Friedrich A. Hayek, Big-Government Skeptic

Must read of the day. There is a review by Francis Fukuyama of a new release of F.A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty.  Hayek is one of the more thoughtful of the thinkers that modern day conservatives love to champion.  Yet the more I read of Hayek the more I learn from him and the more I realize the Hayek championed by conservatives usually isn't the Hayek in the works its self.  Never the less the key failures of Hayek are quite obvious and Fukuyama brings them up. His failure to capture the actual challenge of political economy is still obvious...

Moreover, freedom even in this minimal sense can be threatened by a variety of social actors, from wealthy elites to corrupt local governments to large corporations that hold a whip hand over their workers. A truly free society is not simply one that limits the power of the central government; many times in history, central governments have defended the liberty of non-elites against the coercions of well-­organized local power brokers. In American history, freedom for African-Americans did not evolve spontaneously. It required first a bloody civil war to end slavery and then intervention by the federal government a century later to bring about the end of legal segregation...

Hayek provides a very minimalist definition of freedom as freedom from coercion, and particularly coercion by a central government. But as the economist Amartya Sen has argued, the ability to actually take advantage of freedom depends on other things like resources, health and education that many people in a typical society do not possess.

As is a key epistemological assumption he makes...

In the end, there is a deep contradiction in Hayek’s thought. His great insight is that individual human beings muddle along, making progress by planning, experimenting, trying, failing and trying again. They never have as much clarity about the future as they think they do. But Hayek somehow knows with great certainty that when governments, as opposed to individuals, engage in a similar process of innovation and discovery, they will fail. He insists that the dividing line between state and society must be drawn according to a strict abstract principle rather than through empirical adaptation. In so doing, he proves himself to be far more of a hubristic Cartesian than a true Hayekian.