"Economic Liberals" and the Social Liberal Forum's Straw-man

Thanks to Lib Dem Voice's "Golden Dozen" I stumbled upon this post at Matthew Gibson's "Solution Focussed Politics" blog that seems to epitomise the lack of understanding of what "economic liberalism" means by the sort of folks who side with the "Social Liberal Forum".  Apparently there's some new research out from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (pdf) examining more evidence for the hypothesis in "The Spirit Level" that inequality within a society leads to damaging social and health outcomes.  Matthew says that:

the debate is very important to the Lib Dems. The Social Liberal Forum endorse the Spirit Level and propose policies to promote equality, while those more economic liberals have argued that this is not a good strategy to pursue.

Indeed.  If memory serves, the SLF was more or less established as a result of Wilkinson and Pickett's work.  And ever since it has been building a straw man argument against "economic liberals" that says that our argument that more government, more "policies" to address the issues thrown up by The Spirit Level, means that we don't care about those issues.

In fact, Matthew makes the point several times, using the tired analogy of economic liberals as Tories by another name:

this is basically what the Tories have based their entire existence on – that people should be allowed to get rich and it doesn’t matter how much richer than those at the bottom

and later...

For those who believe in inequality and that it is a good thing this report won’t change their mind

…each time suggesting that economic liberals somehow equal Tories and that neither care a whit about inequality and are never likely to change.  For this economic liberal at least, the main problem with the Spirit Level is not so much what its data purport to show, but that it (and this new JRF report) goes beyond reporting these "facts" and pushes the authors' solutions, their "policy suggestions".  And in both cases these come from a pre-existing belief in the power of the state to change these inequalities through well crafted "policies".

It's not that I don't care about inequality, but that I don't share Gibson's, the SLF's, Wilkinson and Pickett's or Karen Rowlingson's (of the JRF report) faith in the state to do something about it.  In fact, I go further: I blame the state for most inequality.  I keep mentioning this quote, and it is worth repeating once again, from the Preface to Kevin Carson's "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy":

...coercive state policies are not necessary to remedy the evils of present-day capitalism. All these evils--exploitation of labor, monopoly and concentration, the energy crisis, pollution, waste--result from government intervention in the market on behalf of capitalists. The solution is not more government intervention, but to eliminate the existing government intervention from which the problems derive. A genuine free market society, in which all transactions are voluntary and all costs are internalized in price, would be a decentralized society of human-scale production, in which all of labor's product went to labor, instead of to capitalists, landlords and government bureaucrats.

While the sort that consort together at the Social Liberal Forum refuse to acknowledge we share common goals, nay, worse, portray us having entirely different, exploitative goals, there can be no real conciliation between us.  If they stop building their straw-man, then perhaps we can unite around liberalism as our central passion.