We're big fans of the Niskanen Center here at the ASI. So we were glad to see Niskanen's Karl Smith follow our lead and embrace neoliberalism.
In his post, Karl sets out why he identifies as a neoliberal and sums the ideology up rather well.
He writes:
There is something fundamentally hybrid about neoliberals. I embrace the term, yet my intellectual background and native sympathies lie on the right, not the left. Neoliberalism most readily brings to mind a certain type of libertarian who never quite bought the discarded philosophical case for liberty. It’s someone who was more enamored by Milton Friedman than Murray Rothbard; liked Nozick but preferred Rawls; and saw the failures of Eurosclerosis as just as relevant to the case for free markets, as Cold War-era anti-communism. It’s the cast of mind described in a Medium post by Sam Bowman, the executive director of the Adam Smith Institute.
Crucially, it also connotes the type of libertarian who saw free-market liberals as heroic bedfellows. Their heroism lies in the courage to overcome the anti-market bias of the left. Ours was in embracing them and so transcending the anti-left bias endemic to the right. Together we are a muddy middle of liberal philosophy and libertarian policy solutions.
In practice, this implies that we’re suspicious of regulation, but embrace redistribution. I often tell my more conservative friends that I’ve made my peace with the welfare state. That, however, isn’t entirely honest. The truth is that I wholeheartedly embrace the welfare state as a tool for empowering people to live happy, fulfilling, self-directed lives. My primary concern regarding the welfare state is making it less intrusive in the choices of individuals, families, and communities.