Hayek for the 21st Century
Biographer Bruce Caldwell on the Road to Serfdom author's enduring lessons about bad planning, distributed information, and the liberating power of choice.
In 1944, with World War II raging and the fate of the Free World far from clear, Friedrich A. Hayek (1889?1992), one of the great intellectual heroes of reason, published his best-known work. The Road to Serfdom became a bestseller even as it challenged the conventional wisdom that extensive, top-down economic planning would result in a more just and more efficient distribution of goods and services. Hayek, an Austrian who had immigrated to England, argued that such planning ultimately would lead to a stultifying society in which fewer and fewer people were satisfied as planners asserted more control. What's more, he drew disturbing connections between developments in relatively free societies such as Great Britain and the United States and totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
The Road to Serfdom was a publishing sensation but, as we noted in our "35 Heroes of Freedom" (December 2003), Hayek "paid a steep price–decades-long professional isolation–for daring to suggest that social democracy had something in common with collectivist tyrannies of the right and left." In the sort of happy ending history rarely delivers, Hayek, who was awarded a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, lived long enough to see his reputation restored and his ideas vindicated by world events, a tale told well in Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw's magisterial 1998 economic history, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy.
To mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Road to Serfdom, reason interviewed Hayek's most recent explicator, Bruce Caldwell, author of Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek, published in 2003 by the University of Chicago Press. Caldwell is a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and the general editor of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. In early October, he spoke with reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie about the origins of The Road to Serfdom, its continuing relevance, and Hayek's legacy in the 20th century–and in the 21st.
Reason: The Road to Serfdom was published in 1944. How did the book come into being?
Bruce Caldwell: In the 1930s, Hayek was writing articles criticizing the economics of socialism. Most people then saw socialism as the middle way between failed capitalism and totalitarianism of the Soviet and fascist varieties. By the late '30s, Hayek felt that he needed to write a broad-based attack on socialism. In Hayek's Challenge, I mention [sociologist] Karl Mannheim in particular as a figure who argued that planning was the only way to avoid totalitarianism, but everyone was making a similar sort of argument. Hayek turned that on its head and said that extensive planning of the economy was in fact the road to serfdom, to less and less freedom.
He was engaging a widespread belief that socialism was not only more just but more efficient than capitalism, that it was the way to make the world work better. Not just economics should be planned. Science should be planned. Everything should be planned. There was an influential magazine around at the time called Science. Virtually every third or fourth week, they'd run an editorial that said we need to have scientists helping plan all sorts of things. Not just the war effort, but everything about the economy to make it work better. This is what everyone who was "intelligent" thought.
If you look at the early 1930s, there was this sense that the Soviet Union had a huge commitment to science and scientific progress. Beatrice and Sidney Webb's two-volume, 1,000-page Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (1935) was filled with praise for the way the Russians were supposedly letting science work to make society much better. By the late '30s, once the purges and other things came to light, many people realized the Soviet Union was a monstrosity, but if you look a bit earlier, that wasn't the case. Hayek was reacting to books such as the Webbs'. Living in the current world, you have a hard time believing what sorts of things were being said back then that Hayek was reacting to.
Reason: What was the response when Serfdom first hit the bookstores?
Caldwell: The book appeared in England in March of 1944 and in the U.S. in September. He had a hard time getting an American publisher, but the University of Chicago agreed to bring it out. It was not expected to be a big seller in the U.S. They were figuring that it would maybe sell a couple of thousand copies, but it got very strong write-ups in a couple of the New York newspapers and demand was high for it. They did second and third printings, and in the spring of 1945 the Reader's Digest condensed version came out. That was done by [high-profile former communist] Max Eastman. That certainly made it [much] more popular and it got even more attention.
Hayek came over to the States on a ship in 1945 to do a publicity tour. He thought he was going to be mostly speaking at academic departments, but he ended up having big audiences.
Reason: Give us the stripped-down version of The Road to Serfdom's thesis.
Caldwell: Let's say you agree that the definition of socialism is the ownership of the means of production by the state. That means the state is making decisions about production. Under a wartime scenario this can work and even be productive, because everyone has shared values. Everyone believes that production should be aimed toward anything that is necessary to defeat the enemy.
Hayek's point is that when people are not under war conditions, they have many different values. So the question then becomes, if you have socialism, who makes the decision of what gets produced? If people have different values, they are going to disagree with the planners. The planners end up being frustrated because they are unable to decide what to produce and gain full consensus. So they completely take over the production process. Hayek argues that you can't make that neat separation between economics and politics that implicitly fills in the claims of the socialists.
In terms of the kind of full-blown socialism that Hayek was describing, I think his argument was shown to be absolutely correct. States that went to full socialization of production also placed considerable restrictions on personal liberty and decision making. You don't get the kind of choice that you get under a more liberal system…
Reason: …choice very broadly defined, meaning lifestyle choice…
Caldwell: …job choice…
Reason: …being able to exit or enter a country….
Caldwell: Yes, all the dimensions of things such as that.
Reason: Sometimes the moral of Serfdom is boiled down to what's called "the inevitability thesis": If you get a little planning, you'll get more planning, and then eventually you'll have full-blown socialist planning.
Caldwell: If you look at Hayek's preface to the 1976 version of the book, he says that can happen. But that's not the argument of the book. He did not say that as soon as you get some combination of markets and planning, you are immediately going to go down the slippery slope to socialism and all the restrictions it entails.
In a historical context, he was worried about Britain primarily. One reason that he was so keen to get the book published during the war was that people were already making the same argument that had been made in various German-language countries during the 1920s: that wartime production produces what people need and that state planning is an efficient way to do it. People were calling for the same sorts of controls that were in place in the war to continue in peacetime.
In England nationalization went forward after the war, and a number of different industries were nationalized. At its peak, about 20 percent of British industry was nationalized, so it was nothing even close to full nationalization. But that was the direction in which Britain seemed to be headed, and that was one of the reasons that Hayek wrote the book.
Reason: We live in a time when even socialists grant that capitalism is better at producing things. What about The Road to Serfdom and Hayek remains especially relevant in the 21st century?
Caldwell: His critique of the way "science" gets used in social settings. Science is a very powerful tool that has brought a lot of technological and material progress. But the mistaken notion that we can plan social structures and social realities and social institutions in the same way that we can accomplish goals like putting people in space is very, very seductive. That belief is something that never goes away. Hayek's critique of that mind-set is part and parcel of The Road to Serfdom and many of his other writings. Road is part of a larger effort called "The Abuse of Reason Project," which attacked what he eventually called "rationalist constructivism," the idea that we are able to reconstruct or correct society along rational lines.
He argued that you can't easily improve on what he called "spontaneous orders." There are many situations in which an order has arisen by individuals following rules. They often can't articulate why they follow the rules, some of them are moral rules, whatever, and this has lead to a certain amount of coordination of people's activity. To the extent that it's done, that it's allowed, groups that have followed those rules tend to prosper. That's what he defined as "a spontaneous order." This can occur among animals that are noncommunicating, and it can occur among humans and various social institutions. Language, the market, money, and more reflect this.
To simply come in and say, "OK, this stuff all needs changing," ignores that social evolution has taken place through time. We can all see the problems that exist in various institutions, but it's particularly dangerous when you try to make wholesale changes, rather than piecemeal ones, within social institutions to try to achieve better ends.
The way socialism was implemented in the 20th century is one of the pre-eminent examples of what goes wrong when you try to reconstruct society along more "rational" lines.
Reason: Is it inevitable that top-down, central planning fails?
Caldwell: I don't think Hayek would say inevitably. It would depend on the specific question at hand. Hayek always wrote at a very high level of generalization, so it is difficult to get down to specifics with him, and that is one of the limitations I think of Hayek's particular approach.
Reason: He emphasizes that things change over time, the rules under which people act change over time, the institutions through which they are constrained change over time. But he doesn't like wholesale social change where you just say, "We're paving over Cam-bodia and starting a new society," or paving over Paris…
Caldwell: …or paving over Iraq. I think Iraq actually is a perfect example of this. You don't just come in and say, "Here are all the institutions that have worked well in the West," and expect overnight changes. That seems to me to be a contemporary example of the sort of hubris he argued against.
Reason: Beyond his critique of wide-scale social planning, what would you say are Hayek's other major contributions to 20th century thought?
Caldwell: Another very important one has to do with the role of prices in coordinating social action where knowledge is dispersed.
As I mentioned, in the 1930s, Hayek was engaged in debates with various types of socialists. The model that was then used to describe how an economic system works assumed that all agents had full knowledge and that [an efficient distribution of goods and services] gets obtained [through various transactions]. Some of the socialists argued that the differences between socialism and capitalism, or the market system, were really about what set of people [made the transactions]. Under socialism, you had planners; under capitalism, you had individuals.
Reason: And the socialists argued that their planners could coordinate the production and distribution of goods and services with less trial and error, more quickly, more efficiently?
Caldwell: That's right, because they would be centrally gathering information. The socialists argued that individual entrepreneurs are just looking over their own markets whereas the planners are taking everything into account.
Hayek said, "Well, wait a second, this does not make sense. Markets do a lot of stuff, but this model does not shed light on what markets do." He zeroed in on the critical assumption of full or perfect information. He said that in the real world, we have millions of individuals who have little bits of knowledge. No one has full knowledge, and yet we see a great deal of social coordination. As Frederic Bastiat said, "Paris gets fed." No one intentionally plans on feeding Paris, but millions upon millions of people get up every morning and get what they want for breakfast. How does that happen? Hayek's answer is that a market system ends up coordinating individual activity. Millions of people are out there pursuing their own interests, but the net result is a coordination of economic activities. And prices are the things that contain people's knowledge.
Mainstream economists have picked up on this and talk about prices as containing information. Modern information theory certainly nods to Hayek as a precursor. He argued that pricing contains knowledge of specific time and place and the man on the spot. Prices contain knowledge that is tacit, that can't really be expressed by individuals. Individuals make actions in markets, and that's what causes prices to be what they are. People are acting in markets. They are not always explicitly saying why they are acting, but they are acting on their knowledge of local situation, the past, and more.
Reason: What about his influence in academic economics?
Caldwell: His impact on things like our standard graduate, or even undergraduate, education has been pretty minimal. However, if one thinks of Hayek as being part of a stream of people making contributions that often do not fit easily into the mainstream but which provide real insights into the workings of the economy–public choice analysis, analysis of property rights, transactions cost analysis, the new institutional economics, evolutionary economics, some variants of experimental economics, maybe even parts of behavioral economics–then Hayek, together with people like other Nobel Prize winners James Buchanan, Ronald Coase, Douglass North (who invokes Hayek's emphasis on getting the right institutions, but also his caution that one cannot just impose them, all the time), and Vernon Smith, are all contributing to an important line of research that has in many different ways had an impact on the mainstream, even if it doesn't show up in the textbooks or the latest working papers.
Reason: What do you think Hayek's legacy in the 21st century will be?
Caldwell: To the extent that the ideas in papers like "The Theory of Complex Phenomena" get developed, that could be a big part of his legacy. He didn't get very far in developing the concept, but it's the basis for his claims that what we can know in the social sciences is ultimately very limited. It holds that pattern predictions are the best that we can often do when it comes to society. He suggested that it's better to provide explanations of the principle by which something works than to make precise predictions of how people will act.
Reason: So he taught us that the starting point of our plans has to be a recognition of the necessary limits of our understanding, that the grand old Enlightenment dream of total knowledge has to be replaced with one that is limited and provisional.
Caldwell: That is a Hayekian theme. One of the things that I take away from Hayek is you can't really prove any of this stuff in a traditional way. What you can do is develop a way of thinking and all sorts of different evidence that ultimately convinces you that this is an appropriate way of looking at this particular type of social phenomenon. I think this is part and parcel of Hayek's method. It's certainly what I took from him in my book.
Understanding the limits of what we can do is an important legacy. And so is understanding that in trying to do too much, we often end up making situations much worse.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
mtyf
Aubrey. although Benjamin`s remark is incredible, on thursday I bought a top of the range Mazda when I got my cheque for $6465 this past 4 weeks and-over, $10 thousand lass-month. without a doubt it is the most-comfortable job I’ve ever done. I actually started 6 months ago and almost immediately started to earn more than $70, p/h. this hyperlink —– Click Here
Go to website and click Home tab for more details.
?????????????????????????
I think they’re in love.
The problem is that it seems so plausible at first blush, especially because people subconsciously see society as static; most of us still are momentarily surprised when movie stars or relatives get older and vanish from life. Socialism in a static society could be gradually fine tuned into a semblance of efficiency, but the slightest upset — a new way to make steel — would snowball into requiring a complete restart.
At least that’s my take on why the idea of scientifically planning more and more of society is such a strong lure. The problem is those who cling to this childish belief and rise to positions of power. The solution is to prevent positions of power having any coercive power.
Good points.
Hayek did not live for more than a century. His birth year was 1899, not 1889.
collectivist tyrannies of the right and left.
aka fascism and socialism.
Or if you prefer Team Red and Team Blue.
I’ve noticed that people who liken conservatism to fascism have no fucking clue about what fascism is.
You are no exception.
Now get on the bus. It’s time to take you to the zoo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfrQ8ZutmLE
For example, France and Turkey are both fascist countries, and they are unabashedly not right wing.
Authoritarian, nationalistic, and right-wing describe fascism.
Granted, American conservatives hate America right now because it has a black president, but all the right impulses are still there.
LOL
Numerous aspects of the New Deal were lifted from Mussolini’s policies by FDR and his brain trust.
Are you arguing that FDR was right wing, Tony? I mean, we know you are ignorant about many things, but is your ignorance so pervasive?
I’m arguing in favor of the dictionary definition and general understanding of a word.
You mean the dictionary which translates NAZI into National Socialism?
The dictionary definition of fascism is a reactionary totalitarian political/economical system that has the state directing the means of production while retaining their nominal ownership in private hands.
It’s associated with right wing states solely because the right often advocated for it an an anti-communist measure.
The French, though, went fascist as a way of neutering the Catholic church and the other right-wing institutions and classes that had lost their primacy in the French Revolution.
Being reactionary, it’s right-wing/left-winginess is entirely predicated on what external threat the fascists are wetting their pants over.
Mussolini only bolted from Communism because he didn’t want to deal with a Politburo. (Apparently, even Stalin’s fig leaf was too much for him.) Later, he deviated from full economic control because it was a pain in the ass to coordinate all that. But he had the realization that so long as he total political control, nominally private economic interests didn’t matter.
So essentially, Fascism was lazy Communism.
American progressives like Tony tend to confuse the conservatism of the late 18th, 19th and 20th centuries right up until today as “right-wing.”
Back then, all the morally and intellectually defunct movements – like socialism, communism, and yes, fascism tended to find their origins in liberalism – or if you prefer, the disintegration of liberalism as understood and bequeathed by The Enlightenment.
Conservatives were a consistent objector to the insanity that was all around them. Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler and everyone in between never were conservatives. You can claim anything else from nihilists to totalitarians; from socialist to communist – whatever. But what they each were NOT was conservative in its classical form.
Numerous aspects of the New Deal were lifted from Mussolini’s policies by FDR and his brain trust.
Mussolini was originally a socialist. He was more revolutionary, though, and a tad impatient. So after his experience in WW I which convinced hiim that militarizing society was more efficient, he came up with ‘Fascism’, a ‘middle way’ between Communism and liberalism (as defined in Europe at the time).
Tony!
Psh.
“American conservatives hate America right now because it has a black president.”
Generalization much? Citation?
Because he said so, duh!
Authoritarian and nationalistic are reasonably objective terms. “Right-wing” is not. It is completely arbitrary jargon used to infect the conversation with the kind of cheap crap that you often see in ideological discussions. Just toss in “racism” and it goes poof!
Bottom-line is that people want to either control their own lives (to some degree) or want to control the lives of others. Using the dictionary or general understanding does nothing to promote a flow of ideas.
So people in the 21st century must be getting a feeling of deja vu about Hayek’s ideas from the 20th.
Silly fetish for emergent order.
Everyone plans. CEOs plan. Workers plan. Governments plan. Children plan. Human decision making contributes to any social outcome at any scale.
Why is everything that is supposedly good for society as a whole not practiced by individual businesses? They don’t sit around and let chips fall where they may. They plan. They’re also mini-totalitarian societies, for that matter.
Sure, other than the part where they don’t have a monopoly of force. So there’s that.
Non sequitur
Well that and the small fact that they are completely voluntary.
Well that and the small fact that they are completely voluntary.
We’ll have to fix that problem.
Human decision making contributes to any social outcome at any scale.
Yup. That’s what emergent order is. Order that emerges from individuals planing for themselves. Right on the money. Glad you’re on our page.
Except the “order” that emerges from a laissez-faire system is largely undesirable.
Oh is that what happens.
So people still live in caves and forage for food where you live?
You stupid fool, those aren’t iPhones the people in the ghetto’s are using, they’re iPhonz.
/repeat for any product that even 20 years ago would have only been in the hands of a few wealthy elites and celebrities.
Yeah. The highest standard of living in the history of mankind is largely undesirable.
Actually, we are being unfair to Tony. It’s not the improved standard of living for the poor that bothers him. It’s something else, and he’s willing to fuck the poor in order to prevent it form happening.
I have lots of money. I am not envious of anyone, except maybe someone with better abs. You have absolutely no evidence of your accusation of envy, so it can only be the case that you are a pathetic slavish brownshirt toadie ball-licker of the rich.
Record levels of wealth inequality, almost every cent of the economic growth of the past few decades going to the very wealthiest individuals–if that’s the product of a free and fair market, then a free market is pointless. If it’s not the product of a free market, then why are you defending it?
I really think I should repost something I wrote in response to Tony’s superstitious concerns that free trade would reduce him to abject poverty:
You have absolutely no evidence of a lot of things you assert, To. May I call you, To?
Tarran, that’s exactly how they see it. Whether they are envious I don’t know but I have a liberal friend who has a rabid hatred for inheritance because the “kids are useless fucks living off the system.” To him, he equates a welfare bum to the heir of a fortune. To me, they’re not the same. The wealthy person living in decadence is squandering the family’s wealth; not the the government.
But he doesn’t see it that way.
His line of thinking always gives an opening to things like arbitrary redistribution and appropriation and confiscation and so on of earned wealth created.
It all boils down to one thing with left-wingers: They are lovers of coerced action to further their own takes on what life oughta be. They have no qualms squashing individual rights so long as it comes with the “for the children and society” tag. They’re totalitarians. They’re the last people who should know where the guns are.
pathetic slavish brownshirt toadie ball-licker of the rich
Ooo, watch out tarran, this kitty has claws. (Not really)
(Actually, that was quite a bit of invective. I think you hit a lot closer to home than “Tony” likes.)
He doesn’t have a problem with the aggregation of wealth at all, he just believes that it should all be held by the state. Then it can be distributed according to political clout as opposed to productive ability or skill.
The mainstream historical consensus is that the postwar (quasi-socialist) reforms are what led to that highest standard of living. They were found necessary because the prior laissez-faire regimes had left things pretty shitty for most people.
It’s cute how you guys can claim credit for anything you want just by asserting it.
Strange how GDP growth was lower under quasi-socialism than before.
Were you as unaware as I that FDR had instituted vast laissez-faire regimes for the twelve fucking years he was in office? Must have missed that in my history textbooks between setting the prices of things and fucking farmers in the ass for growing extra wheat.
Consensus!
derp
You know, if you can call something quasi-socialist, you can just as easily call it quasi-capitalist.
If a corporation was run by having the Board of Directors make every plan for every business unit, it would go out of business very quickly.
Yet there are idiots who think you can run a national economy that way.
Tony, clearly you know nothing about emergent order.
Tony, clearly you know nothing.
I know that you guys fetishize the concept without paying attention to its limitations.
People do not spontaneously generate the institutions generally regarded as essential to modern civilization. An efficient highway system does not organically emerge from individual market decisions. Planning is planning. If it’s not evil at the individual or small-group level, why is it evil at the policymaking level?
RRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAADDDDDDDDSSSSSSSS!
Reductio ad Somaliasm!
Do you guys get together, figure out the absolute best slam-dunk arguments against your bullshit, and then determine a way to mock them so that they are inadmissible?
If you don’t want to talk about roads then explain how an efficient transportation system can come about without planning in a free market. If you can’t do that, then you don’t deserve to mock the argument.
To put it simply, you’re wrong. Not only are you wrong, but your ignorance is willful. Even when someone points out the truth, you willfully ignore it. Pathetic. That’s what you are, Tony. Pathetic.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ji…..-possible/
Tony, jesus fucking christ. It took me one god damn hour on Reason a few years ago to understand the underpinning value in the libertarian thought process: No coercion.
It is completely unacceptable for you to keep coming here and making all sorts of claims while disregarding this key ingredient. In doing so, I conclude you’re either very stupid or a jerk.
To wit, keeping in mind (snap, snap consistency please; something left-wingers are horrible at because they lack, seemingly, discipline) planning at the INDIVIDUAL level generally, you know, is productive and VOLUNTARY whatever the results are.
Policymaking is made by BUREAUCRATS (with little or no consultations from the people they intend to impose their policies on) which often comes with a final “this is law and you must follow or face fines or jail.” In other words, COERCED.
In my case, many of the laws in place in my town work AGAINST me and my business.
If a leftie and a rightie were in a room and given a set of options to build their private lives and the society in which they belong, I bet you the rightie would stay the course with the ideals and values they possess.
A leftie would abandon them because they’d realize immediately it wouldn’t fly leaving them with other perhaps more pragmatic, practical options that hinge on the voluntary actions of a community committed to the same common goals and objectives. A leftie’s view would hijack that.
Lefties have no ideals other than might makes right. They feel that it is perfectly OK to lie, cheat, steal and even kill, if it means getting what they want. That’s why they want government to do everything. Because government can lie, cheat, steal and kill without consequence.
The difference, Tonykins, is that the people making the plans cannot compel anyone else to participate in the plan against their will.
Interestingly enough, the people who first recognize and idea is a bad idea tend to be the ones who have to bear the costs or suffer the harms from it, and they tend to be the first guys to bail out of the plan. For example, among the first guys to freak out at PACA (aka Obamacare) were the labor unions who would have been fined heavily for offering too deluxe a level of health care coverage to their members per the Congressional central planners.
Had Metlife proposed a PACA like framework for people to buy into, the labor unions would, of course, have refused to participate, and it would ahve died from lack of consumer interest.
In our current political order, the labor unions ended up having a friendly politician exempt them (and only them) from the fines. Of course, this sort of corruption is endemic in state planning since it’s essentially the only exit offered to people who are harmed by the state’s central planners.
Living in a society means being compelled to do things you don’t necessarily want to do–especially, say, if you’re a murdering psychopath. I am not moved by the libertarian titty baby argument.
But since you brought up healthcare, what, exactly, was preferable about the prior status quo? Not a laissez-faire system exactly but more so than any alternative in the civilized world. Yet much less efficient. NOT less efficient at delivering profits to insurance companies, but less efficient at delivering healthcare at a reasonable cost–an end that is not on anyone’s radar in the free market, and that only exists among policymakers, and which can only be achieved by planning.
It’s no use arguing healthcare with Tony (even if he’s not a sock). The dumb motherfucker thinks you have a right to force someone to provide you medical care.
The problem is, and this still befuddles me, despite Americans consistently polling against Obamacare, they didn’t hate it enough to boot Obama out of office so as to give repealing or defunding it a real chance.
I’m afraid they’re stuck with it. Unless 2014 changes this assertion?
Do you seriously think Romney was going to fight Obamacare?
Remember, Romneycare was the template that Obamacare was based on. I suspect Romney lost largely because he failed to articulate that he would be a philosophically coherent alternative to Obama, and many people who wanted such coherence stayed home.
Romney was a Massachusetts technocrat. Obamacare is precisely the sort of abortion they routinely generate.
Hell, if he’d said that he was ashamed that he had let it pass during his tenure as governor and pointed out how it’s not working there and that’s why he would work to actively repeal Ocare, he would have gotten at least a little bit of a bump.
I mean I still wouldn’t have voted for him, but I’d at least respect him (as much as I respect any politician).
Living in a society means being compelled to do things you don’t necessarily want to do
Of course it does, but not everything must be compelled. A great deal of thought must be put into anything that will require compulsion and the arguments should satisfy the great majority of the pupulace (not just 50%). It (compelling people) should be entered into *very* reluctantly as it’s hard to back out once those doing the compelling find they are allowed to get away with it. We could use a lot more humility and prudence in government, but it’s highly unlikely we’ll see much of either any time soon.
Living in a society means being compelled to do things you don’t necessarily want to do
Of course it does, but not everything must be compelled. A great deal of thought must be put into anything that will require compulsion and the arguments should satisfy the great majority of the pupulace (not just 50%). It (compelling people) should be entered into *very* reluctantly as it’s hard to back out once those doing the compelling find they are allowed to get away with it. We could use a lot more humility and prudence in government, but it’s highly unlikely we’ll see much of either any time soon.
There should be a caption contest based on that picture.
extensive, top-down economic planning would result in a more just and more efficient distribution of goods and services
This is probably right… if it were done by some omniscient, all-powerful being, but I suspect God may prefer we figure this kind of thing out ourselves.
Most people then saw socialism as the middle way between failed capitalism and totalitarianism of the Soviet and fascist varieties.
What’s funny is that at the time Fascism was supposed to be the “middle way”.
my Aunty Lily just got yellow Mercedes-Benz S-Class S65 AMG by working online at home. this hyperlink…max38.com