Why can't we have a better EJ Dionne? His absurd critique of Hayek
In a column bashing Austrian economics and Rand paul, EJ Dionne taks a swipe at Hayek's magisterial The Road to Serfdom:
Hayek and Mises perceived little difference between democratic governments that used their power to plan against recessions and dictatorships that did the same thing. In this view, the policies of Franklin Roosevelt led down what Hayek called t he “Road to Serfdom” and were thus objectively comparable to those of Hitler or Stalin. ...
Those who follow Hayek ... would also have us overlook that Hayek’s “own historical justification for apolitical market economics was entirely wrong,” as the late Tony Judt put it in “ Thinking the Twentieth Century,” his extraordinary dialogue with his fellow historian Timothy Snyder, published in 2012, after Judt’s death.
Hayek believed, Judt said, that “if you begin with welfare policies of any sort — directing individuals, taxing for social ends, engineering the outcomes of market relationships — you will end up with Hitler.”
The implication is that Hayek equated Roosevelt and Hitler. But this is an absurd libel. First, to compare is not to equate. Second, despite Dionne's presumably carefully chosen wording seemingly intended to put words in Hayek's mouth, Hayek never said "you will end up with Hitler.” Tony Judt said that about Hayek.
As Don Boudreaux observes:
Hayek argued (in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom) that individual freedom will inevitably be snuffed out if government insists on centrally planning the economy in the way demanded by many socialists of the era, or if government attempts to protect every producer and worker from the forces of market competition. The argument is neither that the slightest overreach by government dooms society to totalitarianism, nor that all unwise interventions such as those of the New Deal are “objectively comparable” to the tyrannies unleashed by Hitler or Stalin.
As for Dionne's claim that gridlock has prevented Keynesian economics from getting a fair trial, I agree with Russ Roberts:
I guess he forget that $820 billion “stimulus” spending. That spending somehow got through the political system despite the obsession conservatives have with Austrian economics. Keynes is dead but somehow, between 2009 and 2012, federal deficits were over a $1 trillion every year. We’ll see about 2013, it may be less. That government spending as a percentage of GDP was only 25% in 2009 and above 24% in 2010 and 2011–the highest levels since WWII–was evidently due to lawmakers being in thrall to Austrian thinking.
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