarded as two separate and mutually exclusive ideas.

No economic system will function without strong moral underpinnings to protect it.

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Edmund Burke 1791

Morality is necessary to the function of civil society. You can't have a financially free, but morally corrupt society. It will collapse.

I think the problem lies with the Ayn Rand followers. Once they flocked to the “libertarian” label, instead of called themselves what they really are (objectivists), a lot of people forgot what the term originally stood for.

Kind of the same way the Marxists tainted the word “liberal”.

Adam Smith and Edmund Burke were good personal friends, and their theories were intended to work together, not be regarded as two separate and mutually exclusive ideas.

I confess that Edmund Burke is only a name to me; I have never read any writings of his. But what you say is not at all surprising. Adam Smith himself is after all hardly unfamiliar with conservative social thought; he wrote only two books of which I’m aware, one of which is renowned Wealth of Nations - and the other is entitled Theory of Moral Sentiments . . . from which I frequently have occasion to quote:
The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.
The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors.
I think that an excellent explanation of the behavior of “sheeple” and of the motives of journalists which explains why journalists tend to be socialists.