Liberalisme.

• Author: Palda, Filip

Liberalisme

By Pascal Salin Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 2000. Pp. 506. 180 F.

Liberalisme is a beautifully written book that seeks to shock the French into understanding what freedom is and why it is important for creating prosperity. In France, as in many other countries, to be a liberal means to celebrate a government that takes from some to give to others. Salin explains that such a use of the term is a perversion of the conception of freedom.

To be free means to have a right to property and a fight to exchange that property as one sees fit. As Salin writes, freedom and property are inseparable. From this premise, the author constructs a coherent account of how markets might work in the best interests of all if only government stopped meddling with property rights. He explains how property rights evolve and how government can rearrange those rights to transfer income away from those who have cultivated property to those who wish to seize its fruits. He discusses tobacco regulation, labor-market laws, and macroeconomic policy with a view to showing how policies intended to serve the greater good can end up filling the saddlebags of a few highwaymen dressed in the livery of public servants.

Salin informs us that his book is based on a "true conception of man." Man desires freedom, which he puts to use in a reasoned manner. Man's reasons for acting are subjective and outside the ability of economics to analyze with data. Economists who seek to model demand and supply or to carry out controlled experiments in psychology laboratories are "scientistics," a breed of quack who applies scientific methods to quantities that cannot be measured or, if measured, cannot be found to be related to each other in a systematic manner (p. 55). Instead of appealing to data, which Salin scorns, the true liberal begins with a realistic conception of man and deduces what sort of society is best. The method of deduction is the only true science and cannot be separated from liberalism (p. 41). Only a liberal of Salin's ilk can be a humanist, for, as he states, "humanism is indissociable from liberalism." An economist such as Milton Friedman--who employs statistical analysis and therefore is willing on occasion to allow the data to tell him that government might productively lay its hand on the economy--cannot have a true respect for the individual.

Most scholars think that science is a method of testing beliefs based on trial and error, and that theories are...