Source: EconLog
by Pierre Lemieux
“There is a way and, I suggest, only one way to defend populism from a liberal viewpoint: it is to reject the populist concept of ‘the people.’ Let the people be plural, that is, a collection of individuals. Let each individual be recognized as having a right to veto (at some contractual-constitutional level) any prohibition or mandate he (or she, of course) does not consent to. A fortiori, no subset of the people may use coercion against the individuals in another subset. It follows that the elite or the experts (‘they’) or the politicians themselves may not legitimately boss people around. If populism is thus characterized, it is defendable from both a moral and an economic viewpoint as it would coincide with (classical) liberalism.” (11/26/24)