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He

MANUAL
LIBERAL
Edited by Antonella Marty

WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT DEFENDS

POLITICAL LIBERALISM,
ECONOMIC, INDIVIDUAL
AND CULTURAL
With texts by, among others,

Mario Vargas Llosa, Tom G. Palmer,

Mauricio Rojas, Johan Norberg,
Carlos Alberto Montaner, Eamonn Butler,
María Blanco, David Boaz Álvaro Vargas Llosa
and

Prologue by GLORIA ÁLVAREZ

Afterword by DEIRDRE N. MCCLOSKEY
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The liberal manual

What is political, economic, individual
and cultural liberalism and what does it defend?

Antonella Marty

DEUSTO EDITIONS
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© Antonella Salomon Marty, 2021

© PAPF Book Center, SLU., 2021

Deusto is a publishing imprint of Centro de Libros PAPF, SLU.
Diagonal Avenue, 662-664
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www.planetadelibros.com

ISBN: 978-84-234-3252-3
Legal deposit: B. 5.140-2021
First edition: May 2021
Preprint: Planet Realization
Printed by CPI (Barcelona)

Printed in Spain

The paper used to print this book is certified eco-friendly and comes from sustainably
managed forests .

Reproduction of this book in whole or in part, its incorporation into a computer system,
or its transmission in any form or by any means, whether electronic, mechanical,
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The infringement of the aforementioned rights may constitute a crime against intellectual
property (Art. 270 et seq. of the Penal Code).
Please contact CEDRO (Spanish Center for Reprographic Rights) if you need to photocopy
or scan any part of this work. You can contact CEDRO through the website www.conlicencia.com
or by phone at 91 702 19 70 or 93 272 04 47.
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Summary

Prologue - Gloria Álvarez .................................. 9

Chapter I
a defense of freedom

Antonella Marty ........................................... 29

Chapter II
Political freedoms and the enemies of freedom

Tom G. Palmer – Why Be a Liberal ........................ 121

David Boaz – The Roots of Liberalism ..................... 129
Carlos Alberto Montaner – Liberalism and its true values
enemies ................................................ 163
Eamonn Butler – Foundations of the Free Society: The
argument in brief .................................... 175
Ricardo Manuel Rojas – Respect for property rights and
legal security as the basis for prosperity 181
Álvaro Vargas Llosa – The Renaissance of Populism ........ 205
Mario Vargas Llosa – Liberalism: The Fundamental Enemy
of fanaticism .................................................. 218
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8 · The liberal manual

José Benegas – Liberalism without shepherds: The West and religion 226
Loris Zanatta – Jesuit Populism: Enemy of Liberalism 242
Gerardo Bongiovanni – Populism, Peronism and the debates
pending in Argentina ............................... 250
Mauricio Rojas – Marxism and Totalitarianism ................. 261

Chapter III
individual liberties and cultural liberalism

Johan Norberg – The Importance of Open Societies… 281

María Blanco – Maybe you are a liberal feminist, and you don’t know it 292
Alejandro Bongiovanni – On the legalization of drugs… 303
Irune Ariño – The liberal family: function, not form
that's what matters ..................................... 309
Marian L. Tupy – The history of humanity is a circle
of ever-expanding empathy ..................... 324
Rocío Guijarro – Liberalism, art and culture ................. 331

Chapter IV
economic freedom and progress

Adrián Osvaldo Ravier – Notes on liberalism in history

of economic thought ............................ 343
Iván Carrino – Ten principles of economic liberalism
in times of quarantine ................................ 386
Juan Carlos Hidalgo – Global Financial Crisis: Requiem
of capitalism or interventionism? .................. 410
Alberto Mingardi – The myth of the entrepreneurial State ........... 419
Matt Warner – Ending Poverty in the 21st Century: The Case
in favor of freedom .................................. 428
Roxana Nicula – Are the Nordic countries socialist? ........ 436

Epilogue - Liberalism is adultism ....................... 449

Acknowledgments by Antonella Marty ....................... 468
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Antonella Marty

Antonella Marty holds a degree in International Relations. She is

the Associate Director of the Center for Latin America at Atlas
Network (Washington, DC), Director of the Center for American
Studies at Fundación Libertad (Rosario, Argentina), and a Senior
Fellow at the International Foundation for Liberty (Madrid,
Spain). She hosts the podcast "Hablemos Libertad" and is the
author of books such as The Populist Intellectual Dictatorship
(2015), What Every 21st- Century Revolutionary Needs to Know
(2018), and Capitalism: An Antidote to Poverty (2019).

I don't want to believe, I want to know.

Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

This book seeks to provide a consistent guide to the basic

subjects and arguments that form the backbone of liberal thought.

There are countless battles that confront freedom today,

which is threatened by the dangerous devices of tendencies
such as socialism, statism, populism, conservatism, nationalism,
the left, the right and
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30 · The liberal manual

so many instruments that are exalted and endeared by the outline of the
masses and by any collectivist pretension, annihilating any vestige of
individuality.
The demagogues of our countries come to power and establish systems
governed by populism. Why? It's because certain aspects converge that can
explain, in some way, the geography of populism based on a mystical concept
of the big state, the need for the "enemy of the people" in every populist
discourse, the promise of heaven on Earth, the presence of an "official truth,"
and the inevitable popular cult of the exalted charismatic leader.

It is true that populism also tends to adopt a nationalist language that

serves to appeal to the outbreak of symbols and emotions of the masses,
immersed in an expression or discourse of constant opposition, with epithets
that become instruments of recurrent discredit, turning adversaries into
enemies that the populist "must" eradicate, since they represent a "threat"
that puts the interests of the "people" or a supposed "popular will" in check,
an act reflected, perhaps, in one of Hugo Chávez's endless speeches, when
he argued that "this is not between Chávez and those who are against Chávez,
but rather between the patriots and the enemies of the homeland": time and
again, beneath populism abounds the creation of popular identities placed by
the same redeeming leader in the face of anything that threatens his absolute
power.

Under these arguments, the populist declares the moral duty to conquer
all institutions so that "the enemies of the people" cannot return to power,
proclaiming himself a kind of infallible being or deity who knows nothing of
error, becoming our permanent father whom we must all consult and whose
permission or blessing we must always ask. "I have doubts about building
housing because I asked for your support and you didn't give it to me," said
Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan narco-dictator, in a public speech a few years
ago.

A faithful paternalistic translation of "You misbehaved, you disobeyed, now

I'm threatening you and you'll have to endure the scolding for not obeying my
orders. You're left without candy."
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A Defense of Liberty · 31

Populism, which combines the political with the emotional, ultimately

polarizes society into antagonistic poles, devaluing democracy in the name of
democracy itself, disrupting the institutional order, criticizing the media as a
basis for populist rhetoric, and using power as a personal tool to distribute
resources and perform specific favors in order to win votes. The populist
seeks to embody the famous figure of the "people man," adopting a quasi-
religious profile.

Populism, whether left-wing or right-wing, is always hostile to liberalism

and liberal principles based on civil liberties, the separation of powers, and
the plurality of voices, something that makes it clear to us that always, without
exception, populism is deeply anti-liberal and represents an anti-democratic
dynamic for the exercise of political power. In the words of Steven Pinker, in
his work Enlightenment Defense (2018): “Populism comes in left-wing and right-
wing versions, which share a popular theory of economics as zero-sum
competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between
nations and ethnic groups in the case of the right [...]. As for progress, forget it:
populism looks back to a time when the nation was ethnically homogeneous,
orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were driven
by agriculture and manufacturing.”

All these populist systems, which emerge with promises of improvements

that they have never fulfilled, come to power in systems where institutional
weaknesses are looming, where the rise to power can be configured as a direct
rejection of traditional political leadership and can capitalize on people's
discontent, turning it into a logic that constructs the people as a homogeneous
entity, leads management towards the concentration of absolute power,
subjects other state powers, uses the name of the law as a mechanism to self-
legitimize when they have already lost all legitimacy, forges authoritarian
governments that show us that populism can be born through democracy and
electoral means, using the elec-
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32 · The liberal manual

tions as a springboard to power and as a basis for initial legitimacy, but in the
long run populism only survives by and through force.

Ernesto Laclau, in his work The Populist Reason, describes populism as

a clear discursive strategy for constructing a political boundary that divides
society in two. Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian philosopher and political scientist
and also an exponent and promoter of populist regimes, explained in her
book For a Left-Wing Populism that populism is neither an ideology nor a
political regime, but rather a way of doing politics that can take various
ideological forms depending on the movement and location. In turn, Mouffe
argues in favor of her left-wing populist preference, arguing that left-wing
populism seeks to recover democracy in order to deepen and expand it
(something that has never happened under any type of populism, whether
right-wing or left-wing, since the tendency is to fall under the deep spell that
power generates in the flattering leader). Mouffe insists, of course, that the
populist strategy seeks to unify democratic demands into a collective will to
build a "we," a "people" capable of confronting a common adversary. This is
the thinking of the exponents of populism and the populist politicians who
abound, such as Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Hugo Chávez, Jean-Luc
Mélenchon, or Íñigo Errejón.

All these leftist figures and their waves of fanatics fit the description that
maestro Carlos Alberto Montaner gave years ago: "The left is the sector of
society most interested in distribution than in production; it is a group fanatically
convinced that manna falls from the sky. After a certain time, perplexed, it
discovers there is nothing left to distribute and goes out to stone the United
States embassy."

Populism is the demagogic policy of some politicians and leaders who

do not hesitate to sacrifice the future of a population for an ephemeral present.
This populist, this providential being, this new deity who embodies the "people,"
always places himself above the law and relies on the mobilization of a group
of emotions and strong passions. That is the culture
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A Defense of Liberty · 33

populist politics, always shielded by the distinction between

"them" and "us."
This history of clashes between power and freedom,
between abuse and liberty, seems to resemble a kind of cycle
that we repeat over and over again incessantly, both in
Spanish-speaking countries and throughout the world. Steven
Pinker, in his aforementioned work In Defense of the
Enlightenment (2018), specifically in its third chapter, which
refers to the "counter-Enlightenments," points out how the
second decade of the 21st century has witnessed the rise of
populist movements that openly reject the ideals of the
Enlightenment, and that are tribalist rather than cosmopolitan,
authoritarian rather than democratic, disdainful of experts
rather than respectful of knowledge, and nostalgic for an
idyllic past rather than hopeful for a better future.
Many rulers, even knowing the long-term negative results
of certain policies, implement them because in the short term
they help them retain power. This seems to be the rule of Ibero-
American politics. In reality, good government is, simply put,
one that makes you not need it, not one that makes you
dependent on it. As Thomas Jefferson so aptly summed up in
his 1801 inaugural address, a sensible government is one that
tries to prevent human beings from harming one another and
leaves them free to organize their own aspirations for work
and progress.
Thus, throughout our region, we find faithful believers in
that idea that, on the other hand, maintains that the State must
solve our lives: provide us with decent housing, give us a
check at the end of the month, send us a box of food, among
many other absurdities. We must begin by asking ourselves
the following: Where does the State's money come from? Is
there such a thing as "state money"? In reality, that money
doesn't grow on trees; rather, it can come from monetary
issuance (which generates inflation), from debt (which is never
good and is one of the Latin American pretexts for continuing
to be immersed in populism), and from taxes (which are either
theft or a punishment for success). And this brings us to that famous distin
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34 · The liberal manual

as sociologist Charles Dunoyer once made when he noted that "there are only
two major actors in the world: those who prefer to live off the product of their
labor or their property, and those who prefer to live off the labor or property of
others." Some generate wealth (barely in the Latin American case, given the
colossal bureaucracy and the complexity of opening a business), and others
appropriate the wealth produced. That's basically the story.

Tom G. Palmer wrote an important article entitled “The Origins of State

and Government” (2012) in which he concludes with a vital reflection on what it
means to be free: “When we reflect on what it means to live as free people,
we must never forget that the state does not grant us our identities or our
rights. The U.S. Declaration of Independence states that ‘to secure these
rights, governments are instituted among men.’ We secure what is already
ours. The state can add value when it helps us do this, but rights in a society
precede the state.”

Liberalism believes that the most effective way to lift individuals out of
poverty is through wealth creation, supporting the free market and allowing
each human being to fully utilize and exploit their own potential.

The path to a successful country is achieved through effort, work,

responsibility, and freedom, not through a larger government that seeks to
impose success by law while destroying the steps to achieve it. Progress
cannot be achieved by punishing wealth.
Our leaders insist that poverty is combated by taxing wealth or with
redistribution policies.
History has shown us a very different reality. Freedom generates prosperity
and creates wealth where none existed before, and this is achieved through
talent, innovation, and private initiative, not through persistent government
plunder. If we want to progress, we cannot continue putting the cart before the
horse.

Even so, there are many challenges we foresee in the world in the face of
a virulent and recurring populist return. The great de-
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A Defense of Liberty · 35

The challenge is not only how we choose our leaders, but also how we
restrain them from using power arbitrarily, and how we remove them from
power precisely when they overstep the limits we set for them.

In the 21st century, populism, like so many other fantasies, continues to

pose a danger to freedom. No matter where collectivism comes from—whether
conservative, socialist, right-wing, or left-wing—sooner or later, it will always
pose a vehement threat to freedom.

Right-wing sympathizers make no secret of their belief that, for them,

there are "less bad dictatorships" or "benevolent dictators." In Latin America,
these types of figures abound, improperly calling themselves "liberals" while
defending military dictators like Augusto Pinochet, who disappeared and
murdered leftist Chilean dissidents in the 1970s. As Mario Vargas Llosa has
aptly said, there are people who believe that there are "good dictatorships"
or that there are "less bad dictatorships."

The reality is that dictatorships are all bad. In no case, and under no
circumstances, can a liberal accept that a dictatorship is tolerable. All
dictatorships are unacceptable. In the words of Ayn Rand, from her book
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal: "The issue is not the dictatorship of a 'good'
gang versus the dictatorship of a 'bad' gang. The issue is freedom versus
dictatorship." Being anti-communist doesn't make you a liberal.

When it comes to integrating the pillars of freedom, it is important to

emphasize its key elements: trade, open society, free enterprise, private
property, and legal certainty, to mention just a few of the most famous pillars.

However, it should be clarified that liberalism, or "defending the ideas of

liberty," does not only mean raising the banners of economic freedoms and,
sometimes, political freedoms. That is a substantial part of the subject matter,
but it is not the entirety of the vertebrae that make up the liberal spine: there
is much more.

Liberalism goes far beyond being based solely on

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36 · The liberal manual

Economic freedoms refer to the important task of reducing a country's tax

burden, reducing public spending, the essentials of trading with the world,
having free markets, or eliminating terrifying exchange or price controls. The
same is true of political freedoms: liberalism goes far beyond believing solely
in legal certainty, private property, or clearly defining the limits of those who
govern us. All of this is transcendental and vital, but it is not the only thing that
liberalism encompasses.

Our ideas are also historically grounded, and from their very beginning, in
individual freedoms, which, we could say, rest on three notable pillars: first,
that we are all equal before the law; second, that, as the fantastic economist
Deirdre N. McCloskey always mentions, my freedom to move my hands ends
where another's nose begins—that is, the basis of the nonaggression principle;
and third, that my freedoms or rights do not end where the feelings of others
begin. Liberalism is, therefore, a political philosophy that defends the right to
freedom of all individuals. Liberalism, which allows for contractual life, is what
makes peaceful coexistence flourish, where no one seeks to impose their will
on another and where mutual respect prevails. Liberal life is one governed by
voluntary contracts.

We liberals believe that human beings are free to live our lives as we see
fit, as long as we respect that same freedom in others. A liberal knows full well
that his or her life belongs to no one but himself or herself, and that, moreover,
he or she does not own the lives of others.

Being liberal is, to paraphrase Alberto Benegas Lynch (h), to unrestrictedly

respect the personal life projects that each human being has for themselves
and for their way of living their own life without imposing a morality or the same
project on others, letting each human being pursue their own ends and dreams
without harming others. Liberalism ensures that no one but you makes
decisions for yourself. It does not guarantee or assure you that you will make
the best decisions, but it does ensure that you will be the one who makes
them. Liberalism ensures that you are a
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A Defense of Liberty · 37

individual, not just another number on the government computer or "another

brick in the wall" (as the British rock band Pink Floyd sang).

David Boaz synthesizes liberal thought in a way

quite right in Liberalism: An Approximation (2007):

Liberalism holds that every individual has the right to live his or her life as he or
she wishes, as long as he or she respects the equal rights of others. Liberals
defend every individual's right to life, liberty, and property—rights that human
beings possess naturally, before the creation of governments. According to the
liberal view, all relationships between human beings should be voluntary. The
law should prohibit only actions that involve the use of violence against those
who have not exercised it. In other words, the law should be limited to
suppressing murder, robbery, kidnapping, and fraud.

Consequently, it is essential to review the individual freedoms that are

reflected throughout this issue by leading liberal voices: liberal feminism, the
legalization of drugs, the legalization of euthanasia, sexual freedoms, religious
freedoms, the importance of openness to the world and freedom of expression,
as well as the importance of promoting immigration and fighting against
xenophobia, racism, and the nationalisms that, on the surface, constantly find
a way to build walls.

The liberal believes in "the true liberation of the mind," as sung by the
musical group The 5th Dimension in their song Aquarius, one of the most
energetic and fantastic songs in history (ranked number 66 on Billboard 's list
of the best songs of all time), which represents the essence and awakening of
the freedom of the late sixties of the last century.
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Liberal or conservative: call a spade a spade

Differentiating liberalism from conservatism is, today more than ever, essential.
Liberalism is far removed from conservatism, from nationalist movements, or
from what is called the "right." For this reason, I insist, I applaud the work of
authors like Gloria Álvarez in exposing the true face of a right-wing conservatism
or collectivism that has camouflaged itself over the decades and is extremely
fearful of change or anything new that might challenge its "ideal model" of a
1950s magazine.

Both the left and the right have sought, through the State and, therefore,
coercion, the imposition of what each of these political tendencies understands
as the "good society" or the "good model of life."

And, on the other hand, we liberals maintain an open attitude because we

defend a free society, we defend spontaneous order, and we maintain that
change arises freely as a result of the evolution of things. Faced with this
aspect, and since it is always pleasant to turn to the sources, there is nothing
better than to turn as a reference to two of the greatest liberals in our history:
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992).
I will begin with the latter's thought.

In his book The Foundations of Liberty (1960), F.A. Hayek spelled out with
extreme lucidity his opposition to conservatism when he wrote Why I Am Not
a Conservative, where he emphasized the importance of drawing a clear
separation between the philosophy he himself advocates and that traditionally
defended by conservatives. Hayek begins by quoting Lord Acton, who states
the following:

The number of true lovers of liberty has always been small;

therefore, to succeed, they have often had to ally themselves
with people who pursued objectives quite different from those
they advocated. Such associations, always dangerous, have
sometimes proved fatal to the cause of liberty, for they have
provided its enemies with overwhelming arguments.
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A Defense of Liberty · 39

Throughout his text, Hayek warns that the opposite of

conservatism, until the rise of socialism, was liberalism. That
is, the two positions were always on opposite paths. In the
author's words in Why I Am Not a Conservative, we
understand that:

Liberalism has never been opposed to evolution and progress [...].

Herein lies the first great difference separating liberals and
conservatives. What has been repeatedly pointed out in the
conservative is the fear of mutation, the fear of the new simply for
its own sake; the liberal position, on the contrary, is open and
trusting, attracted, in principle, by everything that involves free
change and evolution [...]. Conservatives, when they govern, tend
to paralyze evolution or, at least, to limit it to that which even the
most timid would approve of. Never, when they look into the
future, do they consider that there might be unknown forces that
spontaneously put things right [...]. Conservatives only feel at ease
if they believe that there is a higher mind that watches over and
supervises everything; there must always be some "authority" to
ensure that changes and mutations take place "in an orderly
manner" [...]. This fear of the operation of apparently uncontrolled
social forces explains two other characteristics of conservatives:
their fondness for authoritarianism and their inability to understand
the mechanism of the forces that regulate the market [...].
Conservatives, as a rule, do not oppose coercion or state
arbitrariness when rulers pursue objectives they consider to be
correct [...]. Conservatives, like socialists, are concerned with who
governs, ignoring the problem of the limitations of the powers
attributed to the ruler; and, like Marxists, they consider it natural
to impose their personal judgments on others [...]. Liberals, in
open contrast to conservatives and socialists, never admit that
anyone should be coerced for reasons of morality or religion [...].
This repugnance that conservatives feel for everything new and
unusual seems to be somewhat related to their hostility toward
international issues and their tendency toward patriotic nationalism
[...]. This nationalist predisposition that concerns us is often what
induces the conservative to em-
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40 · The liberal manual

to take the collectivist path [...]. The individual's disgust with

foreignness and conviction in his own superiority lead him to
consider it his mission to "civilize" others and, above all, to
"civilize" them, not through the free and mutually desirable
exchange that the liberal advocates, but by imposing on them
"the blessings of efficient government" [...]. What distinguishes
the liberal from the conservative in this matter is that, however
deeply held his beliefs may be, the former never attempts to
coercively impose them on others. For him, the spiritual and the
temporal constitute clearly separate spheres that should never be confused.

Now let's turn to Hayek's great teacher: Ludwig von Mises.

This titan of liberalism, on the other hand, reminded us in
Bureaucracy (1944) that:

The tendency of our contemporaries to demand arbitrary

prohibitions as soon as something is disliked, and to be willing to
submit to such prohibitions even when one disagrees with their
motivation, shows that we have not yet freed ourselves from
servility [...]. A free man must know how to tolerate his fellow
men behaving and living in a way that differs from what he
considers appropriate, and he must abandon the habit of calling
the police as soon as something does not please him [...].
Liberalism limits itself totally and exclusively to earthly life and
praxis. The realm of religion, on the other hand, is not of this
world. Thus, both liberalism and religion could coexist, each in its
own sphere without reciprocal interference. If, despite everything,
a conflict between the two spheres has inevitably arisen, the fault
does not lie with liberalism. Although bonfires " Ad maiorem Dei
gloriam" are no longer lit, there is still much intolerance [...].
Liberalism is not a religion, it is not a general worldview, and
even less a party that defends particular interests. It is not a
religion because it demands neither faith nor commitment, it does
not live in an aura of mysticism, and it has no dogmas.

What, then, is the most beautiful thing about freedom?

That it allows us to doubt. Freedom allows us to doubt: that "first
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A Defense of Liberty · 41

"great virtue of the human being" as described by Carl Sagan,

who also reminded us that the "first great defect was faith." In
A Pale Blue Dot (1994), Sagan points out, referring to religion,
that supposedly

There was one particular tree we weren't supposed to partake

of: the tree of knowledge. Knowledge, understanding, and
wisdom were forbidden to us in that story. We were supposed
to remain ignorant. But we couldn't resist. We were starved for
knowledge. Therein lay the cause of all our troubles.
Specifically, that's why we no longer live in a garden: we wanted
to know too much. As long as we remained indifferent and
obedient, I suppose, we could console ourselves with our
importance and centrality, and tell ourselves that we were the
reason the universe was created [...]. We are the guardians of
life's meaning. We long for parents to care for us, to forgive our
mistakes, to save us from our childish blunders. But knowledge
is preferable to ignorance. It is far better to understand the hard
truth than to believe a reassuring fable.

Returning to the question of doubt, it is worth emphasizing

that freedom does indeed allow us to doubt, and that is
something that neither conservatives nor socialists are keen
on, because they constantly seek to impose on others their
own way of life, their own idea of what is "right" and what is
"wrong," framed within their own ideological or religious morality.
However, no one, absolutely no one, has the right to
decide how we should and shouldn't live. As John Stuart Mill
said in the 19th century: "Over himself, over his mind and
body, the individual alone is his sovereign."

On sexual freedoms

These aspects lead us, once again, to contents that refer to

individual freedoms and rights appropriately.
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42 · The liberal manual

dealt with by numerous authors throughout this work, such as, for example,
sexual freedoms.
On this matter, the big question we address is this: Who is harmed by
homosexuality, transsexuality, polyamory, or prostitution, provided that these
relationships, like heterosexual relationships, for example, occur within the
framework of consensual and voluntary decisions or relationships? The answer
is simple: no one. Your body, after all, is yours.

Neither the State nor anyone else is responsible for dictating how you should
behave in bed. What two (or more) adults voluntarily do in private is their
business and no one else's.

Why do we mention this? Because the state can't have a place in your bed,
and if we're talking about conservatives, the state (or anyone else) can't be
used to arrange other people's beds according to your own idea of the "right
bed." You, as an adult, have every right to go to bed with any adult you want
(as long as everyone involved agrees) and to love whomever you want freely.

As Deirdre N. McCloskey explains in this work, liberalism is about being an

adult: no one can tell you how to live your own life. Likewise, freedom is
completely linked to responsibility, something we cannot forget. Responsibility
is a person's ability to respond to the decisions they have made, and it is the
quality of being responsible, of knowing how to respond after having acted freely.

But let's get back to history. Homosexuality has been punished for
centuries throughout our world. Without going any further, even today, in the
21st century, sexual relations between adults of the same sex continue to be
atrociously persecuted, condemned, and punished in more than seventy
countries. For centuries, homosexuality was punished throughout the world, but
the big question is what harm does it do to these conservatives (many of whom
today falsely call themselves "liberals" or "libertarians") that someone has sex
with someone of the same sex. Or why not, ask ourselves what harm it does
to them that John wants to be Jane instead of John because he wants to,
because he wants to.
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A Defense of Liberty · 43

wants it, and because that's his own body, his own property. The answer?
None.
The only thing that affects these conservatives and false liberals is that it
affects their personal morality, led by their religious inquisition, based on
their "perfect" model of life, where they constantly talk about love for one's
neighbor, but evidently, that "love for one's neighbor" is nothing more than
pure filler words, which only remain as words and no action.

Then aspects such as the "unnatural" are added to the discussion,

seeking the imposition of the "natural family" or the "traditional family," which
for them is composed only of mother, father and children (the heterosexual
family) and everything else is an aberration.

There is no greater fallacy than that of the "natural family."

Throughout the history of humanity, since we were cavemen, families were
tribal: women caring for the children of the tribe, we have had and have
families of single mothers, single fathers, widows, widowers, uncles caring
for nephews, grandparents caring for grandchildren, two fathers and children,
two mothers and children, etc.
Aren't all of those families?
Once again, conservatives are entrenched in that position of defending
the "family" as a defense of the West itself, portraying it as permanently
"threatened." Alejandro Bongiovanni, in his review Benegas Frente al Caballo
de Troya (Benegas Facing the Trojan Horse),
(2019) explains with absolute clarity the idea of the Argentine author José
Benegas, who maintains that at a certain historical moment, liberalism was
the "infection of the West" and that if liberalism developed in the West it was
for the same reason that antibodies against a disease develop in a sick body.
The now idealized West (the new "national being") was, prior to liberalism, a
place marked by the totalitarian tradition of the Church, monarchical
absolutism, privileges, castes, censorship of ideas, and serfs. It is liberalism
that needs to be saved, not the West.

Ultimately, we are surrounded by moral inquisitors who seek to impose

emotional stasis, the builders of closets, as Benegas rightly points out in his
book The Unthinkable: The
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44 · The liberal manual

curious case of liberals mutating towards fascism (2018).

In this extraordinary text, Benegas exposes the Trojan horse that is right-wing
collectivism. There, the author refers to that ideological oddity known as
"paleolibertarianism," one of whose greatest exponents is Hans-Hermann
Hoppe, a member of the Mises Institute, a figure idolized by so many Latin
Americans who call themselves "libertarians" or "liberals" (in reality, staunch
defenders of conservatism, right-wing collectivism, and populisms like Trump,
Bolsonaro, or Abascal). Hoppe actively calls for discrimination against any
individual who is not white and heterosexual, and calls himself a "true
libertarian," when in reality all his arguments are the antithesis of libertarian
ideas. In later chapters, José Benegas explains in greater detail what this
topic is about.

Thus, the State and religions have sought to interfere in individual life
throughout our history. During the times of the Inquisition, in the case of
France and many others, homosexuals were burned alive. The Spanish
Inquisition was responsible for stoning, burning, and even castrating
homosexuals. In 1553, English laws that called for the death penalty by
hanging for homosexuals were in effect.

Dante, already in his Divine Comedy, for example, consigned homosexuals

to the seventh of the nine circles of hell, where they would be condemned to
walk on burning sand.
However, there is no need to go back so far in time.
In the last century, in the 1960s, homosexuality was illegal virtually everywhere
in the world.
In the United States of the 1960s, gays and lesbians were practically
outlaws, living in secret and fear. They were labeled as crazy by doctors,
immoral by religious leaders, and criminals by the police. Mail sweeps were
frequently conducted to detect homosexuals, gay-friendly establishments
were raided and closed down, and countless attempts were made to "cure"
them with electric shocks and other methods.

Thousands of people were arrested every year in cities in

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A Defense of Liberty · 45

those that we couldn't even imagine today, as is the case in New York, due
to what the authorities called "crimes against nature." And precisely there, in
New York, an important event occurred in the famous Greenwich Village
neighborhood, that summer night of June 28, 1969, when gays, lesbians,
and trans people rebelled at the famous Stonewall Inn bar, facing recurrent
police harassment, changing millions of lives to this day.

This was the first official moment in the country's history in which the
LGBTQ+ community fought against a hostile legal system that persecuted
them for their sexual orientation. The famous Stonewall Riots represented a
series of spontaneous demonstrations protesting the police operation that
took place at the Stonewall Inn in Richard Nixon's United States, where
LGBTQ+ people found themselves in the eye of the storm, where anyone
who deviated from the strict norms was persecuted by the law, beaten by
police forces, and punished with imprisonment by the Morality Squad.

These riots served to instill the necessary strength in the oppressed and
persecuted people, who began an uprising against homophobia.

From that moment on, the protests and marches that took place over
the following decades, from the 1960s and 1970s onward, were those that
rebelled against an inquisitorial system. These protests were protected by
the liberal concept of equality before the law and brought to the fore the
freedom and equality before the law that had been denied for many centuries
and that are still denied today in many countries around our planet.

I will bring up cases such as that of Federico García Lorca, one of the
greatest poets in our history, shot for his ideas and also for being homosexual,
in 1936 in Granada, as Antonio Machado reminded us in his poem The
Crime Was in Granada, dedicated to Lorca.

It is appropriate to refer, of course, to Alan Turing, great hero of the

Second World War and in charge of deciphering the Enigma Code used by
the Nazis, who, being homosexual,
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46 · The liberal manual

He was sentenced to a choice between prison or chemical castration. Turing

opted for the latter, but took his own life some time later. Even after World War
II, many homosexuals who managed to survive the repulsive Nazi concentration
camps returned to prison to comply with the norms of the previous century,
which still persecuted homosexuals.

In the face of all this, the left has raised the banner of defending sexual
freedoms when, in reality, and we see this historically, the left in power has
detested homosexuality, has persecuted it, has prohibited it, has murdered
homosexuals as happened in the Soviet Union or, why not, in Cuba, the land
of bloody adventures of Ernesto Che Guevara, a homophobe and murderer
who referred to homosexuals — in his own words — as "sexual perverts."

Instead, liberalism, as the American libertarian from the Cato Institute,

Tom G. Palmer, has consistently pointed out, has been a pioneer in the
campaign for the liberation of LGBTQ+ people from injustice and oppression.
The first arguments that mutually and voluntarily consenting behavior between
adults is no concern of anyone but those adults were made by authors such
as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Beccaria, and Bentham during the Enlightenment.
Johan Norberg (2017) reviews how the world has changed vis-à-vis
homosexuality over the past few centuries:

The first signs of a change in attitudes toward homosexuality

also occurred during the Enlightenment. Jeremy Bentham, a
staunch defender of women's rights, wrote an essay advocating
the decriminalization of homosexuality. Signed in 1785, the
document rejected the idea that gays and lesbians were a threat
to society and concluded that we could not call something a
crime if it left no victim, so he argued for its declassification as a
crime [...]. The values of the Enlightenment and the ideas of
classical liberalism have led to greater tolerance.
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A Defense of Liberty · 47

In his 2016 article “Capitalism, Not Socialism, Advances Gay Rights,”

David Boaz points out that all of the human rights advances we’ve seen in
American history (and, I might add, around the world), such as abolitionism,
feminism, civil rights, and gay rights, stem from the founding ideas of a free
society: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Enlightenment’s
emphasis on the individual mind, the individualistic nature of market capitalism,
and the demand for individual rights were, as Boaz has pointed out, the factors
that led people to think more carefully about the nature of the individual and to
recognize that the dignity of individual rights should be extended to all people.

After all, Steven Pinker (2018) made it clear that it was reason that led
most Enlightenment thinkers to repudiate belief in an anthropomorphic God
who took an interest in human affairs, that accounts of miracles were dubious,
that the authors of holy books were eminently human, and that different cultures
believed in mutually incompatible deities, none of whom were less likely than
the others to be figments of the imagination. Thus, and to paraphrase Pinker,
Enlightenment ideals are products of the human mind and reason, and have
always been at odds with other facets of human nature, such as tribal loyalty,
deference to authority, or magical thinking.

If we look at the indices and numbers, we'll see that the countries with the
greatest freedoms for LGBTQ+ people are those with the greatest levels of
economic freedom, the most capitalist, and the most free. What's the other
side of the coin?
Declared socialist countries rank last in every ranking of LGBTQ+ freedoms.
Once again: the data kills the story.

Today homosexuality is punishable by death in debts

eleven countries. In more than thirty — if you are ,
homosexual — you can serve a ten-year prison sentence. Not to mention the
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48 · The liberal manual

amount of those aberrant and monstrous "conversion

therapies" still in force in so many countries around the world.
In terms of numbers and specific data, it is worth citing the
Argentine economist Iván Carrino, who in his article
Equal Marriage, Economic Freedom and Conservative Values
(2020) notes the following:

There are currently 29 countries in the world that have legalized

same-sex marriage. What clashes with conservative theories is
that these laws are overwhelmingly more prevalent in countries
with greater economic freedom. Taking economic freedom data
from the Heritage Foundation and dividing the 180 countries
evaluated into groups of four quartiles, where the first quartile is
the group in the top 45 highest rankings, it is observed that 62.1
percent of countries that have legalized same-sex marriage are
in the first quartile. On the other hand, in the second quartile
(where countries number 45 to 90 are located in the Heritage
Foundation index) appear another 24.1 percent of countries
with legal same-sex marriage. That is, 86.2 percent of countries
with same-sex marriage belong to the first two quartiles of
countries with greater economic freedom. Countries with the
least economic freedom, on the other hand, have an incredibly
low concentration of these types of institutional arrangements:
only 3.5 percent in the third-largest country and 10.3 percent in
the fourth-largest country, where Argentina is located.

But that's not all, Carrino goes on to point out that:

If we group countries by their per capita GDP into four-quartile

groups of 46 countries each (the sample here is a total of 184),
we see that of the 29 countries that have legalized same-sex
marriage, 72.4 percent are among the richest countries on the
planet, while 24.1 percent are in the second most economically
developed group. That is, 96.5 percent of the most culturally
"progressive" countries are also the richest economically,
shattering the fatalistic expectations of conservative thinking.
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A Defense of Liberty · 49

We insist, it is no coincidence that precisely those countries with the

greatest economic freedom are leaders in the defense and promotion of free
trade, property rights, political freedoms, legal security, and civil liberties.

Yet we see conservatives and right-wingers seemingly arguing that there

are "Marxist freedoms."
They argue that the individual freedoms we liberals defend (LGBTQ+ rights,
feminism, the legalization of drugs, euthanasia, and prostitution) are what they
call "cultural Marxism." What a coincidence that all of these freedoms and rights
(very liberal, I insist) are abundant in the most capitalist countries, and not in
socialist, Marxist, or protectionist countries. But of course, as José Benegas
argues, since they can't call us "heretics" today, they call us "cultural Marxists"
or simply "progressives." Regarding these conservatives and everything that
encompasses this right, Gloria Álvarez makes the following statement in her
book How to Talk to a Conservative, stating something completely true:

We no longer live in the Middle Ages, where many would have taken the pleasure
of scorching me to death in the Inquisition. In fact, in every century and historical
era, I would have been sent to the asylum, to the stake, to the dungeon to be
raped, to be stoned, and to the Inquisition. Now all that's left for them is to insult
me using electricity with a device on a social network that, thanks to many atheist
scientists, is now in their hands without many people even realizing it.

In The Invention of Science (2015), David Wootton reminds us how an

Englishman, back in 1600, used to believe that witches could summon storms
to sink ships at sea, that werewolves existed, that a murdered body bled in the
presence of the murderer, that it was possible to turn base metal into gold, that
the rainbow was a sign of divinity, that the Earth stood still and that the Sun
and stars revolved around it once every twenty-four hours.