Two pillars of the libertarian counter-revolution are Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” and Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” What Rolling Stone or Mad Magazine were to their less ideological peers, these screeds have been to young conservatives like Paul Ryan, Rand Paul (get it?), to Tea Party zealots and to the billionaire cabal described in Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money” that funds their endeavors.
In my misspent youth I read the ponderous Ayn Rand, but until once again being reminded Mayer of the centrality of Hayek’s tome to the worldview of the alarmed right hadn’t suffered through it. So I bit the bullet. The first thing you notice about Hayek, and Rand too, is that they are very much the artifacts of a bygone era.
Rand was the daughter of prosperous Russians who was twelve at the time of the October Revolution. She saw her father’s business confiscated and the descent of an ancien regime into a communist nightmare. She escaped to America and advocated the extreme opposite of government power for the rest of her life.
Hayek came from the cultured elite of Austria and watched as it was ground to bits between the two totalitarian millstones of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly, he too came to discern in the enslavement of Central Europe under the “iron rule of fascism… a process something like an internal law,” in the words of economic historian Robert Heilbroner. “Once government had interfered enough with the market mechanism it had no alternative but to embrace the economy in a top-to-bottom grip.”
By the time 1943’s “The Road to Serfdom” was published, Hayek was a refugee professor at the London School of Economics. He grew alarmed when he saw Britain and the United States responding to Depression and the vast military-industrial necessity of World War II with an unprecedented increase in government power. These crises compelled the state to mobilize troops, to press industry into the war effort, to impose rationing, wage and price controls, and other emergency instances of overreach.
He argued strongly that this was a slippery slope and that it could get out of control and lead to the same totalitarianism the allies were fighting, with a concomitant loss of liberty and rise of collectivization. The ensuing Cold War made the looming specter of communism no less scary. In Europe, leftist governments were elected and in Britain they nationalized various industries with predictably poor results.
The United States soon relinquished control of plants that had been devoted to armaments. Most returned to making convertibles, airliners and money in the good old capitalist way, though the arms race with the Soviets also turned huge profits for decades and caused even Ike to warn of the power of a military-industrial complex.
But Hayek’s wilder-eyed followers saw jackboots, concentration camps and the ovens behind every effort to control water pollution, ensure safe food and drugs or to assure the elderly a pittance in old age. I once worked for a committed libertarian who advocated the privatization of the sewerage system since it gave too much power to the state. For the capitalists who cheerfully profited from government contracts, it must be noted, the fear of the commissar was always secondary to the hatred of the tax man.
But I discovered by reading Hayek that he was not quite as doctrinaire as his American libertarian followers thought him to be. Mayer notes that an analysis of Hayek’s influence in America, “The Great Persuasion” by Angus Burgin, explains that the origins of their misreading was a 1944 Reader’s Digest condensed book version of “The Road to Serfdom.”
Because “many reactionary Americans knew only the distorted translation” they missed his nuance. “The conservative publication omitted Hayek’s politically inconvenient [if you are taking a libertarian line] support for a minimum standard of living for the poor, environmental and workplace regulations, and price controls to prevent monopolies from taking undue profits.”
These, of course, are anathema to the right-wing, and the far more extreme Rand denounced Hayek as a “compromiser” and “an abysmal fool.” But the right may have felt it needed Hayek’s gravitas, a learned member of the Austrian school of neoliberal economics, as opposed to the easily mocked Rand — a failed Hollywood Script writer, pot boiling novelist, crackpot philosopher, and founder of a personal cult. The trouble is, if you actually read Hayek, he seems not to justify the kinds of extreme libertarianism and hatred of government his fans espouse.
At his most overheated he could, like Rand, seem to argue that free markets were more than an economic model, were “the key to all human freedom. He vilified government as coercive and glorified capitalists as standard bearers of liberty,” as Mayer says. But he did not endorse a conservative regime of the sort favored by his libertarian followers who take him as an apologist for freedom from all government activity.
Indeed, he makes a clear distinction between conservatism which, “by its very nature is bound to be a defender of established privilege” and the liberal position whose essence is “a denial of all privilege,” defined as “the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.” Ironically, such special treatment is exactly the sort of privilege conservatives in government regularly grant to the wealthy by giving them access to special tax breaks and deductions, contracts and other perks unavailable to ordinary citizens.
By contrast, Hayek argues that limited privilege, “which can be achieved by all, and which is therefore no privilege, but a legitimate object of desire’ should be part of government’s responsibility. What’s that mean in practice? “There can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter and clothing sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody’ by government….Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which few individuals can make adequate provision” among which he includes sickness and accident.
Therefore, Hayek concluded, “the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.” And there is “no incompatibility in principle between the state’s providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.”
OMG! The Koch brothers, Grover Norquist, Paul Ryan and the rest of the “drown government in the bathtub” crowd have been worshipping an apostate to their extreme creed. Hayek is for the social safety net, and the protection of the many from the rapacious few by means of government regulation. He thought the real threat came when government began to assume control of the economy, not when it tried to mitigate the crueler effects of free enterprise.
Not for the first time, zealots have turned an author’s notions into a sacred text and erected a vast ideology based on a self-interested misreading of it, one so far from the author’s intention that he might no longer recognize it as his own. If he were around to object, he would undoubtedly be denounced as heretical.