CapitalistImperialistPig

After saying that there is no reason that a rich society should not provide a minimum of economic security to all its citizens, Hayek adds: Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance— where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks—the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to supercede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition ...

Hayek claims that fascism and National Socialism arose partly due to the envy of the poor and educated for the more favorable positions of the unionized workers - the beneficiaries, in his view, of socialism's successes. They were quite ready to take over the methods of the older socialism but intended to employ them in the service of a different class. The movement was able to attract all those who, while they agreed on the desirability of the state controlling all economic activity, disagreed with the ends for which the aristocracy of the industrial workers used their political strength. Hayek, F. A.. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) (Kindle Locations 3514-3517). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. Interestingly, the founders or at least principal sponsors of US libertarianism made the same choice - to imitate Leninist tactics and methods.

So long as property is divided among many owners, none of them acting independently has exclusive power to determine the income and position of particular people—nobody is tied to any one property owner except by the fact that he may offer better terms than anybody else. Hayek, F. A.. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) (Kindle Locations 3303-3306). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. Perhaps you recall that it was precisely the issue of particular people being tied to any one property owner that exercised Paul Krugman and brought on your denigration. I added a few other instances of laws and contract structures having this effect. I'm sure you learned somewhere that actual serfdom was precisely the condition of workers being tied to one property owner. In the US today, it's common for students to graduate from university, or worse, fail to gradu...

I seem to recall having heard that Hayek published a Reader's Digest version of his Road. I should have looked for it. So far, he has expended about 25,000 words on saying (1)Government direction of the whole economy doesn't work, (2)Will restrict individual's freedom, and (3)Socialism is bad. Concision is not in his wheelhouse. Oops, I forgot one - the autobahn was an economic disaster because it wasn't carrying much traffic before the war. I guess he has also proclaimed - I can't say argued - that the development of Civilization (up to the invention of Socialism, anyway) has been a gradual expansion of individualism and individual rights - what a load of crap. Despite some advances in recent Centuries, the overall development has been almost opposite. I agree with the first three, but I'm really, really bored. I would at least like him to say something I could argue with, something that would surprise me, or be some kind of revelation, however minor.

We can rely on voluntary agreement to guide the action of the state only so long as it is confined to spheres where agreement exists. But not only when the state undertakes direct control in fields where there is no such agreement is it bound to suppress individual freedom. Hayek, F. A.. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) (Kindle Locations 2568-2569). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. Which of course is the whole point of the State. Most of Hayek so far has consisted of inveighing against the kind of central planning that nobody still believes in. it may have been an important message 80 years ago, but not so much today. My question is whether he has anything relevant to today.

It's pretty clear that all human society, from primitive band to tribe to civilization, is based on collective action. The most fundamental human skill is cooperation. The trouble with cooperation is that it carries evolutionary risk, the risk that something an individual does for the collective benefit will be exploited by cheats, thieves, and free riders. Thus, cooperation only works if those particular individualistic tendencies can be suppressed. In individual hunter-gatherer bands, such suppression is managed by an ethic and by punishment, the ethic being a collective consciousness and the punishments being ridicule, banishment, and execution. More complex societies evolved more elaborate means of control: myth, hierarchy, religion, and law. Perhaps civilization's greatest contribution in this regard was money, which greatly expanded the capability of cooperation via trade. Civilization also invented new instruments of collective action, like debt. All of these had...

Hayek's starting point, and slogging through 27% of the much prefaced and introduced edition of The Road to Serfdom I have, has only barely gotten me to that point, is that England and America (in the 1940s) were just arriving at a point that had already transformed Germany, Italy, and Russian into totalitarian states, and that the central agent of that transformation was socialism. Obviously that latter was true in the case of Russia. My first impression is that Hayek is a very narrow minded fanatic, who is heroically trying to force history into the Procrustean Bed of his own obsession. In particular it would seem to ignore long established authoritarian histories of all three nations as well as their recent social and economic convulsions. But I should wait to hear his argument. One thing I would note from one of the many prefaces, was that Hayek says: But, whatever the name, the essential point remains that all I shall have to say is derived from certain ultimate values. ...