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The Liberal Capitalist Party Is a Dynamist Party

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Much of the Liberal Capitalist worldview results from reasoning out the implications of three principle truths regarding the world in which we live. The first truth is that constant change is here to stay. Whether we consider the life span of a mosquito or the shifting of continents, no thing endures, everything changes. Secondly, in this world of incessant change, all knowledge is “local” knowledge, only knowable by those closest to it. The stream of information we receive from outside of our immediate locales, no matter how rich, is but the merest fraction of all the important things there are to know. And third, in the end, all human knowledge which we don’t simply happen upon is the product of a single process: trial and error. We have made our long, slow trek from cave to skyscraper almost exclusively by endless iterations of trial and error.

The implication of these facts taken together portray the world as it is, a world of unimaginably immense, shifting complexity. It also allows us to glimpse the shape and boundaries of our knowledge of that world, which is spotty, mostly unarticulated, and highly dispersed throughout the population, existing nowhere—absolutely nowhere—as any kind of accessible whole.

For the purposes of governance, this knowledge quickly leads us to a few primary questions, such as: how do we bring together and coordinate the information contained separately within our individual heads in such a way that we are able to produce things more complex than, say, a turnip? How are we to best gain knowledge we don’t yet have but will need anyway to successfully face the challenges of an ever-changing world? And how do we produce a social order sophisticated enough and adaptable enough to be successful yet still be able to deal with the expense and consequences of trial and error?

We’ve just spent a century learning, the hard way, exactly how NOT to do it: with economic collectivism. In our dynamic world, static, centralized command-and-control economic institutions function about as well as a train with square wheels. Desirable outcomes aren’t to be commanded into being, nor undesirable outcomes banished away by the diktats of a central authority, because that authority, whatever its form, and whatever the scope of its nominal power, is simply incapable of obtaining or processing the knowledge required to produce the outcomes it intends.

This is why the Liberal Capitalist party embraces the opposite paradigm, most recently defined by author Virginia Postrel in her book The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, as “dynamism.” Instead of trying to use brute political power to force the square peg of a contrived static social order into the round hole that is our dynamic natural world, the dynamist strategy takes an organic approach, where patchwork tangles of government micro-regulations are replaced with a simple framework of broad general rules, which are designed to allow those operating within them to create nested systems of ever more specific rules and modes based on their own specialized knowledge, which of course only those closest to the reality on the ground can possess in the first place. The playing field created by the top level of government rules is called a market, and generally the freer it is, the more spontaneous it’s order, and the better the outcomes it produces. To encourage further learning and find solutions for the new problems which confront us, trial must be promoted and error must be permissible. If barriers to participation are sufficiently low, then many players will enter the game with different approaches to the problem. Open competition in the marketplace of ideas swiftly rewards the best ideas, and withdraws support from unsuccessful attempts. And it all happens spontaneously. No one has to be "in charge".

Unfortunately, in today's poisonously partisan public square, the least error is instantly pounced upon and made to seem the grossest incompetence in order to gain political advantage. This has a terrible and mostly hidden chilling effect on creativity and experimentation. We must remember that most of the work with which we are engaged in America has never been attempted by humanity before. We are the bleeding-edge society on this planet. If we become so afraid of mistakes that we refuse to take risks, we literally stop learning. And then the next new problem that comes along is a catastrophe.

The Liberal Capitalists believe that true diversity and a spirit of humility and willingness to fail must be cultivated to encourage the experimentation which we rely upon to continue our journey into the future. We believe that inappropriate centralization impedes progress and should be deconstructed wherever possible. For these reasons we support free and open markets, and a federalist approach to governance.

Keywords :

dynamism

dynamist

knowledge

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