Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2019
Verified Purchase
Anthony Signorelli has written what amounts to an extended essay on what it means to be considered a 'liberal' in today's world. The question itself is an important one; but Mr. Signorelli's book takes too many side roads and digressions to make the best use of either his time, or his readers' patience. In modern parlance, the appellation 'Liberal' has a very specific, and often pejorative meaning.
As a rhetorical device, Mr. Signorelli commits what rhetorician's call the Fallacy of Equivocation, meaning that he uses the word 'liberal' in differing ways and senses. Religious liberalism differs from economic liberalism, which then differs from political liberalism; and although religious and economic and political theory may converge at some point, they do not all mean the same thing.
We do not need to go back to the Middle Ages, at whatever historical era that Mr. Signorelli wishes to start in order to understand the points of disagreement between liberal political theorists and their conservative counterparts. True, from an historical perspective, one could go back to the schism that occurred within the Catholic Church giving rise to the Protestant Reformation; but that historical context would not convey meaningful understanding to today's political controversies, not when the founding documents of our country specifically decree at several places within the Constitution that secular government must be entirely free from an established church.
Likewise, economic liberalism traces its origins to the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries, when the focus of the dispute was the power of the state, in the form of the state's hereditary monarch, to dictate economic policy, which then chiefly meant commerce with foreign states, and most particularly, commerce between the home country and its satellite colonies wherever they might be, during an era when international trade was seen as an extended arm of national power and security. In other words, Liberals wanted to focus on free markets, regardless of politics, because politics, in the form of trade restrictions, had a way of advancing the interests of the landed gentry (who were, in many respects, cash poor) at the expense of merchants, manufacturers, and businessmen, who are pressing the king's ministers and Parliament, to permit them to move full speed ahead in the development of a cash economy in which the ownership of land itself became largely irrelevant.
In one sense, the debate was over economic stasis. Landowners, the great magnates of the realm, held their wealth in the form of land, land that their tenant farmers tilled, and ultimately paid rent to their landlord. The social arrangements attendant to that landlord – tenant arrangement went back centuries, with the parties bound together by formal and informal bonds that were not easily disregarded, much less broken. These were traditional societies in which tenants owed service, and the landlord owed protection. Land transfers were nothing like the real estate markets of today, and primogeniture laws ensured that large land holdings stayed together, devolving upon the eldest son of the landlord,the landlord' other male children left dispossessed until the eldest son died. Daughters were married off as soon as possible, in marriage arrangements in which they might have little or no say, and they were expected to produce male heirs.
Very little of that traditional manner of accumulating wealth was relevant to merchants, bankers, and others were looking to develop a cash economy to enrich themselves and to achieve greater political influence. They could do that because the King, a large landholder himself in his own right, always seem to be short of money; and money was needed to raise armies to fight wars, words that the king deemed necessary to either protect or to enhance his own power.
So that is our starting point. We need only to go back to the first decade of the Seventeenth Century, or perhaps the ninth decade of the Sixteenth Century during the reign of Elizabeth I, when a ragtag British fleet defeated the Spanish Armada, to see that England saw its future, not in land and the rents that land ownership would produce, but rather in trade and commerce. Europe was still in the lock of the Mercantile System, whereby the King believed it to be his duty, right, and privilege to weaponize economic policies to protect his realm and to augment its wealth. And the king would go to war to protect his kingdom's economic interests.
Beginning in 1652, England went to war with the Dutch Republic over trade. And, in fact, four naval wars were fought between them over control of the seas and trade routes. The last war ended in 1780.
As we look back, such was the success of Dutch mercantile interests, specifically their devotion to free trade, that England was forced to reconsider its own trade policies with regard to how trade would be conducted as the vehicle for increasing national wealth. Great Britain's loss of its American colonies in the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century, a war largely fought over the American colonies' demand for the right to trade freely with whomsoever
they chose to do business had a great deal to do with the change in British thinking.
From there, we move forward to look at trade as the vehicle by which economic liberty became part of the political economy of what was now the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Scotland, dating from the Act of Union of 1707.
From wars over trade, to arguments over free markets, Liberalism focused on the right to do business free of governmental intrusion. Today that is a conservative position; but at its point of origin, what it meant was the right to do business anywhere and at any time around the world, without arbitrary restriction imposed by royal authority.
The impetus for the right to trade freely came chiefly from the maritime nations of northern Europe, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden. For historical reasons, perhaps because of its agricultural base, and fertile soil, France was not an active participant in the competition worldwide for trade rights. The French political culture has been since the late Middle Ages one of centralized control. In matters of commerce, the type of liberalism epitomized by British and Dutch mercantile interests did not appear to take hold until very late.
Consequently, a shift in emphasis segues into a shift of meaning when the word 'Liberal' begins to mean something else, something other than a right to trade freely without arbitrary restriction from royal authority. What we have then is a spectrum in which the polarities are reversed. What used to be allowed and encouraged now becomes distrusted and restricted; and the reasons for that reversal of polarities becomes clear when it is understood that in international trade, increasing the number of trading transactions is of mutual benefit, a win-win situation in which all parties benefit from the trade. This was the lesson taught by economist David Pareto. On the other hand, absolute freedom of action on the domestic side in a closed loop environment invariably put the stronger party is at odds with the weaker parties, the so-called 'Matthew Effect, based upon the biblical aphorism that 'He will has more gets more; and he who has less takes nothing and becomes poorer'. The polarities are reversed, and what was formerly applauded as freedom of action suddenly appears to be selfish exploitation. Liberal philosophy has not changed, but the context in which it is applied most certainly has changed, and both parties to the transaction are now appealing to the same political authority for protection and approbation. What was once a win-win is now a zero-sum game.
What I have laid out are the basic arguments that now form the lines of contention over globalization, with free traders claiming that unrestricted free trade benefits everyone; that is to say, anyone with money to spend on goods and services produced anywhere in the world, and at a lower price than they would have to pay to do the same work, or to manufacture that same thing domestically at home. Within that specific sphere of activity, the claim is largely true. The problem lies in the fact that the statement ignores, and quite intentionally so, the problem of externalities. Those may include people who cannot afford to buy what is produced halfway around the world, or whose jobs, their livelihood, used to be manufacturing those things that could be sold domestically or abroad, but only at a higher price. So, the bottom line for them is not the few cents that they might save on the trade or transaction, but rather, it is the ability to survive either individually or as a household, or as a community. In other words, if the consequences of worldwide free-trade are laid out on a balance beam, the few cents saved by the free trader, i.e., he gets more bang for his buck, must be weighed against the destruction of jobs, homes, and communities, when the traditional occupations formerly engaged in are no longer economically viable. It is like the situation that existed in the Intermountain states in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, where gold or other valuable minerals were discovered, excavated war mind until those resources were exhausted, and then abandoned. Whole towns and villages sprung up almost overnight, only to be abandoned four, five, ten, or twenty years later, after the mines played out. The Far West is littered with ghost towns like Bodie, California, now a National Historic Place; but maybe a few miles away, another unnamed town is simply a collection of rotted or collapsed buildings that are no longer habitable, and would serve only as a reminder of a transient civilization come and gone.
The Liberal at those in philosophy would hold that the miners, the businessmen, the laundry workers, and perhaps the camp followers, that arrived there when times were good, were perfectly justified in staying just long enough to make some money, and then depart for the next mining town, or wherever else they needed to go to earn a living. Back then, the Far West was thinly populated, and it made sense to maintain a nomadic existence while seeking one's fortune somewhere over the horizon.
Today we live in a different world, and the putative 'Liberal' response to diminished opportunities for economic activity would be looking for outside help to restore and help maintain what people already have, and so not to have to abandon whatever value may be left in where they are living. Those are investments made over a lifetime that can never be recouped if the owner pulled up stakes and had to relocate to a better job market. Besides, the cost of relocating is very high, much higher than the wages that the sojourner might be able to earn in another state, even if they could find a job. Moreover, and this is getting more the case than before, there is a new form of protectionism that is a disincentive to relocating across state lines: occupational licensing. Everyone agrees that people engaged in certain sensitive occupations, such as building contractors, skilled mechanics, professional persons, i.e., physicians, lawyers, financial services and accountancy, healthcare workers, electricians, plumbers, hairdressers, beauticians, and many other occupations, need to be licensed and regulated, because the occupations they fill and the work that they do involves things, possibly use or exposure to harmful chemicals, that make it dangerous for unqualified persons to engage in those occupations without certification and proof that they are fully competent to do so. The 'Liberal' mantra holds that these are occupations that are freighted with the public interest, and that the occupational licensing regulations go no further than is necessary to protect the public interest, health and safety.
Well, maybe yes, may be no. All I can say is that if I wanted to practice law in the state other than Massachusetts or California, I would have to take that state's Bar Examination before I could open a law practice there. Some states, particularly California, have stringent regulations requiring so many hours of classroom instruction, so many hours of practical experience, and so on. Is that overkill? Who is to say? Between the extremes of states where there is minimal occupational certification to establish baseline competencies, and wealthier, more complicated places like California, that have extensive regulations, these policy choices that political legislative bodies make based upon their view of what the public health and safety require. In this regard, the labels 'Liberal' and 'Conservative' are entirely meaningless, because those labels reflect absolutely nothing about the minimum qualifications that the licensing law ought to require in order to protect the public interest.
Consequently, what Mr. Signorelli has to say is either very little or nothing at all; and yet, it is a major impediment to people seeking new jobs who live in places where there is diminishing employment.
On top of that, the cost of moving from a low-wage locality to a high wage locality, California being among the most expensive places to live, can make even the best qualified individual willing to make the trip unable to do so simply because he or she cannot find a place to live close enough to where the jobs are, at a rent or mortgage payment that they can afford to pay. Right now, California has a huge deficit of housing, and tens of thousands of people who live homeless on the streets, simply because there is insufficient housing at rents they can afford to pay, and most of these people have regular jobs. Again, the 'Liberal' and 'Conservative' options being developed to address the problem of homelessness are immaterial and meaningless, except to point out, that governmental involvement in solving the housing situation is imperative, and without which, there would be no movement forward at all. That, in and of itself goes against the Conservative mantra favoring smaller government with fewer functions and responsibilities.
Additionally, it is a heartless philosophical position; unsustainable, and against the public interest. So, what would a Conservative proposal to remedy the situation look like? We do not know; and prominent Conservatives have been keeping mum about it. The implication is that they would just wish that the problem would go away.
The bottom line is that simple answers to complex questions in situations in which unanticipated 'emergent' factors or behaviors are increasingly encountered make decision-making extremely difficult. Based upon our previous experience, those emergent factors or phenomena can be sufficiently severe as to not only destroy the viability of the program that brought them in, but can generate severe ripple effects that can make entire communities unsustainable. We saw this happen with the Urban Renewal programs during the late 1940s through 1950s. Public housing progress like Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis were dynamited within fifteen years after they were erected. These are problems that had their roots in Liberal thinking and ended up destroying entire communities.
As for Mr. Signorelli's little book, there is nothing that I can find either in his exposition of Liberalism's principles, or in their application, that response to the dilemmas that I outlined above. I would say that he made a fair effort at addressing the matter; except that there is no overarching principle within his book that allows me to draw any conclusions, or for that matter, to make any real sense of what he has to say. I fully understand and appreciate the fact that my review of this book does not go into any great detail about what Mr. Signorelli actually wrote in his 74 page book; but modern Liberal principles are not derived from from some grab bag of nice sounding phrases that mean different things to different people. Historically, as noted above, the term 'Liberal' comes from the world of international commerce, and its advocacy of free trade. The fiercest advocates for free trade were the Dutch, who, in the early Seventeenth Century, ran circles around the British in their quest for worldwide markets. As I also mentioned above, the British and the Dutch fought four naval wars, three within a twenty year span of time in the second half of that century, principally over which of the two was to dominate international trade. None of that involved either civil liberties or expansion of human rights as we know them today; but the principle of free trade was the economic heartbeat and muscle of each nation, both then and now. The transposition of the right to trade freely with the nations of the world into a right of an entrepreneur to set up and go about his business unregulated by government, and answerable only to the free market, was an obvious and necessary extension of the right to trade freely with any and all comers. What changed was the circumstance by which both competitors were part of the same polity, where the right of the stronger party, the entrepreneur, was never denied; but over time the weaker party, i.e. workers, domestic competitors, consumers, and others victimized by the spillover effects of untrammeled laissez-faire capitalism, demanded, and eventually received a voice at the table. That may have cut into the entrepreneur's profits, but it did not deny him the right to do business more or less as he chose.
What also changed with the terms under which business might be conducted. Early chartered stock companies required either a charter from the King or the permission of Parliament. Three centuries later, multinational corporate stock companies were deemed to be the normal way of doing business; and with those changes in business practices, emergent factors, such as environmental concerns, anticompetitive practices, money laundering, and the like became emblematic as unsavory ways of doing business requiring governmental intervention. The basic theory never changed, but the spillover effects multiplied, and they had to be dealt with. Free-market capitalists, and so-called 'Libertarians' prefer to focus their rhetoric on the natural necessity and superiority of 'free markets', as if they were divinely ordained. The extent to which those assets and commodities markets are truly 'free' raises questions involving the factual validity of the suppositions and assumptions that those advocates make for themselves. By way of example, that which belongs to all of us in common, and in equal shares, such as the natural environment, ought not be monetized to benefit a tiny wealthy minority. Mr. Signorelli does not even try to go there.
As a rhetorical device, Mr. Signorelli commits what rhetorician's call the Fallacy of Equivocation, meaning that he uses the word 'liberal' in differing ways and senses. Religious liberalism differs from economic liberalism, which then differs from political liberalism; and although religious and economic and political theory may converge at some point, they do not all mean the same thing.
We do not need to go back to the Middle Ages, at whatever historical era that Mr. Signorelli wishes to start in order to understand the points of disagreement between liberal political theorists and their conservative counterparts. True, from an historical perspective, one could go back to the schism that occurred within the Catholic Church giving rise to the Protestant Reformation; but that historical context would not convey meaningful understanding to today's political controversies, not when the founding documents of our country specifically decree at several places within the Constitution that secular government must be entirely free from an established church.
Likewise, economic liberalism traces its origins to the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries, when the focus of the dispute was the power of the state, in the form of the state's hereditary monarch, to dictate economic policy, which then chiefly meant commerce with foreign states, and most particularly, commerce between the home country and its satellite colonies wherever they might be, during an era when international trade was seen as an extended arm of national power and security. In other words, Liberals wanted to focus on free markets, regardless of politics, because politics, in the form of trade restrictions, had a way of advancing the interests of the landed gentry (who were, in many respects, cash poor) at the expense of merchants, manufacturers, and businessmen, who are pressing the king's ministers and Parliament, to permit them to move full speed ahead in the development of a cash economy in which the ownership of land itself became largely irrelevant.
In one sense, the debate was over economic stasis. Landowners, the great magnates of the realm, held their wealth in the form of land, land that their tenant farmers tilled, and ultimately paid rent to their landlord. The social arrangements attendant to that landlord – tenant arrangement went back centuries, with the parties bound together by formal and informal bonds that were not easily disregarded, much less broken. These were traditional societies in which tenants owed service, and the landlord owed protection. Land transfers were nothing like the real estate markets of today, and primogeniture laws ensured that large land holdings stayed together, devolving upon the eldest son of the landlord,the landlord' other male children left dispossessed until the eldest son died. Daughters were married off as soon as possible, in marriage arrangements in which they might have little or no say, and they were expected to produce male heirs.
Very little of that traditional manner of accumulating wealth was relevant to merchants, bankers, and others were looking to develop a cash economy to enrich themselves and to achieve greater political influence. They could do that because the King, a large landholder himself in his own right, always seem to be short of money; and money was needed to raise armies to fight wars, words that the king deemed necessary to either protect or to enhance his own power.
So that is our starting point. We need only to go back to the first decade of the Seventeenth Century, or perhaps the ninth decade of the Sixteenth Century during the reign of Elizabeth I, when a ragtag British fleet defeated the Spanish Armada, to see that England saw its future, not in land and the rents that land ownership would produce, but rather in trade and commerce. Europe was still in the lock of the Mercantile System, whereby the King believed it to be his duty, right, and privilege to weaponize economic policies to protect his realm and to augment its wealth. And the king would go to war to protect his kingdom's economic interests.
Beginning in 1652, England went to war with the Dutch Republic over trade. And, in fact, four naval wars were fought between them over control of the seas and trade routes. The last war ended in 1780.
As we look back, such was the success of Dutch mercantile interests, specifically their devotion to free trade, that England was forced to reconsider its own trade policies with regard to how trade would be conducted as the vehicle for increasing national wealth. Great Britain's loss of its American colonies in the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century, a war largely fought over the American colonies' demand for the right to trade freely with whomsoever
they chose to do business had a great deal to do with the change in British thinking.
From there, we move forward to look at trade as the vehicle by which economic liberty became part of the political economy of what was now the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Scotland, dating from the Act of Union of 1707.
From wars over trade, to arguments over free markets, Liberalism focused on the right to do business free of governmental intrusion. Today that is a conservative position; but at its point of origin, what it meant was the right to do business anywhere and at any time around the world, without arbitrary restriction imposed by royal authority.
The impetus for the right to trade freely came chiefly from the maritime nations of northern Europe, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden. For historical reasons, perhaps because of its agricultural base, and fertile soil, France was not an active participant in the competition worldwide for trade rights. The French political culture has been since the late Middle Ages one of centralized control. In matters of commerce, the type of liberalism epitomized by British and Dutch mercantile interests did not appear to take hold until very late.
Consequently, a shift in emphasis segues into a shift of meaning when the word 'Liberal' begins to mean something else, something other than a right to trade freely without arbitrary restriction from royal authority. What we have then is a spectrum in which the polarities are reversed. What used to be allowed and encouraged now becomes distrusted and restricted; and the reasons for that reversal of polarities becomes clear when it is understood that in international trade, increasing the number of trading transactions is of mutual benefit, a win-win situation in which all parties benefit from the trade. This was the lesson taught by economist David Pareto. On the other hand, absolute freedom of action on the domestic side in a closed loop environment invariably put the stronger party is at odds with the weaker parties, the so-called 'Matthew Effect, based upon the biblical aphorism that 'He will has more gets more; and he who has less takes nothing and becomes poorer'. The polarities are reversed, and what was formerly applauded as freedom of action suddenly appears to be selfish exploitation. Liberal philosophy has not changed, but the context in which it is applied most certainly has changed, and both parties to the transaction are now appealing to the same political authority for protection and approbation. What was once a win-win is now a zero-sum game.
What I have laid out are the basic arguments that now form the lines of contention over globalization, with free traders claiming that unrestricted free trade benefits everyone; that is to say, anyone with money to spend on goods and services produced anywhere in the world, and at a lower price than they would have to pay to do the same work, or to manufacture that same thing domestically at home. Within that specific sphere of activity, the claim is largely true. The problem lies in the fact that the statement ignores, and quite intentionally so, the problem of externalities. Those may include people who cannot afford to buy what is produced halfway around the world, or whose jobs, their livelihood, used to be manufacturing those things that could be sold domestically or abroad, but only at a higher price. So, the bottom line for them is not the few cents that they might save on the trade or transaction, but rather, it is the ability to survive either individually or as a household, or as a community. In other words, if the consequences of worldwide free-trade are laid out on a balance beam, the few cents saved by the free trader, i.e., he gets more bang for his buck, must be weighed against the destruction of jobs, homes, and communities, when the traditional occupations formerly engaged in are no longer economically viable. It is like the situation that existed in the Intermountain states in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, where gold or other valuable minerals were discovered, excavated war mind until those resources were exhausted, and then abandoned. Whole towns and villages sprung up almost overnight, only to be abandoned four, five, ten, or twenty years later, after the mines played out. The Far West is littered with ghost towns like Bodie, California, now a National Historic Place; but maybe a few miles away, another unnamed town is simply a collection of rotted or collapsed buildings that are no longer habitable, and would serve only as a reminder of a transient civilization come and gone.
The Liberal at those in philosophy would hold that the miners, the businessmen, the laundry workers, and perhaps the camp followers, that arrived there when times were good, were perfectly justified in staying just long enough to make some money, and then depart for the next mining town, or wherever else they needed to go to earn a living. Back then, the Far West was thinly populated, and it made sense to maintain a nomadic existence while seeking one's fortune somewhere over the horizon.
Today we live in a different world, and the putative 'Liberal' response to diminished opportunities for economic activity would be looking for outside help to restore and help maintain what people already have, and so not to have to abandon whatever value may be left in where they are living. Those are investments made over a lifetime that can never be recouped if the owner pulled up stakes and had to relocate to a better job market. Besides, the cost of relocating is very high, much higher than the wages that the sojourner might be able to earn in another state, even if they could find a job. Moreover, and this is getting more the case than before, there is a new form of protectionism that is a disincentive to relocating across state lines: occupational licensing. Everyone agrees that people engaged in certain sensitive occupations, such as building contractors, skilled mechanics, professional persons, i.e., physicians, lawyers, financial services and accountancy, healthcare workers, electricians, plumbers, hairdressers, beauticians, and many other occupations, need to be licensed and regulated, because the occupations they fill and the work that they do involves things, possibly use or exposure to harmful chemicals, that make it dangerous for unqualified persons to engage in those occupations without certification and proof that they are fully competent to do so. The 'Liberal' mantra holds that these are occupations that are freighted with the public interest, and that the occupational licensing regulations go no further than is necessary to protect the public interest, health and safety.
Well, maybe yes, may be no. All I can say is that if I wanted to practice law in the state other than Massachusetts or California, I would have to take that state's Bar Examination before I could open a law practice there. Some states, particularly California, have stringent regulations requiring so many hours of classroom instruction, so many hours of practical experience, and so on. Is that overkill? Who is to say? Between the extremes of states where there is minimal occupational certification to establish baseline competencies, and wealthier, more complicated places like California, that have extensive regulations, these policy choices that political legislative bodies make based upon their view of what the public health and safety require. In this regard, the labels 'Liberal' and 'Conservative' are entirely meaningless, because those labels reflect absolutely nothing about the minimum qualifications that the licensing law ought to require in order to protect the public interest.
Consequently, what Mr. Signorelli has to say is either very little or nothing at all; and yet, it is a major impediment to people seeking new jobs who live in places where there is diminishing employment.
On top of that, the cost of moving from a low-wage locality to a high wage locality, California being among the most expensive places to live, can make even the best qualified individual willing to make the trip unable to do so simply because he or she cannot find a place to live close enough to where the jobs are, at a rent or mortgage payment that they can afford to pay. Right now, California has a huge deficit of housing, and tens of thousands of people who live homeless on the streets, simply because there is insufficient housing at rents they can afford to pay, and most of these people have regular jobs. Again, the 'Liberal' and 'Conservative' options being developed to address the problem of homelessness are immaterial and meaningless, except to point out, that governmental involvement in solving the housing situation is imperative, and without which, there would be no movement forward at all. That, in and of itself goes against the Conservative mantra favoring smaller government with fewer functions and responsibilities.
Additionally, it is a heartless philosophical position; unsustainable, and against the public interest. So, what would a Conservative proposal to remedy the situation look like? We do not know; and prominent Conservatives have been keeping mum about it. The implication is that they would just wish that the problem would go away.
The bottom line is that simple answers to complex questions in situations in which unanticipated 'emergent' factors or behaviors are increasingly encountered make decision-making extremely difficult. Based upon our previous experience, those emergent factors or phenomena can be sufficiently severe as to not only destroy the viability of the program that brought them in, but can generate severe ripple effects that can make entire communities unsustainable. We saw this happen with the Urban Renewal programs during the late 1940s through 1950s. Public housing progress like Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis were dynamited within fifteen years after they were erected. These are problems that had their roots in Liberal thinking and ended up destroying entire communities.
As for Mr. Signorelli's little book, there is nothing that I can find either in his exposition of Liberalism's principles, or in their application, that response to the dilemmas that I outlined above. I would say that he made a fair effort at addressing the matter; except that there is no overarching principle within his book that allows me to draw any conclusions, or for that matter, to make any real sense of what he has to say. I fully understand and appreciate the fact that my review of this book does not go into any great detail about what Mr. Signorelli actually wrote in his 74 page book; but modern Liberal principles are not derived from from some grab bag of nice sounding phrases that mean different things to different people. Historically, as noted above, the term 'Liberal' comes from the world of international commerce, and its advocacy of free trade. The fiercest advocates for free trade were the Dutch, who, in the early Seventeenth Century, ran circles around the British in their quest for worldwide markets. As I also mentioned above, the British and the Dutch fought four naval wars, three within a twenty year span of time in the second half of that century, principally over which of the two was to dominate international trade. None of that involved either civil liberties or expansion of human rights as we know them today; but the principle of free trade was the economic heartbeat and muscle of each nation, both then and now. The transposition of the right to trade freely with the nations of the world into a right of an entrepreneur to set up and go about his business unregulated by government, and answerable only to the free market, was an obvious and necessary extension of the right to trade freely with any and all comers. What changed was the circumstance by which both competitors were part of the same polity, where the right of the stronger party, the entrepreneur, was never denied; but over time the weaker party, i.e. workers, domestic competitors, consumers, and others victimized by the spillover effects of untrammeled laissez-faire capitalism, demanded, and eventually received a voice at the table. That may have cut into the entrepreneur's profits, but it did not deny him the right to do business more or less as he chose.
What also changed with the terms under which business might be conducted. Early chartered stock companies required either a charter from the King or the permission of Parliament. Three centuries later, multinational corporate stock companies were deemed to be the normal way of doing business; and with those changes in business practices, emergent factors, such as environmental concerns, anticompetitive practices, money laundering, and the like became emblematic as unsavory ways of doing business requiring governmental intervention. The basic theory never changed, but the spillover effects multiplied, and they had to be dealt with. Free-market capitalists, and so-called 'Libertarians' prefer to focus their rhetoric on the natural necessity and superiority of 'free markets', as if they were divinely ordained. The extent to which those assets and commodities markets are truly 'free' raises questions involving the factual validity of the suppositions and assumptions that those advocates make for themselves. By way of example, that which belongs to all of us in common, and in equal shares, such as the natural environment, ought not be monetized to benefit a tiny wealthy minority. Mr. Signorelli does not even try to go there.