If you have been married any length of time, have children and grandchildren, or have lifelong or long-term friends, it is highly likely that you can look back and see where some of the arguments or debates about what appear to be different things are, when dissected, actually the same disagreements dressed in different clothing.

The arguments and debates never reach a conclusion; that’s why they keep resurfacing.

It happens ideologically, too.

Leftists in America have changed outfits more than Taylor Swift during one of her shows. Over the past century, they have been liberals, progressives, social democrats, democratic socialists, communists, etc., while, thanks to them, every variant of the classical liberal right — Tea Party, Conservative Caucus, Establishment GOP, MAGA — has been lumped into one category called “the far right.”

But the debate, regardless of how it is cloaked, is more than a debate about two different economic systems and the structure of a government compatible with either. It is about a deeper principle that has been explored by philosophers from Plato to Friedrich Hayek, and this is it:

The question is not simply, “Who should rule?” but “Who is capable of making decisions for other people?”

And those are two very different questions.

In a free-market economy coupled with a minimalist government (classical liberalism), the answer to that question is “you.” The individual is entrusted with the responsibility for making their own decisions — and accepting the resulting consequences. Sometimes you choose wisely, sometimes not, but you are the one who knows best what you think is best for you and your family.

And when millions of your closest friends make the same or similar decisions as you do, it creates what economists from Adam Smith to F.A. Hayek have called “spontaneous order.” Spontaneous order is the emergence of an organized, functional social or economic system from the independent decisions of millions of individuals, without any central planner directing the outcome. Markets, prices, language, common law, and many social norms are classic examples.

Spontaneous order is common in free societies, and leftists hate it for one reason — they don’t believe individuals can make the “right” decisions by themselves (the definition of “right” generally means “the decisions our experts think should be made”).

Communism, at least in its Marxist-Leninist form, ultimately answers that there exists a class of people that Vladimir Lenin called the “revolutionary vanguard” (the planners, the leaders of the Party), who possess sufficient knowledge and moral authority to direct society toward its proper end. They are presumed to understand history, economics, and justice better than ordinary people understand their own lives. That assumption is what allows planners to replace millions of voluntary decisions with centralized commands.

The Left constantly claims that collectivism “will work this time” because we are “smarter than we were.” The problem I see is that human beings have a natural tendency to overestimate the quality of their own judgment. The proof is that, in the face of a documented history of failure, disaster, and death, the current crop of communists is making the same arguments for their system as they made a century ago.

My take is that we may know more, but that doesn’t necessarily make us smarter.

Communism elevates that universal human weakness into a governing principle by concentrating authority in the hands of those presumed to possess superior knowledge and wisdom, a.k.a. “The Science” or “The Experts.”

But what happens when “The Science” is merely camouflaged ideology and “The Experts” are not actually as expert as they think they are?

This is a more fundamental criticism than simply saying central planning is inefficient. It questions the underlying assumption that any group of people can know enough to direct the lives of millions of others.

C.S. Lewis said, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. … Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Many collectivist ideologies are like this; they begin from a place of genuine compassion. They see poverty, inequality, addiction, homelessness, and injustice and conclude that these conditions exist because people are making poor choices. From there, it is only a small intellectual step to believe that if wiser people made those choices instead, society would be better off. Compassion gradually becomes paternalism, and paternalism, when consistently applied, becomes authoritarianism, not because its advocates necessarily desire tyranny, but because they increasingly lose confidence in ordinary people to govern their own lives.

This is why classical liberals such as Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith emphasized humility more than intelligence.

Their argument was never that experts know nothing, but that no expert can possibly know enough. The fundamental divide between collectivism and classical liberalism is therefore not one of education, intellect, or even compassion. It is one of epistemological humility. The collectivist asks, “Who should make the right decisions for society?” The classical liberal asks a prior and more difficult question: “How could anyone know enough to make all of those decisions?”

Liberty, viewed through that lens, is not so much a celebration of human wisdom as it is an acknowledgment of human ignorance. It recognizes that millions of imperfect people, acting on their own knowledge, bearing the consequences of their decisions, and continually adapting to changing circumstances, are more likely to produce a prosperous and free society than even the most educated planners directing it from above.

My take is that there is no perfect answer to those questions; however, there is a “best” answer that allows the optimum of freedom while we continue to experiment.

And whatever produces the most individual liberty is the best answer.

It always will be.