Did not expect to see Hayek come up in this. Got my bachelor's in Economics and studied Austrian Economics. Definitely informed much of my thinking about anarchy and the evils of the state.
Also, thriller a cruel picture kicks ass. I remember watching it for the first time and being blown away with how cool the slow motion revenge scenes looked.
Been a few years since I read Road to Serfdom, but if memory serves right, he and anyone who references it as a free market capitalist today are operating in such different economic and political contexts that it's essentially two different conversations. It made sense to critique a totalizing central planning in the Soviet Union era, but other than China, there's hardly an economy in the world today that is centrally planned to the extent he writes about. Famously for anyone whose read it, he's not nearly the free market fundamentalist compared to the libertarian strands you see today - he believes in active government involvement in environmental regulation, workplace safety and the definition of the workweek, ensuring competition and regulating fraud, guaranteeing a social safety net ..... Mitigating externalities that markets can't or have no interest in solving .... Short of some nationalization of industries here and there, this would basically describe the extent of most "liberal" platforms in the world that libertarians rail against today, as most countries described as "socialist" are merely mixed economies with more substantive versions of the regulatory actions above. Hayek is arguing against being assigned a job against your will in a choiceless economy, a prospect that is on no economic horizon I've seen in my lifetime - while libertarians want to cite him against the lowly regulatory actions of a CFPB, etc. Slippery slope argument on a dry ass slope.
Sorry to go long - but the "socialism" and "national socialism" conflation basically starts and ends at the rudimentary notion of government involvement in industries for the "collective good." You can read Ullrich's Hitler bio for a pretty thorough examination of what "socialism" meant to the Nazis, and at times there were many competing interpretations. There was no interest in repudiating private property, wealth redistribution, or any Marxist notion of class conflict (they uh fucking hated Marx's guts), or economic levelling - just a general idea that the economy should work for the benefit of the nation (and, obviously, this meant the racist definition of "the nation"), and that the capitalists would very much remain in charge - hardly an example of central planning. The word "socialism" in "national socialism" had the explanatory value of "liberal" in countless political parties, buzzy but of no actual distinction.
And as is common for free market proponents, there is no sufficient acknowledgement that while capitalism has the veneer of freedom and choice, and does in fact provide real choice for a select group, it is also a system that functions by reducing the freedoms provided to people through its own forms of coercion. Tradeoffs abound.
Command capitalism = central planning to me, but not to you. I'm fine with whatever hair people care to split here. It's a carousel I jump off earlier than you. I do, however, think you're not being fully honest about the nazi utility of the 'private' sector.
I take your point but we're generalizing, and like you said, it depends not only what values and criteria you're emphasizing, but what carousel you're even on in the first place to jump from. If your primary analysis is the level of government involvement in an economy, regardless of its intentions or mechanisms or how it fundamentally structures that management, then ok, the Nazis managed to a degree that a purely socialist state might. But if that's your sole basis of comparison, then you're really just judging in a libertarian framework that lumps all notions of central planning together. The mine owner loses the mine, any other ramifications from there are for the birds; today's China is fundamentally the same as Finland ... I don't find the analysis that gets you to either to be particularly useful. If a single regulation of a contract, environmental law, or price control is central planning, then we're really just saying the only truly free market is one absent any regulatory laws ... The larger point is that Hayek's central planning bogeyman is no longer a reasonable fear for those who are fearful of it, unless you write off his own prescriptions for government managing the economy, which are basically the highest ceiling most of today's "liberal" parties have as loose-chain managers of capitalism ... At that point he's basically Paul Krugman.
Did not expect to see Hayek come up in this. Got my bachelor's in Economics and studied Austrian Economics. Definitely informed much of my thinking about anarchy and the evils of the state.
Also, thriller a cruel picture kicks ass. I remember watching it for the first time and being blown away with how cool the slow motion revenge scenes looked.
Been a few years since I read Road to Serfdom, but if memory serves right, he and anyone who references it as a free market capitalist today are operating in such different economic and political contexts that it's essentially two different conversations. It made sense to critique a totalizing central planning in the Soviet Union era, but other than China, there's hardly an economy in the world today that is centrally planned to the extent he writes about. Famously for anyone whose read it, he's not nearly the free market fundamentalist compared to the libertarian strands you see today - he believes in active government involvement in environmental regulation, workplace safety and the definition of the workweek, ensuring competition and regulating fraud, guaranteeing a social safety net ..... Mitigating externalities that markets can't or have no interest in solving .... Short of some nationalization of industries here and there, this would basically describe the extent of most "liberal" platforms in the world that libertarians rail against today, as most countries described as "socialist" are merely mixed economies with more substantive versions of the regulatory actions above. Hayek is arguing against being assigned a job against your will in a choiceless economy, a prospect that is on no economic horizon I've seen in my lifetime - while libertarians want to cite him against the lowly regulatory actions of a CFPB, etc. Slippery slope argument on a dry ass slope.
Sorry to go long - but the "socialism" and "national socialism" conflation basically starts and ends at the rudimentary notion of government involvement in industries for the "collective good." You can read Ullrich's Hitler bio for a pretty thorough examination of what "socialism" meant to the Nazis, and at times there were many competing interpretations. There was no interest in repudiating private property, wealth redistribution, or any Marxist notion of class conflict (they uh fucking hated Marx's guts), or economic levelling - just a general idea that the economy should work for the benefit of the nation (and, obviously, this meant the racist definition of "the nation"), and that the capitalists would very much remain in charge - hardly an example of central planning. The word "socialism" in "national socialism" had the explanatory value of "liberal" in countless political parties, buzzy but of no actual distinction.
And as is common for free market proponents, there is no sufficient acknowledgement that while capitalism has the veneer of freedom and choice, and does in fact provide real choice for a select group, it is also a system that functions by reducing the freedoms provided to people through its own forms of coercion. Tradeoffs abound.
Command capitalism = central planning to me, but not to you. I'm fine with whatever hair people care to split here. It's a carousel I jump off earlier than you. I do, however, think you're not being fully honest about the nazi utility of the 'private' sector.
I take your point but we're generalizing, and like you said, it depends not only what values and criteria you're emphasizing, but what carousel you're even on in the first place to jump from. If your primary analysis is the level of government involvement in an economy, regardless of its intentions or mechanisms or how it fundamentally structures that management, then ok, the Nazis managed to a degree that a purely socialist state might. But if that's your sole basis of comparison, then you're really just judging in a libertarian framework that lumps all notions of central planning together. The mine owner loses the mine, any other ramifications from there are for the birds; today's China is fundamentally the same as Finland ... I don't find the analysis that gets you to either to be particularly useful. If a single regulation of a contract, environmental law, or price control is central planning, then we're really just saying the only truly free market is one absent any regulatory laws ... The larger point is that Hayek's central planning bogeyman is no longer a reasonable fear for those who are fearful of it, unless you write off his own prescriptions for government managing the economy, which are basically the highest ceiling most of today's "liberal" parties have as loose-chain managers of capitalism ... At that point he's basically Paul Krugman.