The Economist Has Given Up On Liberalism

Even as The Economist drifts further and further into progressivism and away from the liberalism of its founding, it still claims to be liberalism’s true, authentic voice.

The Economist fashions itself a liberal magazine, in the original sense of the word. The weekly was founded in 1843 to argue against the corn laws, which discouraged food imports with tariffs and other restrictions and kept domestic food prices high. It chalked up the repeal of those laws only three years later to “a fearless reliance upon the truth and justice of a great principle”: liberalism.

Today we usually call the intellectual descendants of liberals “classical liberals” for clarity. Liberals like those who founded and supported The Economist in its earlier years believed in property rights, free trade, freedom of speech, religious toleration, and the emancipation of slaves. The original liberals’ idea of government was limited, usually sharply.

Conservatives are broadly in agreement with classical liberal ideas, and so are libertarians. The reason we don’t call ourselves liberals, without the qualifier, is what happened to the term in the intervening years. As we’ll see, it was an unfortunate intellectual trend that The Economist was susceptible to.

Progressives Versus Liberals

Progressivism is a movement that came after liberalism, and had very different ideas about government. Progressives wanted a lot more government with few restrictions of its aims or its size.

To progressives, the growth of the state, and its demands on our purses and our persons, was a good thing. Big business was the enemy of the people. Big government was the people, and it was the remedy to a huge number of problems. This was true even if it trampled the liberal project underfoot.

Many opponents of progressive politics in America considered themselves liberals, but so did many defenders of big government, especially New Dealers. Liberal critics of progressivism included economist Milton Friedman and journalist Felix Morley.

In his 1949 book “The Power in the People,” former Washington Post editor Morley wrote in support of “the liberal position, using the word in its true, historical sense.” He explained, “A person who maintains that the State should solve, by necessarily coercive methods, any problem that individuals are capable of solving voluntarily is, of course, the very opposite of liberal.”

The European Union Problem

The European Union is many things, but not one of those things is a classical liberal institution. True, it helps facilitate trade and movement across the subcontinent. It also imposes a huge body of laws and regulations upon people in member countries.

The EU regulated the curvature of bananas, for instance. Straight bananas are still allowed, but the extra-curvy ones are right out. It banned bottled water packagers from saying that their H2O “fights dehydration” and prohibited prune packagers from saying that the contents can help your bowels move. It insists on the “right to be forgotten” and has passed Internet copyright laws that may throttle most memes. It heavily subsidizes fisheries, farming, and French Boeing competitor Airbus.

Organizations such as the World Trade Organization also help to facilitate free trade. The WTO manages to do this without forcing countries to pass all kinds of laws and regulations that have little to do with knocking down barriers to allow the normal back-and-forth of commerce.

Obviously, a British magazine that was founded to champion liberal ideas would be cheering on the UK in its moves to get out of the EU, right? Wrong. The unsigned editorial collective that makes up The Economist is so bitterly opposed to Brexit (the voter-driven “British exit” from the EU) that they endorsed the Liberal-Democratic Party in the December 12 Parliamentary elections.

The Liberal-Democrats are the shrill and irksome third party that promised to raise spending, raise taxes, and to just cancel Brexit without so much as an “are you sure about that?” second referendum to the voters. These positions ought to be spurned by a genuinely liberal journal, not encouraged.

Even More Economic Illiberalism

Brexit is far from the only issue where The Economist takes leave of classical liberalism. The magazine is also an enthusiastic promoter of gun control in all its forms, an influential endorser of Obamacare, and an advocate for penuriously high taxes on hard alcohol.

The late Friedman wrote an open letter explaining why “Death should not be a taxable event” that has been co-signed by over 700 fellow economists, many of them distinguished. “Spend your money on riotous living – no tax; leave your money to your children – the tax collector gets paid first. That is the message sent by the estate tax. It is a bad message and the estate tax is a bad tax,” Friedman and company argued.

In contrast, The Economist published a cover story package in 2017 arguing that “the case for taxing inherited assets is strong,” and calling the estate tax “a hated tax but a fair one.” That was the final straw for this liberal reader. I let my subscription lapse and haven’t gone back.

Pretending to be Almighty

Other magazines have started out as liberal enterprises, drifted into progressivism, and owned it. The Nation is a great example of this shift. But The Economist is a different sort of magazine. It’s often wrong, but never uncertain. “Pretend you are God,” was one senior editor’s famous advice to a first-time editorial writer.

Even as The Economist drifts further and further into progressivism and away from the liberalism of its founding, it still claims to be liberalism’s true, authentic voice. “Liberalism made the modern world, but the modern world is turning against it,” the magazine warned in 2018.

One of the funnier cases is a Scandanavian Communist party accused of being Nazi because they’ve rejected social justice.

Their party leader said that social justice was not acceptable. He said that focusing on sexual minorities distracted from the issues of their poor working class voters. He said that the social justice open borders brought in poor people from other countries that competed with their poor, making matters worse. And that the culture conflict and violence was hurting their voters.

And the head of the communist party in that Scandinavian country was called a Nazi for saying your policies hurt OUR poor, so we can’t do it anymore.

I stopped subscribing when they had this on the cover:

I built a little tool so that I can read the Economist, NY Times and more for free too. So can you.

Here's the post that shows you how:
Bookmarklets

I actually used to enjoy reading The Economist 10+ years ago. It was an interesting non-US point of view on world events. I liked that, and I knew what their angle was. It helped understand “the other side”.

But maybe 5+ years ago it really went full on progressive in a disappointing and unreadable way. It became irritating and manipulative in fact presentation. R.I.P.

Progressives poison everything they touch.

The weekly was founded in 1843 to argue against the corn laws, which discouraged food imports with tariffs and other restrictions and kept domestic food prices high. …

Oh boy. It was price controls (price fixing) that kept domestic prices high. Not to mention, if there really was a distinction between liberalism and the left in the era when the Communist Manifesto came out (a scant five years after The Economist came to be), none of the leftists ever illustrated a distinction.

“(I)n general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”

— Karl Marx before the Democratic Association of Brussels, January 9, 1848

I stopped reading the Economist in the 2000s. I noticed an obvious drift towards statism and central-planning, using Keynesianism, open-borders, elitism and globalism as justification. The occasions I have looked the Economist again, its gotten a lot worse.

The agenda is simple—they want a small wealthy elite to rule the planet while everyone else lives in poverty.

We _get_ it.

“I built a little tool so that I can read the Economist, NY Times and more for free too. So can you. “

Why would anyone want to read that garbage?

“I stopped subscribing when they had this on the cover:”

I picked up a copy off my host’s coffee table in 1982. He was basically a conservative but sometimes strange ideas came from him.

I saw where they came from ... a socialist magazine!

I knew The Economist jumped the shark during the GW Bush administration. They couldn’t for the life of them figure out why the USA supported Israel so much more than Europe did. They were at an almost total loss - leaving them to speculate that it must be Evangelical Christians influencing the foreign policy of the US for their own religious ends!

Think about that for a minute! Wow! Those wily, powerful, sneaky Evangelicals.

It never occurred to them to search for a sordid antisemitic history in Europe itself! You wouldn’t have to look to Europe’s medieval past, you could simply look in the last century. But, no! The intellectual giants at the Economist could only offer up the American Christians as the reason.

Gee.

Why would anyone want to read that garbage?

The tool works with much, much more. Every once in a while it is good to see what the other side is discussing so that we may be better prepared.

I used to read it in college. Back then they didn’t have the US addition. You could read it and really get a different perspective.
When they started to distribute the US addition here it became just another mainstream news source.

I used to read the Economist cover to cover every week and did so for years. I could hardly wait for next week’s edition to come out. I didn’t agree with them about everything but at least they were their own unique voice. They did not just parrot Leftist talking points you would hear in the MSM either here in the states or in Britain.

That really changed a bit over 15 years ago. They still clung to their positions I disagreed with but found myself agreeing with them about 0% of the time - and I haven’t changed much. They sure have. Now the Economist is just another Yurp rag and is not worth reading. I stopped reading it for good by the time they endorsed Kerry over Dubya. They have of course plumped for every single Democrat in every election since.

Yep. I just posted the same before I saw your post. They have endorsed every single Democrat since they endorsed Kerry in 2004....yet they still try to pretend they are something other than a Yurp global socialist rag. Pick any issue. The Economist is wrong about it. They’re also frequently dishonest in what they write about it.

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