The Good Book tells us that a prophet is not without honor, except in his own country. Of no one was this more true than of F.A. Hayek. Born in Vienna on May 8, 1899, Friedrich August von Hayek would prove himself the most formidable opponent of the particularly malignant threats to human freedom spawned in a century his long life tracked so closely. Yet despite the ultimate vindication of his work by a Nobel Prize in 1974 and the discrediting of both socialism and Keynes, the man who predicted it all so very long ago remains largely ignored, at least in the America that was for some time his home.
Elsewhere on this page Edwin J. Feulner notes that Hayek's pursuit of truth earned him derision and scorn among his peers. This is no coincidence. He had stung their pride. Back when the fad for planning had hit fever pitch--whether New Deal Democrat or national socialist--Hayek exposed not just the faulty economics, but the presumption upon which the economics itself rested. Not for nothing would he entitle one of his books "The Fatal Conceit."
Certainly his enemies understood. In 1945, Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" was kept out of Berlin by the Allies lest it offend the Soviets, one of the occupying powers. Mao's China was also quick to ban his works, though the government did publish restricted, pirate editions to keep high-ranking cadres abreast of what he was saying; the Chinese introduction to "The Road to Serfdom" describes it as "full of poison." Closer to home, a just-published Modern Library list of the 20th century's 100 most influential works of nonfiction found room for Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" in the top 10, but left Hayek unmentioned.
Hayek's view was that information was too widely distributed to allow for central planning, and that the attempt to do so would inevitably lead to coercion. Understand this, and you understand the link between economic freedom and political freedom, indeed between liberty and civilization. "The conception that government should be guided by majority opinion," he wrote, "makes sense only if that opinion is independent of government." Without property and freedom, there could be no real independence. Marx understood this too, of course, which is why he summed up communism not as redistribution of wealth, but the abolition of private property.
Let out of his bottle, Hayek has proved a potent genie. In Communist Czechoslovakia, the government ran a Department of Bourgeois Studies as part of an effort to inoculate its academics against the virus; instead, a young Vaclav Klaus read Hayek and ended up steering his country toward freedom's shores in wake of the Velvet Revolution. In the mid-1970s, when Margaret Thatcher was laying the plans for her revolution, she thumped down a copy of Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty" before a group of Tory researchers, telling them "this is what we believe." Only a year ago too in Beijing, a new Chinese translation of "The Constitution of Liberty" became a best-seller, with a subsequent conference attracting a veritable Who's Who of Chinese dissidents.
All roads may not lead to Rome. But on the 100th anniversary of his birth, it is hard not to notice how many of those seeking the path of human liberty sooner or later find themselves passing through Hayek's door.
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