Friedrich Hayek, George Orwell, & the Road to Serfdom

"For most of the...population today, the notion that people could solve many of the problems of society without governmental Gleichschaltung, the Nazi term for overall coordination, is completely alien," concludes Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal on The Roads to Serfdom.

Well worth a read, especially if you haven't read Friedrich Hayek lately.

For George Orwell, the difference between the two tyrannies was one of ends, not of means: he held up Nazi Germany as an exemplar of economic efficiency resulting from central planning, but he deplored the ends that efficiency accomplished. While the idea behind Nazism was “human inequality, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world,” socialism (of which, of course, the Soviet Union was the only exemplar at the time) “aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings.” Same means, different ends: but Orwell, at this point in his intellectual development, saw nothing intrinsically objectionable in the means themselves, or that they must inevitably lead to tyranny and oppression, independently of the ends for which they were deployed.

Friedrich Hayek, tho ignored for long, had other ideas for which he eventually won a Nobel Prize.

Hayek pointed out that the wartime unity of purpose was atypical; in more normal times, people had a far greater, indeed an infinite, variety of ends, and anyone with the power to adjudicate among them in the name of a conscious overall national plan, allowing a few but forbidding most, would exert vastly more power than the most bloated plutocrat of socialist propaganda had ever done in a free-market society.

Hayek—with the perspective of a foreigner who had adopted England as his home—could perceive a further tendency that has become much more pronounced since then: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by the British people in a higher degree than most other people . . . were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility . . . non-interference with one’s neighbour and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.”

"non-interference with one’s neighbour": What a remarkable concept in today's planned communities, with homeowners' association rules in detail about what color one may paint one's shutters, permission required to plant a tree or a flowerbed, bans on garage sales, and on leaving the garden hose out. It doesn't take the state to oppress: it takes a mindset. The mindset which tells one that I am my neighbors' keeper, and my neighbors' ruler. And my neighbors are mine. It is the mindset of control.

Unlike Orwell or Beveridge, however, (Hillaire Belloc) realized that such benefits would exact a further price: “A man has been compelled by law to put aside sums from his wages as insurance against unemployment. But he is no longer the judge of how such sums shall be used. They are not in his possession; they are not even in the hands of some society which he can really control. They are in the hands of a Government official. ‘Here is work offered to you at twenty-five shillings a week. If you do not take it you shall certainly not have a right to the money you have been compelled to put aside. If you will take it the sum shall stand to your credit, and when next in my judgment your unemployment is not due to your recalcitrance and refusal to labour, I will permit you to have some of your money; not otherwise.’ ”....” The people lose “that tradition of . . . freedom, and are most powerfully inclined to [the] acceptance of [their servile status] by the positive benefits it confers.”

This might apply equally to today's debate over privatizing Social Security. It is a matter of control over one's own money. Currently, those who die early get none of their payments back, and neither do their heirs. Changing that system is to strike at the heart of the state, and thus cannot be tolerated by the apostles of statism.

The real argument over Social Security isn't about how to provide for the elderly: It is all about who shall be in control.

It is about freedom versus security: Do we want to be free, independent, and likely but not surely prosperous, or marionettes dancing on the government's strings in return for security?

Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the lead.