Welfare and Charity

I am still not clear on why CT is obsessed with an intellectual movement that is only popular among a small minority of White Americans. But, I do eagerly await a day when they deal with something applicable to parts of the world other than the basements of American suburbia. Perhaps a seminar on Pan-Africanism?

I am still not clear on why CT is obsessed with an intellectual movement that is only popular among a small minority of White Americans

Because we all live on the intertubes where it is huge.

I know nowt about Hayek, but I’m interested in this not-very-sensible-really principle of charity. I see the downside, but you can see the upside if you read economics. Economists are astonishingly quick to attribute sloppy reasoning to the dead or even the merely emeritus. Robert Waldmann discovered recently that Samuelson and Solow didn’t actually believe that the Phillips Curve is a structural relationship. But why would anyone ever have supposed that they did? The bookshops are crammed with titles like Kant: a Guide for the Perplexed. Where is Keynes: a Guide for the Perplexed? It’s not as if the Treatise on Probability and the General Theory are light reading. Of course there’s a huge literature on Keynes, but you’d be surprised how little attention is paid to what he actually wrote, as opposed to what the authors think he should have written.

Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger, might be able to help J. Otto Pohl understand the need to worry about “a small minority of White Americans.” As the bombs were falling in 2003 he could hear David Bowie on his radio singing I’m Afraid of Americans.

I think the real reason is because there are plenty of libertarians in academia, but few conservatives. Therefore, for a certain kind of lefty, arguments for conservative positions simply don’t exist, and so the foil becomes libertarianism.

I think people are confusing libertarians with the last Bush administration. I am pretty sure that President Bush never defined himself as a libertarian. People who are self-identified libertarians are a pretty small group of people in the US and I can not think of any who occupied important positions in the executive branch of the US Federal government. For the most part libertarians in the US like Trotskyites in the UK are pretty marginalized figures living weird political fantasy lives. They may have allied themselves with the US right wing, but they do not control it. Salem’s theory, however, may have merit.

JOP,

This was hashed out at mind-numbing length on some thread here recently, but here’s a list of Cato-endorsed policies (from Wikipedia):

Specific policy proposals advanced by Cato scholars include such measures as abolishing the minimum wage, reforming policies on illegal drugs, eliminating corporate welfare and trade barriers, diminishing federal government involvement in the marketplace, and in local and state issues, enhanced school choice, abolishing affirmative action, and abolishing restrictions on discrimination by private parties.

Every one of these–save drug policy reform–is endorsed Republican candidates running for the highest offices (inc. president) and/or by other very high profile Republicans (Paul Ryan, Paul pere at fils, etc.) And remember when GWB had a Mandate! to privatize social security (or at least in his head he did)? Regardless of who self-identifies as “libertarian” it’s pretty weird to think that recognizable libertarian positions aren’t quite influential in the current American political scene.

(And yes, Republicans don’t generally openly call for abolishing the minimum wage. But you know it’s a matter of time…)

Js:

The fact that libertarians share a lot of policy positions with the Republican politicians does not mean that libertarians have any political power. I could come up with lots of lists showing similarities in policies between different groups. For instance I am sure if I thought about it long enough I could come up with a long generalized list of policies endorsed by both socialists and the Democrats. For instance both support keeping the minimum wage, keeping public schools, and keeping anti-discrimination laws. I guarantee you that the socialists have no political power or even influence in the US.

“For instance I am sure if I thought about it long enough I could come up with a long generalized list of policies endorsed by both socialists and the Democrats.”

Get yourself some coffee.

I haven’t seen a Democrat asking for general state ownership of production or state management of the economy since, I dunno, I guess back in the 80’s when we were conquered by Russia and Cuba in a surprise invasion and that local sports collective, the Wolverines, fought a guerrilla war For Freedom! and made the world safe for capitalism again. Otherwise, back in the real world, Democrats spout off mildly pro-union, pro-environment, and pro-safety positions occasionally, occasionally note that unbridled capitalism isn’t always helpful, and follow the monetarist and mild demand-side boosterism urged by noted socialist Milton Friedman.

It’s like the mirror image of the basic libertarian positions adopted by the Republicans!

_They do not exist in Africa._

I just googled “African libertarians”

Chris:

Okay maybe there a few. But, I have not seen any. Certainly 173 google hits is pretty small. Most of them also appear to be based in South Africa which for historical reasons is considerably different than the rest of the continent.

Isn’t Somalia notoriously a libertarian paradise? Maybe they just call themselves something different in Africa — you know, warlords?

http://www.mises.co.za/

But, how about we just have one thread on Pan-Africanism for every 100 on libertarians?

A capital idea. jpohl.blogspot.com is that-a-way. Knock yourself out.

Whether or not libertarians form a significantly powerful political faction, the specific argument in Road to Serfdom–that a larger welfare state or more active industrial policy would put an otherwise free society on a slippery slope to totalitarianism–is a common one throughout the GOP and Tea Party, including from Romney (“we are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy.”)

Hayek is just like Aristotle.

gubbish

“The disagreement between Henry and Vallier is, among others, whether Hayek’s argument makes room for “hybrid states” (not my term) such as the Scandinavian states, or whether the existence of the Scandinavian states as welfare states (but lacking totalitarianism) constitutes an empirical refutation of Hayek’s argument.”

The problem appears to me that Hayek uses the term welfare state to mean things which do NOT include things like universal public income, while Henry seems to insist that the term welfare state includes things like universal public income.

When you use terms differently, it is super easy to make your opponents look like idiots.

Since Hayek specifically allows for most of the functions of the ‘hybrid’ state within a very few paragraphs of the ones we have been talking about, it is pretty clear that Hayek allows for hybrid states as we would define them.

He is mostly worried about interfering with the price signal, which many basic redistribution schemes don’t interfere much with. It is central command crap (like recent proposals by Angell to have the government totally take over pharma research) which he is against.

To go back to the beginning of this argument (It was a week ago? Not Decades? It feels like decades.) Tony Judt’s position was at least arguable and Cowen suggesting it was overly vicious is incorrect. Libertarians could admit that you can be fair-minded and think Hayek argued that the welfare state inevitably leads to totalitarianism.

The fundamental problem is that Hayek in Henry’s reading was right. Don’t believe me? Look up the actual restrictions imposed upon welfare recipients in the 1960’s. These real restrictions on the liberty of the supposed beneficiaries of state action only existed because of the logic of the Fordist welfare state. Policies of tailored benefits are very different from handing out cash to individuals, in that the tailored benefits attempt to impose a plan of life decided upon by the creators of such schemes upon the recipients, whereas cash doesn’t do it. The Black Power Movement was not demanding more welfare but an end to a system principled upon ignoring those it claimed to help.

The Swedish welfare state sterilized undesirable citizens. Any attempt to defend it runs up against its real history. Vallier has the correct reading: Hayek points out that not all social provisions are tyrannical, merely those that are not based on principled, clear, public, rules. The existence of an administrative bureaucracy with rulemaking power, whose decisions are subject to deference in the courts , is a sign that there is power exercised in ways difficult to hold to account.

James Shikwati—he’s even given a TED talk.

But of course he has.

JH @39: You appreciate the smart ideas of smart people better if you just acknowledge their dumb mistakes as such

Yes and no. I think another way of approaching the dumb mistakes of smart people is to think: “Hmm … X was smart. There must have been some good reason why the other, more conventional answers to the question to which s/he gave what now seems a dumb answer seemed wrong to X. Or maybe we’re not even perceiving the question the way X did, which might explain why his/her answer seems so bizarre. Mightn’t it be premature just to move on with an ‘Oh well, even Homer nods!'”

For example, Isaac Newton’s belief in alchemy may have just been an odd, inexplicable quirk. But I’ve always wondered exactly what problem he thought it was the answer to, and why the other contemporary answers to that problem (if there were any) were inadequate. Likewise, why did Shaw and Wells, so brilliant and forceful in their early opposition to oligarchy and patriarchy, give up on Enlightenment rationalism and parliamentary democracy late in life and decide that only an authoritarian state could drag the mass of humankind out of the atavistic tribalism that seemed on the point of blowing up the planet? And why did Heidegger –considered by the most diverse contemporary thinkers to be the greatest 20th-century philosopher — believe science and rationality so inescapably destined to result in the spiritual death of Western civilization that he allowed himself to be seduced by National Socialist claptrap?

Dumb ideas, in other words, may often be great thinkers’ desperate attempts to solve intractable problems, to which even we, in our surpassing wisdom, haven’t yet found an answer, or have even stopped trying to find an answer to.

I’d be interested in JOP’s response, but my impression is that there may well be more libertarians in Africa than pan-Africanists these days.

I’d be more interested in reading about, say, the impact of the Arab Spring on sub-Saharan Africa, if we could get one or more good guest posters on the topic. Google produces plenty of links, like

http://www.un.org/en/africarenewal/vol25no2-3/arab-spring.html

but I can’t tell which are the good ones, and what issues are being overlooked.

Well the history department of Legon is certainly more favorable to Pan-Africanism than libertarianism. I noticed that some of the few African libertarians have degrees from KNUST in Kumasi which is a university devoted primarily to the hard sciences rather than humanities and social studies. A rough analogy would be the University of Ghana in Legon is equivalent to Cal in Berkeley and KNUST to Caltech.

But, as a general rule there is very little interest in politics, particularly politics outside of Ghana by students here. The main interest of students is religion. Most of them are Pentacostals (Assemblies of God) and devote all their spare time and effort to church related activities. Far more so than any place in the US evangelical Christianity dominates society in Ghana. Compared to the US and UK young people here have almost no interest in international politics. Knowledge about other African countries is extremely limited in large part because the media here is so parochial. During the civil war in the Ivory Coast there was no discussion and almost no news coverage of events next door. Only near the very end did the Ghanaian newspapers have any news stories on the war at all.

Vallier has the correct reading: Hayek points out that not all social provisions are tyrannical, merely those that are not based on principled, clear, public, rules. The existence of an administrative bureaucracy with rulemaking power, whose decisions are subject to deference in the courts , is a sign that there is power exercised in ways difficult to hold to account.

This is an arbitrary distinction that disappears after 10 seconds of thinking about how states actually operate. What use are “principled, clear, public rules” without an administrative apparatus to implement them? “You must possess a driver’s license to drive” is clear, principled, and public; does this mean that filling out a form at the DMV is tyranny? (If you answered “yes” we have nothing more to talk about). Or, let’s consider rules against pollution (principled! clear! public!) which refer the definition of “pollution” to a 1000-page technical manual. Or literally any other feature of the state that requires an actual implementation.

Since I’m not a generous person like JH or Henry, I’m not inclined to read Vallier, or libertarians in general, charitably. What is clear to me is that distinctions of the type drawn by Vallier are not factual statements about the way things are but rather a sort of rhetorical signifier; “principled” and “clear” are coded as good, “administrative” is coded in opposition to those as bad (bureaucrats! boooo! hisss!) and the two are put in false opposition with each other. This must be done to preclude the obvious analysis (“is this or that regulation producing good results?”) so that any factual consideration of what’s actually happening can be dismissed via a sort of theoretical sleight-of-hand trick.

Well, what is a “proper law”? statute law, customary law, case law. sub-law created by an executive or administration? In modern states, a lot of law is created by administrative decrees filling out the frame of statute law. Statute law and this sub law together with the case law will give you the entirety of law.

And if you watch at the actual historical development of law and administration, in general the administration is much more bound now then a hundred years ago. Just look at the hundred years ago almost non-existent public procurements laws. Generally the whole welfare state is regulated by laws and administrative discretion is quite limited.

Jerry, saying you must possess a license to drive suddenly gives the licensing body power.

But of course it does. As it should; indeed, as it must if it’s going to be anything other than a suggestion. The dissociation between law and administration is absolutely untenable unless the concept of law is completely divorced from any actually existing laws. If laws are going to be anything other than philosophical musings, then of course they’re going to have to be grounded in some enforcement mechanism, and that mechanism will itself be a codification of various procedures and so on. Yes, the administrative body does control its own procedures (to an extent), which, again, is what it must do, unless you literally believe that every aspect of an administrative body’s operating procedures must be explicitly legislated. Which is something you’d only do if you wanted administrative bodies that couldn’t accomplish a damn thing.

Think about it like the distinction between “may issue” and “shall issue”. One set of laws lays out conditions, and redress for when you satisfy them and are not given the permit. The other set lets local officials at will restrict your rights. Clearly there is a distinction here, and it’s one that has legal force in the form of when writs of mandamus are appropriate.

While there may be a legal distinction, I don’t believe there’s a substantive philosophical one. What effective distinction would there be between a law specifying explicitly what toxin levels are considered inappropriate in drinking water and a law that leaves it to the agency’s expertise to determine those levels (and mandating full disclosure of the information, obviously)? It’s simply a matter of the delegation of labor; you still have agencies authorized by the power of law to do something, within some specified parameters. The only reason I can see that one would want to advance a distinction between a fully-specified law and the regulations drawn up by an agency that has been legally charged with doing so is if you wanted to impede the effectiveness of agencies in accomplishing the tasks set before them because passing mammoth legislation takes forever. Which is of course the libertarian project anyway from the start.

State/Commonwealth wellfare might include foreign aid too.

Let’s assume there is a difference between executive fiat and Congressional authority, or in the European case between legislative authority of the Parliament and the executive authority of the Prime Minister. This isn’t terribly hard to see in the works of the bourgeois radicals, who identify Congressional authority or legislative authority with the political. Then the administrative state, by delegating what should be legislative power, and hence political in a particular way, to the executive, whose power isn’t subject to politics in the same way, is dangerous.

Arguing that all administration involves power ignores the role of discretion in power. The secretary who types an order has no power as their actions are determined by another. When legislative authority, historically exercised through discussion and politics, is sent to the executive branch, this removes politics and replaces it by the person of the executive, who is very much not subject to political oversight!

“this removes politics and replaces it by the person of the executive, who is very much not subject to political oversight”

Something’s wrong with that statement…

But we do not elect a president to make law.

Something wrong with that statement too.

Watson, I realize this is probably hopeless, but you do realize that the role and function of the executive can be defined in categorically different ways in parliamentary vs. presidential vs. other systems, yes? I mean, this has, umm, exactly fuck all to do with Obama.

Yes, obviously, the legislature (or, in a bicameral house, the lower chamber), is generally or even almost always more democratic–in a fairly intuitive sense–than the executive. It’s a reasonable presumption that it’ll better reflect the will of the people than the other branches, etc. Believe me, I’m all for making it more powerful–esp. as against the upper chamber and the executive. But (a) this really won’t get you around the problem of administrative discretion–for one thing, if you make the law too specific, you’d have to keep changing it every time there were new relevant information, etc. (b) As far as I can see, this has absolutely nothing to do with Hayek’s proposed distinction. Hayek seems to be working with a notion of “law” where a law passed by an actually existing legislature is not actually a “law” in his sense.

SO: if your point is that the legislative should be entrusted with more power as against the executive because this is a generally reliable guarantor of democratic rights and freedoms, well and good. Beyond that, it’s pretty much nonsense.

“Further, there’s an argument at least as strong that administrative discretion, as opposed to Prussian, hyperspecific, blackletter rules, is a source of freedom.”

Hmm.

The Federal Government can execute someone if they’ve tried that person under certain rules (that the act was illegal before committed, carried the death penalty, suspect has representation, sees the evidence against them, is tried, jury decides, the whole schmatter).

The President can decide to kill someone because they think they’re a bad ‘un.

One of these two is “administrative discretion” the other is what we’d generally refer to as the rule of law.

I’m not sure that it is an outrageously libertarian position to insist that there’s a difference in kind between these two systems.

Whether Hayek’s occasional brief and sketchy remarks about a social ‘insurance’ of some kind to top up incomes when the market goes ‘badly wrong’ were concessions to the opinions of his target audiences, or to reality or to basic decency, they certainly seem out of place in his work.

The ‘pro-welfare-state’ leg of the Hayekian two-step stands on a few perfunctory asides which appear to have been dropped in without proper attention to their implications. In RTS, we are looking at a sentence or two I believe, and mentions elsewhere are AFAIK equally ill-considered. No attention is given, again AFAIK, to the issue of where the payment is to come from, which is of course a standard complaint of libertarians. This half-hearted commitment is evidently intended to effect only a slight shift in Hayek’s chosen stopping point on the ‘slippery slope’.

Whatever policies exactly are being alluded to are also clearly very minimal measures which are grossly inadequate to characterise anything like actually existing welfare states.

—

I agree BTW that principles of charity are massively overused. As interpretative principles, they are just one consideration. Certainly it’s an assumption of attempting interpretation at all that one starts by supposing that the writer or speaker is making some kind of sense and not just babbling. After that, things are less clear. And perhaps ‘principle of charity’ is perhaps not the best term, since it carries a connotation of supererogatory beneficence – a stupid person could, after all, get the idea that it is tantamount to a ‘principle of bending over backwards’. Perhaps they should better be called ‘principles of non-hostility’ or something. Davidson called his PoC something else less memorable at times, IIRC – princ of rational engagement or something.

The parts of government that would still exist in a minimal state–the police and the military–are where administrative discretion is most prevalent. The police have to decide which crimes to spend time investigating, the commander in chief has to decide which battles are worth fighting.

When I think of local officials arbitrarily restricting my rights, I never think of a clerk at the DMV or a welfare caseworker. I think of the cop who decides when my protest is considered disorderly conduct.

Watson, you could just as easily claim the supreme importance of the question, whether a written Constitution is tyrannical, for all the relevance I see to your choice of definitions.

Consumatopia: Your #71 is great. And, of course, when tyranny has come lately, it’s come via the police power and the military, something that seems never to have occurred to Hayek as a potential problem at all.

The Tragically Flip: So somehow the executive power and the administrative welfare state aren’t able to do anything about this either. The politics of the Democratic party are just as responsible for those conditions as anything else. Remember, we live in a democracy.

bianca: Actually, the written Constitution was a point of debate amongst bourgeois radicals. Rousseau in particular was against it, while others saw it as necessary.

IM: Procedure matters. In Tim Worstall’s point above there might not be a difference in the content of the two decisions, but there is a procedural one. And the point I want to make is that it isn’t an empty one, but rather changes the way we think about politics and the relation of reason to society.

Federalism is also protective of rights: New York State had abortion long before the rest of the country. The race to presumes that Mississippi workers are powerless to affect their work conditions in the legislature. To the extent that this is true, it is primarily because of depolitization of the working class, of which the Fordist welfare state is the chief cause.

I don’t usually frequent the site below, but Bruce Caldwell argues that RTS is only about command planning. Since when has partial planning and command planning been the same beast?

Seriously, all should check out the link below: A Hayek 1945 piece reflecting on his message in RTS.

http://mises.org/daily/4690

TW 67:

“The President can decide to kill someone because they think they’re a bad ‘un. One of these two is “administrative discretion” the other is what we’d generally refer to as the rule of law.”

I share your revulsion at the idea of extralegal executions but what you are touching on is NOT a standard example of administrative discretion; it is an example of exceptional wartime powers claimed by the executive, which in the US are vaguely defined and almost limitless (beginning with the fact that the President does start wars without the constitutionally required Congressional approval). We can agree in lamenting the extension of these wartime powers, mostly due to Bush but some of it due to Obama, but that should be kept separately from any discussion about EPA rule-making, for example.

“The rule of law does frequently conflict with the will of the populace and its representatives.”

Indeed: that’s what these constitution and human rights things are about. To embed into that law the things that democracy cannot over rule.

Like, say, arbitrary administrative decison making.

Consumatopia: Workers can also move freely between states. Alabama workers have the same interests as Mississippi workers in avoiding horrible work conditions. To say that companies will play one off against another is not different then saying that these workers might have different preferences.

IM: the wefare state doesn’t lead to dictatorship: I think it’s clear that Hayek is massively overstating his case, and the historical record shows that clearly. But the welfare state does lead to a change in the character of politics by the formation of an administrative state, and many welfare programs impose a particular kind of life upon the recipients. Unlike private charity, those taxed have very limited ability to choose to give cash instead. So the welfare state comes with a massively increased state intrusion into one’s life, along with a change in the character of politics that makes freedom suspicious.

The biggest anti-poverty program in the US is the EITC, which Milton Friedman designed. All of the traditional welfare state programs involve recipients jumping through hoops, whereas EITC sends out checks to everyone making less then a certain amount. How do you make sense of that, or the fact that Fordism lead to the decline of the worker’s movement everywhere? Only if Fordism is not a victory of the working class, but the illiberalism of the capitalist class and the formation of a new regime of accumulation does this make sense.

And what has the EITC to do with anything? A welfare state and it’s policies can and have historically come in many shapes. And in the real world the expansion of the welfare state and the expansions of unions did go hand in hand. Whatever your private definition of “Fodrism” – has anybody talked that? – tells you.

But I accept that you now at long least admit that the central thesis of Hayek was just nonsense.

The EITC has quite a bit to do with the discussion because it doesn’t count as socialism under the Hayek definition. The fact that we use the term socialism differently, 70 or so years later, is a silly argument against Hayek.

A tolerably good argument about Hayek would be that his insight about the importance of price information was amazingly good, and that it is possible to design general welfare programs non-socialistically–ie with very little impact on price and little command/control effect–far more than Hayek would have guessed.

Interpreting ‘socialism’ as essentially all government non military programs is silly.

Interpreting Hayek in the way Henry wants to would suggest his argument is a general attack on taxation. While some libertarians indeed argue in general against taxation, I haven’t seen Hayek do so.

Hayek’s key useful insight is about prices and the stupidity of fucking with them. If you don’t like Hayek’s polemic style, fine, so long as you realize you are complaining about style, not substance, and so long as you admit that you are using ‘socialism’ to describe things in ways that get people who point out that ‘socialist’ is in the NAZI party name looked at as idiots. That isn’t an argument about Hayek’s economics any more than mentioning Keynes’s interest in eugenics (he thought it was more important than his economics) is an argument about Keynesian economics.

Hayek was right about his key insight–prices–and he wasnt nearly as wrong about the authoritarian nature of command economies as this discussion likes to pretend

Stats don’t lie. But you misinterpret them. If you are right the high point of unionization in the US – and by the way whatever you think the US is hardly the world, even the developed world – should have been in 1933.

No, Hayek and the other right-wingers who liked to differentiate between deserving and undeserving poor would not have been better for anybody. Or do you really think the poor laws of the good old Manchester liberal 19th century were unintrusive or not paternalistic? Do you know when the workhouse was abolished in England? 1930. In the bad paternalistic 20th century.

The notion that recipients of any kind of recipient of government aid don’t lose their rights is very much a 20th century novelty.

In the modern welfare states pensions or health care or employment benefits – and that is mostly what talk about – tend to be rights, often in the form of insurance. No jumping through hoops involved. Medicare and Social Security are american examples.

SebastianH, that is nonsense. Welfare State was already a well-known term in the forties. And no, its definition has not really changed now. And Hayek was quite clear: Every function of the state that wasn’t included in the Night-watchman state of the 19th century was already a step to far. A step if not to totalitarian, then to authoritarian government. As the history of the second half of the 20th century has shown, that was wrong. And the long term that Hayek sometimes took refuse in won’t help either: one or two generations is now.

Hayek supportted universal public income Im, so universal public income existed throughout the west as of the nineteenth century? What happened to it? Hmmm…

The welfare, public or private, that did exist in the 19th century was quite paternalistic, and liked to micro manage: Drinking or not, smoking or not, visiting the church, not visiting the pub, etc. Much more endangering to the freedom of any recipients.

Why were nearly all states successful in banning child labor when there was no federal ban?

No states were successful in banning the products of child labor from their shelves, which is why the first federal child labor law (struck down by the courts–thanks federalists!) banned movement of goods produced by child labor between state lines.

100:

Yes, but to be fair almost no political science predictions other than those that are tautologies really hold up. I still remember the theory that no two nations with a McDonalds will go to war. Then the US bombed Yugoslavia. It is hard enough to predict the past without trying to foresee the future.

“Except that his whole argument was about what socialists would start demanding in the future. ”

If you change the definition of socialism to include things that aren’t in the definition of socialism, you aren’t proving someone’s predictions wrong, you’re changing the definitions. It is like saying that the Republican Party must be the pro-black party because they got rid of slavery. Political definitions change over 70 years. (Although I think calling the EITC and similar programs ‘socialism’ as Henry seems to want to in order to try to sock it to Hayek is uncommonly silly even under modern definitions).

And in any case, if you’re trying to talk about the mixed economies, for the most part they haven’t even been run by self identified socialists or whatever either.

If you want to say that yes Hayek took his good ideas too far, and his polemics were crappy, fine. But this whole changing the use of terms and specifically including things that he directly called out as not included in ‘socialism’ is just ball hiding academic point scoring. From a historical perspective he was warning about the dangers of the command economy. And considering that socialists at the same time (1943) were still lying about the USSR and that Mao apologism was still in the *future*, taken in his historical context, he looks pretty much fine warning against the dangers of SOCIALISM (which did not include things like the basic public income or other anti-poverty measures) at a time when the socialists themselves weren’t owning up to it.

The fact that we don’t need such strongly strident warnings about fucking with the price signal is fantastic. (Though don’t tell Angell on pharamaceuticals).

@JOP, 101, that’s a fair point. What makes this failed prediction special is the prevalence of dishonest fools like Sebastien stubbornly clinging to it.

If you change the definition of socialism to include things that aren’t in the definition of socialism, you aren’t proving someone’s predictions wrong, you’re changing the definitions.

As I pointed out, Hayek made predictions about specific countries and governments. If those countries didn’t follow his slippery slope–so much so that even the left of those countries didn’t follow his slippery slope–then Hayek is substantively falsified. Socialists in democracies simply didn’t tend to produce totalitarianism. If they had, there wouldn’t be this confusion over the term “socialism”.

And in any case, if you’re trying to talk about the mixed economies

Hayek certainly was. He said they were on a slippery slope to full command economies. That’s not “taking a good idea too far”, that’s just wrong–there was nothing good or insightful about Hayek’s spurious slippery slope claims. They were terrible ideas that continues to inflict harm today. They breed a distrust for democracy among libertarians, likely leading even Hayek himself to cooperate with dictatorships like Chile.

And considering that socialists at the same time (1943) were still lying about the USSR and that Mao apologism was still in the future

Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot how the USSR and China before Mao were stable, capitalist democracies that were seduced into mixing planning with markets, and this planning slowly increased as it the character of their people was warped by perversion of the sacred price signal until they found themselves with totalitarianism before anyone knew it.

The fact that we don’t need such strongly strident warnings about fucking with the price signal is fantastic. (Though don’t tell Angell on pharamaceuticals).

We don’t need strongly strident warnings about fucking with the price signal because fucking with the price signal doesn’t put us on a slippery slope to totalitarianism. Interfering with price signals in one situation won’t lead a democracy to completely eliminate the entire price system or free market. Hayek no doubt has economic arguments against interfering with the price system in this or any other case, but we can completely dismiss his political argument.

Interestingly you’ve provided an example agreeing with Hayek, not a counterexample.

No, actually, it does not. Is forced drug testing bad? Yes. Does it’s presence, or that of unemployment benefits generally, lead to totalitarianism or “serfdom”? No. Nor is there any reason why EITC or any other government benefit couldn’t be made dependent on forced drug testing.

“Interestingly you’ve provided an example agreeing with Hayek, not a counterexample… instead of trying to disprove Hayek’s point about central control having authoritarian tendencies.”

We can’t ask Hayek whether he would agree with me or not. We can only go by the responses of his present-day followers. What I can say is that everybody left of center objects to forced drug testing and those who support it come exclusively from the right. So maybe what you are telling us is that the GOP is the true heir to old-style socialism. Anyway what the example proves is precisely that welfare policies do not have to be structured in an authoritarian way. But, whenever right-wing parties get their hands on welfare programs, they have the tendency to turn them into authoritarian rule. Republicans are not hypocrites – they do exactly what all conservatives have always done. The hypocrites are those who blame that same old conservative authoritarianism on us left-wingers.

Hayek’s few vague remarks about social provision of income for basic needs don’t suggest any real commitment, but in any case the sentences in question are clearly not about universal basic income. First, they are for when ‘something goes badly wrong’ or a person cannot command adequate market income (one suspects he is happy, in the usual right-wing way, to suppose these would be unusual and rather suspect situation, best abstracted away for theoretical purposes); Second, they are envisaged as means-tested top-ups.

Merit on both scores would thus have to be assessed (though Hayek doesn’t go into any such detail because he isn’t really interested). Since he seems to think any such assessment would have to be carried out by some bureaucrat wielding a potentially oppressive discretion, I don’t see how this notional Hayek of the Gaps could complain much when the official treats drug use as an indicator of lack of effort, or of wasting money, and refuses to pay out.