POST-ELECTION NOTE: The Crips and the Bloods
by H.R. Shapiro
VON HAYEK, FATHER OF "NEO-CAPITALISM": (1) AUSTERITY IS STATISM, AND (2) GLOBALISM IS UNIVERSAL STALINIZATION
Whatever merits this book [Road to Serfdom, 1944] has is in the patient and detailed examination of the reason why economics planning [See Balanced-Budget Amendment, Bretton Woods, etc.], will produce...[despotism].
The century of socialism [the sense of Stalinism, as opposed to the socialisms of Western Europe] probably came to an end around 1948.
F.A. VON HAYEK, PREFACE, 1956, ROAD TO SERFDOM, 1944
On both sides of the Atlantic, it is only a little overstated to say that we preach individualism and competitive capitalism, and practice socialism.
MILTON FRIEDMAN, PREFACE TO 1994, ROAD TO SERFDOM, U-CHICAGO
Von Hayek, father of neo-Capitalism, actually neo-Classical Liberalism, attempted in 1956 to explain the nature of Classical Liberalism or Laissez Faire to USA politicians and economists. Von Hayek tells us that he uses the term "liberal" in its original 19th century "sense," but in the USA "it often means very nearly the opposite of this."
It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that "liberal" has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control.
I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left [Von Hayek means FDR-Truman State, for there has never been a "left" in the USA.] to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium.
This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.
[The Conservatives, following the "Bullmoose Party" of T. Roosevelt, 1910-1920, and the Communists, in fact, believed in the USA, W.W. II "National Service State." Robert Taft, notwithstanding his words, always voted with Truman (See NATO) and the New "Cold War" State]
VON HAYEK, Ibid.
Von Hayek, in fact, tells us that "Conservatism" is, in fact, a version of statism:
Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place.
A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege.
The essence of the [classical] liberal position, [according to von Hayek,] is the denial of all privileges, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.
VON HAYEK, Ibid.
Von Hayek is more of a Jeffersonian, sans a knowledge of the political history of Britain and the USA, than a "classical liberal," for he assumes democratic-republicanism, with a "safety-net," and free enterprise, all of which was foreign to Britain, at any time, including today, post the Glorious (Counter) Revolution, 1689-1789/1832.
THE POLITICAL TRADITION
By the reign of Edward II [1307-1327] the representatives of the communities of shires and boroughs had attracted the title of communitas regni to themselves.
This view of the counties and boroughs as communes, achieved so laboriously in the face of feudal privilege, and held firmly by the year 1300 [that is, there was no such thing as political feudalism in England], not only made it possible for the crown to handle them as units and deal with them through their representatives, but it also blocked the way to direct negotiation with individuals and groups.
[Thus the moots, as communities regni, elementary "legal publics," established the federal principle in England, the crown-court-moot structure, l300's-1600's, which we later find brought to fruition in the constitutional, compound, federal structure of the USA.]
J.E.A. JOLLIFFE, CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND, 1969
Those wards called townships in New England, are vital principles of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest inventions ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government.
JEFFERSON
Whereas Jefferson and Tocqueville well understood that political power had to be organized in elementary republics, before one could begin the discussion of freedom, as in the form of British institutions, pre-1689 , von Hayek seems to know little of the history of England and the federal principle/structure of the USA federal compound/constitutional-republic. Von Hayek does not begin with the "spaces of freedom," which constitute freedom, but with an attempt to wrest a space of economic freedom from the state.
RISE OF IDEOLOGICAL 'CAPITALISM'
IS THE DEATH OF CAPITALISM & ECONOMISM
The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.
[The strange conceptual/ideological carts before the Jeffersonian horses obviously nullifies the reality of economism.]
MILTON FRIEDMAN, 1994, Ibid.
Friedman and USA economists misconstrue von Hayek, who believed that civilization or freedom could not exist without democratic institutions and a "safety-net," although von Hayek, as we have seen, also knew little of English and American history, and the actual constitution of freedom.
Friedman, following J.S. Mill, does not establish the citizen and the township, but something called individualism, which is a Mill-ian code word for "isolation," and, as Hannah Arendt puts it, "the isolated man is powerless."
I have made it a practice to inquire of believers in individualism how they came to depart from the collectivist orthodoxy of our times.
FRIEDMAN, Ibid.
Collectivism, in fact, is impossible sans individualism, sans the equal isolation of the people, for "neither freedom nor despotism can come into existence without equality," so that it is "Capitalism," or actually radical state mercantilism, that has produced statism.
We can now understand why "Friedman-ism" is the very disease it pretends to cure, is the very establishment of citizen isolation, which produces the collectivist state.
How stands the battle between collectivism and individualism in the West [a] half century after publication of Hayek's great tract?
Unfortunately the [post-W.W.II] check to collectivism did not check the growth of government...[because, given the Welfare State], ...the fraction of the national income being spent by governments has continued to mount.
FRIEDMAN, Ibid.
Friedman, in dismissing the citizen and the elementary republic, can only find his villains, not in (anti-township) party growth of the state, but in welfare programs.
In the world of ideas...the intellectual climate of the West [has shown] that intellectual classes everywhere almost autonomically range themselves on the side of collectivism...and denigrate and revile capitalism. Why is it that the mass media are almost everywhere dominated by this view.
Government in the post-World War II period was smaller and less intrusive than it is today. Johnson's Great Society programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, and Bush's Clean Air and Americans with Disabilities Acts, were all still ahead...Total government spending -- federal, state and local -- in the United States has gone from 25 percent of national income in 1950 to nearly 45 percent in 1993.
On both sides of the Atlantic, it is only a little overstated to say that we preach individualism and competitive capitalism, and practice socialism.
MILTON FRIEDMAN, PREFACE TO 1994, ROAD TO SERFDOM, U-CHICAGO
back to POST-ELECTION NOTE: The Crips and the Bloods
