How Hayek bred a race of elite monsters

It’s been a while since I’ve read Law, Legislation and Liberty, but as I recall, Hayek argues pretty unambigously against the idea that a person’s wealth is an indication of virtue or even usefulness. There’s no doubt that his personal political views were far-right, and certainly the current American radical right has adopted him as some sort of patron saint, but that’s no reason to dismiss his political philosophy (parts of which are fascinating) entirely.

Also, I’m surprised that Black reacts to this idea so incredulously:

democratic government invariably leads to the rule by “demagogues” who manipulate the most immoral segments of society.

Has there ever been a more succinct summation of American politics?

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I have to say, this thread is a pretty reasonable response to a fairly unreasonable article. All kinds of thinkers are misread for all kinds of reasons.

As was mentioned before, Hayek won the Nobel Prize for his work on the business cycle – to be specific an analysis of the effects of monetary expansion on the structure of production/cycle of boom and bust (the rap video is actually a fine introduction) Which is a pretty important question today since the world is “printing” money like it’s going out of style.

Hayek would most certainly be against is the governmental protections that allow elite monsters to arise. Here I find that concerned people from all points of view get into a chicken and egg argument. Business is bad, or government is bad. Well, they’re two bad tastes that taste horrible together. You can’t have big (phenomenally, monstrously big and immune to the wants and desires of consumers big) businesses without lots of regulatory protection. Of course businesses seek this protection. Why wouldn’t they?

For example, Cable companies can be so awful because they are granted geographic monopolies. More than anything, a free-market perspective is against these barriers to entry. There are nothing free about them.

Or the continual expansion of copyright law so that Disney can continue to control it’s classic properties.

My point here is that there has been a considerable aggregation of power by governmental/corporate interests. This is in no way Hayek’s spontaneous order. He’s also not very kind to the economics profession as a whole. His Nobel address, The Pretense of Knowledge is as damning a takedown of false scientism and the arrogance of economists as anything I can think of.

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Is this an interpretation or did he actually say this? I don’t know why he would advocate for a welfare system for people who are “necessarily evil.”

My first thought when I saw the headline “Well, she is married to a French billionaire, so there is a good chance that the kids could be entitled assholes, but monsters seems a bit hyperbolic”

See I was thinking about her vava-vooms

And then I logged onto BB

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“Cringeworthy.” I have to use that as a character surname in something.

Why does it seem that democracy has not prevented absolute power in the U.S? Most wars are unpopular, and therefore undemocratic, but are started anyway. The drone war is widely unpopular, but continues. The War on Drugs is widely unpopular, but continues. The bank bailouts were widely unpopular, but happened anyway. NSA spying is Orwellian, and continues.

Is there something that I’m missing? It seems that democracy has not prevented absolute power in the U.S.

Is the U.S. not a democracy? Is the power to start unpopular wars and give billions to banks and spy on everything everyone does and throw them in jail for doing drugs not enough to be considered absolute? What organization on this planet scary enough to justify this much power in the hands of U.S. politicians?

His anti-democratic views rarely make it into conservative party platforms. What does make it in are the wacky Austrian prescriptions about monetary theory and central banking… which is again strange because Hayek saw a role for central banking.

Once again though the standard movement conservative Austrian line is “Hayek wrote a book and I read/hear about it all the time from the Ludwig von Mises Institute/Glenn Beck, teary eyed hero worship” and it’s usually all to obvious that they have the intellectual curiosity of a peanut.

It’s strange but I often find myself wishing to at least read something from self-professed conservatives that still meets the criteria of objective rationality and intellectual rigor, and the only place I can reliably find that these days is The American Conservative. I still don’t agree with them all that much and some of their writers have their own problems, but National Review it ain’t. They did an admirable teardown of the ridiculous “Liberal Fascism” book that Glenn Beck fans adore that I’ve recommended to a number of loonies. If you want to read it it’s here but it’s more than likely that you already knew the book was a tortuous pseudo-intellectual exercise in nasty name-calling.

Sounds more like a New Yorker cartoon caption.

I think it’s because they like to appeal to populism, because you need the votes to get shit done.

Right they are reacting to the bite sized chunks of his theory that glenn beck has predigested for them, and spat back out in some odd form. That’s the thing about economic theories (including lots of Marxist theory), not a lot of people have actually read them. they have read or heard people talking about them, and are therefore getting their spin. To be fair, it’s heady, academicy stuff and it needs a certain familiarity with the specific lingo to really get.

Of course that book was hogwash, and good on American Conservative for pointing that out. You’re right, there isn’t much intellectual discourse coming out of the right, in part because the right has had to disavow intellectualism in order to appeal to a populist base. Now they hate the universities and academics, the very same ones who gave them many of their theories in the first place. In truth, they spout lots of populist rhetoric, they really aren’t very populist in the true sense of the word.

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Nope, constitutional republic. According to the original constitution, there is no election for senators or presidential electors (both selected directly by state legislatures).

The original demagogues (who we now call the founding fathers) probably realized that someone might pull the same trick on them that they pulled on King George III.

My take on Hayek: much of his rhetoric is now used to promote a view that Chomsky described as removing political power from a barely-accountable government and granting that power to a completely unaccountable private entity. His quotes about welfare and government regulation that people have brought up in this thread have been eye-openers to me. I’d never heard of these ideas in connection to Hayek.

Are you saying the current Government of the U.S. is not a democracy, and therefore cannot prevent absolute power? I agree, there was a study about how politicians ignore voters and listen to the money: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/princeton-scholar-demise-of-democracy-america-tpm-interview

But that being the case, what is to be done?

No.

You asked:

I answered that one specific question. I said nothing about absolute power. I simply noted that no Government of the United States of America has ever been a democracy. It has gotten more democractic as a result of the amendment allowing direct election of senators and state laws allowing direct election of presidential electors, but it has never truly been a democracy.

To be fair, this is in part a matter of semantics; there are definitions of democracy (including wikipedia’s) that would imply that the US government is a democracy. I personally feel that “constitutional republic” better described the design and implementation of the US government and that “democracy” is better reserved for government by direct participation of the governed.

If you want my answer on the absolute power bit, democracy doesn’t actually protect from absolute power. The Athenian democracy demonstrates this nicely (that is actually part of the reason the US is a constitutional republic rather than a democracy).

What is to be done? I think as long as mass media and advertising can be used to reliably sway election results there is nothing that can be done.

Thanks for clarifying.

If the internet remains unshackled, the old ways of controlling information will die away as those who cling to it grow old and die. With information freely shared, it will be interesting to see how things change. I remain hopeful.

I like Bill Black but he can sometimes get a bit histrionic. It must be hard though to be right about so much only to be utterly sidelined. Fucking Obama trotted him out to bash McCain about the Keating Five in '08 when he secretly had absolutely no plans to bring on Black as an advisor in dealing with the financial crisis. The best thing would’ve been to set up a special prosecutor’s office under Black and jail the C-suites of the big banks that caused the crisis with their massive frauds.

My guess is that it is less a matter of histrionics than of simple ignorance. At least I hope so.

Another random thought about this - when people read the Road to Serfdom or rather interpretations of the book by morons like Beck, they are not reading it within it’s historical context. Much like Karl Polyani was in his book the Great Transformation (which if you listen to Pope Francis sounds familiar), I think Hayek was addressing a particular point in time and that was his historical moment - 1944, Europe. There is a reason that Timothy Snyder called central Europe in the late interwar period the bloodlands in his book - Ta-Nehisi Coates did a great meditation on the book recently.

You can imagine what Hayek (or Polyani) was thinking about as he wrote that book. With the rise of fascism in the interwar period and with Stalin on the scene, there was much handwringing and debating about the real or perceived (depending on where you stood) merits or evils of classical liberalism and enlightenment thought - this is still an undercurrent in holocaust studies, whether modernity leads to mass murder or if it leads to less violence. We know where Stephen Pinker stands on that but Hannah Arendt was less sure (as she famously called Eichmann a mid-level bureaucrat, in her “banality of evil” articles).

Much of the French Left, especially after Khrushchev’s secret speech in the mid 50s, came to be deeply disillusioned with the enlightenment. that’s when you get the post-modern turn in the humanities, with philosophers like Foucault who seem to have nothing but contempt for modernity and its consequences. I think maybe in some way, Hayek and Polyani are part of that conversation, as was Hannah Arendt, Foucault, etc. This carried over into the Cold War, though there was much less debate on these points in the US, in part because we benefited much more from the war than Europe did, as Europe, especially central Europe was ripped apart. We just didn’t have that debate in the same way here. We were focused on our internal issues and on the evils of communism. We essentially had a liberal consensus happening, and few disagreed on this being the obvious correct answer. Even the civil rights movement purged itself of the left for the most part.

I think people forget that even when economists are looking at the long view, and applying it historically, that doesn’t mean it can or should apply later on down the line. You get the same problem with Marxist, I think. Marx was writing in the 19th century, and though he is often writing history, he was doing it from his vantage point in time, late 19th century Europe that was deeply tumultuous. What he’d say today with the direction of the economy, we can really only speculate. I guess Howard Zinn did, but that’s Howard Zinn. He’s dead too. This is not to say that older writers can’t be useful, just that you need to understand why they were saying what they said and apply carefully.

I do find the debate about the enlightenment and modernity important. There is a strong case to be made the the proliferation of European countries as colonial powers has been historically deeply destructive. But even Zizek agrees that many of us have a much higher standard of living than our ancestors. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is the debate that the movement conservatives are trying to have.

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Yes. It is easy to mock modern enthusiasts of Hayek who see “socialism” creeping behind any little attempt to do anything for the poor, but when he wrote it, there was an excellent reason to fear that Soviet-style socialism was going to conquer Europe – and not just the Eastern part, as France and Italy had large Moscow-backed parties as well.

Well, first off, I wasn’t “mocking” anyone, I was making a specific point, which is oddly enough the same point you just made. Specifically where I wrote this “With the rise of fascism in the interwar period and with Stalin on the scene, there was much handwringing and debating about the real or perceived (depending on where you stood) merits or evils of classical liberalism and enlightenment thought” (sorry, for some reason I can’t get quoting to format for me… :frowning: )

But maybe I didn’t make myself clear… So, again, I’ll say that Hayek was writing from a specific historical vantage point and it clearly informed his view. People drawing on Hayek often ignore this specific point or they are not thinking that his position in history actually matters.

BTW - much like we should be wary of attributing puppet like powers to the CIA in regards to their interventions into the Cold War culture of Europe (such as with the Congress of Cultural Freedom or CCF), we should likewise not underestimate the agency of local communists in Western Europe. They often had their own agenda and as Odd Arne Westad argued in his study of the third world in the Cold War, the smaller countries or smaller communists parties around the world would at times play the US and Soviets off one another.

Plus, the spectre of fascism was still pretty heavy over the continent, let’s not forget that. A friend of mine who is working on the CCF for his dissertation had some documents that said that local intellectuals in Italy who weren’t quite communists nor were they fully anti-communists, and they would not go as far as the CIA would have liked in regards to speaking against local communist parties, often made that very same point. They wouldn’t condemn the communists outright because they so feared a fascist take over again. I don’t think you can blame them for that.

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No, I agree with you – that it is important to consider when and why he wrote and that the fears of totalitarianism which he had were quite justifiable for the time, even if they seem somewhat absurd today.