The First "Fiscal Conservative"

         FA Hayek

Wesleyan University professor Richard Adelstein introduced  me to FA Hayek almost twenty years ago, but I had never read his seminal work, The Road to Serfdom until this week. I knew Hayek was the classic conservative economist, who placed his faith in markets and who mistrusted big government planning more than anything. I knew that, through the University of Chicago, he spread his influence such that he was, in some ways, the founder of the American libertarian movement.


I had no idea, however, how lucidly and powerfully he wrote, nor how truly liberal he was. In fact, Hayek used the word "liberal" in the old, 19th-century way -- to mean those opposed to dictatorship and those who believed in the right and the power of the individual to decide his own fate.

For Hayek, the conflict was  not between government on one hand and liberty on the other, but between governments that helped facilitate liberty and governments that suppressed it. Mostly, he feared central planning, the effort to make government decide the values -- economic and otherwise -- of all people with goal being perfect efficiency and perfect equality. Planners, he feared, were the first step on the way to totalitarianism because they believed that some rational eye in the sky could decide for everyone what was good and right.

But Hayek was not anti-government. Unlike today's Tea Party types, who eschew all government, Hayek believed it was essential for wealthy societies to provide some minimal quality of life for everyone by funding programs including -- wait for it -- government-sponsored health care. He figured that programs like these only allowed more opportunity for serious individual decision-making. In fact, his second-greatest fear was a drastic difference between rich and poor because it might provoke the kind of thinking that led to Hitler in German and Stalin in the USSR.

I wish the whack-jobs in our political arena could read and understand Hayek, so we could get to the real business at hand and stop wasting our time debating nonsense.