Just a little more time than has passed to date. Whenever you look at it, it will be just a little bit more time.
I remember the Chicago boys rushing down to Chile to help Pinochet the Executioner – all in the name of freedom of course. Allende was about to commit atrocity: they knew this in their hearts and had no need to bother with facts, experience or evidence. So when Pinochet rounded up the undesirables into a soccer stadium and had them shot, that was ok. He meant well. After all welfare states inevitably lead to tyranny.
I don’t know how to test these competing hypotheses. My take is that modern conservatives are driven by the need for reassurance – I mean you need to be fairly far out to lunch to watch a channel like Fox News which consistently is shown to traffic in falsehoods. But modern conservatives only think in terms of teams: if anything intentional falsehoods are a feature since they show special dedication to the club. It’s a seriously mucked psychology-- very different than that of traditional conservatives like Nixon who just wanted the goddamn facts.
Anyway, conservatives have their pre-existing conclusions and any school or network that reinforces them is met with happy squeals. In doing so modern conservatives express their disdain for that which liberals value most - an operational bullshit detector.
Oh, 'bout five minutes afore Jesus come, give or take.
Wow, that was easily the most dishonest recreation of of history I’ve read in a while. Congrats. You’re not even worth asking for a cite.
ETA Made all the more pathetic that you then criticized Fox News for intentional falsehoods.
Are you referring to the Scot Adam Smith? He favored progressive taxation.
Add another socialist to the crowd Fox News hates.
The reason I dislike Mr. Paul may surprise you. He corrupts the Libertarian message and I think we badly need an active 3rd party. The LP is the only real candidate for such.
Contrast Paul with a Mark Cuban. Although he is not a politician Cuban would be an attractive standard bearer for the LP. At least 20% of the electorate is inclined toward LP principles.
The sooner Paul retires and moves on the better.
“Our merchants and master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
“By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.”
“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess … It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
“We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate … Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate.”
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
“The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy. But the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot perhaps be corrected may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquility of anybody but themselves.”
– Adam Smith
Corrupts it how?
There’s also the Green Party, the Constitution Party, and the Working Families Party. Each of these expresses a current in American politics at least as important as Libertarianism.
Cite for his prediction? I’m no economist, and certainly not a student of Hayek, but it’s my understanding that the Socialism leading to tyranny was not the welfare state, but collectivist central planning. Hayek was no fan of massive social programs or redistribution of wealth, but he did believe in some sort of safety net.
You’re kidding, right?
Oh I’m always happy to cite. Frankly though I’m not sure exactly what your complaint is. Let’s start with wikipedia:
Military dictatorship of Chile (1973–1990) - Wikipedia Ah, but wikipedia is known hotbed of facts and liberals, isn’t it? Let’s try the BBC:
BBC News | AMERICAS | Soldier confirms Chile stadium killings
Eyewitness account: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-pinochet-affair-i-saw-them-herded-to-their-death-i-heard-the-gunfire-as-they-died-1179543.html
Finally, let’s look at the Encyclopedia of World History, Peter, Stearns, ed: 6th ed: Gen Augusto Pinochet emerged as head of a four-man junta. In the next month perhaps as many as 30,000 dissidents were rounded up and tortured, and approximately 2,000 were murdered. Political parties and labor unions were banned and Pinochet moved quickly to adopt a free market strategy to “regenerate” the Chilean economy and society.
I almost missed this post. Wikipedia:
Yes, Hayek was critiquing the Soviet Union, but I understand that he thought that the US and the UK would fall into the same trap.
With that as background here’s a more contemporary discussion by the economist Brad DeLong: he is speaking of Milton and Rose Friedman, but the comparison is apt. J. Bradford DeLong Responds to T. M. Scanlon at Boston Review
Now to be quite honest, I haven’t read Hayek: my exposure is entirely second hand. We can go deeper if you want, but I think I’ve demonstrated my point. Heck I’ve amplified it by pulling in the Friedman family.
We have freshwater economists and saltwater economists. George Mason produces swampwater economists.
He also suggested getting rid of minimum wage and completely eliminating public schools which are just fantasy today. And his negative income tax was conditional on a whole lot of factors that are anathema to the Dems.
Mine, too (and sorry to reply so late), but I don’t see that your cites demonstrate anything other than (a) Hayek was criticizing collectivism, not social welfare spending, and (b) Friedman went way, way past Hayek.
No worries, Nametag: at least you didn’t accuse me of dishonesty then slink off.
I just skimmed the Reader’s Digest version of Road to Serfdom, available at the Wikipedia link. Now I can’t say what Hayek actually believed. I can say though that a brief skimming of his work reveals some ambiguity. Hayek is against, “Planning” and for liberalism (the older definition). And he claims that serfdom occurs via a gradual process, the first step being wartime planning. Now my take is that libertarians were reasonable to interpret Hayek as saying that industrial planning and state ownership of coal mines and electrical plants (eg in Britain) constitute worrisome steps on the road to serfdom. But actually he was pretty vague: I wasn’t able to locate a quote that would rule out a more restrictive interpretation.
I see lots of planning in the 1950s and 1960s, for example the interstate highway system and Keynesian counter-cyclical spending. But I can’t say for certain whether Hayek had such baby steps in mind. Other conservatives interpreted him that way, but as you say they may have been going beyond him.
Digging further, I see that in his 1948 text Paul Samuelson interpreted Hayek as claiming there was a slippery slope to serfdom. Cite. This apparently inspired angry letters from Hayek. Cite. So I guess I’ll argue that if my initial claim was a misreading of Hayek (quite conceivable), it certainly was a popular one.
Anyway, in the future if I want to bash conservatives for this particular misprediction, I’ll cite the Friedman’s 1962 work Capitalism and Freedom.
ETA: Qin: Lefties never claimed that M. Friedman was one of their heroes. Conservatives lionized the guy though. Liberals merely thought (correctly) that he was very smart and therefore worth reading. Not sure what you mean about negative income tax: we have it right now in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit. Conservatives pushed for its expansion in the early 1990s as an alternative to a min wage hike. Now they want it rolled back.
They are reading road to serfdom and they are reading it to say that social programs inevitably lead to serfdom.
You are making some fine distinctions.
Forget all of what Hayek said. Most folks have read Road to Serfdom and nothing else and most of them have only read the conservative cliff notes to Road to Serfdom.
You are changing the definition of words.
How was it dishonest. it might have overstated things a bit but they did in fact round up political dissidents into a stdium and execute thousands of them.
It may not be what Hayek wanted to say in 1948 but it certainly seemed to be what he was saying in 1942. By 1948 after a successful war and wartime economy returning to normalization, I think it became obvious that democracy is more resilient than than that. But it is pretty hard to walk away from reading hayek’s book without the impression that he thought the road to serfdom was a very slippery slope indeed.
The Austrian school is popular because it reassures some folks that they were right all along.
Uh, thanks, but we’re all well aware of the atrocities committed. What I’d like to know is who you think was “okay” with them.
Simply tell us who you think was “okay” with Pinochet’s murders, or admit you were just making shit up. Friedman gave lectures in Chile and wrote letters to Pinochet because he felt economic freedom was a path to political freedom, not because he thought mass murder was an acceptable part of the free market.
We know they rounded up political dissidents. What I’d like to know is who from The Chicago Boys was okay with it, as Measure for Measure stated.
Nametag: FWIW, here’s one take on Hayek by the economic historian Brad DeLong:
Numbers 2 and 4 beg for a cite. Number 3 is historically interesting: Hayek was among those calling for liquidation and tight money during the great contraction of 1929-33. When the Friedman ranted about terrible monetary policy of the 1930s and monumental government screwups, he was criticizing a central bank that relaxed far more than the tight money men wanted. The Fed’s problem wasn’t that it was doing the wrong thing: in Friedman’s view it was that they didn’t do enough.
emacknight: Please do not accuse me of dishonesty in the future, at least without making clear what your problem is. I am heartened that you aren’t a Pinochet apologist and agree that it was a murderous regime. My argument had a number of steps in it, and I chose to address the baseline issue on the top of page 2. And thank you for returning to the thread.
The Chicago boys made a hash out of the Chilean economy, ultimately leading to renationalization of the banks and the firing of the head of economic policy in 1982. Wags called bank nationalization “The Chicago Road to Socialism”. You can see in this chart how Chilean growth diverged from the Latin American baseline around 1973 and only caught up after 1990. I frankly don’t know all the details of their policies though: the point is that Chile’s period of strong growth only dates from the mid 1980s at the earliest (and some of that was playing catchup – it’s one thing to grow by absorbing unused capacity; efficient investment led growth is something else.)
Color me unimpressed by Friedman’s private letters to Pinochet. The question is the extent to which the Chicago economics department gave material support to his regime. Key members of the regime are listed here. Charles Maechling Jr., an international lawyer and former State Department adviser, stated the following in a 1998 submission to the International Herald Tribune
But let’s go live to Jan 4, 1977 when James Street, professor of Economics at Rutgers University, writes an angry letter to the New York Times about Milton Friedman’s Chilean connections.
Milton Friedman could have spoken out against Pinochet: he chose not to. I understand that there was even a big gathering in the U of Chicago to celebrate their team’s rise to power in 1975. But I haven’t tracked down a good cite for that.
Anyway, it seems to me that my POV was anything but revisionism. I reject your assertion of dishonesty. I was able to find these citations because I was drawing upon a very old and bitter criticism of U of Chicago and not just making shit up. I trust there’s another side to this: there always is.
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/09/opinion/09iht-edchas.t.html?scp=7&sq=chicago%20friedman%20chile%20pinochet&st=cse
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10916F83A55157085DDAD0894D9405B878BF1D3&scp=12&sq=chicago%20friedman%20chile%20pinochet&st=cse