Excellent article from the WSJ.com. It tells you that John's "Welfare State" is still ascendent. I have always agreed with Hyeck's essay, "Why I am not a Conservative."
THINKING THINGS OVER
About Freedom in the Free World
The modern welfare state hasn't been beaten yet.
BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, October 14, 2002 12:01 a.m.
LONDON--Friedrich von Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 to combat the seemingly inexorable rise of socialism, along with its more virulent collectivist cousins, fascism and communism. As some 550 disciples gathered here last week, the prevailing mood might be summed up: If we finally won, how come we feel so glum?
Hayek died in 1992 at age 92, having lived long enough to receive the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974 and to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Neither outcome seemed remotely likely when he published "The Road to Serfdom" in 1944; John Maynard Keynes dominated economic theory, Fabian Socialism was rising in Great Britain and the New Deal prevailed in the U.S. Hayek's brilliant polemic argued that central economic management was an impossible task, leading to ever greater measures of authoritarian control and ultimately ending in totalitarianism.
It seemed a lonely alarm, indeed a cranky one. Yet events and experience have vindicated the Hayekian vision. Economists now agree on the need for decentralized market decisions. At its London meeting the Mont Pelerin society honored a distinguished list of long-time members headed by Nobelists James Buchanan and Gary Becker. Milton Friedman, the last active member of the 36 founders, appeared in London by videotape.
No practical person any longer talks of socialism. The idea of nationalized industries faded as early as 1948. After the collapse of communism in 1989, today everyone talks of privatization.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the British party conferences before and during the Mont Pelerin meeting. Staggering under divisions and personal scandal, the Tories nonetheless found a Hayekian program: Partial reimbursement for private health care to create a diversified market, a voucher-like program for schools, and further privatization of the pension system. The week before Labor had mounted a me-too program with ineffective bows to the same ideas. But note well that while the Tories establish the intellectual agenda, Labor holds the government. That the Tories remain in the wilderness is one reason for Mont Pelerin glumness.
Prime Minister Tony Blair practices a tactically brilliant politics of triangulation. His latest heresy, support for President George Bush's position on Iraq, may not be especially popular but certainly shows a willingness to confront his own backbenchers. Voters trust him not to follow his party's ideology over a cliff.
Meanwhile, his opponents are split between Hayekians and traditionalists. The Tories prospered with Margaret Thatcher's market-opening policies, but its aristocrats grew tired of being lectured by a grocer's daughter. They deposed her in 1990, and wasted a decade blustering about Europe. This backward-looking program, with overtones of protectionism and exclusion, can't unify the Tories themselves, let alone build a majority.
Britain's example is worth wider attention, since it follows an internal logic that also applies elsewhere. Hayek's disciples remember his famous essay, "Why I Am Not a Conservative." He was, rather, a "liberal," as the word is and has always been understood except in the United States. Liberals stand, in the editorial credo of this newspaper, for "free people and free markets." They see decentralized market-driven decisions not only as economically efficient, but also as a moral bulwark against intrusions on liberty by the crown, or more recently the collectivist state.
Conservatives, by contrast, stand for authority and are suspicious of change. As Hayek's essay put it, "In the last resort, the conservative position rests on the belief that in any society there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others."
The liberal order did indeed prevail in the 19th century, but in the 20th century was challenged by the rise of socialist thought. So liberals and conservatives found common cause in opposing socialist "reforms." And the U.S. has always been an exception, since it was founded as a liberal Republic, so "what in Europe was called 'liberalism' was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense."
Hayek's liberal philosophy, that is, always had a larger agenda than merely turning back central planning. His followers gathered here are ambivalent because they understand their success falls far short of creating a truly free order, of rebuilding the 19th century freedom. Yes, freedom is advancing in the world, Mr. Friedman said in his remarks, because reform in Russia and changes in China dominate the picture. But in the traditional industrial democracies, the picture is far more mixed.
In the European welfare states, for example, taxes claim nearly half of all income. If the state had laid such a claim to citizen's property before the French revolution, one London speaker noted, "there would have been tax collectors hanging from lampposts all over the country." (The OECD reports that government receipts last year were 44% of GDP in European Union nations, and 31% in the U.S.--each case a growth of about two percentage points over the last decade.)
The rule of law, that is legal decisions based on predictable rules and precedents, has frequently been supplanted by arbitrary rulings by regulatory bureaucrats. While outright state ownership has been defeated, collectivism has reappeared in new forms such as environmentalism and the assertion of ethnic or other group rights. A cult of political correctness threatens free speech.
Yet somehow citizens of the modern welfare state have been conditioned to accept these intrusions as routine if not indeed high-minded. One visitor to London comes away pondering this, and thanking a great economist and philosopher for directing our attention to fundamental questions.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. |
