Are you starting to see a pattern?

Many people continue to perceive the presence or impending advent of socialism here, there, and everywhere and to lament the prospect. But full-fledged socialism is almost extinct. Aside from North Korea, hardly any country now has socialism’s essential attributes: government ownership, management, and direct control of all the major means of production; central planning of resource allocation and income distribution; and an almost complete absence of private property rights except for very small properties and some personal items. Almost all countries on earth now permit major elements of private property, combined with extensive government intervention and regulation of private property use and extensive taxation, subsidization, and government provision of a variety of “public goods,” “welfare,” infrastructure, and many other types of goods and services.

Moreover, almost all countries have elections of public officials; hence the term I’ve used for more than 30 years (borrowed from my Ph.D. student and friend Charlotte Twight), “participatory fascism.” (Never mind that the elections are often rigged and fraudulent.) Moreover, many countries have established institutions for permitting aggrieved citizens a measure of due process in contesting the government’s treatment of their persons and property and allowing them a public voice in expressing their preferences for government action. (Never mind that this ostensible due process is largely spurious.)

This type of regime, amigos mios, is clearly the wave of the future. Unlike full-fledged socialism, which leads to totalitarian rule, mass poverty and economic decay, participatory fascism not only placates people’s wish to participate in the formal process of government decision-making, but also permits private entrepreneurs enough room for maneuver that they can in some cases get rich; also enough that they can keep national output at a tolerably high level and in some cases even generate positive economic growth. Hence this system, even if it contains the seeds of its own destruction, does not destroy itself nearly as quickly as full-fledged socialism does. And meanwhile the politicians and their cronies who dominate the system smile all the way to the bank.

The post Socialism Is Dead; Participatory Fascism Has Triumphed appeared first on The Beacon.

Ender’s Game, the #1 New York Times bestseller, was made into a 2013 film starring Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis, Abigail Breslin, and Ben Kingsley.

Finally, after much encouragement from my college freshman daughter, I just finished reading Ender’s Game, the best-selling science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card that won the Nebula and Hugo awards when it was published in the mid-1980s. The story follows the cultivation of a 6-year-old, boy-wonder, military tactician, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, as he is prepared to lead a massive intergalactic war that threatens Earth and the entire human race.

This book should be on the reading list of every free-market economist and libertarian. It’s the only novel I’ve read to date that fuses the fundamental problem of market coordination and the value of dispersed knowledge with the essence of individual liberty (although this is fully revealed only at the end). The main plot and character arc of Ender can be read as an allegory that brings to life the core conflict between markets (and liberty) and central planning, all in the context of interplanetary warfare.

The story is also implicitly critical of the authoritarian world in which Ender lives—strict population control limits families to two children although Ender is a Third because the military authorities considered the genetic makeup of his family “promising”—likely to produce a military commander capable of leading the interplanetary fleet. Religion has also been banned, although Ender’s family doesn’t abandon many of these fundamental beliefs. Ender is raised with a strong allegiance and loyalty to his family as a result.

The story is very humanist. It’s primarily a character-driven story, effectively showing the human toll on Ender and his fellow child soldiers (Suzanne Collins anyone?) during their training for total war. No one will come away from Ender’s Game thinking that the violence total war requires is either compassionate or, for that matter, necessary. Whether it is Just is a bit more controversial, but I won’t spoil too much of the plot and ending in this post.

Rather, it’s the source of Ender’s genius that is so central to the plot and the broader lessons about individualism, liberty, and the value of markets. Ender has a startling degree of empathy. He understands the motivations and psyche of his friends and his enemies. And, as a commander, he allows his officers to lead, take risks, and use their judgement. Even when he is outnumbered, Ender is able to use the creativity of his sub-commanders to gain advantage. In fact, Ender’s insubordination—his willingness to take risks and follow his own path–is an essential part of his development as a commander. This is the entrepreneurialism that forms the heart of much free-market economics, particularly Austrian economics.

In contrast, his enemy, “the buggers,” are directed by a central commander. A Queen Bee, if you will. The enemy’s strategy is centrally coordinated. More uniquely, their entire strategy is based on complete and instantaneous knowledge of the central planners goals, values, and directives. It is a true collective. Even in this ideal setting, the centrally coordinated strategy is less adaptable, less nimble, less robust, and, ultimately, less resilient.

Thus, Card has set up a battle of values and social systems, not just military strategies. Ender instinctively and effectively utilizes the intelligence of all the individuals in his fleet by letting them use their decentralized and fragmented knowledge, expertise, and skills to make critical decisions in the field, including being alert to new opportunities (entrepreneurship) and being accountable for their actions. While Ender still plays the commander, he learns that his effectiveness increases by giving his friends more freedom, not less. Humans survive the war, thus showing the benefits of individual freedom over central planning.

But Ender’s Game is more than an allegory for the economic coordination problem (and calculation debate). It’s also a tale of misunderstanding, insensitivity, and the needless destruction brought about by total war. The military commanders get what they want–the ruthless destruction of an enemy–but the book calls into question in a very fundamental sense what an enemy is. I won’t spoil the ending, but the message is a profound call for the objective value of life and humility in interpreting the intent and actions of others.

Card’s writing style is so crisp, direct, lean that it makes Hemingway seem verbose. While many literary mavens will clamor for more description and rhetorical flare, the benefit is a fast paced novel that ends up focusing more on the psychology and emotional conflicts of the protagonist than the setting and environment. The fast pace and streamlined writing is driven by dialogue and the inner thoughts of Ender, and this probably explains why the book is popular with teens and young adults as well.

But, like most good science fiction, the ideas are what has given Ender’s Game heft and shelf life, and these ideas are fundamentally celebratory of individual liberty, hostile to the violence of warfare, and, even if indirectly, pro free market.

The post The Hayekian Liberty of <i>Ender’s Game</i> appeared first on The Beacon.

Here are some excerpts:

Two wars necessitated vast curtailments of liberty, and we have grown, though grumblingly, accustomed to our chains. The increasing complexity and precariousness of our economic life have forced Government to take over many spheres of activity once left to choice or chance. Our intellectuals have surrendered first to the slave-philosophy of Hegel, then to Marx, finally to the linguistic analysts. . . . The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good—anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which whole lives are their business.

I write ‘they’ because it seems childish not to recognize that actual government is and always must be oligarchical. Our effective masters must be more than one and fewer than all. But the oligarchs begin to regard us in a new way. . . .

I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer? Admittedly, when man was untamed, such liberty belonged only to the few. I know. Hence the horrible suspicion that our only choice is between societies with few freemen and societies with none.

Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man.

Thirdly, I do not like the pretensions of Government—the grounds on which it demands my obedience—to be pitched too high. I don’t like the medicine-man’s magical pretensions nor the Bourbon’s Divine Right. This is not solely because I disbelieve in magic and in Bossuet’s Politique. [Jacques Benigne Bossuet, Politique tiree des propres paroles de L’Ecriture-Sainte (Paris, 1709).] I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands ‘Thus saith the Lord’, it lies, and lies dangerously.

On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They ‘cash in’. It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science. Perhaps the real scientists may not think much of the tyrants’ ‘science’—they didn’t think much of Hitler’s racial theories or Stalin’s biology. But they can be muzzled. . . .

A hungry man thinks about food, not freedom. We must give full weight to the claim that nothing but science, and science globally applied, and therefore unprecedented Government controls, can produce full bellies and medical care for the whole human race: nothing, in short, but a world Welfare State. It is a full admission of these truths which impresses upon me the extreme peril of humanity at present.

We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other. In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves, in order to eat. So in society. Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers—a war-lord who can save us from the barbarians—a Church that can save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to them bound and blindfold, if only they will! Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish them not to. Yet we can hardly bear that they should.

The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting?

Let us make no mistake about the sting. The Swedish sadness is only a foretaste. To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death—these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow.

All this threatens us even if the form of society which our needs point to should prove an unparalleled success. But is that certain? What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about ‘Man taking charge of his own destiny’. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?

The post C.S. Lewis on the Welfare State: Dangers of Obamacare appeared first on The Beacon.

The Road to Serfdom, by F.A. Hayek

The book had a profound effect on the thinking of people worldwide and created a new wave of insight that hindered the growth of statism in many countries and reversed it in some.

However now, building upon a many decades-old escalation of government power in the U.S., including the huge explosion of federal power and spending under George W. Bush, Barack Obama is proving to be not a champion of real change but a sorry caricature of the true believer in foolish pursuit of a dangerous agenda based on the exact myths of collectivism and statism that Hayek warned about.

Americans and people worldwide would be well-advised to read Hayek’s great book, which after thirty-two printings is more timely now than ever. In the meantime, here is a video based on the cartoon portrayal of the book as originally published in 1950 by Look Magazine.

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