tanstaafl,
Your mentioning of Hayek got me thinking. Hayek’s thesis is that the desire for collective economic planning is inherently dangerous, because its a road that – in his argument – leads invariably to totalitarianism. But while he makes good points about the need to balance our desire for security with our desire for freedom, the fact remains that his analysis has not been borne out by events. Hayek specifically opposed the creation of modern Western European welfare states, fearing that they would end up as copies of the Soviet republics. Only they didn’t. You might believe that Britain and the Netherlands are dystopian nightmares, but they are healthy democracies that also include strong social safety nets (and very high standards of living and reported quality of life). Of course they’re not perfect, no democracy is. It’s a constant struggle to balance freedom and social responsibility. But it can be done without falling into totalitarianism.
Hayek’s great value is philosophical: we must jealously guard our freedom if we wish to preserve it, and the government should never be our master or our mother (seriously, liberals really do believe this. We’re not Maoists). But that does not mean that we the people, as masters of our own lives and our own government, can’t create a system that protects freedom and encourages initiative while also guaranteeing that we are free from dire want. Democracy is not a zero-sum game; rather, democracy is the best method we have to guarantee the existence of civil society. And a civil society is one in which we take responsibility both for ourselves and for our neighbors. It’s murderers and tyrants who want us to deny that we are all, in some measure, our brother’s keepers.
Your thoughts?
