# Classical Liberalism defaults towards gridlock Classical Liberalism says that you’re allowed to swing your fist as much as you want as long as it doesn’t hit anybody’s nose. Nose growth is a ratcheting process - never get shorter. In the limit this process leads to a situation where the only way that you can avoid hitting someone’s nose is to do absolutely nothing. Analogy aside, classical liberalism is about individual rights and enforcing those rights. We started off with a set of bare-bones rights that weren’t even applied to everybody. Over time more people acquired those rights (yay!) and those rights expanded (yay!) However, as these rights expand, there is less you can do without violating someone’s rights. You could think of individual rights as little high dimensional spheres that start off with lots of space between them and can jiggle around quite a bit. As they expand, they slowly squeeze up against each other until they can’t move at all. All the [[Slack - concept]] gets squeezed out of the system. The solution to a slackless system is a shared and evolving ruleset that can enable group selection. Classical liberalism does not itself provide a shared group code. When Classical Liberalism was created, that ruleset was some combination of Religion and Nationalism. ([[Classical liberalism arose in an environment that no longer exists]]) the balance shifted from the former to the latter over time, but now we don’t have either. [[The liberal bargain is that the role of the state is to enforce the rights of individuals]]. Thus, these rights are encoded as regulations. [[Regulations create paradigm lock-in]] and [[Regulations slow down technological advancement]]. Like rights, regulations ratchet. Even more explicitly than with conceptual rights, regulations can end up overlapping each other, leading to a situation where no matter what you do you’re violating *something.* Practically it also just leads to a situation where it’s impossible for anybody to know all the regulations so the only way you can assure that you’re not violating a regulation is to do absolutely nothing. The US government has the distinction of being set up most directly on liberal values and being set up to default in gridlock. I do not think this is a coincidence. Gridlock as a default mode is a feature, not a bug, in a world where change is bad for most people on net. That may not be the case for the world today. [[Technology has enabled progress to be a net positive]]. ### Related * [[Post-liberal synthesis]] * [[Individual rights conflict with societal progress]] <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Classical+Liberalism+defaults+towards+gridlock) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Classical+Liberalism+defaults+towards+gridlock)