How the idea of liberty became Liberalism

This situation was only confronted at the beginning of the twentieth century. Minimum wages were set in the UK in 1909 and in Australia in 1907. In Britain it took the Beveridge report in 1942 and a Labor win in 1945 to produce the National assistance act of 1948 that established the welfare state. For this to happen the government had to finally ignore the social and economic thinking of the previous century.

One would have thought that The New Deal, under Franklin D Roosevelt and the rise of Keynesian economics had finally put paid to the economics of the nineteenth century that were based on pseudo-science and petty moralising. However, Frederick Hayek, an Austrian who became a colleague and rival of Keynes at the London School of Economics managed to turn the tide away from government intervention in the economy and towards free market capitalism. Thatcher and Regan were promoters of his ideas and ushered in a new era of new (neo) liberalism that repeated the errors of the original nineteenth version. And lo, trust in market forces, the belief in small government and faith in the big end of town led only to a massive disparity in wealth followed by social disintegration particularly in the US where capitalism and the free market reigned supreme. Globalisation, that child of the free market, allowed businesses all over the world to blithely shut down manufacturing and shift it to low wage regimes in dictatorial countries that lacked union organisation. The result in the US was the generation of an embittered working class who were ripe for the picking to a game show host telling them that he would make America great again.

In spite of the progress we have made towards the sharing of wealth via progressive taxation and the welfare state, the Australian Liberal Party continues to denigrate the unemployed as witnessed by Joe Hockey's "lifters and leaners speech" and Scott Morison's anxiety that continued government support during the Covid epidemic will "disincentivise" the population to work. It seems that the old evangelical morality is still with us. People are thought to be basically lazy and must be incentivised, one of John Howard's favourite words. This is to miss that the great majority of people recognise the advantages of a good job against living on what used to be called the dole.

Australia has done well with a Liberal federal government acting quickly and effectively to co-ordinate with the states. Unlike in the US, we have overcome politics and geography so that we can act together to produce a better outcome. We have done so, mainly because the Labor Party has gradually inaugurated what may be called "soft" socialization. We have universal healthcare, many forms of welfare support, but unemployment benefits that ensure a life of stress and poverty for those who cannot find work, as the prime minister strangely added "through no fault of their own." The lessons learnt from our experience of the pandemic is that societies who have entertained some form of social democracy, whose governments maintain strong institutions and public trust do better than those who rely on the market and private enterprise. The sins of Thatcher and Regan have come home to roost.