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<!-- you can have any number of categories here --> [[Category:R. H. Murphy]] [[Category:Friedrich von Hayek]] <!-- 1 URL must be followed by >= 0 Other URL and Old URL and 1 End URL.--> {{URL | url = http://increasingmu.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/defending-boilerplate-hayek/}} <!-- {{Other URL | url = }} --> <!-- {{Old URL | url = }} --> {{End URL}} {{DES | des = Some plausible advice on interpreting Hayek, once you understand that "The Great Society" is society run in the interests of the wealthy few. Starts with "Arguing Hayek can be unclear is arguing water can be wet." | show=}} {{Quotes}} {{Text | It’s not quite my nature to defend the received view on some topic, but a lot of attacks on Hayek have taken place on the blogosphere as of late. Here is Glasner just now, with a summary, and here is Kuehn with a controversial post. Several points to start off with: Arguing Hayek can be unclear is arguing water can be wet. The Road to Serfdom is NOT the place to read Hayek’s social philosophy. There are times he basically referred to it as a popular tract. The Constitution of Liberty is first and foremost a restatement of classical liberalism, not a complete statement of his own ideas. If you want the final statement on what Hayek felt practically about political economy, read Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 3. If you want the final statement on Hayekian social philosophy, read The Fatal Conceit. If you want to know the different stages in Hayek’s thought and how all these things fit together, read Caldwell’s Hayek’s Challenge. To get at the questions people are asking today: Everything Hayek wrote was really about not destroying The Great Society, which gives us our standard of living and some positive level of per capita income growth. Everything MUST be read through that lens. The Road to Serfdom was written in a climate in which Communism and Fascism were viewed as opposites. THE contribution Hayek made (and in many circles today it is almost banal) is that they were the same thing in every way except their trappings. The logic that leads you from The Great Society to Communism or Fascism is the same. Intellectual rejection of The Great Society because it does not fit some ideal goes from one stage of interventions to the next in a number of stages made explicit in The Road to Serfdom. If you keep following the logic of what got you from stage 1 to stage 2, it will eventually lead you to go from stage 2 to stage 3, and so on. Maybe you will stop following the logic before things get really bad, but it will be a break in your logic. There is some evidence that this is what happened in Britain when they stopped just short of planning who got which job. It is in this way that The Road to Serfdom was a warning, and it was a warning that was heeded. Hayek’s concern with the welfare state was that it sought to “plan” the end-states of a spontaneous order. This presumption was what made him concerned about all those things in The Constitution of Liberty. If what you are trying to achieve is some idealized distribution of incomes or whatever, and that’s your priority, you will eventually break the market order (and thereby The Great Society) in doing so. Saying “everyone in society gets a voucher for $3000 in housing, $2000 in health care, and $2000 in food per year” does not follow such a logic. You can just write the check and do it. You aren’t forcing society to fit a mold you think it should fit. This in no way will follow the logic of The Road to Serfdom. One of the evolved institutions of The Great Society was the poor laws, which provided minimum incomes. Hayek thought we should presume something like the poor laws should continue to exist unless empirical evidence to the contrary could be obtained. All of this is coherent and self-consistent. It isn’t mushy; it asks questions which differ from the questions that interest most people working in political economy (including most libertarians and even self-described Hayekians). Different evidence and arguments are seen to be persuasive. Maybe this paradigm is wrong. But the commentary online misses the point because it is assuming Hayek is viewing the world as modern economists and political scientists do. }}
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