Bertram and company’s criticisms of BHL have gotten some attention. Some of my fellow BHLs think their arguments are important. I’m not as impressed. I think their arguments miss the mark.* They have not yet produced a real objection to BHL.

Here’s the bottom line. We BHLs are for the most part not hard, deontological libertarians. We are liberals who think that a major part of the justification for property rights and market institutions has to do with their expected consequences for all decent, conscientious people. We think that in the real world, in the long run, the best way to liberate workers is to produce high levels of wealth and opportunity, such that even the lowest workers are usually in a position to tell employers to shove it, and such that employers face serious economic pressure to behave well. We want to liberate workers by making them rich and making sure they have lots of options. We advocate formal negative economic liberties in significant part because such liberties are vital to realizing positive economic liberty. If it turns out empirically that certain governmental social insurance schemes are necessary to make sure that large swaths of innocent people are not left behind, then we will advocate such schemes. In short: We believe that as a matter of fact, our favored institutions will tend to prevent workers from being exploited, even though we might not have the law criminalize certain kinds of exploitation. We care about results, not legal guarantees.

Since that’s our position, most of Bertram and company’s hypotheticals (and even many of their real examples, which occur, of course, in a non-BHL world) are of little interest to us. What they’d need to do instead is argue that the kinds of market societies we advocate would in fact be horrible for workers.

Bertram et al have a different view about how our favored institutions would function. They may be right and we may be wrong. However, as far as I can tell, they evaluate the market on the basis of semi-Marxian, heterodox economics, while we get to use mainstream neoclassical and institutional economics. That doesn’t mean they are wrong and we are right, but it does mean they argue from a defensive position.

Now, if I learned that Bertram et al were right in claiming that free markets undermine or fail to promote workers’ positive freedom, then I would change my position. Hey, if I discovered that Marx were right about markets, I’d stop being a classical liberal (at least at the non-ideal level).

*If Bertram et al want to know where we’re coming from, quit thinking of us as disguised Nozickeans. Read North, Weingast, David Schmidtz and me, Elinor Ostrom, the public choice literature, de Soto, Coase, Demsetz, Oliver Williamson, and so on. If you want to object to my position, refute these people.