Which Road to Serfdom?

I read the same book that you read. I concur. Hayek was claiming a direct path between the British equivalent of food stamps and the Gulag. The most striking thing to me was that he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of such an evolution, but it seemed to discount the entire history of those countries up until that point. It was a book such a breath-taking absence of context that as it had been referred to me by a libertarian friend as a definitive I never seriously considered the ideology again.

Churchill was just a politician talking nonsense during a election campaign.

And Orwell said something different: After a socialist party taking power in a revolution, there would be a totalitarian dictatorship.

Hayek claimed that the election of democratic socialist or social democratic party would lead into serfdom. And that did not happen, anywhere.

And Orwell said something different: After a socialist party taking power in a revolution, there would be a totalitarian dictatorship.

Erm, actually he said that, following the logic of Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, all superpower imperial systems would eventually become indistinguishable from each other and indistinguishable from totalitarianism.

Or perhaps I’m thinking of The Man with the Golden Arm.

Found it!

‘The first representative body in Hayek’s model constitution is what he confusingly terms a ‘Legislative Assembly’. This assembly would be charged with the task of upholding and gradually improving the rules of just conduct or ‘law’. Its
function would be the articulation of moral norms – ‘the views about what kind of action is right or wrong’ – thatunderpin the market order. It would enforce the rules of just conduct, revise private (including commercial and
criminal) law, define the principles of taxation and state regulations on matters such as health and safety and production or construction. These tasks would be substantial and difficult as they would involve ‘the preservation of an abstract
order whose concrete principles were unforeseeable’ and the exclusion of ‘all provisions intended or known to affect principally particular identifiable individuals or groups’ (Ibid, 109). Hayek, however, makes it explicit that the function of Legislative Assembly would not be to define the functions of government, but ‘merely to define the limits of its
coercive powers’. He states that ‘though it would restrict the means that government could employ in rendering services to the citizens, it would place no direct limit on the content of the services government might render’ (Ibid, 109-110).
Because of the significance of its task, Hayek suggests that membership of the Legislative Assembly should be severely restricted to particular individuals capable of carrying of carrying out its responsibilities. Hayek (1944, 76) states in
his Road to Serfdom that the liberal notion of an assembly of independent and infallible men entrusted with the task of maintaining the rule of law is an ‘ideal that can never be perfectly achieved’. He, however, goes on to claim in his Law,
Legislation and Liberty that it would be possible to select specific members of the community for the Legislative Assembly that could be paid and pensioned sufficiently to be independent of any interest group pressure. Hayek
suggests that membership should be limited to those ‘mature’ members of the community aged between forty-five and sixty, who would be elected by their peers for a ‘fairly long period’ such as fifteen years, ‘so that they would not be
concerned with being re-elected, after which period, to make them wholly independent of party discipline, they should not be re-eligible nor forced to return to earn a living in the market but be assured of continued public employment in
such honorific but neutral positions as lay judges’. This Hayek states would ensure that members tenure as legislatures ‘would be neither dependent on party support nor concerned about their personal future’. As an additional safeguard, he
maintains that the ‘nomothetae’ elected to the Legislative Assembly will not have served in the Governmental Assembly or party organizations (Ibid, 113-4).
The second representative body in Hayek’s constitutional scheme, the ‘Governmental Assembly’, is entrusted with administration and what he refers to as ‘legislation’. The Governmental Assembly Hayek states is representative of
existing parliamentary bodies. It central tasks would be very considerable; it would organise the apparatus of government, decide the use of personal resources entrusted to the government and mobilise popular support around
policy measures. Hayek, however, makes it clear that the Governmental Assembly would be ‘bound by the rules of just conduct laid down by the Legislative Assembly, and that, in particular, it could not issue any orders to private citizens
which did not follow directly and necessarily from the rules laid down by the latter’ (Ibid, 119). Unlike the Legislative Assembly which is guided by opinion, Hayek believes that the Governmental Assembly should be based on a
competitive party system and should be guided by the will of the majority.’

‘Problems’ between the two bodies would be solved by an unelected Court, and a ‘state of emergency’ could be declared at any time which would suspend the Governmental Assembly.

http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jpl/article/viewFile/737/709

To be fair, lots of people have had ideas about restricting the franchise. And every time you see who gets elected to public office, you see why… But continuing the Churchill riff, democracy may be a pile of crap, but it’s better than the shitpile you’re proposing, dude. [I think that’s more or less how the quotation goes, isn’t it, at risk of a certain terminological inexactitude…?]

Hayek claimed that the election of democratic socialist or social democratic party would lead into serfdom. And that did not happen, anywhere.

Further to this we could quite plausibly argue that the rise of social democracy precisely prevented any moves towards revolution in many European countries. So Hayek was not just wrong: he was perfectly wrong.

At the risk of Godwin’s Law, many of the economic policies within Germany at the time of Hayek’s writings would have been virtually indistinguishable from other social democracies.

A “libertarianism” built on such brazen lies can’t be have much in the way of positive arguments.

Did anyone else turn up this gem? The Road to Serfdom … in Cartoons!
http://mises.org/books/trts/

The title page suggests the comic was “originally published in Look magazine” and then “reproduced from a booklet published by General Motors, Detroit in the ‘Thought Starter’ series (no. 118)”.

Cheers

‘Further to this we could quite plausibly argue that the rise of social democracy precisely prevented any moves towards revolution in many European countries. So Hayek was not just wrong: he was perfectly wrong.’

Or, perhaps the propogation of books like Road To Serfdom changed the character of social democracies, thus averting (or delaying) the disaster that Hayek predicted. There were still plenty of ‘progressives’ who were enamoured with Communism back then. Hayek, in response, helped to articulate a scepticism of state intervention, and bolstered the liberal ideal of things like the rule of law. You can see the influence of these ideas as far into social democratic thinking as people like John Rawls (who, I am told, was briefly a member of the Mont Pelerin Society that Hayek founded).

Many of Hayek’s concerns have since become common currency, and they are often better expressed on the left than the right: http://hurryupharry.org/2009/09/29/rereading-hayek/

Or, perhaps the propogation of books like Road To Serfdom changed the character of social democracies, thus averting (or delaying) the disaster that Hayek predicted.

I’m glad I wasn’t drinking coffee when I read that. Yeah, Attlee was almost finished with his planning for a Soviet Britain until he read some Austrian loonie’s stupid book and the scales fell from his eyes, just in the nick of time.

Libertardians are funny.

written by an FA von Hayek

Wrong Hayek. Try S. Hayek. Better results.

‘I’m almost sure this isn’t true, not least because if it had been true people like Will Wilkinson and me would mention it a whole lot.’

I will check my source:)

<i<Give me a little credit. You don’t need to set out to create the Soviet Union. You can get there by accident, by demolishing institutional safeguards in order to get policy stuff done more quickly and efficiently.

But that is assuming facts not in evidence. To claim that you can get to the Soviet Union by accident is risible. And what institutional safeguards exactly wanted social democrats to demolish? The house of lords? (That was proposed by Orwell).

Face it: the influence of Hayek on social democratic or even most other centrist or right wing thinking was very small. Further,more, if his pamphlet was that influential, why weren’t there social democratic attempts at dictatorship prior to 1944? Do you have an example?

Also relevant in assessing Hayek’s legacy: When a broadly tyrannical regime did come to power in the US, it built its power on the solid foundation of the police power, responding to alleged threats of exactly the sort that are the core function of a minarchical state. It isn’t the Social Security Administration that became the cornerstone of a national security state; it’s the military, federal police, courts, and like that. There are, I believe, no actual examples of a state engaging in efforts to promote positive liberty that become the basis of tyranny.

All that needs to be said about Nick’s “example” can be imported from commenter Barry on the “this is getting silly” thread: “You know, this latest ‘libertarian’ brouhaha reminds me of the pedophilia crisis in the Catholic Church, in that it’s really, really hard to find an argument which won’t be eagerly seized upon by apologists. It certainly confirms the stereotypes about libertarians.”

Ceri B’s point is important – while control of the ‘commanding heights of the economy’ is certainly useful for a totalitarian state, that doesn’t happen until the ‘commanderinger heights’ such as the police, military, etc. have been taken.

Hmm, will this close the italics tag?

My point is that there were other people besides right wingers who were reading and interacting with Hayek at that time. The left were already grappling with some of the problems of central planning and the potential for totalitarianism (having previously been very impressed with elements of the Soviet Union). Hayek, as part of the milieu, may have sharpened some of the arguments of the moderates within those debates.

‘You can get there by accident, by demolishing institutional safeguards in order to get policy stuff done more quickly and efficiently. ‘

Give me one example, just one, of the classic libertarian ‘slide into slavery’ in which a democracy slowly and unwittingly becomes a totalitarian state, so to speak ‘by accident’.

If you do manage to provide one example I would be very surprised. But in any case, a quick look at the empirical data will show that even if it does happen it is very very rare.

Overwhelmingly communist dictatorships arise not through a slow decades long ‘slide into surfdom’ but as a result of violent, dramatic revolutions, either as as a result of a civil war, or some geopolitical cataclysm, or invasion by a foreign power, or else as a violent revolutionary counter-reaction to right wing violence and autocracy.

In other words, the empirical data casts doubt on Hayeks’ central proposition. To put it rather mildly.

Sorry, cash only. And you’re bust. Bye.

No fiat currency, either. Gold only.

I suppose there is a certain irony in how the defenders of absolute property rights stole their name from the left:

“The very label ‘libertarianism’ has been captured from the left by free-market liberalism.” (Steven Lukes, “Equality and Liberty: Must They Conflict?”, pp. 48-66, Political Theory Today, David Held (ed.), (Polity Press, 1991), p. 53)

It would be nice if libertarians dropped all pretense and simply called themselves propertarians, wouldn’t it? Does anyone know where this term originated? A quick look at the wiki says the term was used in 1973 by Historian Marcus Cunliffe to apply to “characteristic values of American history” in regard to property. But that surely isn’t the end of the trail; Le Guin after all used it in “The Dispossessed”, published in 1974, which would seem to indicate an earlier use of the word.

Nick, do you know anything, anything at all, about the history of the Weimar republic and its downfall? That’s a rhetorical question, of course, since the answer is obvious.

Mark Steyn has embraced the argument that big gummint works not through being totalitarian but being … popular.

Well I guess Germany is the only example I can think of and the one that Hayek most feared. Venezuela recently looked like it could be going in that direction. But there is a lack of data points.

Sweden on the other hand brought the social democrats in to master the recession and we still wait for the dictatorship now, after all these years.

First, Weimar was a very troubled, divided state whose legitimacy large numbers of German questioned, not a true social democracy with a mixed economy. Especially amonth the elites there was still a strong nostaligia for the Monarchy and authoritarian nationalist rule. Second, in 1928 elections, an election that saw the NAZIS only get 2.6% of the vote, and the Catholic Centre Party became the largest party, replacing the socialists. Bruening’s Center party formed a grand coalition with the Socialists, and dealt with a growing recession, that soom became a depression. Bruening, the Reichs Chancellor, by adopting ever more conservative, neo-classical, one could say Austrian, economic policies. It cut unemployment benefits and assistance to the poor, in tail chasing effort to balance the budget, and deal with a crisis for the ReichsMark and trying to keep it on the Gold Standard. By 1930, the Socialists had left the Goverment and Bruening ruled by decree until his Government fell in 1932. Ahmed Liaquat’s “The Lords of Finance” have an excellent short description of this tragedy in bad economic policies, of ideology and orthodoxy run amok. Germany by that time had an unemployment rate of 25% and the NAZIS had become the largest party in the Reichstag. Hayek’s policies, not Keynes’s, were the road to serfdom and barbarism.

From the linked cartoon of Road to Serfdom (thanks, etbnc ): The Gullible do find agreement. . .Meanwhile, growing national confusion leads to protest meetings. The least educated–thrilled and convinced by fiery oratory, form a party.

Do they call it the Tea Party?

‘Now what the authoritarian rule of a catholic conservative has to with social democrcy I don’t know.’

Hang on, I was told to give an example of a democracy collapsing into dictatorship, not specifically a social democracy. But it was legitimate to be concerned about social democrats at the time, due to some of them admiring the Soviet Union, and the even more widespread respect for Nazi economic policies before and even after the war. And there was an avowedly socialist wing of the Nazi party before it was purged. So these distinctions appear somewhat larger in retrospect as history plays out. The fear in Serfdom does not apply to social democrats only, but to any demand for robust national planning of which right wing governments have often been very enthusiastic.

Perhaps social democrats are different from other kinds of socialists, and fared better, precisely because they heeded some of the advice and evidence from liberals about market economics and the dangers of unrestrained Government. Perhaps you are saying that they had done that all on their own. But perhaps Hayek made a small contribution to this softening of the socialist tendency for authoritarian planning.

‘And I personally find Hayek’s emphasis on constitutional restraints against populist democracy to be useful in this regard.’

As I pointed out in the quote above, what Hayek (or you?) refer(red) to as ‘populist democracy’ is what most people call…….democracy. And it is true that he wanted restraints on it. But since he opposed what most of us in the ‘West’ would call ‘democracy’, all he is really saying is that he opposes some forms of autocracy, because he prefers others.

I really don’t see what the controversy is here. At one point, widespread economic planning was a pretty big thing in democratic politics. It was admired on both the left and the right, and even led some to talk about how great some aspects of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were. It then ceased to be considered such an unalloyed good thing, on both the left and the right. Hayek was part of that shift in ideas, and social democrats were influenced by that shift.

Unless you think that Western liberal democracies are somehow impregnable to really bad but popular ideas amongst elites, I don’t see how that can be anything other than a good thing.

At one point, widespread economic planning was a pretty big thing in democratic politics.

So what? That has to do with dictatorship exactly that? That is the thesis of Hayek and that was nonsense then and has been disproven by the historical record now.

And, no elites in liberal democracies are not immune to bad policies: See the popularity of classical economics during the depression (and now).

I am not saying ‘were it not for Hayek’. I am saying he was part of a reaction against some very popular doctrines at the time.

I have Serfdom back in my hands now and actually the argument does not seem to be so much specifically about economic regulation itself leading necessarily to a dictatorship. It seems to be more the ideas that were justifying these policies at the time. Germany’s descent was traced not by the final years of the Weimar Republic but by a powerful collectivist ideology that had been growing for decades before. He feared that this collectivism was making grounds in Britain too.

Perhaps he didn’t have so much to worry about. But it is hard to say how much of the liberty in Britain today was down to the enduring stability of British institutions, and how much was down to the anti-Communist ideas that were starting to emerge on the left and right at that time.

To deal with two idiots in one reply:

Germany’s descent was traced not by the final years of the Weimar Republic but by a powerful collectivist ideology that had been growing for decades before.

Which, one more time, had absolutely fuck-all to do with how and why the Nazi seizure of power actually took place.

Clearly no one thought in 1932 that Roosevelt would be rounding up Japanese-Americans and putting them in concentration camps, but he later did. Road to Serfdom?

Uh, to put it mildly, no. Xenophobia also has fuck-all to do with any “road to serfdom”. For example, draconian restrictions on immigration from Asia were put in place by the US during the liberal (sensu Hayek) 1920s.

Libertardians are only good for comic relief, but are tiresome when their jokes fall flat.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, thus issuing in an era of freedom the likes of which the world has never seen.

“At one point, widespread economic planning was a pretty big thing in democratic politics. . . . It then ceased to be considered such an unalloyed good thing”

In defense of Hayek, “The Road to a Moderate Degree of Inefficiency” is not a very catchy book title. Maybe it was just garden-variety sensationalism that tempted him to (over)dramatize his thesis.

None of this is to say that Hayek wasn’t interestingly wrong, or even usefully wrong; but he clearly was, objectively, wrong.

P.S. Did anyone ever consider central planning an *unalloyed* good thing, as opposed to, say, sometimes the least of several evils? Libertarians are a tad bit prone to strawmanning, so I have to ask.

P.S. Did anyone ever consider central planning an unalloyed good thing, as opposed to, say, sometimes the least of several evils? Libertarians are a tad bit prone to strawmanning, so I have to ask.<i<

But I doubt you can make the libertarian conclusion Gospaln = TVA.

Personally I think people just don’t quite see the depth of collectivism into which many intellectuals had sunk back then.

Could have been because there were people starving in the street, but that’s neither here nor there to the terror of government-manufactured boardgames.

Ceri B. 04.12.10 at 1:15 pm:

“Also relevant in assessing Hayek’s legacy: When a broadly tyrannical regime did come to power in the US, it built its power on the solid foundation of the police power, responding to alleged threats of exactly the sort that are the core function of a minarchical state. It isn’t the Social Security Administration that became the cornerstone of a national security state; it’s the military, federal police, courts, and like that. There are, I believe, no actual examples of a state engaging in efforts to promote positive liberty that become the basis of tyranny.”

Was Mao’s Great Leap Forward not an effort to promote positive liberty? Mao certainly didn’t start out with the desire to kill 50 million of his own citizens (or thereabouts; it is hard to obtain accurate data on deaths when dealing with numbers so large). In fact, he (and the many American and European left-wing intellectuals who supported him as being an exemplar of “progressive” values) thought that collectivization would free up rural workers and allow them the material and other basis for realizing true freedom. In fact, most of the atrocities of the last century were committed in the name of positive liberty– see Pol Pot for more information.

Furthermore, while it is somewhat silly to call the Bush administration “broadly tyrannical” (I was certainly no fan, but they did willingly leave office, something that cannot be said of, say, Hugo Chavez), most of the tyrannical things they did in the name of national security were PRECISELY what Hayek feared would result from wartime justifications of state power. Aside from foreign interventionism and wealth-destroying deficits, the bureaucratic institutionalization of torture is something that came as no surprise to libertarians, and if this group were more committed to serious intellectual inquiry (as opposed to fighting society’s true enemies: libertarians) you could probably find common ground with libertarians on this and many other issues.

The scary thing is that, although I have read this blog and the comments accompanying it for some time, I have never seen a single post as derisive of, for instance, Lincoln Steffens, Joseph Davies, George Bernard Shaw, or the litany of public figures who supported Mao, Stalin, Che, Castro, etc., as this thread is of Hayek. Oh, and for those of you who claim that there is no good example of central planning leading to tyranny, I suggest you ask Alvarez Paz his opinion on the matter (unfortunately you may not be able to catch him, as he was thrown in jail last week). And the fact that Weimar’s slide into tyranny was quick and not gradual does not seem to prove your point.

I visit plenty of conservative sites and never see posts like this. It’s not like Rich Lowry is going to devote a post to ridiculing Rawls TOJ — he probably hasn’t read it and he doesn’t care. But the same goes for conservative academic sites, like No Left Turns or Volokh. I don’t have an explanation for why this is, maybe conservatives don’t think conservatism requires any theoretical justification.

If one regards the loss of the right to armed self -defense as a massive loss of personal and political freedom (a position which does not strike me as entirely unreasonable at all), it looks like Hayek was in fact onto something…

I’m not sure about that. It’s pretty clear that he saw how that happened in the Russian Revolution (see Animal Farm). But I’m not sure he thought it inevitable. And he certainly didn’t think that democratic socialism led to totaliarianism—he was a democratic socialist all his life. I’ve always read 1984 as a tract on the misuses of political language (see also Politics and the English Language), and a warning against them, as much as anything.

Now because of the manipulation of history we know about the fictional history of Ozeania only from the hazy memories of Winston Smith. But it seems from his fragments that there was indeed a revolution and a quite violent transition including nuclear war. It is mentioned for example that the three old comrades purged (Jones, Rutherford and ?) belonged to the party prior to the “revolution” and that one of them incited with his drawings the revolution.

Orwell wasn’t against socialist revolutions in general, only against Leninist ones. See Homage to Catalonia.

The base economic case of the rise of the Nazis in the 1930-33 period was mass unemployment and the collaspe of capital liquidity. The SDP , the ZP and the NVP (the major players in most central and lander govt) limited their plans to small scale public works programs and timid social contract “in place of strife” stuff. The Weimar republic was indeed founded on an explicit rejection of socialisation/nationalisation/central planning. Weimar economics were the pinnacle of 19th century liberal economics and one of the few poitns of consensus shared by the original parties of the republic

The explosion in Fascism was not the culmination of a growing “collective moment” brought about by top down initiatives, “making the masses clients”. Rather its was the plain failure of the nightwatchman or limited Gladstonian/Bismarckean state to fight (and lose) a total war and cope in a depressed world market. Neither the virtuous and mythical Hajekean “constitution of noble men, not mobs” or the actually existing Giolottian “compromise of interests” would fare any better.

With regards to Russia and Germany, access to weapons was never really an issue in creating the dictatoships. Restrictions were only put in place on firearms after the Tambov rebellion had already been defeated and the basis of the Stalinist dictatorship erected. As far as I know, there were no firearm restrictions to “citizens of the Reich”, beyond a formal licence before 1943.

If the 2nd ammendement was seriously about having a populace who could defeat their own govenment in a military trial of strenght, surely they should double produce every weapon system, one for the state, one for the “people”. Try removing my Abrams from my cold dead driveway

A question on Hayek: If he really believed that the welfare state equals tyranny, why did he live from 1997 until his dead in 1992 in Germany, in other word in a statist hell-hole?

Serfdom fitted him good enough.

The political-freedom benefit of an armed populace isn’t for actually fighting pitched battles with the nation’s military. (Once you reach that point, you’ve got to pretty much hope that at least half of the soldiers and officers are, when push comes to shove, on your side in the matter, which can be a forlorn hope.) What it’s really useful for, though, is in stopping (usually through deterrence rather than actual conflict) pogroms and other thuggish behavior from actual and would-be unofficial extensions of the government and party in power.

But really, speaking here of the particular case of Britain, it’s the loss of the legal right to defend oneself and home that’s far more significant than the specific regulation of particular weapons. Once the police are literally the only possible protection against criminals, you already have the physics part of a police state, and the rest is just collecting postage stamps.

(One could also make a similar argument based on the extent of Britain’s current surveillance culture, by the way…)

to add, since I didn’t see #90 — the situation in Venezuela is very bad. But Chavez is a classic military strongman. It’s idiotic to try and explain him as a consequence of of central planning, even if you interpret “central planning” in the loosest way possible.

So when Nixon instituted price controls, that was central planing , too? Words have meanings, you know.

Did Hayak predict the discovery of North Sea oil also?

Cranky

Give me one example, just one, of the classic libertarian ‘slide into slavery’ in which a democracy slowly and unwittingly becomes a totalitarian state, so to speak ‘by accident’.

Well, the US is not quite there yet, but the expansion of executive power under Bush, and for the most part retained by Obama, is certainly rather worrying, no?

@83 — The Nazis came to power because Weimar lacked the Keynesian message?

@101,

roughly yes. It is coventional wisdom, more or less.

1) the Nazis did come to power because of the great depression, more severe in germany than in other countries.

2) the great depression was not ended or meliorated between 1930 and 1933 because everybody, but especially Brüning followed the conventional, classical economical wisdom of the day, that is deflation.

3) After 1933 the economy picked up because Schacht financed a fiscal stimulus or created money with the Mefo-Wechsel. Armament-Keynesianism or War-Keneysianism.

So a – peacefiul – Keynesian solution could have be tried prior to 1933 and was proposed but universally rejected in the WTB-Plan.

104: Not to mention the tomes and tomes of spot-on libertarian historical analysis in the Library of Babel.

Nick, or whoever –
Give me one example, just one, of the classic libertarian ‘slide into slavery’ in which a democracy slowly and unwittingly becomes a totalitarian state, so to speak ‘by accident’, and this process has actually been completed

So far we’ve had the US, the UK and Chavez’s Venezuela as candidates for places on the slide, but rather a dearth of examples of states which have actually, well, slid. Which was the point of the original question.

(By the way, if you don’t mention Nazi Germany again neither will I.)

Nick, please think carefully. (a) “central planning” has a rather specific meaning that you might want to look up too. But (b) of course the Venezuelan gov’t interferes with its economy in many ways. That’s obvious, and *that is not the point in dispute.* What you can’t show is that Hugo Chavez’s suppression of opposition and jailing of judges *is a consequence* of his interference in the domestic economy, or more specifically, that current conditions can be explained by the _Road to Serfdom_ creeping-socialism thesis, that a little more taxation here and a little more regulation there and sooner or later you’re shooting the opposition.

The point that commenters have been making patiently is that if you look at the examples, big and small, of murderous totalitarianism over the last century (or even petty, ramshackle totalitarianism) they are *not* explainable as social democracy gone too far. Pol Pot was not the result of creeping regulation.

You *can* regulate and tax your way into grotesque inefficiency and pervasive corruption and these things are not good, but the tight link you want between economic and political freedoms is not there in the data. The world is not so simple. Try pulling data for Latin American countries for the last half century for gov’t spending as a % of GDP, or any other measure you want to devise for the size of the state’s role, and see if any correlation emerges between that and political freedom.

end tag.

‘…Road to Serfdom creeping-socialism thesis, that a little more taxation here and a little more regulation there and sooner or later you’re shooting the opposition.

The point that commenters have been making patiently is that if you look at the examples, big and small, of murderous totalitarianism over the last century (or even petty, ramshackle totalitarianism) they are not explainable as social democracy gone too far. Pol Pot was not the result of creeping regulation.’

I think the point is that is not exactly the Serfdom thesis, either. It doesn’t apply only or strictly to social democracies, and it does not proceed by small increases in taxation or a little more regulation here and there, to which Hayek was content to accede (even in Serfdom itself). It was an ideology that seemed very impressed with the achievements of some variants of authoritarian socalism that he was concerned about. That ideology collapsed in the West. Now we have somewhat different ideological threats to liberty, like whatever it is that keeps the drug war and the war on terror going.

The political-freedom benefit of an armed populace isn’t for actually fighting pitched battles with the nation’s military. … What it’s really useful for, though, is in stopping (usually through deterrence rather than actual conflict) pogroms and other thuggish behavior from actual and would-be unofficial extensions of the government and party in power.

Ah, yes, only the deterrence of a well-armed populace stands between us and thuggish behavior in support of the party in power by a well-armed populace.

I don’t think anyone above was arguing Orwell was anti-socialist, just that, as a matter of plot, the IngSoc system derived from a socialist revolution. I don’t buy that myself. In the book England is still a vassal state of the US (“Airstrip One” – no-one ever gives Orwell sufficient credit for his jokes) and it’s hard to believe that Orwell was suggesting, even in an allegory, that the US would succumb to a socialist revolution. ( I don’t recall the stuff about Jones and Rutherford “before the revolution” but it’s been a while.)

The point was more that permanent war feeds a permanent war economy feeds permanent war. And, so far, he appears to have been on the money.

Following is from Orwell’s review of *The Road to Serfdom* as quoted in CEJL. Don’t stop with his first two points. As usual with Orwell, he shifts ground.

“…Shortly, Professor Hayek’s thesis is that Socialism inevitably leads to despotism and that in Germany the Nazis were able to succeed because the Socialists had already done most of their work for them, especially the intellectual work of weakening the desire for liberty. By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it. Britain, he says, is now going the same road as Germany, with the left-wing intelligentsia in the van and the Tory Party a good second. The only salvation lies in returning to an unplanned economy, free competition, and emphasis on liberty rather than on security.
In the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often — at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough — that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.
Professor Hayek is also probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift toward collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.”

>>You really do have to read Homage to Catalonia<<

Have done. Fully aware Orwell strongly disapproved of Stalinism and the Soviet Union (note also "fellow travellers" blacklist incident, assuming that wasn't just part of an attempt to get laid). IngSoc is clearly a species of oppressive Soviet-style state-capitalism, as the Trots call it, and whatever the rest of Eurasia has will be very like it. Just not convinced Orwell intended a future history that included a revolution as such – more likely a slow decline into an oppressive state from the continued war economy state with attending negativities: propaganda, surveillance, informers, the widespread incidence of the “gramophone mind”, etc. This does, now I think of it, sound creepily like Hayek’s thesis, but I’m pretty sure Orwell didn’t have the NHS in mind when he was doing his extrapolations. Martha Bridegam’s quote refers.

Of course, if the book really does explicitly talk about a revolution, my idea of the transition that Orwell had in mind is obviously less credible, even if whatever history Winston Smith thinks he knows is a construct of the Party.

‘Hayek’s misgivings and apprehensions were shared by the best minds of the day (and arguably of any day) in social science, including current and former Leftists such as James Burnham’.

You can’t argue that Hayek was uniquely and brilliantly original, and that everyone thought the same, at the same time.

Incidentally, Orwell didn’t make the ‘backstory’ of 1984 clear (that this was impossible was one of the points of the book) but he referred to an atomic war between the major powers and street fighting in London, self-evidently some kind of revolutionary/civil war situation. Orwell did not at any time believe that democratic socialist regimes might slowly, over decades, slide (inadvertently) into dictatorship.

Which was, let’s not forget, Hayek’s thesis.

Not to mention he did fantasize about English revolutions at moments. See e.g. the famous second-to-last paras of *My Country, Right or Left* ( http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/My_Country/english/e_mcrol ). Though that could have been the shell-shock talking, as in Chris Hedges’ current apocalyptics.

‘The right to bear arms as a defence against tyranny is a pleasing illusion. People get to keep their guns for their particular socio-psychological terrors and feel they are in “liberty’s last line of defence”.’

One thing that I haven’t been able to find out on the interwebs is….what were the laws on gun ownership like in Saddam’s Iraq? Because there certainly seemed to be a lot of guns available to the insurgency very very quickly after the invasion. Moreover there is also anecdotal evidence: cf all those stories about shooting guns at weddings etc. Does anyone know?

Ah, well, then I stand corrected.

(About the revolution in Nineteen Eightyfour stuff. I wasn’t ever claiming that Orwell thought democratic socialism would slide into totalitarianism. Which is what I meant when I said he didn’t have the NHS in mind – he certainly didn’t think that kind of collectivism would usher in Big Brother. More the intellectual collectivism he complains about in the “suppressed” preface to Animal Farm and, well, everywhere else. )

—

My Country Right or Left: “building a Socialist on the bones of a Blimp” – I guess Orwell wrote an autobiography after all, albeit a short one.

Mind you, it’s hard to disagree with the observation that Orwell modelled the MiniTrue canteen on the Beeb’s wartime feeding facilities.

Hildari@#125 said:

You can’t argue that Hayek was uniquely and brilliantly original, and that everyone thought the same, at the same time.

Quite true, which is why I did not make that argument.

I argued that Hayek made a “howler…for predicting that welfarism would lead to totalitarianism”. But that at the time all the best social scientists of the day – Keynes, Orwell, Schumpeter, Burnham – all thought that a socialist economy could well lead to a dictatorial polity. So he was in good company.

Hayek was prescient about the personal, rather than political, effects of excessive welfare statism. It does stultify individual enterprise and freedom in general. Not so much by closing off options as by conditioning people to forsake the search for options. Welfare statism reduces freedom by sapping the individual push for freedom, rather than beefing up the institutional crush of freedom.

So curbing the growth of the welfare state has in some way increased the sum of human freedom. Hayek deserves some credit for this.

Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man.

Flannery O’Connor

Jack Strocchi @ 135: “Hayek was prescient about the personal, rather than political, effects of excessive welfare statism. It does stultify individual enterprise…”

Jack, would you care to compare the stultification of individual enterprise produced by (1) excessive welfare statism to that produced by (2) lack of universal health insurance?

“A good question. I’d argue that universal public health insurance acts to stimulate, rather than stultify, individual enterprise. Thats because private health insurance companies tend to cartelise, forming a bureaucratic crypto-government without neither market or democratic accountability.”

Fair enough.

I seem to recall that Krugman or DeLong gave an account of Hayek recanting the RtS thesis before his death, that social democratic programs like national healthcare and social security do not necessarily lead to totalitarianism.

Didn’t Hayek also have a view that any sort of “central planning” being impossible? However his argument, if I recall it correctly, was uselessly simplistic, and either unconfirmed or outright negated by the reasoning of legions of esteemed economists, ironically sponsored by the US Pentagon following WWII, as described by Philip Mirowsky in Machine Dreams.

The singular example of USSR is hardly conclusive for many reasons, including various correctable mistakes in implementation, the fact that USSR actually industrialized in record short time while the free world was in depression, its uselessly costly imperialism, and the fact that its collapse (or western sponsored coup as I sometimes think of it) occurred subsequent to the Perestroika reforms which negated many of the original principles and positive liberty guarantees.

Now it seems rather that lack of central planning, or at least some sort of national industrial and wages policy, is a certain recipe for deindustrialization and economic crisis noted mainly for economic predation, as described by James Galbraith in Predator State.

I wouldn’t give any more creedence to a deathbed apostasy than I would to a deathbed conversion.

Darwin did not “recant evolution on his death bed” as creationists like to claim, but it would matter a damn bit if he did.

Branden@#140 said:

And how you can blame left wing politics for what happend in germany between 1934 and 1940 beggars belief.

Probably been reading Jonah Goldberg…

Goldberg has half a point. Although many socialists are not fascists, all fascists are socialists. Social-democrats are obviously at the liberal end of socialism. Nazis are at the “corporal”* end of socialism.

Both Hitler and Mussolini were socialists as well as nationalist. That is they were Left-wing on economic stratification, but Right-wing on ethnic segregation. They were “corporal” about everything, liberal about nothing. They were an odd blend of revolutionary utopia and reactionary nostalgia with not much thought for reformatory “hard boring of solid boards”.

Hitler began as a nationalist but got more socialist on issues of class as time went on, largely at the urging of Goebbels, his chief propagandist. So much so that he wound up nationalising industry and purging the Prussian aristocracy. Thats the sort of thing Left-wing revolutionaries can only dream about.

Stalin began as a socialist but went the other way and got more nationalist over time. (“socialism in one country”) Eventually winding up a Great Russian chauvinist, with anti-semitism to boot.

More generally, the terms of political discourse are unhelpful to the point of idiocy. von Hayek called this “the confusion of language in political thought”. Particularly in the US where the contraposition of “liberal” and “conservative” generates maximum feasible misunderstanding. Bush was Right-wing alright, liberal on some matters but conservative about almost nothing.

Hereunder are some helpful suggestions to reduce conceptual confusion:

Left-wing: progressive empowment of lower-status
Right-wing: regressive establishment of higher-status

Liberal: consensuality with individual autnonomies (scalable for artificial “persons”)
“Corporal”*: conformity to institutional authority

Conservatism: integration of traditional identity
Constructivism#: differentiation of fashionable identities

Reactionary: orientation towards past “golden age”
Reformatory: orientation towards present “mundane here & now”
Revolutionary: orientation towards future “never never land”

Hayek did his best to clear up the mess. But he had his own ideological issues to work out, not surprising given his von background, life and times.

* My neologism
# Hayek’s neologism

Hidari@#145 said:

Sure.

Roger Kimball gives a handy summary of Hayeks theory of the effect socialist economics has on both personal, professional and political liberty. Hayek regarded centralised bureaucracy as antithetical to both the pyschology of personal freedom and the sociology of political freedom:

The two great presiding influences on The Road to Serfdom were Alexis de Tocqueville and Adam Smith. From Tocqueville, Hayek took both his title and his sensitivity to what Tocqueville, in a famous section of Democracy in America, called “democratic despotism.” Hayek, like Tocqueville, saw that in modern bureaucratic societies threats to liberty often come disguised as humanitarian benefits. If old-fashioned despotism tyrannizes, democratic despotism infantilizes. “It would,” Tocqueville writes,:

resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves… . It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? … [This power] extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; … it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

Echoing and extending Tocqueville, Hayek argued that one of the most important effects of extensive government control was psychological, “an alteration of the character of the people.”

Now its hard to test for the effects of socialist economics on personal pyschology. But its hard not to see some truth in what Hayek was saying. Welfare statism demonstrably demoralises dependent client populations, which is one reason why welfare dependency seems to be inter-generational. “Wealthfare” statism for trustafarians does the same thing at the other end of the class scale.

Hayek was right to warn that statist bureaucracy is a threat to political freedom. Max Weber foresaw the soul-destroying effects of the Iron Cage of Bureaucracy. He argued that bureaucracy was a common feature of both capitalist enterprise and statist agency. Hayek pointed out that the statist bureaucracy was ultimately more dangerous to liberty since it rested on the foundation of coercive power.

All things being equal one is more likely to enjoy more personal, professional and political freedom when there is a diffusion of economic power. I would suggest that is why the US tends to lead with institutional and instrumental innovation. Hayek dedicated the Constitution of Liberty to the “unknown civilization of America”.

More generally the rise of a nanny state seems to correspond to what Rieff calls the “therapeutic culture” of counselling and victimology. Its not exactly 1984, but it does tend to head in the Brave New World direction where individual problems are medicalised and then socialised. I daresay that some such vision is animating the Tea-Party animals.

I don’t think it’s a reactionary point to highlight the problem of welfare dependency. I mean, it is if you do it in a way which is code for racism or what-not, but outwith that, it should be nobody’s ideal society in which large populations exist on state handouts. People should have work they can value, and that gives value to them. If you embed them in a situation where the answer to the question ‘What am I for?’ is going to be ‘Nothing much’, then no good will come of it in the long run. Greater generosity of handout, without challenging the structural problems of the status-quo, is self-defeating if the goal of one’s politics is actually to empower ordinary people.

Actually scratch that. I’ve just had a look at some of the academic papers on ‘welfare dependency’ (most of which seem to have been written by economists, quelle surprise), and the whole concept is so ideologically loaded it’s impossible to have a discussion about it without accepting its reactionary assumptions. What these papers demonstrate is that poverty is real, that if you are born poor, you tend to stay poor, that if are poor and you have kids your kids are likely to be pooor, that long term unemployment is an extremely serious (and worsening) problem in the ‘West’, and so on.

Of course, the purpose of these ‘papers’ (some of which, it should be noted, have been published in allegedly serious academic journals in the ‘liberal’ academy) is to mask all this by disguising nice, crisp, accurate words like ‘poor’ and ‘no job’ with slimy euphemisms like ‘welfare dependent.’

A good counter argument is here:

http://www.radstats.org.uk/no079/henman.htm

Although many socialists are not fascists, all fascists are socialists.

That’s not an argument, it’s a smear. All Fascists nationalise heavy industry, just like socialists! Except the ones who don’t! But when a non-Fascist government nationalises heavy industry it’s not socialist because… and anyway, did you know that Hitler was actually a National Socialist?

Hidari, indeed – and my response would be that we ought to acknowledge that poverty is the problem. It is easy to say, and in some senses self-evident, that giving people money can solve that problem. But if some of the cultural consequences of poverty are forms of exclusion, it is not self-evident to say that people who are poor and excluded can be reintegrated meaningfully to the mainstream of collective life just by giving them money. What they need is a valid social role. Saying that poor people ought to be given money to do nothing is a curious consequence of left-leaning sentiment attempting to function while implicitly accepting the existence of a capitalist society. One rages against its injustice, and demands more for those with less, but the end result is merely the request for a little extra handout for the poor who appear always to be with us. And who wins? Not the cause of real equality. It is certainly hard to imagine a socialist – or indeed any just – society in which fit, able-bodied people were paid to do nothing while their comrades worked to support them.

What Steve said, if I hadn’t taken half an hour to get round to posting…

‘Saying that poor people ought to be given money to do nothing is a curious consequence of left-leaning sentiment attempting to function while implicitly accepting the existence of a capitalist society. One rages against its injustice, and demands more for those with less, but the end result is merely the request for a little extra handout for the poor who appear always to be with us. ‘

Again, straw man argument. I don’t ask for ‘a little extra handout’. I ask that societies’ productive capacities be used such that there are meaningful, relatively well paid jobs for all. But in the absence of such a move (and none of the major political parties seem to be in the slightest bit interested in such actions) ensuring that the poor don’t starve should be the first priority.

Alex, again, such hyperbole neither accords well with reality nor serves any but right-wing goals. I have to go with Hidari on that.

‘It’s a very long way from ensuring people don’t starve to essentially creating by policy entire communities dependent on state handouts’.

Or, another way of putting it, entire communities who are without work. And who therefore have to depend on state handouts, in order not to starve.

Jack

Was Bismarck left wing?

Was Stolypin?

Was Hindenburg?

Was Pitt the younger?

Was Corrandini?

Was AC Cuza?

Was Gömbös?

Was Carol II of Romaina, of the royal house of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen a socialist?

The problem with the Goldberg “thesis” (if you assume that it isn’t just shite polemic and, like a post shedder puppy, just wants to be loved) is at base it’s inability to imagine a right wing ever that doesn’t look like his corner of Con-Liberatarianism in 21st century America when we quint at it and don’t really pay attention. Combined with a complete void of context/knowledge about the political cultures and lexicons of storm of modernity Italy and Germany, it is no wonder it is entirely arse.

It’s a very long way from ensuring people don’t starve to essentially creating by policy entire communities dependent on state handouts.

Er, the communities existed before the handouts; you have the cart before the horse here.

‘Being unemployed is horrible, therefore we must incentivise people not to be unemployed — by making it more horrible’

Right-wing ‘logic’ at its finest, and so nice to have it in Alex’s ‘socialist’ concern troll version.

“Meanwhile, just out of curiosity, any chance of some citations for the ludicrous schmibertarian over-readings of Hayek?
The mothership of Austrianism is the Ludwig von Mises and in their store they have this Amazon link plus review: http://mises.org/store/Road-to-Serfdom-The-P252C0.aspx I don’t know that ‘over-reading’ is the word.

What F.A. Hayek saw, and what most all his contemporaries missed, was that every step away from the free market and toward government planning represented a compromise of human freedom generally and a step toward a form of dictatorship–and this is true in all times and places. He demonstrated this against every claim that government control was really only a means of increasing social well-being. Hayek said that government planning would make society less liveable, more brutal, more despotic. Socialism in all its forms is contrary to freedom.

Nazism, he wrote, is not different in kind from Communism. Further, he showed that the very forms of government that England and America were supposedly fighting abroad were being enacted at home, if under a different guise. Further steps down this road, he said, can only end in the abolition of effective liberty for everyone.

More interesting than that is the following, an authorized reduction of the Road to Serfdom to 18 cartoon panels.
http://mises.org/books/TRTS/

The extremes of the left & right are the same thing: central planning, in actuality more akin to the left. Fascism & Communism are virtually identical: no property. This has ethical dimensions (cf John Locke’s ‘Letter Concerning Toleration’ for example) as well as consequential-ist wealth-creation arguments of great merit. Consider thus that the information exchanged via the market doesn’t reflect real world circumstances and how that poses a conundrum for the central-planners to achieve their goals is one logical and forceful argument that has been seen in theory & practice. Among others is the incentives put in place under different political climbs, hence leading to much elucidation of behavioral norms. Adam Smith takes as a starting point that people generally act in their own best interest. He doesn’t imagine a Utopian ideal. His explication of the spontaneous discovery of a steam valve is useful as a metaphor to the inherited, evolving circumstances that we utilize to better our station, and ultimately of others as well. From one perspective, that’s a broad decency enlightened on a perpetually suffering mass that’s trying to accomplish the right-things and his view of the attainability of such is a vast array of win/win scenarios that’s a compliment to the Human Race entire.

Hayek is muti-faceted and can be considered outside of a political milieu. His arguments span many bridges, one being the Matlhusian predicament of limited resources, akin to all living things, being bounded by humans — yet restricted via the loss of data via market-signals, i.e., the evolved language of trade.

He also wrote during a time of great push for grand political experiments, all necessarily influenced by their own characteristic evolution — which deems it distinct from any other, yet from these broad expanses of cause & effect, we attempt to converse on expected principles of what constitutes Law. The different facets of influence and how they comprise our station.