#f.a. hayek

[giant-bean]

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

-Frank Herbert (Chapterhouse: Dune - 1985)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Trump Killed Not Just the Libertarian Party But Maybe the Libertarian Movement Too

The principles will live on but his headlining the party convention has thrown into relief deep, longstanding philosophical rifts that can n

Andy Craig at The UnPopulist (05.24.2024):

Though libertarianism as a political philosophy will continue, there is no longer anything resembling a coherent libertarian movement in American politics. That’s because the movement still bearing its name is no longer recognizably libertarian in any meaningful sense of the term. Nor can it still claim to be a political movement, which implies an association organized around not just a consistent set of ideas but a distinct political identity. For over a decade now, since Trump has dominated the national stage, longstanding disagreements have boiled over into a complete schism. There are those who have effectively become adjuncts of MAGA, and some who have gone firmly in the opposite direction, while others took a stance more akin to anti-anti-Trump voices who neither endorse nor firmly oppose the former president but train their ire toward those opposing Trump.

Movement libertarianism has always been a distinctly minority faction in American life, often on the fringes. But it has also had its moments of influence since it emerged as a distinct political affiliation in the post-World War II era. In the process, a constellation of loosely and mostly informally affiliated organizations—of which the Libertarian Party was one—formed what could be called a cohesive, if often fractious, political movement. Understanding this turn of events, and what it means for the future, requires tracing internal libertarian disputes that began long before the rise of Trump. In some ways, they are a microcosm of similar developments in the American intellectual landscape writ large. Not just the implosion of a minor fringe party, the L.P.’s de facto endorsement of Trump shows important currents that will shape the ideological content of both the right and left for decades to come. The libertarian movement may be a thing of the past, but, like many movements before it that have come and gone, its influence—both for the better and for the worse—will not disappear.

From Fringe to … Somewhat Less Fringe

In his 2007 history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty identifies five key figures who most shaped the nascent ideology and its organized advocacy: author Ayn Rand, and economists Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard. Though they exhibited substantial differences, each of these figures set out a general vision of what can be called libertarianism (though their attitudes toward that label varied). While other luminaries—such as Robert Nozick and Leonard Read—also made important contributions, most libertarians are primarily in the mold of one or more of Doherty’s essential five.

It’s not surprising that the influence of these foundational advocates has diverged and become more complicated, simply by the passage of time. The eldest of them, Mises, passed away in 1973. Only Friedman, who died in 2006, lived to see this century. Many of their differences turn on questions of economic methodology and abstract philosophy. But these are largely beside the point to the more concrete political valence each embodied. With one exception, all paired radical free-market and smaller government views with liberal tolerance and cosmopolitanism on social issues. None were religious, and Rand and Mises were both avowedly irreligious. Friedman and Hayek both trended more moderate and pragmatic, and also achieved the highest degree of mainstream intellectual recognition as demonstrated by their Nobel prizes.

It was in Rothbard that the divergence began which today has culminated in the Libertarian Party’s convention transforming into a literal Trump rally. He was in many ways the most radical—an avowed anarchist—and the most marginal, never achieving mainstream prominence. But he was also the most involved in creating a self-consciously libertarian movement and many of its institutions. In this he was aided by his skills as a prolific polemicist. Towards the latter part of his career until his death in 1995, Rothbard took a turn into the illiberal hard right. He branded this proposed strategy paleolibertarianism, a name which has stuck even as its advocates have variously embraced or dropped it. As he outlined in a 1992 essay, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” paleolibertarianism was an explicit alliance between small-government radicalism and the extremist far-right.

By accommodating and embracing conservative culture warriors, even including avowed white supremacists, Rothbard believed he was forming the basis of a political coalition to demolish modern big government—an early version of “drain the swamp,” as it were. This went so far as to lament the loss of David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in Louisiana’s 1991 gubernatorial election. And it included an open embrace of police brutality, fuming about the need to “dispense instant punishment” to “bums,” while railing against efforts to undo America’s white supremacist past. Later, opposition to immigration became one of the paleo posture’s signature issues. Over the latter half of the 20th century, some more right-leaning mainstream libertarians eschewed the more socially liberal side of the philosophy, particularly on issues of race and civil rights. Many were more amenable to the “fusionist” vision of libertarianism as part of the regular conservative coalition. Others embraced the leading edge of the gay rights movement, the fight to end the war on drugs, and other issues of individual freedom. But only in Rothbard’s vision, and those who followed it, did courting the authoritarian far-right become the centerpiece of the agenda.

[...]

From Tactical Bigotry to Actual Bigotry

It was in the fever swamps of the Trumpist neo-right that the Libertarian Party’s demise began. After the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the then party leadership denounced the “blood and soil” rhetoric. But to the Rothbardians, this smacked of unacceptable wokeness. Within a few days, the Mises Caucus—named more for the ideas exhibited by the think-tank than the actual economist—was founded. Over the next few years, this group began launching hostile takeovers of state parties and then the national party. As they did so, the party increasingly adopted rhetoric that sounded more like the tiki-torch brigade than one committed to individual liberty.

With this transformation has come an increasing unease with the word “libertarian” in some quarters, especially among those repulsed by the recent antics of the L.P. Though it was never the central pillar of the movement, the party retains the most prominent use of the term. It’s right there in the name, and on ballots across the country. For those who took a dim view of Trumpism, especially after Jan. 6, self-describing as libertarian came to have more baggage than it was worth. In their view, Trumpism was an authoritarian cult of personality, rank demagoguery, even something approaching fascism. Increasingly, those in this group have returned to the use of the word “liberal.” (The UnPopulist is firmly within that camp.) Hayek himself had grumbled that he preferred this term, and that “libertarian” was an ugly neologism arising out of the confused American terminology that conflates “liberal” with the welfare-state left. But around the world, “liberal” retained its more classical connotation, which has started to seep back into American discourse. If everywhere else the term refers to the sensible, socially tolerant, pro-market bloc, why not in the United States?

At the same time, the Trump effect was working its larger realignment of American politics. A minority of traditional Republicans peeled off into the “Never Trump” camp. The libertarian movement was not immune to this realignment along pro-Trump and anti-Trump lines. The two camps within the movement—the cosmopolitan and the paleo—already strained to nearly the breaking point, went through the inevitable rupture. A number of differences and disagreements fueled the split, but most central was the divide into MAGA-friendly and anti-Trump sympathies. Some were caught in the middle, unwilling to prioritize the rise of Trump as a fundamental threat to liberal values above more traditional policy disagreements. But as the sorting dynamic continues, this number is dwindling, getting pulled into one or other camp.

Donald Trump may have helped destroy the relative cohesion of the Libertarian Party and maybe the libertarian movement too.

[wrathofgnon]

“Tradition is not something constant but the product of a process of selection guided not by reason but by success. It changes but can rarely be deliberately changed. Cultural selection is not a rational process; it is not guided by but it creates reason.”

— Friedrich A. Hayek

[eternal-echoes]

Intellectuals value newness over truth, but what they offer is neither new or true.

F.A. Hayek

[mountain-west-individualist]

We have central planning today in nations like North Korea and Venezuela. So why doesn’t it work, given that they have access to virtually all the supercomputers and big data that modern socialists have? The answer lies in the fact that the fundamental problem with socialism isn’t informational, it’s institutional.

Boettke (1998) summarizes Mises and Hayek’s core arguments in three related steps. Each point is so critical that I make my students memorize them in every one of my classes.

Without private property in the means of production, there will be no market for the economy’s means of production

Without a market for the means of production, there will be no money prices for them

Without money prices reflecting the relative scarcity of capital goods, economic decision-makers will be unable to rationally calculate alternative uses of capital goods.

The theoretical case against central planning is valid in the face of the big data revolution. Big data may help give firms and governments the sort of information they need to make better decisions. But it poses no threat to capitalism. And it certainly doesn’t provide a magic elixir to the theoretical and practical ills of socialism. The big data revolution might be alive and well. But Marx’s ideas are still dead wrong.

[a-path-beyond84]

In my earlier efforts to criticize the concept I had all the time the feeling that I was hitting into a void and I finally attempted, what in such cases one ought to do in the first instance, to construct as good a case in support of the ideal of ‘social justice’ as was in my power. It was only then that I perceived that the Emperor had no clothes on, that is, that the term ‘social justice’ was entirely empty and meaningless. As the boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, I ‘could not see anything, because there was nothing to be seen.’ The more I tried to give it a definite meaning the more it fell apart — the intuitive feeling of indignation which we undeniably often experience in particular instances proved incapable of being justified by a general rule such as the conception of justice demands. But to demonstrate that a universally used expression which to many people embodies a quasi-religious belief has no content whatever and serves merely to insinuate that we ought to consent to a demand of some particular group is much more difficult than to show that a conception is wrong. In these circumstances I could not content myself to show that particular attempts to achieve ‘social justice’ would not work, but had to explain that the phrase meant nothing at all, and that to employ it was either thoughtless or fraudulent. It is not pleasant to have to argue against a superstition which is held most strongly by men and women who are often regarded as the best in our society, and against a belief that has become almost the new religion of our time (and in which many of the ministers of old religion have found their refuge),and which has become the recognized mark of the good man. But the present universality of that belief proves no more the reality of its object than did the universal belief in witches or the philosopher’s stone. Nor does the long history of the conception of distributive justice understood as an attribute of individual conduct (and now often treated as synonymous with ‘social justice’) prove that it has any relevance to the positions arising from the market process. I believe indeed that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be if it were in my power to make them ashamed of ever again using that hollow incantation.

F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty

Critique of Social Justice

[randomglory]

The more our technical civilization advances and the more, therefore, the study of things as distinct from the study of men and their ideas qualifies for the more important and influential positions, the more significant becomes the gulf that separates two different types of mind: the one represented by the man whose supreme ambition is to turn the world round him into an enormous machine, every part of which, on his pressing a button, moves according to his design; and the other represented by the man whose main interest is the growth of the human mind in all its aspects, who in the study of history or literature, the arts or the law, has learned to see the individuals as part of a process in which his contribution is not directed but spontaneous, and where he assists in the creation of something greater than he or any other single mind can ever plan for.  It is this awareness of being part of a social process, and of the manner in which individual efforts interact, which the education solely in the sciences or in technology seems so lamentably to fail to convey.  It is not surprising that many of the more active minds among those so trained sooner or later react violently against the deficiencies of their education and develop a passion for imposing on society the order which they are unable to detect by the means with which they are familiar.

F.A. Hayek, Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason

[anarchyandacupofcoffee]