Recommended Reading
Top Billing Juxtaposition on Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, For and Against:
FOR: Lord Robert Skidelsky – The 2006 Hayek Lecture: The Road to Serfdom Revisited
The second thing that one needs to know about the background of The Road to Serfdom was that it arose from Hayek’s involvement in the debate on central planning in the 1930s. Socialists had argued that a central-planning authority could replicate the economic benefits of the market, minus its costs, by causing state-run firms, required to equate marginal costs and prices, to respond appropriately to simulated market signals. Hayek claimed that this was completely utopian. Central planning was doomed to failure because the knowledge needed to make it work could never be centralized. Further, it ignored the role of market competition in discovering new wants and processes. It would thus freeze economic life at a low level.
In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek extended his critique of central planning to politics. He defined central planning as the central direction of all economic activity toward particular ends. The nature of the ownership system was not crucial, since central planning removed the essential rights of owners or managers. Democratic central planning, he declared, was an illusion, because there was never sufficient voluntary consent for the goals of the central plan and because partial planning would lead to problems that required ever more extensive planning. So planning involved a “progressive suppression of that economic freedom without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.” Fascism and communism were totalitarian culminations of what had started as democratic socialism. Western democracies were fighting fascism without realizing that they were on the slippery slope themselves. Against the planners, Hayek upheld the fundamental principle that in the ordering of our affairs, we should make as much use as possible of the “spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion.”
AGAINST: Fabius Maximus –Isaac Woodard) sparked President Truman’s historic executive orders taking the first step to rolling back the South’s successful counter-revolution after Reconstruction. This continued at a high but decreasing level though the 1960?s (e.g., the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo).
How many conservatives reading his book see these contradictions with history? My guess: very few. It’s such a useful theory, even if false (creationism serves a similar role)!
I note that Paul Krugman also wrote something on von Hayek and Keynes recently, but it was a brief and largely stupid ahistorical comment to score contemporary partisan points, so I won’t link to it ( and I say this while being in agreement with Krugman that there’s a potential deflationary danger present). Some ironies, von Hayek despite being lionized by conservatives, did not consider himself to be one and Keynes, von Hayek’s alleged statist bete noire was favorably inclined to The Road to Serfdom. The back and forth between the two great economists was a lot more nuanced and complex in their exchanges than is generally presented in the media.
Schmedlap –Politics and the Military Profession
Here is the deal. Military service and political office do not go together.
What do I mean by that? I am not just referring to the rare instance in which someone does both simultaneously. I am referring to four situations, in descending order of egregiousness:
Serving in the military while also serving in elected office.Serving in elected office soon after serving in the militaryServing in the military soon after serving in elected office.
Voting while in the military
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