Psa 20:7 KJV
Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the
name of the LORD our God.
American Thinker | Articles: 30 Years of
Nobelity: What Hayek Means to Me http://bit.ly/1sDzko6
By Christopher Chantrill
In this year's Nobel season we are celebrating
the 30th anniversary of Friedrich Hayek's Nobel Prize for Economics. So it's a
good time, in the dog days of the Worst President Ever, to think about what
Hayek means to us.
That's beyond the obvious point that if
liberals had read and understood one word of Hayek they wouldn't be cowering in
the utter meltdown that we know as the failed Obama presidency. Oh, the shame
of it.
I can't remember exactly when I first heard of
Hayek, but it must have been from reading the Wall Street Journal's edit page
in the early to mid-1970s during its Golden Age under Bob Bartley. All I know
is that in 1976 I got a copy of Mises' Human Action for my birthday.
We now know that the “amiable dunce” Ronald
Reagan had also read his Hayek and his Mises, and it showed. We only know that
he read them because after he died people discovered that his copies had been
heavily annotated by Ronaldus Magnus himself.
Economist Mark Skousen celebrates Hayek as a
macroeconomist of the Austrian business cycle, but I have always looked to him
as a political philosophe
r.
As a political philosopher, Hayek had one Big
Idea. It was that the socialist/Fabian/Progressive project would end in tears
because, as he wrote, the man in Whitehall could never know anything close to
the aggregate knowledge about the economy communicated in prices by millions of
producers and consumers.
In its attempt to impose their will over the
economy, Hayek wrote in 1944, the “socialists of all parties” would herd their
nations down The Road to Serfdom.
In 1960, when he published The Constitution of
Liberty, Hayek sharpened his analysis. He pointed out that the powers and
responsibilities of the administrative state could never be defined and
detailed by legislation. The task of the central planner was too complicated;
he had to have the flexibility to issue administrative regulations to deal with
the day to day contingencies of directing economic traffic. But administrative
flexibility is the very definition of arbitrary political power, so the central
administrator is bound to violate the rule of law and reduce human freedom.
Fifty years later, the rollout of ObamaCare confirmed his view in every
particular.
Hayek's Law Legislation and Liberty was a
three-volume expansion of The Constitution of Liberty and was published between
1973 and 1979 when Hayek was in his seventies. It ends with chapters on “A
Model Constitution” and “The Containment of Power and the Dethronement of
Politics.”
But Hayek still wasn't finished. In 1978 (at
the age of 79!) he wanted to stage a grand debate with the socialists, but in
the end satisfied himself with The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
published in 1988. Here is the money
paragraph in Chapter Five: “The Fatal Conceit.”
[I]t was found that decentralized control over
resources, control through several property, leads to the generation and use of
more information than is possible under central direction. Order and control
extending beyond the immediate purview of any central authority could be
attained by central direction only if, contrary to fact, these local managers
who could gauge visible and potential resources were also currently informed of
the constantly changing relative importance of such resources, and could
communicate full and accurate details about this to some central planning
authority in time for it to tell them what to do in the light of all the other,
different, concrete information it has received from other regional and local
managers...
And so on. And on. In other words: That
super-centralized administrative monster ObamaCare will crash and burn. It was
always going to crash and burn. Because Hayek.
You can see the problem with Hayek. He cannot,
for all the world, condense his Big Idea into a catchphrase that could change
the world. But we can honor his memory
by doing his catchphrasing for him.
“Socialism cannot work because it cannot
compute prices.” That was Ludwig von Mises in 1920.
“Central administration is a Road to Serfdom
because it always violates the rule of law.”
“Human society is the product of human action,
not of human design.”
“The market has its reasons, of which reason
knows nothing.”
“Responsible individualism and free exchange
create prosperity and freedom; administrative collectivism corrodes into
poverty and domination.”
“The administrative state is a mechanism, but
human society is an organism.”
Maybe you can do better.
And maybe there's a young liberal student in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, right now, that's furtively turning the pages of The
Road to Serfdom at a local bookstore, and hoping that nobody will notice him.
Maybe in another 30 years we'll know him as the
Democrat that saved liberalism from itself.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the
go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his
American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.
Related Notes
Articles: Liberals Have Got What They Asked For
Liberals Have Got What They Asked For By
Christopher Chantrill If you want to know why everything is going wrong for
Obama and the Democrats, from Obamacare to Ukraine, the answer is simple.
Liberals ...
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