Hayek and the Welfare State

The historical evidence of actually existing socialism does suggest that a centrally planned administrative command economy is incompatible with political freedom and democratic institutions. Certainly the USSR and PRC proved to be extremely authoritarian and repressive. Cuba was a considerably more attractive model in that it achieved many of the same social goals as the USSR with considerably less violence and terror. But, even here the regime was a dictatorship that did repress dissidents and socially undesirable elements, although at levels much lower than the USSR or China. The welfare states in contrast never abandoned the basic structures of market capitalism even if in a few cases state enterprises comprised the majority of economic output. There is a huge difference between a state run enterprise and an economic commissariat. The first one is truly state capitalist and has existed in places like the UK, France, and Norway. The second one was unique to actually existing socialism and does indeed appear to be completely incompatible with a system of government that allows political freedom.

“but he just seems to have changed his mind, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.”

Isn’t it only perfectly reasonable if experience has shown that you original position is not supported by new evidence? It seems like Hayek changed his position in the area in which he was correct and didn’t change where he was incorrect. That seems inconsistent with being perfectly reasonable.

Few individual words have ever made me more angry than “amorphous” in “amorphous desire to increase social justice.” Live in the real world, Hayek.

Emily:

I have no idea what you mean by that.

Pohl…

Not to defend such communist countries, but their geoeconomics (autarchy) drove much of their internal repression. One always needs to be sure, when talking about Stalin killing Ukrainians and comparing to Western States, that you talk about 19th century UK monarchs killing Indians and Chinese, or about King Leopold and the Congo, or the near extermination of aboriginals in the US, AU. It’s likely that the western states are still better, but the score would be closer.

shah8

I am not sure why I have to talk about British imperialism or US policy towards Native Americans when talking about Stalin’s atrocities. The two are not directly related. Although I do think things like the deportation of the Chechens and Crimean Tatars do resemble things like the Trail of Tears of the Cherokee and the Long Walk of the Navajos in being essentially racist acts of ethnic cleansing.

Not “specifying” is, of course, a rhetorical strategy. Hayek was always an ardent proponent of plutocratic domination, by means of laissez faire malign neglect. He could scarcely specify his true desiderata, without alienating most of his intended audience. His argument in the Road to Serfdom is basically just dumb, a re-incarnation of Herbert Spencer’s arguments that the City of Birmingham’s public works department was going to lead swiftly back to feudalism. Its intellectual significance, today, owes nothing to its dubious analysis, and everything to its ability to attract financing from its beneficiaries.

There is no little irony in looking forward in 2012, and seeing a slippery slope ahead, leading toward a neo-feudalism of corporate plutocracy, paved not by the delusions of Marxists (many of whom embraced libertarian/anarchist ideas and rationalizations back in the day), but by the unlikely fanaticism of conservative libertarians of Hayek’s type. Authoritarian domination once again rides into town on a libertarian horse.

Enough of the pretend “scholarship”.

Read Hayek’s _The Constitution of Liberty_ and his _The Road to Serfdom_.

You’ll find the “Welfare State” advocated in both books, and also analysis given of how best to implement a welfare state so that prosperity and freedom as best advanced.

Hayek is EXPLICIT.

The welfare state is NO danger to a free society.

Hayek says this DIRECTLY.

Again, spare us the fake “scholarship”.

“Hayek and his supporters are looking worse and worse as this is hashed out more fully. The argument I perceived Hayek to be making in Road to Serfdom seemed exaggerated, but I could certainly sympathize with it and at least he seemed to fully support the principle of social insurance and public goods provision. It seems in his later writings he at least partially reneged on this view and to the extent that he predicted that welfare states would lead to totalitarianism, he looks like a fool. But at least he’s an honest one. Not always 100% clear, but he just seems to have changed his mind, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.”

There is a constancy here: Opposition to the political left and the labour movement. When the left proposed central planning, he wrote a book opposing that. When it turned out that centre-left governments mostly restricted itself to social insurance and public goods provision, he turned against this. I’m not sure to what degree he really changed his mind, or if it was just his opponents that changed.

Henry, someone working from the principle of charity — or simply from best practices as an honest and competent scholar — would make an effort to identify the consistency between:

(1) Hayek’s advocacy of the welfare state

(2) Hayek’s insistence that the welfare state is NO threat to a free society

(3) Hayek’s SPECIFIC institutional recommendation for IMPLIMENTING a successful welfare state

with:

(4) Hayek’s concerns about institutional designs which set of processes that call inevitably for further necessary revisions, that increasingly throw a monkey wrench into the workings and principles and ethics of a free society.

Your not stupid.

You can do it. It just takes honesty and scholarly discipline.

Wow. Greg Ransom is soooo tiresome.

The guys you quote have a half decent reply to Caldwell also.

http://mesharpe.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,7,9;journal,9,69;linkingpublicationresults,1:106043,1

Ransomite logic?

Obama supports the welfare state

Hayek supports the welfare state

Obama and Hayek support the same thing!

John,
while you are playing at that level, you should read caldwell’s on the-job training with hayek paper on the many errors in the quotes and citations in the road to serfdom.

Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals is a must read for this thread. He documents the deficiencies of men who talked big and lived meanly. Most of the great thinkers were deeply flawed and preoccupied with money and lead immoral lives

Their greed, their lust and promiscuity, their deceit and arrogance, and the despicable
way they treated those around them, and especially their wives, mistresses and children while proclaiming selfless love for humanity. The best of them were 1950s bounders.

Ex-communists are quickly forgiven, so are practising renegade liberals.

Orwell in his proposed preface to ‘Animal Farm’ wrote of the renegade liberal who glorifies communist experiments and disdains middle-class life despite their own pleasant bourgeois circumstances.

Renegade liberals search for outlaws states and revolutionary movements to support, who, of course, would ship these renegade liberals straight to the camps as soon as they won power.

The revolutionary excesses of the new regime would be excused as the misadventures of ‘liberals in a hurry’ who understandably lost patience with the slow pace of democratic reform.

Why not Hayek? He was a divorcee too!

I tried to read Ransom’s link. In the very first sentence, I encountered this construction:

“the Marxist-Socialist-Interventionist-Galbraithian paradigm”

No one that openly hackish gets 27 pages worth of my attention unless I need to read it for a particular research project.

Matt, the argument against Johnson’s book is reciting the countless vices of intellectuals and that you would not were not want them for close friends are not arguments.

their vices must be connected with other propositions such as that those who are immoral are intellectualy unreliable, or that bad ideas come from bad people, in order to make a case. the questioning of the morality of Hayek is a topic of this thread.

I am deeply amused that the response to “as a tribe, they’re wicked” would be “look at the results of a criminal justice system we routinely denounce and actively obstruct”. As though legality established morality.

Bruce Baugh, I will assume the numbers were not in your favour.

Sorry for the typos, esp at (4) which should read

institutional designs which set _off_ processes that call inevitably for further necessary revisions

It’s idiotic and illiterate to term a ratchet mechansim a “slippery slope argument”.

A mechanism isn’t an argument, and a non-inevitable potential for ratcheting things ever tighter in a pathological direction to “fix” the problems created by the last ratchet tightening is not a slippery slope inevitability.

This sort of sloppiness in thinking and rhetoric permeates the garlic / crosses / silver bullets & panties in a bunch side of the “Sefdom” conversation, unfortunately.

the argument against Johnson’s book is reciting the countless vices of intellectuals and that you do not want them for close friends are not arguments

If I may, I actually think the Ransom stuff should stay. Accusing Henry of dishonesty and lacking scholarly discipline may cross the line but his posts are on topic and the feebleness of his arguments only serve to bolster Henry’s point.

Strange that some folks, even in 2012, think the Soviet system, the Chinese system, or Cuba represented “real existing socialism.” Obviously, they didn’t and don’t. Workers don’t own the means of production in any of these systems. There is no democracy — which is the natural essence of socialism. Even worse is the idea that “communism” has ever existed in any modern nation state. It hasn’t. First you have to establish real socialism, set the table, create the needed surplus, and then the state can dissolve — which may takes generations. Communism is the absence of the state and of all classes. Nothing could be more “democratic.” Nothing could be more “natural”, either, as human beings operated in communal systems for our first 200,000 years or so . . . and in some places, scattered across the globe, as recently as the 19th century.

Beyond that, perhaps the most important devolution in our public conversation is the successful right-wing conflation of “liberty and freedom” for the rich with liberty and freedom for everyone. Sorry, but the two things are in direct conflict. When the capitalist is free and at liberty, he or she will exploit the workforce, extract more natural resources than we have left to give, and screw over consumers and supply chains with impunity. Their “liberty and freedom” is our poverty, the planet’s death, and the death or worker and consumer rights.

(And the supposed “threat” to liberty and freedom coming from real socialism? It’s kinda like the supposed “threat” to the institution of marriage if same-sex couples get their chance to be miserable, too.

The capitalist system is structured in such a way (and has the built-in incentives) to dramatically exploit workers, consumers and supply chains, and rape the planet without cessation. Grow or die. Make a killing, not a living. With greater power and wealth, more wealth and power is possible, etc. etc. There is nothing about this anti-democratic system par excellence to even remotely appeal to the vast majority of human beings on this planet.

Yes, predators do very well with this system. It actually opens up the field for predators to include those not already in the ruling class. But the vast majority of humans aren’t predatory, have no desire to be, have no desire to own businesses or run them or do any of the sociopathic things predators do to make their fortune. In short, the system is designed for a tiny percentage of the human population, and it’s the worst possible way to organize any society.

The best is democratic socialism, followed by true small “c” communism (full on democracy, without parties, classes, rulers, etc), when we’ve evolved enough to handle it. That would mean real “liberty and freedom.” Those two words have become untethered from reality in capitalist society.

Jim Rose,

It’s a huge assumption, of course, but I’m assuming that the electorate is well-informed (someday) and acts in its own best interest — not that it’s doing so now. If it does, it will never, ever, not in a million years, put right-wingers back into office. It will also, if well-informed and freethinking, dismantle capitalism and get rid of it once and for all. Because it’s obviously in the best interest of the world — as opposed to the 1% — to do so. That is, if we actually want to improve the quality of life for all, create a sustainable future for everyone, and so on.

I’m also assuming — and this is key — that if we ever really implemented true democratic socialism, citizens would love it to such a degree that they’d never want to go back to the barbaric, anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian ways of the past. Neoliberalism would be seen as a major blunder of epic proportions and the right discredited beyond all chances of redemption. Centrism would be discredited. Even New Dealism would be seen as far too much the compromise (which it was).

Basically, a well-informed, freethinking people will see that capitalism and a sustainable future are incompatible, to put it mildly. The only reason more people don’t see this right now is that so much is hidden from us, distorted — through the media and corporate propaganda and via distance. Pain, for many Americans (and Europeans) is elsewhere. Across the tracks. Overseas. Out of sight, out of mind. The richest 20% of the world’s population gobble up 85% of its resources and the folks in that 20% too often are oblivious of the rest of the planet. This can’t go on. The math doesn’t work. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that by 2030, we will need two entire earths to meet demand. I’ve seen estimates that say we’ll need four earths.

Capitalism must grow or die. It needs new markets, endlessly, and an endless supply of finite resources to sustain growth. Obviously, capitalism and our planet are on a collision course, and as long as we privilege “freedom and liberty” for business owners above all other things, including our health, safety, welfare and the planet’s future, we don’t stand a chance. Once the world wakes up to these facts, the right doesn’t stand a chance. It backs the predators, and we outnumber them by roughly 10-1.

If I may break in, it always seems to me that Hayek’s tragedy is that he was never invited to the Macy cybernetics conferences. He was one of those proto-systems theorists from the early part of the last century, and he might have benefitted from exposure to lots of them.

As it is now, an introduction to whole systems thinking via Hayek’s ideas gives a sort of concreteness to the enterprise which really isn’t there, something which trips-up his rather curiously strident, current-day adherents: because systems thinking is an epistemology or a grammar, really. And Hayek didn’t get it all anyway.

I think the tragedy is sad indeed, perhaps a loss to 20th century intellectual development. Hayek wrote, over three decades after the date of the last conference, “When I began my work I found that I was nearly alone in working on the evolutionary formation of such highly complex self-maintaining orders. Meanwhile, researches on this kind of problem — under various names, such as autopoiesis, cybernetics, homeostasis, spontaneous order, self-organization, synergetics, systems theory, and so on — have become so numerous that I have been able study closely no more than a few of them.” –The Fatal Conceit (1988) intro. p.9.

He didn’t know others were working on it, and he didn’t get a chance to study more than a few. This is the key to Hayek, as well as (it seems to me) an affirmative description of his adherents: an inchoate excitement with ideas of self-maintaining organisation that could use a good deal more field description, and a good deal more fitting of fundamentals to facts. This area of thought has lately been taken over by the computer revolution of course, though it remains a fascinating, underdeveloped possibility for biology in general and needs a good deal more observation and examples, especially from nonhuman wildlife systems.

Anyway, I recommend it: The Fatal Conceit is very short. That is my most favorite recommendation for any nonfiction. If you want to know where Hayek’s intellectual energies were headed, read it. It is the only book of his that I was surprised to read, because you get a clear sense of his overall anthropological comprehension, as well as his own subtle flaws. I wrote something very much like the anthropological parts of it, when I was around 25 and had gone through Polanyi (Karl) and structuralism and Sahlins and Roy Rappaport, after studying lots of ethnology of nonliterate tribes.

To get back to my main point, the fatal conceits of Fatal Conceit are also rather instructive. We read not only the old socialism bugbear but now the suggestion, the insistence, that Western liberalism will do best by patterning itself upon the self-regulation of acephalous systems. (This is another normative imaginary extension from Hayek, of the same sort as this one: “extensive government control produces…an alteration in the character of the people.”) To achieve this normative goal, Hayek famously advertised the method of spontaneous order propounded individualistically via market prices.

The example for me is in not in these assertions, but in the assurance behind them. (Yes of course, I want to reply, there are self-regulating systems. The question should be whether self-regulation is a solution to be introduced, in a specific hypothesis or a specific policy.) The point is, ALL of the early systems theorists did this type of fantasizing about how systems work, or should work. They mistook molehills for mountains. This suggests the direction in which the earlier Hayek of The Road to Serfdom was headed: it was an entry into systems theory, though his is hidden underneath a political ideology.

I imagine some of the Macy conferees would have been horrified at the thought of inviting Hayek, if it even crossed their minds, although I imagine that Bateson would have found the encounter to have been an interesting “species of schismogenesis”. (Which is a negative/positive vicious-circle game that applied to intra-tribal status competitions as well as nuclear arms races, etc.)

Bateson benefitted from the conferences, and the later Bateson (e.g. Mind and Nature) showed a way to think more clearly about the epistemology of systems, although he was barely prepared to accept his own conclusion. Bateson came very close to the position that “information” is different from “matter-energy”, though it always rides upon a substrate of it. They are epistemological equals. It is a restatement of the ancient form/substance dualism. But Bateson was a true Western scientist, and a new addition to scientific fundamentals is a very serious venture to take on. He really never took the leap. Since crackpots are already running round the kitchen as it were, I shall venture to say that it really is an addition to the basic grammar of science. By applying the “pincers maneuver” of going back and forth between theory and experiment/observation in several subjects, Bateson was led to the conclusion that information and matter-energy are different things.*

I am well aware that Crooked Timber abounds with silly energy monists, but if you want to pick a fight, you won’t acquit yourself so easily. To conclude here, I just wish to point out that the profundities (and errors) of Hayek are neither unique nor in the end are they particularly noteworthy. Late Modernist Thought had as many practitioners as medieval scholasticism did, and Finnegans Wake put it to bed. (Indeed, put ’em both to bed.)

[* This gets back in a curious way to the central error of the hard-money believers who congregate around Hayek’s bookshelves. Because money is not a long-term surrogate of matter-energy. Money is a type of information. It has no long-term hard value.]

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Gosh, but who’s going to stand up for the “principle of charity” now that he’s gone?

What the hey are “energy monists”?

And if Greg Ransom wants to argue in comments that notorious left-wing provocateur Bruce Caldwell is ignorant and dishonest about what Hayek says, he’s free to make the best case he can …

It is always unwise to invite trolls or vampires into your dwelling. (Though commenters at The Straight Dope call the vampire thing a “myth”.)

Lee A. Arnold: his last book demonstrates clearly where he was headed or where he later decided, wished or pretended he would have been headed if he’d been sufficiently scholarly to do some research into what others were writing rather than churning out polemic.

I don’t see that systems thinking is an epistemology or a grammar any more than psychology, game theory or computing is, or why “information” is different from “matter-energy” would be considered an interesting or surprising discovery.

But an interesting contribution. Can you recommend any reading on self-regulating systems? My general impression is that these are very often if not always illusory, either being a non-self-regulating base system with a regulator attached, e.g. a thermostat, or having no independently and substantially specifiable end-state, e.g. ecosystems, the Market. But maybe this is to inflate expectations of what a ‘true’ SRS would have to be like.

Lee: “information” is different from “matter-energy”, though it always rides upon a substrate of it. They are epistemological equals. It is a restatement of the ancient form/substance dualism.

“Equals” for what purpose? For the purpose of being able to say that there are immaterial entities without being rediculed by materialists? I’m not sure I see what other purpose the distinction serves.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia: “Aristotle analyses substance in term of form and matter. The form is what kind of thing the object is, and the matter is what it is made of.” Is this your understanding as well? If so, in what sense is “the kind of thing an object is” epistemologically equal to “what it is made of”? Is it also ontologically equal?

Are you sure Rorty’s advice isn’t best: do science, forget philosophy?

J. Otto Pohl,

Soviet problems regarding the efficient distribution of goods due to the lack of an internal market would seem to prove Hayek’s argument regarding price mechanisms to be largely correct.

I’m looking for something a bit more precise than generalities concerning the Soviet Union as a whole. Specifically, I’m curious about comparisons between centrally coordinated and diffusely coordinated systems and the conditions under which one or the other might prove superior.

Energy monist.

Piglet wins.

This Stiglitz overview of information economics is useful on this and other questions.

Pohl 1: “The historical evidence of actually existing socialism does suggest that a centrally planned administrative command economy is incompatible with political freedom and democratic institutions. Certainly the USSR and PRC proved to be extremely authoritarian and repressive.”

They did but a bit more work is required to establish a causal link with central planning.

11: “I am not sure why I have to talk about British imperialism or US policy towards Native Americans when talking about Stalin’s atrocities. The two are not directly related. Although I do think things like the deportation of the Chechens and Crimean Tatars do resemble things like the Trail of Tears of the Cherokee and the Long Walk of the Navajos in being essentially racist acts of ethnic cleansing.”

And those atrocities were committed by regimes that were economically quite distinct. Again the claim that economic control and political repression are necessarily related is dubious at best.

JOP: the point is simimlar to piglet’s: the two facts may not be controversial, but it’s the causal relations that you assume to hold between them that is at issue.

Your statistical method of deriving laws of politics suffers from a vanishingly small sample size.

Tim Wilkinson, Hayek is not a neo-classical economist. He is an austrian school economist.

The break came during the socialist calculation debate in the 1930s because of neoclassical economics “excessive preoccupation with the conditions of equilibrium”.

Milton Friedman declared himself “an enormous admirer of Hayek, but not for his economics”. This may may have been one reason why Hayek could not get a job at the university of chicago’s department of economics.

The USSR wasn’t a socialist economy that became a tyranny. It was a tyranny that became a socialist economy (while staying tyrannous). In point of fact, the one came before the other, and the tyrants explicitly said the point of the tyranny was to create the socialist economy.

But everyone seems to think Russians voted for socialism and got Stalinism. It really didn’t happen that way. It would be more to the point to say that they fought for something that wasn’t the tsar, voted for the SRs, Leninism seized power, and then Stalin seized it off Lenin. Rejecting the popular will in favour of an elite coup is a Communist trick.

Gordon Tullock used Sweden as an example to support his argument that the basic problem with The Road to Serfdom is “that it offered predictions which turned out to be false. The steady advance of government in places such as Sweden has not led to any loss of non-economic freedoms.”

Geo, sorry, I didn’t answer your other question. My idea is that form includes kind, shape, and impressed patterns. So if you close your eyes and pass your finger over a piece of metal, and feel a bump, the bump is part of the form, and the substance is iron or aluminum or whatever. But the dichotomy is local and passes through variations. So if your voice were recorded and then transcribed, then your comment would exist in two forms, while its substance is what you said, or the meaning I received.

The question here is whether or not high levels of economic control can exist without political repression.

What is “economic control”? Economy is always controlled somehow by somebody: Gosplan or Federal Reserve, Politburo or a few hundred CEOs.

You could say that suppressing commerce requires repression, but how is it “political repression”? Suppression of illegal drugs trade, prostitution, trade violating IP, unlicensed vendors in capitalist states is repressive, but is it “political repression”, or just ordinary repression, AKA “law enforcement”?

You could say that the war on drugs repression is different because a majority of the population supports it, but what if a majority supported what you call “high levels of economic control”? Would it then cease to be “political repression”?

A government can be popular or unpopular. The degree of repression follows from the level of popularity. The lack of popularity could be a direct or indirect consequence of various policies and characteristics; “high levels of economic control” could be one of them, but it could be “not enough economic control” as well.

1. Sebastian explicitly derives hoary old Nozickian ‘Patterns upset liberty’ conclusion from a correlation (n= what? 2? 3?)

2. ‘Central planning’ is also known as ‘planning’ – the idea that it must be undemocratic is a highly prejudicial stipulation. If one were to consider a continuous variable – degree of democratic control over industrial production – instead, one would have more data and a less droolingly simplistic argument. Bring in corporatist and social democratic regimes and plot degree of socialism against degree of repression. It still wouldn’t prove much but it would be a bit more gormful.

3. Remember also to adjust for ‘repression’ caused by the need to combat US-backed astroturf saboteurs, guerillas and terrorists, in e.g. Sandinist Nicaragua (and indeed Cuba, USSR, Europe, South America). Adjusting for this would of course involve correctly assessing the extent and significance of it – it tends to be understated, euphemised, salami sliced and just plain ignored in Western historiography.

4. In general, economic ‘liberty’ tends implicitly to be defined in a tendentious manner so that a property regime unconcongenial to private business becomes ipso facto ‘repressive’ (just as taxes are always ‘coercive’, imposed by threat of state violence, while a ban on shoplifting, for which people do acually get clapped in irons and frogmarched off to jail, never seems to be so described by the Sherman McCoys of this world).

Paul Johnson’s “Intellectuals”? Really? By far inferior to “Caddyshack.”

But of course they would tell you that they needed to create an industrialized society in a hurry because of external threats… I don’t have any academic studies, but maybe something like Darkness at Noon will do?

What’s that got to do with anything?

I think it was supposed to be a Gotcha – ie look, right wing governments did the things you are praising. Therefore you are wrong to be left wing. Or something.

Frankly, a combination of Ransom + Rose + Data Tutashkhia saying something I agree with has my head spinning, so I’m not quite sure.

is there any way to guess how the 1930s in Russia might have looked without a fear for Germany? would they have followed similar policies and oppression with a different set of rationalization? could Stalin have maintained as much power without a fear for Germany?

How much did they fear Germany, in fact? some rethoric from days sounds almost prescient in its call for industrialization for self-defense, but at other moments they seem to have forgotten the imperialist threat completely

Zamfir:

There was no fear of Germany in 1930-1931 during dekulakization and the subsequent famine in 1932-1933. During 1930-1931 the Weimar Republic was in very bad economic straights and not in any condition to threaten the USSR. It is only in 1934 after Hitler came to power that there are political trials aimed at people connected to Germany. In this case ethnic Germans in the USSR who received assistance from groups like _Bruder in Not_ in Germany . They were accused of receiving “Hitler Help” even though organizations like _Bruder in Not_ that provided the relief had nothing to do with National Socialism. This is a pretty feeble excuse for 1934 and later. But, it does not exist at all in 1930-1933.

Since the massive war against the countryside by the OGPU in 1930-1931 is one of the greatest waves of violence by the USSR trying to justify all Stalinist repression as justifiable defensive measures against foreign powers does not fly. The uprooting and confinement of some 2 million peasants to special settlement villages where some 600,000 of them perished from material deprivation was never justified by the Soviet government itself in such terms. They never claimed that the “kulaks” were a source of “Us-Backed (or German backed) saboteurs, guerillas, and terrorists,” but rather class enemies some of which were accused of sabotage and terrorism. That is it was conceived by the Stalin regime as a war against indigenous internal enemies who stood in the way of expropriating the wealth of the peasant majority in order to create an industrialized state.

The irony of “serfdom” in Hayek’s famous essay should be considered: serfdom is a condition and a relationship of person to state, which arises only when the central state is very, very weak, and when the economy is characterized by a high degree of autarky — an economy without extensive market trade, and therefore without much specialization in production. Serfdom implies a critical role for an intermediate power, with an interest in attenuating trade, and exploiting the individual serf — a local lord of the manor.

Mapping the idea of “serfdom” onto an economy characterized by a great deal of planning and hierarchical direction by a powerful central state is inherently contradictory. The planning implies a high degree of specialization, which requires coordination, and the state is, well, powerful.

Hayek’s central argument is that hierarchical planning is subject to coordination failure: the seemingly powerful central state is not, in practice, powerful, because coordination failures will make it, practically, weak. But, he marries that to a more poetic and psychologic argument, by invoking the servile “serf”, suggesting that the dependency of the “serf” on the powerful state will weaken the ability or willingness of the individual “serf” in society to carry out efficient and “powerful” market exchange and coordination.

Actual serfdom, like slavery, is an extractive and exploitative relationship, in which the weakness of the central state, and sharply limited trade, are pre-requisite conditions. An ideology defending serfdom or slavery posits the dependence of the serf or slave on the lord or master, but the factual, functional reality is that the lord or master is dependent on the serf or slave. It is the serf or slave, who knows how to work and to produce and to sustain life, and the lord or master is the parasitic drone; it is only an ideology protective of such a system that tries to make him out as a predator, dressed as a shepherd.

The conservative impulse is revealed in the determination to see the serf as servile and dependent, as well as oppressed and exploited, and to disappear the intermediate power — the local lord and master, who attenuates trade and extracts a surplus, diminished by the costs of oppression, for trade to benefit only the intermediate power.

The Chicago school was far more successful than Hayek, because it took a two-pronged approach to the relationship of the individual to the intermediate power to the state. First, there was the Friedmanite approach to denying the role of a planning and a powerful state in freeing the individual and creating market relations that benefitted the individual: the ideology of the ideal “natural” economy, in which intervention by the protective central state can only make a less-than-ideal mess. Second, there was the public choice approach, in which the central state must necessarily be weakened and corrupted by the intermediate powers lobbying for economic rents. The former hid the planning and regulatory work of the state that went into creating a workable market economy behind paeans to “the freedom to choose”. The latter laid out a blueprint for weakening and subverting the central state, while decrying the effects on the market economy.

So, here, we are, well on the road to serfdom, but on a road paved by Chicago “free market” economics, rather than Austrian nostalgia for feudalism.

@95, it wasn’t fear of Germany. It was the concept of “socialism in one country”. I doubt that it was merely a propaganda device; it seems that at that time many of them were sincere and felt like they were in a constant state of emergency.

The central control/repression correlation is far more tight and at least as logical as the assumptions built in to the constant discussions about the recent banking crises.

Whether or not this is true, what Hayek et al. get across is the idea that the upper levels of the commercial class have special rights of unregulated (also cross-border, etc.) freedom that in the twentieth century was unprecedentedly taken away. Which is not true.

Hayek is not defending the right of men like Thomas Paine to print and distribute pamphlets here, or the right of peasants to periodically destroy their landlords’ property for emotional or semiological reasons (as some Foucauldian-style leftists may assert).

Geo:

The Allied Intervention had completely ended by 1925 when the Japanese pulled their soldiers out of North Sakhalin. After which the Soviet government voluntarily gave them very generous concessions which they maintained throughout the 1920s and 1930s. All the other Allies had left before the institution of NEP in 1921. Under General Hans von Seeckt the USSR and Germany began military cooperation to allow the Reichswehr to circumvent Allied restrictions during this time. A more open normalization between the USSR and Germany came about with the Rapallo Treaty in 1922. So during the 1920s the Soviet Union had a much closer relationship with Weimar Germany than it did with the UK and France. Given this cooperation I fail to see where the Soviet regime would have perceived any threat from Germany. If they did fear the small restricted military of Weimar Germany then why allow the Reichswehr to train in the USSR? The first claims by the Soviet government that there was any connection between Germany and “internal enemies” only comes about in 1934. This is after the war against the “kulaks” has been won and the man made famine in Ukraine has ended. I am still failing to see how a weak, economically crippled, and still democratic Weimar Germany threatens the USSR in 1931. I completely fail to see how it justifies the forced relocation of two million Soviet farmers to wastelands in the Far North and Urals.

I completely fail to see how it justifies the forced relocation of two million Soviet farmers to wastelands in the Far North and Urals.

It doesn’t justify it, for me or for Zamfir, as I think I made completely clear. Should I have put it in capitals?

What’s at issue is your statement @97 that “there was no fear of Germany in 1930-1931 during dekulakization and the subsequent famine in 1932-1933.” Saying @105 that “I am still failing to see how a weak, economically crippled, and still democratic Weimar Germany threatens the USSR in 1931” misses the point. No one is saying that Weimar Germany was an imminent threat to the USSR in 1931. What Zamfir said, what I am saying, what countless people have pointed out, is that 1) there was tremendous and continuing hostility toward the USSR in the capitalist West, recently demonstrated by intervention in the Civil War and diplomatic/trade boycotts in the 1920s; 2) Russia had suffered major invasions from the West twice in the last century; 3) the German right wing was alive and well in 1931, and ferociously hostile to the Bolsheviks. The relationship between capitalist encirclement and internal repression is debatable, and has of course been very widely debated. I’m not taking a side in this debate. I’m simply pointing out that your comments don’t seem to take proper account of its existence.

TW: 106

Here is the problem most Soviet repression is long before 1945 and the Cold War. A lot of it takes place in the 1930s. In terms of numbers of people even adjusted for population differences it is orders of magnitude greater than anything that ever happened in Cuba or Nicaragua. If US backing of “saboteurs, guerillas, and terrorists” is the sole cause of repression in socialist states then there should have been very little repression in the USSR especially during the 1930s. Instead we should have seen hundreds of thousands of people shot in Cuba and Nicaragua. But, there is nothing in either of these states comparable to “dekulakization”, The Great Terror, or mass deportation of various nationalities during WWII. So this justification for Stalinist crimes just does not hold up.

Ignoring JOP who has reverted to his usual complaint about imagined justification for Stalinist crimes, I’d certainly agree with other comments that a wide range of factors other than ‘central planning’ underlay the peculiar and repressive nature of the USSR.

+ I think this was probably the document I was thinking of: http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/frus1969.pdf (pp. 457 ff), but looking at it again, I realise that the ‘black ops’ advertised in p457, fn 2 do not seem to be described in the declassified text. Presumably they were outlined in the 6 1/2 pages said on p. 464 to have been redacted.

JOP, your tirades become tiresome.

Well what is tiresome is the persistent use of the word “justification” and the hand-waving dismissal of contrary arguments free of any evidence. Did France, Britain, the US conspire to topple the Nazi regime after it came to power? Can you name even one fascist or right-wing dictatorship of the 20th century that was threatened anywhere close to the way the SU was threatened after 1917 or Cuba was threatened after 1959? No? So why bring up that comparison?

The US, UK, and USSR did topple the Nazi regime in 1945. The fact that the war starts in 1939 doesn’t seem much of an argument for a difference in “security” justifications for state violence. The Nazi genocide was also after 1939 as well. The US and other countries also eventually put incredible pressure on South Africa to end the apartheid regime. We had far greater economic and other sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s then we did against the USSR at the time despite the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There was no threat to the USSR from 1922 to 1941. This is a crucial period of time since this is when most of the violence by the Stalin regime occurred. The dekulakization, Holodomor, and Great Terror all took place during this time when the USSR was at peace and there were no threats to it from the US or Germany. The comparison with Cuba is telling. US attempts to overthrow the Castro regime were much, much more of a real threat then any of Stalin’s paranoid delusions during the 1930s. Yet there is no mass terror in Cuba. Out of 172 million people in the USSR Stalin had close to 700,000 shot in 1937 and 1938. The equivalent for Cuba would have been killing 50,000 people in 1979-1980. Despite being under much greater pressure from the US there is no equivalent to Stalinist mass violence in Cuba. So claiming that Stalinist repression is the result of US or German attempts to overthrow the regime is just special pleading especially when dekulakization, the Holodomor, and the Great Terror all took place during years in which there were no such attempts.

I’d still like to see someone make the case that there has ever been any socialist, much less communist state in the modern world. States have called themselves that. But, we all know from Orwell, among others, that ends justify rhetorical means of every imaginable kind. We have seen literally thousands of political parties named “freedom” or “people’s” that bare not the slightest resemblance to the titles or concepts. American politicians frequently call their bills things like “Clear Skies Act” even though they actually aid and abet polluters.

We need to go waaay beyond labels and break down how these systems actually functioned and, most importantly, for whom. Any careful scrutiny reveals that the Soviet, Chinese, North Korean systems, etc. . . . had next to nothing in common with socialist theory, much less communist (or actual leftist thought in general). Theory and practice were/are worlds apart.

The reason this is important? How can we argue against a system that has never, ever been implemented? To borrow a sports metaphor. It’s a little like condemning (and arguing against) the overuse of passing in football, when a certain team runs the ball 75% of the time. Some how, it got this reputation for passing at the drop of a hat, but really never has. No one questions the reputation anymore — it’s conventional wisdom — so they argue about their absurd projections rather than the actual, on-the-field reality.

Closer to home, this reminds me of the baffling, surreal view of Obama on the right. That he is somehow “far left” despite the evidence. To me, the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that Obama is easily one of America’s most conservative presidents, especially on economic and security matters. If only he were the leftist the right accuses him of being!!!

I don’t see why you would separate Soviet satellites from the Soviet union – well I do see why, only too well: so that you can present them as independent instances of repression, which in fact of course they are certainly not.

But it doesn’t matter anyway whether you’re talking about 3, or 12, or 50. If you’re going to use statistical methods like correlation, you need large homogeneous datasets. If you don’t have those – which you don’t if you are ‘sampling’ examples of various modes of industrial organisation – you need to get your microscope out and see if you can discern any internal complexity in your specimens (you know, things like ‘the Soviet Union’ and ‘Maoist China’), which you could then try to analyse.

122

For one thing the implementation of a system of collectivized agriculture to finance industrialization had already been completed. For another all potential enemy groups had already been neutralized as collectives. There were no more enemy classes or enemy nationalities that needed to be liquidated. After 1953 there are only individual not mass victims of terror.

Chris, there was less political pluralism prior to 1970 than today.

back then, the UK parliament was dominated by two parties with a cricket team of liberals and a few stringers.

Today, the UK has
• A coalition government in a Parliament with many minor parties
• A Scottish nationalist government in a parliament with green MPs and which had a few semi-retired Trotskyist MPs
• A national assembly for wales
• A Northern Ireland Assembly with power sharing established after 50 years of illiberal democracy and 30 years of direct rule (a liberal dictatorship?)

The German parliament is much more diverse with green and unrepentant communists MPs. There is a green party state government in Germany?

The Italian Christian democrats were replaced with the party formed by their milder version of the rutting chimpanzee

Other European parliaments have economic nationalist parties of the left and right as represented by the greens and anti-immigrant parties

Hayek predicted wrong because he did not anticipated a democratic consolidation in Europe in mid-20th century with the Tory parties winning much of the time.

The much greater political pluralism of the late 20th century was a response to stem the rapid growth of government.

oops, that should have been LeCarré

LFC, didn’t the allies invade Russia in 1918 to nipe communism in the bud?

piglet, when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917, they had given little thought to a future Soviet foreign policy, for they were convinced that Communist revolution would soon follow in the advanced industrial countries of Western Europe.

When such hopes were dashed after the end of World War I, Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks adopted the theory of peaceful coexistence as the basic foreign policy for a Communist state. A highly practical course of holding the survival of the existing Communist state as the foremost goal of foreign policy.

Stalin displayed a consistent preference for the conservative interests of the Russian nation-state over cleaving to revolutionary ideology — by repeatedly betraying indigenous Communist movements. to preserve peaceful relations with the West, Stalin consistently tried to hold back the success of various Communist movements who wanted to take advantage of the ruins of war.

Post-1945 Russia wanted countries on her border that would not be anti-Communist in a military sense, and that would not be used as a springboard for another invasion.

P.s. (2): I know Gaddis got some sort of award or medal from GWBush, etc. I don’t agree with his politics.

Hi
Sorry to post inappropriately but I can’t find any other way to reach you. Thought you might enjoy this satirical blog by UK academics bemoaning encroaching managerialism. If you like it, perhaps you could post it up or simply pass it on.

http://departmentofomnishambles.tumblr.com

Some light relief, at least.
Regards
JDeS

LFC @126: I had to admire the brevity and clarity of the response

Even though it’s perfectly fatuous? And three times as long as “Because imperialism … “?

Shorter Ferrant & McFail on Hayek:

“Hayek didn’t say what he actually said!”

Deny people said what the clearly and provably said — a standard conservative tactic.

E.g.:

JIM LEHRER: The public was never told that the Parade of Horribles were considered possibilities. Instead we were told it would be a cakewalk. Were you–

DOUGLAS FEITH: You weren’t told that by the administration. Absolutely not.

Source: NPR, 16 April 2008.

Compare with:

VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.

Source: Meet the Press, 16 March 2003.

In that light, I can readily identify Ferrant and McFail as ignorant incompetent liars, and furthermore I praise them for their knowledgeable and truthful analysis of Hayek’s work, because, remember! I never said that Ferrant and McFail are ignorant incompetent liars. And if you claim I said such a thing, why, silly you…you’re just attributing to me an argument I never made.

the cold war would then have to be one of the few wars that was not the result of mutual fear, misunderstanding, miscalculation and unplanned escalation.

LFC,
read Hobsbawm.
Kennan was not as silly as Gaddis

“Can you name even one fascist or right-wing dictatorship of the 20th century that was threatened anywhere close to the way the SU was threatened after 1917 or Cuba was threatened after 1959?”

Iraq? Assuming that Baathism is a form of fascism which I pretty much think it is.

Jim Rose

_Chris, there was less political pluralism prior to 1970 than today. back then, the UK parliament was dominated by two parties with a cricket team of liberals and a few stringers._

That’s true, but I think also misleading. Both of the two main political parties then were massive umbrellas containing a lot of ideological and social diversity.

Chris, good point. they were big tents

The impact of the nember of parties on the size of government varies between presidential and parliamentarianism, and plurality rule and proportional representation.

The presidential system, as compared to parliamentary systems, conduct less broad-based income redistribution via social welfare programs, but more targeted spending and will end up with a lower tax burden.

Plurality rule as compared to proportional representation entails more targeted spending and less broad-based social welfare programs. In both cases, Director’s Law could therefore prevail if it is politically prudent to channel targeted spending towards a politically mobile middle class.

Political fragmentation measured by the number of effective parties has a positive relationship with the size of the government, and with subsidies and transfers. Proportional representation and parliamentary countries favour higher public expenditures.

The studies starting from Peltzman showed that government grew in line with the growth in the size and homogeneity of the middle class that was organised and politically articulate enough to implementing a version of Director’s law.

After the 1970s stagnations, the taxed, regulated and subsidised groups had an increasing incentive to converge on new lower cost modes of redistribution.

Reforms ensued led by parties on the left and right, with some members of existing political and special interest groupings benefiting from joining new coalitions.
– More efficient taxes, more efficient spending, more efficient regulation and a more efficient state sector reduced the burden on the taxed and regulated groups.
– Many subsidised groups benefited from reforms because their needs were met in ways that provoked less opposition from the taxed and regulated.

Sweden and Denmark are examples of Becker’s idea that political systems converge on efficient modes of regulation and redistribution as their deadweight losses grow.

There are more political parties these day including pensioners parties because the tax groups are fighting back so the subsidised groups must organise more effectively too.

mofo 141:
“LFC,
read Hobsbawm.
Kennan was not as silly as Gaddis”

I’ve read Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, if that’s what you meant (well, three-quarters of it; not sure I ever quite finished it). There is a huge lit. on the Cold War and Kennan and I wouldn’t put Hobsbawm’s discussion, contained in a work that covers a much longer period (1914-1991), at the top of the list. Hobsbawm describes the Cold War as “a contest of nightmares,” I do recall that phrase, which is a nice one. Hobsbawm of course has his own particular axes to grind, like everyone else.

As for silliness, Gaddis’s response was tossed off at the end of a long talk when he was pressed for time. I’m sure he believes it, though. Kennan’s views were indeed probably more nuanced, on a range of issues. Frank Costigliola made much this point in his review of Gaddis’s Kennan in the New York Rev. of Bks, pointing out that Gaddis downplays Kennan’s late writings on the evils of nuclear weapons etc. But since I haven’t read Gaddis’s Kennan, merely a lot of reviews of it, that’s about all I can say on it.

I know that I am a minority of one. But, the major causes of Stalinist terror were internal not external. To claim that absent the Allied Intervention in 1918-1920 there would have been no Stalinist repression is extremely naive. This is especially true for dekulakization in 1931. The USSR had been in state of peace with the western powers and Germany for eleven years at this point. Not that the Allied Intervention was ever much of a threat. Only the Japanese were serious about trying to take Russian territory during the intervention and the Soviets granted them wide ranging concessions after their intervention which lasted through the entire decade of the 1930s. There is no evidence what so ever that Stalin decided to collectivize agriculture and “liquidate the kulaks as a class” as a defensive measure against the US, UK, Germany or any other foreign power. The Soviet government had a long term goal of industrializing and creating a modern socialist state which required transferring the wealth of countryside to the cities. Given strong rural resistance this required an extreme amount of violence and brutality.

While theoretically it might be possible to have a state that was democratic, allowed political freedom, and had a centrally planned administrative economy there are no real life examples. Primarily because as Alex first noted on this thread the Soviet model is one of creating a dictatorship for the purpose of building an industrialized socialist state. The USSR was highly successful in this, but at great human costs. China was less successful and still racked up a huge toll. Cuba was fairly successful, although less so than the USSR, but had a much lesser degree of repression. None of these states, however, were politically free in the sense that the US, UK, Sweden were. Neither the UK or any of the Scandinavian states ever adopted the Soviet economic model. Instead they all kept a basic capitalist and state capitalist mixed economy.

Finally, during the Cold War it is true the USSR was actually much weaker than it appeared at the time. It may even be true that the socialist bloc never had any realistic chance of ever winning the Cold War from day one due to this weakness. To say that it never engaged in any hostile behavior towards other countries, however, is just silly. If nothing else there are the overt invasions of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1980 to make sure that these countries remained rigidly within the Soviet bloc. These interventions were definitely acts of aggression against the people living in those countries.

Tim 143: Iraq? Well yes at a certain point, the US decided to turn against the Iraqi regime after having supported it for many years. My claim isn’t that the West always and at all times supported each and every right-wing dictatorship. My claim is that it always and at all times opposed each and every socialist country or government. And my claim further is that this real and at times existential threat had a significant impact on how socialist regimes developed. That’s it. It’s not proposing a monocausal theory of everything, just saying that you can’t overlook that fact if you want to understand 20th century history.

P.s. on Kennan: he very publicly endorsed Eugene McCarthy for pres. in ’68 (a fact that may be less well remembered than his Senate testimony against the war in ’66): see Costigliola here.

Chris “since you know the country I live in, I really think you could have tried a bit harder. But since you respond by invoking some past discussion that I can’t remember and asking about Poland and Hungary when I’d explicitly referred to “western Europe” I suppose I’m not dealing with an honest interlocutor. But then I knew that about you.”

Gods you’re exasperating. I responded to the ONLY concrete example that you gave, and it was a rather weak example. Just because you live in the UK doesn’t require that you give it as an example when it is a weak one. That is an awfully strange kind of patriotism. Then you handwave toward other ‘examples’ by suggesting that they are numerous but without actually bothering to do the apparently very difficult work of spelling out their letters. For heaven’s sake all you have to do is put e.g. Sweden, France and Spain or whichever countries you actually mean at the end of your more summarizing statement and then we would have something specific to talk about.

But no. You can’t do that. Instead you have to jump to my alleged honesty in discussions. The reason I don’t guess at your ‘examples’ is because the last time I did that it turned out that when I dealt with immigration in Germany and France and Sweden, you were ‘really’ alluding to the tiny bank states or some crap. It is fine that you don’t remember that, but it makes it rather difficult to to want to guess.

If you want to make general statements, great. If you want to provide examples, also great. But if you want to complain that people respond concretely to your concrete examples, and when the concrete examples suck you want to complain that they didn’t bother to wrestle with the examples that you did not give you are just being strange. You are being especially weird in that you still haven’t bothered to give the little “e.g.” after repeated responses about the fact that you haven’t given the examples.

I don’t want to talk about France when you really meant Finland. And I don’t want to bother to talk about it at all if you really meant Luxembourg or Liechtenstein.

I left a comment – which was that a far better answer to Hayek lies in the rereading of
the book “The Road to Reaction”, Prof. Herman Finer, Little Brown, 1945. Beside the
fact that Finer was my Father, this book is the perfect rebuttal to the Right Wing. I don’t
want to argue with any one of you. Aside from being a Liberal Democrat, and a chip off
my genetic block, I am an Art Historian , a fact which my embattled father grieved over.
Please refer to “The Road to Reaction”, if you dare got admit that others came before
you. Just saying!

Who knows what would have happened in Russia if the revolution had been welcomed with open arms around the world. Who knows what would have happened if they had actually been supported around the world. Logically, that support dramatically reduces any notions of existential threat to the new regime, lowers the paranoia levels massively, and would likely reduce the perceived need to crack down on their own population. A Stalin doesn’t rise, because there is no perceived need for such a “strong man.” Everything would have worked better for Russia at that point. They wouldn’t have struggled so much turning a feudal nation, one with an economy barely out of the 18th century (for all intents and purposes) into a 20th century economy. They coulda been a contenda.

The first general secretary to come of age, AFTER Krushchev’s Secret Speech, was I think Gorbachev, who immediately pushed for Glasnost and Perestroika. Here is the real “character of the people,” toward openness. I am glad they are on the planet with us, actually. They are a great people.

JOP and sebastian ignore that Stalinist methods (which had solid support in the Party) had deep Russian antecedents. If you had to generalise, one could note that if you are going to build a strong state in an impoverished, threatened borderland, a high degree of repression seems to be an essential part of the recipe. It matters less what the immediate international situation was in the 20s than that the Russian political nation strongly felt that harsh internal policies were worth it if they contributed to a strong state – and also felt (justifiably) that a weak state would sooner or later invite attack.

The connection between socialist planning and internal repression is tangential – there were a lot of other drivers. In any event, no-one has yet responded to the point that planning at some scale is essential (as Hayek acknowledged), and that the ability to plan has grown over time. At what point does the ability to plan threaten democracy? And why should planning the economy of a state lead to serfdom but the ability to plan a a complex supply chain be benign? Hayek is simply muddled here.

Peter T, very good points.

Private sector businesses obviously have to “plan” constantly and the interaction between businesses much be “planned.” But they make their plans in order to optimize profitability for themselves, and do not do what they do to benefit anyone else. If that means slashing millions of jobs, shipping them overseas, creating monopolies, creating cartels, crippling smaller companies, polluting, destroying eco-systems, etc. etc. so be it.

It is beyond logical that a nation, if it exists as a nation, should “plan” on behalf of the nation, on behalf of its people, if for no other reason than to counter the individuals who plan for no one but themselves, at our expense. For individual monads of capitalist accumulation certainly don’t do anything to improve the lot of the nation overall, so some entity must. There must be a counterweight for bumper car, casino, me me me economies. There must be counterweights to those who would extract tomorrow’s finite natural resources and destroy them for quarterly profits today.

Basically, the capitalist system, without some form of “planning” that goes beyond individual desires, always fails, and will always fail, and always need bailouts. Because it repeatedly becomes nothing more than a race to the bottom for the vast majority of the people, while the predator class consolidates its power and picks off those who falter along the way. “Competition” for riches and power doesn’t make life better for anyone but the few winners. It requires, of course, and obviously, a lot of losers. We can’t have winners without losers, because consolidation of wealth can never be win/win. A huge number of losers is essential for a few to win. That’s just math. But, for some reason, too many Americans have bought into the absurd notion that, through competition, everyone can win.

Not when CEOs make 400 times as much as their rank and file. Not when just 400 Americans hold as much wealth as the bottom 50% combined.

Planning. Businesses do it. Corporations do it. Cartels and monopolies do it. They couldn’t survive without planning. Somehow, planning is virtuous when it comes to businesses, but a sign of tyranny when government does it. Human beings are ignorant and masochistic all at once. Hayek included.

1922. The UK recognises the USSR (which is why the British ambassador to Moscow gets the diplomatic plate 1922 01 on his car). 1949. The UK recognises the PRC.

Salem @146, this is really a very poor description of the UK in the second world war. The CPGB was probably more influential and successful than ever before or since. There were sensational by-elections when Communists and people from the Commonwealth Party (which oddly enough ended up turning into Amnesty International) got in. In 1942 there was a vote of no-confidence in Winston Churchill, although the Tory who proposed it then queered his pitch by suggesting he should be replaced by a Royal Duke as Commander in Chief of the Army, a post that hadn’t existed since the 1907 army reform.

Churchill won with a majority of some hundreds, but it’s telling that after the Tory whips failed to talk the guy around, two MPs from the government side volunteered to act as tellers in order that the vote could be held and he could make his silly point.

167

Both the US under Reagan and the UK under Thatcher supported FRELIMO in Mozambique against RENAMO. So there is one example of two major Western powers supporting a socialist state against anti-communist insurgency.

This has been a strange sort of discussion. You have to really, really contort yourself to defend Judt on this one. The line Cowen quotes accuses Hayek of believing that ‘welfare policies of any sort’ lead to Hitler. Everyone has agreed that ‘Hitler’ doesn’t belong there (but want to cut some slack for that) but what about that ‘any’? Hayek (I think everyone agrees) supported some welfare arrangements paid for by taxation and organised by the state, namely a citizen’s wage. So Judt was just wrong that Hayek opposed any welfare policies whatsoever and that is what Cowen took him to task for. Why get into such a lather? Cowen was otherwise very complimentary about Judt and we can all still agree that The Road to Serfdom was basically wrong.

Hayek is quite explicit on this count: if you begin with welfare policies of any sort+

I just read in the New Statesman that the PRC is capitalist. Assuming “capitalist” still means “approved by Hayek,” (presumably) this implies that Hayek’s deplored central planning did not encompass enterprises owned and controlled by the Army, for example. Fascinating.

But, ideologically Stalin and his supporters did not want a country with an independent farming class like Poland.

Well, Stalin himself, I doubt that he was in favor of any particular ideology. For one thing, he did team up with Bukharin in a fight against the Trots, and before turning against him and destroying him, he actually did approve an increase in grain acquisition price, so it seems that for while he was on board with the right opposition. And, like I said, the right opposition (Bukharin, at least) was pragmatic rather than dogmatic/ideological.

As for “it would have meant a much slower pace of industrialization“, that is not obvious to me at all. Collectivization reduced the output. Significantly. By half, perhaps. If I have two cows and you take 50% of the milk, you’re still getting more milk than if I have only one cow and you take 90% of the milk.

Due to the odd renumbering of comments, my previous comment should be addressed to 176 not 175 which appeared out of nowhere.

In the UK wartime planning from WWII was extended until the 1960s, and though some parts were probably well accepted, it did become very bureaucratic and bordered on tyrannical in certain areas.

Good heavens.

gliberty:

I did not omit famine and poverty. I have repeatedly noted that collectivization had a great human cost. There were 600,000 deaths of deported kulaks in the 1930s plus the millions to die in the Holodomor in 1932-1933. But, the material standard of living of the urban population did increase significantly in the USSR between 1934 and 1941. During WWII actual famine as opposed to shortages was limited to certain categories of people. The largest group to starve were those under German occupation in Ukraine or siege such as in Leningrad. The only significant number of famine deaths during WWII in territory controlled by the USSR occurred in the GULag and among the special settlers. In 1946 there is a more generalized famine in Ukraine, Molodova, and Siberia as well as among prisoners and special settlers due to the damage caused to agricultural production during the war. By 1949 famine had become a thing of the past for the USSR even among the special settlers. Despite various shortages there is no more starvation after this time.

But, I have to give the Devil his due. The first two five year plans did bring about better material conditions for most Soviet citizens, particularly urban dwellers. Things like medical care, literacy, roads, access to clean water, greatly increased during this time particularly in Central Asia. By 1960 the standard of living in this region was much higher than in Iran or Turkey. In 1917 it had been on a par with Afghanistan. This is a pretty impressive accomplishment.

But I thought Napoleon has always managed to maintain the status of a great romantic/tragic figure somehow, and not just in France, even in Russia.

Yeah, you should see memorials to Genghis Khan in Mongolia, that’s something.

gliberty, is it too much to ask that you actually read the thread? J. Otto Pohl already made the points you’re making two days ago.

_after 20years, so far as I can tell, no one gives a tinkers damm for what Watson or Crick or Mendel or Darwin or X (say Hershey Chase or Hotchkiss, to be esoteric) said._

Those Presocratics, on the other hand ….

Ezra is quite right. History is bunk.

Clearly I also don’t have time to mess around with block quotes.

My comment starts with “Maybe this….” Before that I was quoting rf quoting ezra abrams.

Where the heck has preview gone, anyhow?

Professional economists don’t actually spend much time arguing about Hayek. This isn’t a scientific argument about economics, it’s an argument about politics.

“the” faulty ideas, sorry, today I priced a leaking sewer line, fixed two toilets and a kitchen faucet, received a dog that was stolen from a good friend by his ex-, and now the front-end of my 35-yr. old Dodge truck is falling apart

Lee @197: Heavens, with all those real-life problems to take care of, why worry about phantasmagoria like shadow banks, housing markets, and economic rhetoric?

@#199 You truly got me there. I may give up.

Agree with Wilder @99. There are many ways to pave a road to serfdom. Austrian economics in the service of plutocracy is one of them, and, in the US at least, the most currently salient method.

Also agree with piglet @64 on the mendacity of Tyler Cowen, servant of the US’ enslaving plutocracy.

J. Otto Pohl: “The US was already industrialized in the 1930s. The agricultural crisis in the US was not tied to moving from a predominantly agrarian society to an industrial one. That had already largely been accomplished.”

That’s not an accurate summary of the situation at all. A portion of the U.S. — in the Northeast and around the Great Lakes, and a few other big cities, say, on the West Coast, had industrialized — but a very large part of the population and territory had been left behind, and was sinking into increasingly intense and hopeless poverty as a result.

The politics of electricity was particularly salient. Access to cheap electricity was a key to the new economy, particularly for farmers. Electrical generation and distribution is subject to enormous economies of scale — increasing returns, the economists like to call it — but the rentiers profiting from the Edison electric utilities and their rivals resisted the expansion of electrical generation and distribution, and the inevitable fall in rates and returns that this entailed. There were big, big fights over public projects to increase electrical generating capacity and distribution to underserved areas. Hoover Dam, the Muscle Shoals project that became the Tennessee Valley Authority, FDR’s role in expanding public power generation at Niagara, the epic feud between Samuel Insull and Harold Ickes (who would become one of the New Deal’s key figures), rural electrification efforts — these were all key features of the enormous political effort that went into expanding the industrialization of the U.S. beyond its archipelago mostly in the Northeast and Midwest. Not incidentally, the great stock market crash of 1929, which initiated the Great Depression, centered on a collapse in the values of electric utilities.

The farming sector was shedding labor by the 1920s, and rapid increases in potential productivity from electrification, hybrid seeds, fertilizers, gasoline-powered tractors and other machinery, etc. This agricultural revolution was just as unevenly spread about the country, as the industrial revolution, and spreading it further was a big part of the work of the New Deal.

Thank you kindly, Lee.

Walt: 199 was indeed just a lame (apparently), though friendly, joke.