George Rebane
In the latest package of materials from the Mercatus Center of George Mason University there was an exhortation to today’s conservatives (the classical liberals) to man the intellectual ramparts against the onslaught of socialism. Their opening argument was from a post-war essay by F.A. Hayek –
We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage … . Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospect of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas… the battle is not lost.
This was written in 1949, the same year Hayek wrote another influential essay ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’. In this piece Hayek identifies the intellectuals – being neither anchored in original thought nor practical experience – as the intermediaries between an esoteric social philosophy like socialism and its broad dissemination. These “professional secondhand dealers in ideas” are positioned to the adulating masses as deep thinkers bringing down the wisdom of the ages from Olympus. From this essay we read –
In the light of recent history it is somewhat curious that this decisive power of the professional secondhand dealers in ideas should not yet be more generally recognized. The political development of the Western World during the last hundred years furnishes the clearest demonstration. Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be persuaded to adopt it as their program.
Having recently (re?)read this, I was struck by how timely its analysis still is after sixty years have passed. And then it occurred to me that its currency might instead be cyclic. Did we not go through a Cold War, that began in 1948, and which had convinced most Americans by the end of the 1950s that socialism was indeed the slippery slope to totalitarian communism? By 1960s we all saw the hopeless morass that Britain and France had gotten themselves into through an overreach of government. There were riots in the streets, and France was changing governments as often as people changed oil in their cars.
It would take another twenty years of failed social engineering before Margaret Thatcher appeared on the scene to start rolling back what to even the Brits was by then obvious as an unsustainable scheme of wealth creation and distribution. Meanwhile here in the US, the progressives were able to make from the mountain of civil rights a series of mole hills in other areas of induced public need that have today become the giant sink holes most of which are beyond repair. We will forever have to keep driving around them as they grow to swallow more of our liberties and treasure.
Yesterday some of us celebrated the century mark of Ronald Reagan’s birth. Yes, he did raise taxes several times, but what he was able to fund with the aggregate government revenues was nothing less than the reconstruction of what Vietnam and the Peanut Farmer had left in ruin. And the taxes he reduced launched a twenty plus year expansion which, among many other benefits, convinced the Soviets to abandon all hope and come in for a soft landing, while their Chinese counterparts determined that private property, economic freedoms, and more than a touch of capitalism was what the Middle Kingdom really needed to reestablish its heritage as a great state and people.
But in America things have gone more than a bit sour in the national dialogue between the collectivists and conservatives. The ideological breach is so wide and deep that I am not sure that one can fashion and fire any intellectual ammunition that would make an impact on the fortifications constructed by each. And yet in 2011 the ideological breach may be the least of our problems. The approaching storms now on America’s horizon will require the construction of strong shelters of the kind we have not built before.
In recent days I have had the opportunity to meet and speak with respected and knowledgeable people about what lies ahead. As RR readers are aware, my overarching concerns continue to center on the country’s public debt at all levels of government, and national unemployment that appears to become more ‘structural’ with every passing month. What I have confirmed is that there exists no reasonable plan or approach at the federal level to pay off our public obligations. They will simply be reconciled in the stipulated nominal dollars whose value will have plunged. This implicit policy will be denied until the federal reserve notes in your pocket run out of room for all the needed zeros.
And both parties will simply ignore the unemployment problem. Each will continue insisting that this recession is no different than all the others in our history. People will go back to work as always when the economy improves. All we need do is to get GDP growth back up to the 3% region and happy days are here again. There is no need to consider the advances in technology, no need to take into account the Great Doubling in world labor markets, no need to acknowledge the world’s first fiscal crisis that is endemic to nation-states.
Projections that America’s under- and unemployed may easily exceed 30% by 2020 are simply rejected. Each party has its own nostrums for denial. The left sees that all will be well when America accepts the tax, regulate, and redistribute European model now quietly being disassembled – ‘what the hell, it hasn’t crashed yet’. And the right believes that restoring individual liberties, reducing regulations, cutting the size of government, and cutting taxes should put things back on course – hasn’t that always worked in the past?
If this is to be resolved in the arena of ideas instead of in the streets, what kind of intellectual ammunition will be required to penetrate the possibility that this time it really is a different world that we are trying to fix and live in?
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