When Spanish classical liberalism explains its historic weakness, it usually looks elsewhere for blame. It blames interventionism, the culture of subsidies, a country reluctant to compete, and citizens who sustain contradictory preferences. The charge is not wrong. According to Spain’s Center for Sociological Research (CIS), 77.1% of Spaniards say the country spends too little on health care; yet a cross-tabulation of CIS microdata shows that only 7.7% of those demanding more health-care spending also believe Spaniards pay too little in taxes.
\nThe diagnosis is largely accurate. But within the broader liberal-conservative space, classical liberalism is also mistaken — and in three distinct ways. It sends a signal that discredits itself. It frames its message without considering how that message is processed. And, in its most radical version, it idealizes a market that does not exist.
\nThe first mistake is to reduce liberalism to a fiscal position. When it speaks only of waste and tax cuts, the citizen does not hear “less privilege.” He hears “I do not want to pay.” The debate is over before it starts. Voters do not evaluate the logic of an argument independently of the person making it. They first evaluate the speaker, then decide whether to listen. Taxes may be confiscatory. But turning that possibility into a universal premise confirms the suspicion that the classical liberal denies having received anything from others. That liberalism seems addressed to a listener who separates the message from the messenger. Few real listeners do. Once they infer that the speaker does not want to contribute, they switch off.
\nA second mistake, typical of the more doctrinaire family, is to assume that citizens will process the abstract argument for free contracting. They will not — and the reason is, at root, evolutionary. The human mind was formed in small groups, in face-to-face exchanges and in environments where another person’s gain was easily experienced as one’s own loss. We are predisposed to distrust strangers, to view commerce with outsiders suspiciously, to value the farmer more than the intermediary, and to read capital accumulation as a sign of dispossession rather than innovation.
\nWe also struggle to anticipate indirect consequences. In laboratory settings, those acting as debtors ask judges to relieve them of payment without anticipating that creditors will then stop lending and the market will collapse. We do the same when we protect today’s tenant without foreseeing that tomorrow’s landlord will stop renting. The spontaneous order of an impersonal market swims against the current. Its rivals compete with an advantage: compassionate stories about concrete individuals. Those stories are often simplistic and false, but they are well adapted to the ancestral mind.
\nThere is also a deeper mistake, characteristic of the more radical sensibility: the preference for principle over nuance. It contrasts a real, imperfect state with an abstract market that regulates itself and that needs no enabling state at all. In doing so, it loses anyone who intuits, correctly, that markets do not operate in an institutional vacuum. A market is not a state of nature. It is a legal artifact. It requires well-defined property, enforceable contracts, impartial judges, and mechanisms that channel competition toward production rather than plunder, capture, or exploitation. To deny that markets depend on institutions is to hand the opposing side a monopoly over the institutional story. Spain’s disease here is not overregulation. It is the absence of legal certainty.
\nCorrecting these three messaging errors also requires changing the intended audience. The paradox of contractual protection makes this clear: regulation presented as compassionate toward today’s weak almost always punishes tomorrow’s weak.
\nHousing is the most visible case. For 17 months it has topped the list of Spaniards’ concerns. Yet the real conflict is not between landlords and tenants. It is between current tenants and future tenants. When the law protects today’s tenant through retroactive changes to contracts, it loads the cost onto whoever tries to rent tomorrow. Supply falls. The future tenant most likely to be punished is the most fragile one: the young, the immigrant.
\nA policy presented as compassionate ends up excluding those who most need compassion. The same logic governs employment. The worker with a permanent contract is shielded, and the door is closed to everyone else. To protect the weak inside existing contracts, the law damages, more severely, the weak who need future contracts.
\nThis points to the change classical liberalism has still not learned to make. Reshaping the discourse is necessary but insufficient: from “waste” to “privilege,” from “less state” to “an enabling state,” from “free market” to “a properly governed market.” The decisive shift is to change the interlocutor and, with it, the focus: from the insider to the outsider who pays the cost. Many potential classical-liberal voters do not recognize themselves in liberal messages: not the young wage earner who contributes social charges without seeing them, not the small self-employed worker who pays his monthly quotas.
\nIn practice, the classical-liberal message has mostly been heard by those who already had something to lose. That may not have been the intention. It has been the result. To reach everyone else, it is not enough to correct the argument. The message must be addressed to another audience. That means activating emotions classical liberalism usually cedes to its adversaries, beginning with indignation — not abstract indignation, but concrete and personalized. The target should be real privilege and the large budget items that sustain it, not the small symbolic expenditures that too many classical liberals prefer to attack.
\nFor that change of audience to be viable, one prior condition is needed: the outsider must perceive the cost he is paying. As long as fiscal opacity anesthetizes him, he cannot choose lucidly between what he wants and what it costs. We need not prejudge his decision; it is enough to insist that it be informed.
\nEmpathy and envy are here to stay. What is missing is the ability to direct them toward the real bearer of the cost of our political improvisations. The cognitive limits of voters are structural, but they can be disciplined when the cost becomes near, concrete, and personal. Only then will it become clear that the young person who cannot find an apartment is not a victim of the market, but of a law that, by protecting yesterday’s tenant, has narrowed today’s market. And that the long-term unemployed person is not suffering from capitalism, but from regulation that, by shielding the current employee, has shut the door on those seeking a first one.
\nSome will object that asking classical liberalism to change its audience is naive, because its natural base remains the comfortable insider. But a large part of its potential base is already on the other side: the young person without housing, the long-term unemployed, the small self-employed worker, the wage earner who contributes social charges without noticing. The question is not whether this is possible. It is why it has barely been tried.
\nTranslated by Claude (Anthropic) from the Spanish original.
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