Mapquest to Serfdom
There’s nothing to shake your residual faith in journalists than to see a news report of an event in which you took part, or read a media account of yourself (especially a friendly one that unwittingly links you to the sort of person you’ve spent your life opposing). But a column by Andrew Kohut in Tuesday’s New York Times in praise of protest votes reported a statistic which rings true to me. Citing a Pew poll, Kohut says “fewer Republicans than Democrats say it really matters who wins the presidential election (62 percent vs. 70 percent). And while 74 percent of Democrats say they are satisfied with the candidates, only 49 percent of Republicans feel this way.”
Yep. The Pew study nails it. Now, a small percentage of those Republicans may well be neocons who know that the fix is in, who’ve watched Obama crawl on his hands and knees over broken glass before the peacemongers of AIPAC, and are confident that he’s just as likely to “bomb-bomb Iran” as Mad Jack McCain. But they can’t amount to more than a few percentage points. Your average Fox News jingoist doesn’t think that many chess moves ahead. That’s why he’d rather play Risk—where the critical territory to control is—you guessed it—the Middle East.
No, I’m sure that most of that 38 percent of Republican voters remembers things like McCain’s support for amnesty, his 2006 vote (joining both Clinton and Obama) to grant illegal aliens retroactive Social Security benefits, and his squeamishness about attacking Sen. Obama on any subject at all—except the most losing issue in G.O.P. history since Prohibition, the Iraq War. They recall the years he spent getting “happy-endings” from starstruck leftist reporters who loved a “maverick,” and the back-stabbing he regularly performed on social conservatives. With me they wonder whether the outcome of this presidential election is much more important than the question of who won the Westminster Dog Show. (A beagle, I’d like to remind you.)
Reading this report coincides with some research I was doing recently about the history of the conservative movement in America, and the importance of Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom. (Find a nice illustrated version of the book’s argument here.) The critical significance of that book was in part its timing; when Hayek wrote, there were very few prominent thinkers who flouted the liberal and socialist consensus that a centrally planned economy was the obvious answer to the “contradictions” within capitalism, which they blamed in vulgar Marxist style for the rise of fascism. The Darwinian nature of competition they linked in some vague way with the pseudo-scientific eugenics of the Nazis, and prescribed as a cure for the persistent “inefficiency” of the market economy a massive dose of “rational” planning by government experts. Indeed, the market economy—like other “backward” institutions such as the patriarchal family and the Christian church—was one of the final frontiers that Enlightened reason must conquer, on the road to creating a worldly paradise. I know, it’s hard to believe today that nearly the entire intellectual establishment of the West could think that bureaucrats embodied efficiency and reason. It’s as plausible to us today as the theory that sweaty underwear, left in darkness, spontaneously generates baby mice. (I think all us bachelors can reassure the ladies on this one.) But in time of war, when you’re watching your government accomplish something like rearming a nation almost overnight, and storm across two oceans to crush its enemies, it might be easier to think that militaristic planning could solve problems like urban squalor and infant nutrition.
Hayek knew better. He was well-acquainted with Mises’ devastating analysis of socialism, which proved that in principle it could never meet human needs. Moving beyond the merely practical goal of avoiding poverty and misery, he argued—as did his philosophically more profound associate, Wilhelm Röpke—that socialism was a system unworthy of man, since it treated him as forever infantile. Indeed, Hayek’s analysis forced the men of his generation to face the fact that when fascism and National Socialism set themselves up as radical alternatives to a free society and market, they weren’t kidding. Hayek showed that their credentials as “rational” planners of economic life were at least as good as Stalin’s. Indeed, it was as much their accumulation of economic power as their political police that guaranteed their domination of everyday life. Every step taken by a state to “socialize” or nationalize property, he argued, should be seen as what it is: A power-grab by the government that diminishes the sphere of free private decision.
So far so good. I have just a single quibble with Hayek: His choice of a title. Perhaps his modernist bias made him imagine the Middle Ages as one of the worst imaginable eras in human history. (Fans like me of Monty Python’s Holy Grail call this the “Bring Out Your Dead!” school of historiography.) That was how the history of Europe had been taught in his day. But Hayek really ought to have known enough about historic serfdom to rethink his title selection. While a serf’s freedom of movement was restricted (and who traveled much in those days, unless you were on a pilgrimage or a Crusade?), he was guaranteed the use of his land, which custom and law protected from confiscation. He paid a mere 10 percent of his produce to the landlord (Where do I sign up?), and was completely exempt from military service. Indeed, it wouldn’t be until the murderous Revolutionaries in France declared war on all of Europe, that politicians would get the idea that they could force an entire country’s male population into uniform. A serf confronted with a draft notice would have wiped his behind with it, and handed it back. As we all should do.
I think if Hayek were alive today, and looking at the tax rates, regulations, national debt and increasing restrictions on free expression we face, he wouldn’t be warning about the road to serfdom. He’d be using Mapquest to try to find the on-ramp.
Comments
Ah, again, Zmirak refers to Röpke, my favorite economist. D’r Z., I just ordered your book on him, as well as The Grand Inquisitor, my first foray into graphic novels. I look forward to reading them.
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Let’s not needlessly libel Fox jingoists. I’m sure they’re aware that, per the cost-to-hold/ troop reward ratio, the Middle East, as part of Asia, is among the very worst, uncritical places, in the board game Risk.
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Hayek’s ideas have been official gov’t policy in the United States since 1980 and in Britain since 1979. Moreover, these same ideas became the official policy of the World Bank and the IMF in the 80’s with the so-called “Washington Consensus,” which means the Hayek’s ideas were forced down the throat of every developing country that was at the mercy of the WB/IMF. In every single case, the unintended consequences were the opposite of what Hayek intended.
It is interesting to note that both Hayek and Marx promised a kind of “withering away of the state.” In both cases, the state grew to gargantuan proportions. When Reagan took office, the debt of the United States was a mere $700B. Under Reagan-Bush it tripled to $2.1T, then doubled again and then doubled again, and now stands at $9.4T and congress (at the urging of the President) has raised the limit another $1+T. And this does not even account for the unfunded liabilities.
It is also interesting to note that the defenses of Hayek and Marx are exactly the same: “They didn’t do it right!” Maybe. But when everybody gets it wrong, the suspicion grows that perhaps they got it as right as its ever going to be. Perhaps they got it wrong because there is no way for governments and economies to do what Marx/Hayek wanted them to do. Certainly, no one can doubt the sincerity of Reagan or Lenin. But the law of unintended consequences is merciless.
Abstract systems are a dime a dozen; only history tells us whether or not they can actually function, and history has given more than adequate tests to Marx and Hayek. The results for both have been consistent in every case, and consistently bad. Anyone who rejects Marxism on the basis of its failure must reject Hayek for the same reason, if they wish to remain intellectually.
Insanity, it has been said, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If the Right is to regain its sanity, it must lose this loser and find something that works.
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Can John Zmirak ever write an article in which he does not make a reference to the Nazis?
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One wonders if government has elected to follow the Greatest Hits of either Marxist or Hayek philosophy or instead, merge them into some kind of mongrel beast that serves the whims and powers of the Consumptive State while failing to meet the essential precepts of either social construct.
While the Middle Ages, with it’s internecine wars, plague cycles and inward focus were likely nowhere near as bleak as popular convention would have it, I wonder how many serfs would have looked up at the government rider on his mount, wipe his arse with the draft decree and hand it back cheerfully......before feeling the truncheon descend.
Then again, fractured limbs were quite common in those days and rebelliousness certainly didn’t spring forth exclusively out of the Enlightenment.
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Yessss, those handy nasty Nazis again!
Must blame somebody…
Intellectual ignorance or deliberate lie?
Eugenics is / was an AMERICAN science, transplanted to Germany.
“Falsehood in one, falsehood in all...”.
H.F. Wolff
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I’m going to have to take issue with Mr. Zmirak on this one. I think Hayek’s book is titled very appropriately. Nor does his title necessarily imply any modernist bias. Here’s why:
Because we weren’t all created equal in talents, intelligence, or in any other genetic endowment, when capitalism is the primary system, socialism is inevitable.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of modernism is free labor. Before that time most labor was bonded (e.g., chattel slavery, peasantry, or serfdom). These systems allowed for enough social control to permit social stability. (Yes, it used to be an paramount concern in healthy societies).
Of course the big problem with bonded labor systems is that they allow little quarter for the most talented. The most talented generally resent others trying to make their decisions for them. The Church was this outlet in pre-modern times in the West.
Capitalism definitely favors the best and brightest. It allows them to go as far as their talents will take them. But what of the less talented? Those who can’t make good decisions or don’t have the discipline it takes to hold a job?
It is certainly the case that wealthy Republicans and other capitalists would rather perpetuate the egalitarian myth the same as the most ardent Marxists. If we’re all equally talented and intelligent, then the reason there are so many poor people is that they’re lazy and undisciplined. They just need a stronger work ethic. And consequently, handouts will only encourage their indolence.
The Republicans are half-right. These people tend not to need handouts as much as structure, discipline, and direction in their lives. And capitalism fails miserably on this point.
These are the people for whom socialism, or bonded labor systems, become necessary. And capitalism does itself grave damage be refusing to recognize this point.
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Jupiter, first who says that high intelligence, ambition, and unscrupulous behavior are mutually exclusive? It has been my experience that they often go together. It was also the experience of Plato, who noted that the best leaders come from that group that least wishes to govern. Ambition, intelligence, and unscrupulous behavior often go together.
Having said that, not all intelligent, ambitious people are unscrupulous. If it were my life’s goal to see how much money I could make, I could do far worse than the US, or any other capitalist system. I certainly wouldn’t opt for a communist or feudal system.
The fact is that all economic systems have been criticized as evil--especially socialism, slavery, and capitalism. I think this is because satisfying material needs is the basis of our survival instinct. And in some people this instinct is just too strong for the good of society.
It doesn’t help that our culture has been eviscerated, or that greed is celebrated in many quarters as a virtue. Nothing--not laws or family values--is a substitute for a strong society with values everybody understands and accepts--the very antithesis of multiculturalism. People will do that which society celebrates. And if society celebrates unadulterated greed and screwing the less fortunate, then lots and lots of people will do just that.
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“I challenge the claim that capitalism favors the best and the brightest. On the contrary, it favors the lucky, the megalamaniacs, the very greedy and the very psychopathic. This is not an across the board iron law-although it could be. It is more of a statistical law.”
Yes, those great commercial empires, such as the North Korean, Albanian, Cuban, Soviet, and pre-DEng China. all built by ‘capitalists’, while we in the Western Hemisphere suffer from overdoses of economic and political freedom via Big Brother. It’s not that discarded free market that creates a vibrant economy, it’s the political and economic geniuses in DC such as Schumer and Feinstein. Oh, the humanity, Jupiter! ST
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Compare the facts and arguments at http://www.mises.org with ‘Hayek an Mises are basically ntellectual lightweights prone to making unargued for grand pronouncements.
The computer revolution all aspects of it-computers, internet,browses and the subsidary technologies that went into creating computer technology-came about through the violation of free market principles.
The PEOPLE subsidized computer technology develelopment for decades. Once the technology came into development the technology was prompty turned over to the parasite Bill Gates. IF Gates has his way the internet-whose existence is a consequence of violating free market princeples-will be privatized for his benefit.”
J, thank you for helping to make the case for the free market. ST
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Quote: “Eugenics is was an AMERICAN science,”
NO NO NO NO. Don’t you dare try to pin the sins of the Dirty Old Bitch aka the British Empire on America.
Eugenics is/was a British science born out the synthesis of Malthusian Economics of David Ricardo and Racialist Ideas of Darwin’s Descent of Man.
The American System is anti-Malthusian in the extreme. Read Henry Carey’s “Harmony of Interest.”
As for Hayek it’s even worse than what Dr. Médaille relates. There is no discussion of Hayek without talking about the Mont Pelerin Society.
Quoting from Richard Freeman:
“In 1947, the same wealthy oligarchical families that had financed and steered the world-wide fascist-Synarchist movement from 1921-45, decided to relaunch that Nazi movement at a meeting in Mont Pelerin, off Lake Geneva in Switzerland. n 1947, the same wealthy oligarchical families that had financed and steered the world-wide fascist-Synarchist movement from 1921-45, decided to relaunch that movement at a meeting in Mont Pelerin, off Lake Geneva in Switzerland. A few oligarchs and some trusted ideologues, like the fascist proponent of shock therapy, Friedrich von Hayek, and Milton Friedman, created the Mont Pelerin Society for that purpose. Special objects of hatred were President Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods monetary system, and the Social Security system in the United States. The secretive Mont Pelerin Society decided to create, cookie-cutter style, a series of public entities, starting in 1955 with the London-based Institute for Economic Affairs of Lord Harris and Sir Anthony Fisher, and then several in the United States, including the paradigm, the Cato Institute.
This Mont Pelerin network, drawing on the same sources of financing and interchangeable personnel, is running the Social Security privatization campaign. It is the same network that ran the Pinochet dictatorship, and the 1970s-80s Chilean model of privatization, through individuals such as George Shultz.”
Of course Cato is first and formost in promoting Globalism because Globalism is political ecomony of Jemery Bentham who was in favour of individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the abolition of physical punishment (including that of children), the right to divorce, free trade, usury, and the decriminalization of homosexual acts. Why would so-called “conservatives” want anything to do the modernist liberalism of the British Imperialist Bentham?
Anyway the Mont Pelerin Soceity of Elitists go to create Club for Growth, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Empower America, FreedomWorks, The Institute for Policy Innovation, Americans for Tax Reform.
What can we learn from is that entire so-called “Conservative movement” was designed for failure because fusionism was and is impossible.
A real American conservative doesn’t promote this British System of crushing labor in the name of the “free market” and giant corporations but rather we should return the promoting the “the Harmony of Interests” found in the American System that created the great engine of production of wealth the world has ever seen (even after the Civil War despite all the destruction) with debt free money (national credit), local town currencies, land distribution programs for family farms, and general welfare spending for intrastructure that benefits everyone instead of the welfare programs of the British, and trade based on National Sovereignty.
American Conservativism and indeed the Republic is founded on one truth. We are an English people that reject colonialism and Empire and believe in National Sovereignty. National Sovereignty cannot exist with “free trade” globalism that Libertarians promote. Remember Bastiat said the purpose of “free trade” was to create a “one world, indissoluble, ecumenical union of the peoples of the world.”
But this is Satanic becaused God divided the peoples at Babel and thus Imperialism and Liberalism is Satanism because it opposes order created by God of divided peoples. America must return to its mission for promoting the sovereign independance of the nations under the only true King. No King but King Jesus!
Turn Back American from Empire and come back to your true King.
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Quote: “J, thank you for helping to make the case for the free market. ST”
So you don’t like the internet? Because J’s point is that there is no “free market” created that most of technology we use today. The “Free Market” means no context of laws and institutions to protect folks from bad investments so what happens is that no new capitalists are created at all and the economy stagnates. No you may argue that things like the internet and a highway system are bad things but don’t argue that anything like a “free market” created anything in our capitalist society.
The entire idea of a “free market” is a mystical idea that comes from the occultist Bernard Mandeville (hellfire clubs) who argued for avarice and attacked Christian charity. If you want to hang out with those Satanists freaks then go ahead but don’t expect conservative Christians to take it lying down. I’m this close to starting a blog dedicated to correcting that massive errors of the Cato and the Mises institute on economics because they don’t even present their own theories correctly. Kevin Carson did this with his vulgar libertarianism watch but it needs to be a full time job apparently.
I suggest you stop reading the fake anarchists at the Mises Institute and read the real Anarchist like “Property is Theft” Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker. Stop pissing on Benjamin Tucker’s grave and citing liberal statists like Mises and Hayek. If you want to call yourself an anarchist then go all the way and join Chomsky and Zinn and the Libertarian Socialists who really hate America. Maybe join Bill Ayers with Obama and bomb Fort Dix.
Reading crap like this make me think that giving Ron Paul $200 was a bad idea because I thought point of the campaign was to argue for the Old Republic and ideas like National Sovereignty, the Constitution, and anti-Imperialism but apparently all we need is the British system of “Free Market Capitalism” despite the long history of thuggery done in its practice.
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I dont think their will ever be a form of society/government that can be everything for everyone.
I hear many on the right, mimicking the pundit piddle, that liberalism is communism [Marxism] and so I watched a documentary on North Korea [ http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3742145385913859804&q=welcome+to+korea&ei=kWSRSNKyCIbU4gLSjeiCCA ] and found no liberals. I was lied too!! It appeared to be Marxist spiritualism [Kim Jung is Lord in Korea] and the wealth was not spread about. Jung spends his money on weapons aimed at South Korea.
So to defeat the liberals conservatives must make America like North Korea.
Ackk!!
Really though, where does liberalism come from? Isnt it really just a product of consumerism? And isnt consumerism a product of capitalists {I like to call mammonists} exploiting our inner desires? But what made America a world power? It was our wealth, which was produced by capitalism. Consumerism financed our giant military industrial complex thru taxes..
Aye Aye Aye.
Now we are finding special interest groups are undermining democracy. Our tax dollars are subsidising business..social corporatism.
Feck.
Capitalism is not very patriotic either, it outsources jobs to other countries in search of the highest profit at the cheapest labor. Screw you pedestrians.
The human is an over-unity device. Who knew?
The inhumanity of it all.
I need another drink.
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When I get to be the supreme dictator of the universe, my first decree will be that anybody who says “free market” without defining the term will be water-boarded until they can come up with a coherent definition. That will put an end to the Cato and Mises Institutes in about 10 minutes.
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Apropos the Barack Obama/John McCain candidacies being offered to the American people by the
so-called Democrats and Republicans, and the upcoming election, I recommend to one an all
to read a book titled NONE OF THE ABOVE by Joseph Farah. Basically, he says we Americans
should vote no—that is, no votes for either candidate. He gives reasons why neither man
is qualified to be president of the U.S. The book comes out in August. I had decided long
before that I could not in conscience contribute to the quickening slide into oblivion for
America by voting for cretins like Obama or McCain. Even though my vote will not count to
the county clerk in my part of the country, I will still write in Ron Paul on my ballot.
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“So you don’t like the internet? Because J’s point is that there is no “free market” created that most of technology we use today. The “Free Market” means no context of laws and institutions to protect folks from bad investments so what happens is that no new capitalists are created at all and the economy stagnates. No you may argue that things like the internet and a highway system are bad things but don’t argue that anything like a “free market” created anything in our capitalist society.”
The State harms tech development and innovation by theft to benefit State growth. My anti-grav machine has little use but as intellectual satisfaction if I cannot market it. State has proven over and over again that it cannot provide increasingly better goods at increasingly lower prices. If you prefer State designed, built, and marketed computers to Dells’, so be it.
“
The entire idea of a “free market” is a mystical idea that comes from the occultist Bernard Mandeville (hellfire clubs) who argued for avarice and attacked Christian charity. If you want to hang out with those Satanists freaks then go ahead but don’t expect conservative Christians to take it lying down. I’m this close to starting a blog dedicated to correcting that massive errors of the Cato and the Mises institute on economics because they don’t even present their own theories correctly. Kevin Carson did this with his vulgar libertarianism watch but it needs to be a full time job apparently.”
Hell-fire club predated by the Late Scholastics of Spain, who explored free market ideas but also fought to have New World Indians recognized as fellow human beings in the face of Spanish genocide. Bush and I both like dogs - does that make me a mass-murderer?
“I suggest you stop reading the fake anarchists at the Mises Institute and read the real Anarchist like “Property is Theft” Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker. Stop pissing on Benjamin Tucker’s grave and citing liberal statists like Mises and Hayek. If you want to call yourself an anarchist then go all the way and join Chomsky and Zinn and the Libertarian Socialists who really hate America. Maybe join Bill Ayers with Obama and bomb Fort Dix.”
Such open-mindedness is a tribute to the strength of your arguments. Your suggestion to explore both Proudhon and Tucker is a good one, as I also suggest visiting http://www.lewrockwell.com. Interesting to know that someone who disagrees with you must believe in violence and anti-Americanism - cold solid logic. You do make a strong case for BANA’s notion of nationalism. ST
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“Capitalism is not very patriotic either, it outsources jobs to other countries in search of the highest profit at the cheapest labor. Screw you pedestrians.”
Is ‘capitalism’ evil when a company moves from a high-tax, high-reg, high-wage state to one that is more business frindly? If protectionism is so good, why not have trade barriers between Utah and Nevada? If you want higher priced so much, why not buy American made only goods and leave me alone to purchase as I will? If paying more for goods is so patriotic, why don’t you pay more yourself and leave me in peace? Have you ever asked a company’s reps WHY it was moving overseas to escape American corporatism? Why is ‘American exceptionalism’ turning out to be national busybodydom and envy, coupled with self-righteousness, backed by the bayonet? ST
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“Capitalist success stories:Haiti,El Salvador,Honduras, Guatamala,Mexico. This is a short list.
Nations that “followed"-forced is more accurate-free prescriptions such as “free trade” tend fall into the category of underdeveloped nations. Natins that massively violate free market principles like the US and Western Europe fall into the category of developed nations. For more on this read “Kicking away the ladder”
Every one of your named examples above is more or less corporatist, not capitalist. Weak property rights, trade barriers, endemic state-plutocratic rule. North Korea and Cuba do not practice free trade - are they developed? Nations that violate free market principles are economically downsizing while those that loosen up, such as Viet Nam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and India are surging.
Russia shows how statism destroys an entire society for years to come, esp one without a tradition of strong property rights, required for a sound economy. Compare Russian econ with Chinese and Indian and tell me which of the three is the most robust.
You are spot-on about Bono. His sanctimonius posturing is annoying, which is why I ignore his greed and ignorance. ST
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“Americans should be free to experiment with different economic models. In the present political system this is not possible. They may very well choose a competitive trade policy within the US. Would it follow from this that they are now compelled by logic to have a free trade policy with the rest of the world? Of course not. This experiment has already been performed and is still ongoing; It has been a complete disaster for American workers.”
Except for your diagnosis re: American worker, I agree completely. I must hie over to the Bay Area National Anarchists website for more info along these lines. Jup, you’re a bit of alright. ST
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