The Good Hayek and the failure of my State Rep to learn from him.

So the other day Brad Delong sends us over to Robert Solow to remind us of the difference between the Good Hayek and the Bad Hayek: 

there was a Good Hayek and a Bad Hayek. The Good Hayek was a serious scholar who was particularly interested in the role of knowledge in the economy (and in the rest of society). Since knowledge—about technological possibilities, about citizens’ preferences, about the interconnections of these, about still more—is inevitably and thoroughly decentralized, the centralization of decisions is bound to generate errors and then fail to correct them. The consequences for society can be calamitous, as the history of central planning confirms. That is where markets come in. All economists know that a system of competitive markets is a remarkably efficient way to aggregate all that knowledge while preserving decentralization.

But the Good Hayek also knew that unrestricted laissez-faire is unworkable. It has serious defects: successful actors reach for monopoly power, and some of them succeed in grasping it; better-informed actors can exploit the relatively ignorant, creating an inefficiency in the process; the resulting distribution of income may be grossly unequal and widely perceived as intolerably unfair; industrial market economies have been vulnerable to excessively long episodes of unemployment and underutilized capacity, not accidentally but intrinsically; environmental damage is encouraged as a way of reducing private costs—the list is long. Half of Angus Burgin’s book is about the Good Hayek’s attempts to formulate and to propagate a modified version of laissez-faire that would work better and meet his standards for a liberal society. (Hayek and his friends were never able to settle on a name for this kind of society: “liberal” in the European tradition was associated with bad old Manchester liberalism, and neither “neo-liberal” nor “libertarian” seemed to be satisfactory.)

The Bad Hayek emerged when he aimed to convert a wider public. Then, as often happens, he tended to overreach, and to suggest more than he had legitimately argued. The Road to Serfdom  was a popular success but was not a good book. Leaving aside the irrelevant extremes, or even including them, it would be perverse to read the history, as of 1944 or as of now, as suggesting that the standard regulatory interventions in the economy have any inherent tendency to snowball into “serfdom.” The correlations often run the other way. Sixty-five years later, Hayek’s implicit prediction is a failure, rather like Marx’s forecast of the coming “immiserization of the working class.”

It reminded me of one of the reasons why, at a very basic level, I'm running for State House.   

My current State Representative has failed to utilize social media and public forums in the district to bring information to the district about what is actually going on under the Gold Dome.  In fact within two months of starting my campaign I had already organized more events in the district than he had his entire two years in office.

Check out his Facebook Page--no mention or real engagement with the issues, just lots of pictures and people being honored.  He has fundamentally failed to grasp what the Good Hayek has to teach us about how information is and should be transferred so that inefficiencies and corruption can be reduced and problems can be properly solved.  

Unfortunately the Gold Dome is a massive black box where what the Republicans running the state actually think is hidden behind platitudes and right wing nonsense.  There is no way to figure out where the compromises can be found, nor a way to shine a light on the bad ideas running around as legitimate--when anyone paying attention can tell they aren't.

While my opponent may be a nice guy, he was failed to understand the Good Hayek and is harming the ability of our markets and our Government to efficiently function.  

Look, i'm no fool, hosting meet up's and discussion groups throughout the year in the district; having an active social media that creates a Habermasian space online for discussion and debate; working to pass IRV so we don't waste money and time in run-offs (that no one votes in anyways); these things aren't going to radically reform our broken process.  But these are the small positive steps towards creating more efficient transmission of information to and from the political class and the citizenry;which helps to sustain and strengthen a market based society for a better more responsive Government and improved social outcomes for all of us.  

Its either we shine a light on the corruption, waste, and mismanagement and start to better address the massive inequities and lack of responsiveness from the political class--or we'll see pitchforks doing the heavy lifting for us.

I don't think my State Rep really understands whats going on at a structural level.  That is why I decided to work to take his job.  Chip in a few dollars if you'd like to help.