Hayek’s “The Mirage of Social Justice”

March 21, 2010

“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way people would like the world to work – whereas economics represents the way it actually does work” (Levitt & Dubner, Freakonomics, p. 11).

In Law Legistlation, and Liberty: The Mirage of Social Justice (Vol. 2, University of Chicago Press, 1976), Friedrich Hayek explores the concept of “social justice” or distributive justice, which he finds wanting and destructive of any real understanding of justice. Due to its complexity, it is difficult to do justice to Hayek’s argument against the political application of the concept of social justice in a brief article, but attempt to do so I will. Hayek begins his argument by contrasting the difference between a general rule (as in the Rule of Law) and the public interest, which he defines as a collection of private interests or majority rule. The former must be universally applicable to all citizens, whereas the latter merely implements the preferences of the majority. For example, today American citizens commonly think that the Supreme Court should reach decisions that coincide with the opinions of the majority of the voting public, a view which is reflected in the philosophy of judicial activism and the idea that the Constitution is a “living document” that must reflect the current mores of the citizenry. Thus, when deciding upon such cases as abortion and affirmative action, the Supreme Court begins to take on the duties of a legislative body, handing down “progressive” decisions in line with contemporary morality, whereas according to the intent of the Founders, the Supreme Court was supposed to only determine whether legislative acts were Constitutional or not and the unenumerated powers to enact social policy were to be the venue of the state legislatures. The Founding Fathers did not consider it to be the Supreme Court’s role to act as a legislative body, reflecting the will of the majority (or in the above cases, an elitist and powerful minority). As James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper, No. 10, “Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”

In Hayek’s view, justice in the Open Society concerned “rules of just conduct,” which he defined as “those end-independent rules which serve the formation of a spontaneous order, in contrast to the end-dependent rules of organization” (p. 31). In other words, in a free society that is not planned and controlled by a central authority, the rules must be fair and equally applicable to all, as in a baseball game, and not be directed towards a preferred outcome, as in picking winners and losers. This is the exact opposite, for example, of the tenets of affirmative action or outcome based education, however compensatory those policies might be.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Egalitarianism, Hayek, Liberalism, Marxism | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by markamagi

Of Good and Evil, Right and Left

March 11, 2010

“In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from God. Of course, there is a price.” Sister Aloysius Beauvier, Doubt

Having seen the movie, I recently read the novel, The Kite Runner. Partly a coming of age movie, what the German Romantics would have called a Bildungsroman, a novel about building character, it’s the story of an Afghan boy, Amir, his betrayal of his Hazara friend,  Hassan, and Amir’s guilt and suffering, and his eventual redemption as an adult, as he rescues his murdered friend’s son from Taliban occupied Afghanistan.

Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | Afghanistan, Islam, Left liberalism, Liberalism, Political correctness | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by markamagi

Libertarianism: Left or Right?

February 8, 2010

I generally refer to my political philosophy as conservative libertarian, in order to distinguish it from left libertarianism or modern American “Progressive liberalism.” Hayek’s preferred term, “classical liberalism,” causes too much confusion in contemporary political discourse, although when I say that I am a conservative libertarian what I mean is that I want to conserve the classical liberalism of America’s Founders, with such core principles as individual and economic freedom, limited government, and the rule of law. Whatever confusion has come about regarding political nomenclature, at least in America, is largely a result of the Progressive movement and the fact that it has turned the term “liberal” on its head to mean one who favors a concentration of power in the hands of the state and as one who advocates state intervention in most facets of life, whether Constitutional or not. The Republican Party and the conservative movement, to a large degree, have gone along with this distortion of the understanding of the political term “liberalism,” to such a degree that the term has now become a derogatory epithet that not even the left will own up to, the preferred term now being Progressive. And to add to the confusion: while in nineteenth century speech, “liberal” was in opposition to “conservative,” in that earlier era a conservative was someone who favored a monarchy and aristocracy, and was usually opposed to free institutions and free markets, whereas a contemporary conservative is in favor of such things.

Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments | Conservatism, Egalitarianism, Left liberalism, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Political correctness, US politics, liberty | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by markamagi

Some thoughts on liberalism in Europe and America

February 2, 2010

  Among right wing thinkers in both Europe and North America there is often debate about which continent is more politically correct, with American commentators like Mark Steyn arguing Europe is by far the worst off, and the European New Right arguing that American is the primary source of modern liberalism.

 However, rather than getting into a parochial blame game about who’s the more corrupting influence, I think it’s more interesting to look at how the influence of left liberalism differs between the two continents and what this reveals about their political traditions.

Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments | Education, Europe, Left liberalism, Liberalism, US politics, United States | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

Left liberals and power

January 10, 2010

One of the more misleading claims of some right-wing thinkers, particularly libertarians, is that left liberals are totalitarians with a love for authority.

 Certainly it’s true that the liberal left usually supports interventionist government, but this is not due to a natural love of authority, but an emotional dislike of traditional forms of authority like the church and family.

Contemporary left-liberal thinking arguably began in the late 18th Century with enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau and Godwin who believed that man is good but is everywhere enslaved by unnecessary authority and traditional morality. The subsequent history of left-liberal thinking is the history of emancipatory rhetoric – emancipation from traditional gender roles, freedom from long hours of hard work, freedom from social and parental authority, freedom from the church, freedom from military service, freedom from bourgeois morality.

 Although Karl Marx’s Das Kapital advocates the implementation of communist totalitarianism, his work is full of emancipatory language, and the ultimate aim of his ideology is an anarchist utopia free from traditional or bourgeois authority. The radical ideas of thinkers like Marx are therefore an example of radical liberalism (individual freedom achieved through extreme means) rather than authoritarian collectivism for its own sake. American left wing intelletual Noam Chomsky provides a good example of an anti-authoritarian left liberal. Chomsky attacks any and every manifestation of American power on the international scene and advocates a vague form of anarchism, which he, like Marx before him, conveniently fails to outline in detail.

 While the liberal right also believes strongly in individual freedom, and predates left liberalism in this regard, it places a greater number of checks and balances on what the individual can and can’t do. For example, the individual is expected to respect the legal system, accept the authority of the police and the military, and respect the rights of private property owners. It also tends to take a neutral line on other forms of social organisation like organised religion, accepting whatever social relations people have worked out through free association. Without such checks and balances, freedom negates itself since one individual is free to take away the freedom of another. Today classical liberalism is most strongly supported in the Unitest States, where religion and federalism help to act as conservative counter-weights to classical liberalism’s more radical off-shoots like left libertarianism.

 Thus left-wing liberalism and right-wing liberalism both share a desire for greater individual autonomy, but differ over methods, with the right liberals believing the means shouldn’t justify the ends, and the more politically savvy left liberals believing that autonomy can only be achieved by overthrowing the traditional order through collective action, and by sharing economic resources so that each man or woman is free to pursue their ‘higher’ desires as a rational being. As Marx temptingly put it, in a socialist utopia the individual should be free to “do one thing to-day and another to-morrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner”.

To the extend that the modern liberal state has become increasingly authoritian, it is because either the majority hold traditional views which clash with left-liberal thinking, and so need to be checked by more and more “progressive” legislation, or because the practical application of left-liberal policies leads to social instability or violence. The breakdown of the traditional nuclear family for example, has led to an unintended increase in domestic violence, which has necessitated greater state involvement in family affairs.

Some on the traditional right claim that the left is fully aware that the implementation of its policies will increase violence and instability, and uses the disruption caused by liberal reforms as a means of pushing through further left-liberal legislation. However, since most left-liberals genuinely appear to believe in egalitarian ideology, it seems unlikely they are using this as a deliberate tactic – after all, such cynical tactics would bring into question the left-liberal belief that people are inherently good.

Furthermore, not everyone on the left even supports strong central government. A significant number of left-wing anarchists have an irrational hatred of all forms of authority, and, as in the early years of the 20th century, are again becoming a serious threat to law and order in a number of inner city areas in Europe.

The incorrect labelling of left liberals as authoritarians, also misrepresents the political significance of fascists and populists. Many on the libertarian left try to argue the case that Fascism is part of the same school of thinking as radical left liberalism, but this glosses over the historical fact that few liberal progressives have ever identified with fascist political movements, and that most nationalists thinkers have a general dislike of enlightenment thought.

Although Mussolini was a former communist, both the Italian and Spanish Fascists in the 1920s and 1930s violently crushed all progressive left-wing economic movements (socialist and anarchist) and were generally supportive of the Catholic church and bourgeois society. Similarly, most left-wing progressives and trade unionists in English-speaking countries supported the communists in the Spanish Civil War, while centre-right politicians like Winston Churchill frequently sympathised with the Fascists in Italy.

 It was only the particularly extreme and idiosyncratic Nazi’s that described their brand of Fascism as a type of socialism. If communism can be described as radical left liberalism, then Nazism can be described as a particularly extreme form of radical conservatism that aimed to revive semi-mythical pagan values from before the age of Christianity.

 In contrast to Marxism, populism actually is what it says on the tin – a political ideology that, for better or worse, promotes the interests of the working and lower middle classes. While left liberals identify with the weak, and right wingers with the strong, populists strive to defend to interests of the battler in the middle. Populists may clash with conservatives and right wing liberals over economic matters, but this is more about specific issues of economic justice or social stability than a general desire for radical change or expanded government.

1 Comment | Authoritarianism, Conservatism, Fascism, Left liberalism, Liberalism, Political princieples, Radical Liberalism, freedom, political principles, statism | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

Political Definitions: Conservative, Liberal, and Libertarian

August 2, 2009

Liberalism, Conservatism, and Statism

So-called “Liberalism” is in the very air we breathe; it permeates the air with the media, newspapers, TV, the entertainment industry, movies, and music. Schoolchildren are imbued with the air of liberalism from their first day of school right through to their graduation from colleges and universities. Unless one is brought up in a deliberately conservative Christian environment, it is the worldview we grow up with. But what is often forgotten is that liberalism has a history; a history marked by a dramatic change in the meaning of liberalism and how it is defined. Prior to the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, liberalism in America connoted belief in liberty and limited government, the Rule of Law in which equality before the law was a core principle but equality of condition was not because only by government intervention and redistribution of wealth could the latter be achieved, at the cost of economic freedom. Political liberalism first arose out of the English “Rule of Law” tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was this tradition that was transplanted to the American colonies, and eventually gave birth to constitutional government in America. Hayek wrote that the rule of law is “sometimes confused with the requirement of mere legality in all government action”:

The rule of law . . . presupposes complete legality, but this is not enough: if a law gave the government unlimited power to act as it pleased, all its actions would be legal, but it would certainly not be under the rule of law. (The Constitution of Liberty, 1959, p. 205)

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | American Conservative, Conservatism, Liberalism, Libertarianism, statism | Permalink
Posted by markamagi

The anti-Maginot mentality

May 21, 2009

In contemporary history books, the Maginot Line, the series of fortifications build by the French Army in the 1930s to repel a German invasion, symbolises the folly of defensive thinking.

The standard narrative is that the backward-looking French chose a static means of defending themselves from attack and so succumbed to a simple bypassing maneuver by the more mobile and progressively-minded Germans.

This idea that defensive tactics are impractical and outdated ties in nicely with contemporary, progressive thinking in general.

Trying to contain a potential pandemic is costly and unrealistic. Building a wall to stop illegal immigration isn’t a viable option. Containing an unpleasant dictator without regime change won’t work. Joining a superstate is the best way to unsure peace. Turning away foreign labour will destroy a country’s economy.

The way to deal with todays’ international problems is simply accept them, reinterpret them as positives, or go on the attack. Only a backward-thinking, WWI-era reactionary would think problems can be tackled through defensive measures.

Given the dominance of anti-defensive thinking in the modern West, perhaps we should consider how stupid that supposed showcase of defensive thinking, the Maginot Line, actually was.

Certainly the Maginot Line strategy was a questionable one, and the failure to built defenses in the Ardenne sector was a foolish oversight. However, the most foolish aspect of the Maginot Line strategy wasn’t so much the building of the line itself, which made reasonable sense, but the failure of the French to follow their defensive strategy to its logical conclusion.

Contrary to popular belief, the French did not originally intend to leave the border with Belgium undefended. The Maginot Line was intended to link up with a series of Belgium defenses to provide a defensive line running all the way to the coast.

In the event of the line being breached, the French had built up a large defensive Army, well-equipped with heavy tanks and artillery, which they believed was capable on taking on a German army with more mobile, but lightly-armoured tanks.

In 1936 though, the Belgians declared neutrality, which seriously comprimised the original strategy. Taking advantage of the division between France and Belgium, the Germans launched an attack in May 1940 which pierced the unsupported Belgium defensive line and enabled the Germans Army to roll on towards France.

Meanwhile instead of leaving Belgium to its fate, the French rashly decided to advance into Belgium with their large, lumbering, defensive Army, leaving a gaping hole in their rear. The Germans then launched a second attack through the Ardenne sector, leaving the over-stretched French cut-off from their supply lines and badly exposed to German air attack.

The logical response from the French, would have been to dig in, leave Belgium to its fate and reinforce the Ardenne sector. This would have narrowed the front and allowed them to engage the Germans using familiar defensive tactics on ground of their own choosing. In 1944, the Germans themselves used such tactics against the Allies, with the hedgerow country of Northern France proving ideal terrain for mechanised defensive warfare using heavy tanks and artillery.

The folly of the French decision to advance into Belgium was highlighted by the fact that they fought much better in the later stages of the campaign, when they were able to use their heavy tanks and guns defensively in prepared ambush situations. However, by this stage it was too late as most of their forces had already been overwhelmed in the German blitzrieg through the Low Countries.

Also forgotten by the critics of the Maginot Line, is that the Germans couldn’t have launched their daring attack through the Ardenne without their own defensive line, the Seigfried Line, which protected them from a French counterattack to the south.

Given the Germans superiority in air power, organisation and morale, it’s likely that the French would probably still have lost eventually, but by succumbing so easily, they gave Hitler a popular mandate for the invasion of Russia, a decision that lead to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people.

The Germans in 1940 weren’t too keen on another costly war with a major power but, like most people, were perfectly willing to go to war for an easy victory against a long-time adversary.

The fallout from Hitler’s fateful decision to invade Russia of course still haunts us today, through the hysterical anti-nationalism it’s helped to engender among the modern liberal left.

Rather than being an example of the superiority of progressive thinking, the failure of the Maginot Line in 1940 symbolises the importance of old-fashioned common sense and prudence – if in doubt, then stick with tactics that you already know.

1 Comment | France, Liberalism, Military history | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

Ethics and liberal values

April 4, 2009

“Being smart is cooler than anything in the world” said Michelle Obama to a group of London secondary school children this week.

Well, I’m sure this was a well intentioned statement, but I don’t think it was a particularly smart one.

Intelligence is not something children have much control over, especially by the time they reach adolescence.

Something children have somewhat more control over, is their actions. Instead of telling kids to be smart, and therefore setting most of them up for a life of disappointment, why not just tell them to try to be good.

In an age of rising crime, corruption and corporate greed, surely one of the best things influential public figures can do is to promote traditional standards of moral behaviour, since being a decent person is something that students of all levels of academic ability are potentially capable of.

Unfortunately though, high moral standards don’t seem to be considered particularly important to many of today’s liberal elites.

Provided someone adheres to the prevailing ideology of tolerance and diversity then traditional values like honesty, integrity, courage and hard work aren’t considered that important, or if they are, they’ ve been so watered down as to be virtually meaningless.

The modern liberal definition of courage, for example, has now been widened to include any action in which someone endures something moderately unpleasant or mildly dangerous. Previously the word courage was reserved for instances in which someone risked their own life to selflessly help others.

Mark Richardson addresses the conflict between liberal ideology and traditional morality in a recent post on his Oz Conservative blog.

1 Comment | Ethics, Liberalism | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

Some thoughts on Muslim assimilation

March 12, 2009

It’s assumed by most western liberals that it’s only fundamentalist Muslims who lash out at western culture or get angry about criticism of Islam, and that mainstream Muslims are fine with cartoons of Allah or women in short skirts.

Both right and left liberals believe that Muslims can be successfully assimilated into western culture and that this is the best way of protecting western society from Muslim militancy.

The two sides only differ in approach.

Left liberals pursue a softly-softly diplomatic strategy which seeks to appease older Muslims through a pro-Muslim foreign policy while slowing enticing young Muslims into western liberal ways through the power of consumerism and liberal education. They believe that if right liberal “hot-heads” like Dutchman Geert Wilders can be shut up then eventually the fundamentalist Muslims will mellow out and turn into semi-western moderates who’ll respect women and homosexuals and support western values like freedom of speech.

Conversely, right liberals want a more overt approach which forces Muslims to swear allegiance to western values, and puts pressure on nationalistic Islamic regimes such as Iran and Libya to desist from anti-western policies.

However, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence to support the idea that “moderate” Muslims are a lot more tolerant of western values than fundamentalists, so moderating fundamentalist Muslims probably won’t turn them pro-western liberals

For a long time in the West we’ve had fundamentalist Christian minorities, like the Brethren and Mormons that are clearly more tolerant of mainstream western values than many so-called moderate Muslims.

If western religious fundamentalists acted the same way Muslim fundamentalists did, we’d see Mennonites burning cars in Washington and Exclusive Brethren burning effigies of liberal leaders in Canberra and Wellington.

Furthermore, as Samuel Huntington pointed out, the Iranian Muslims seen on television burning effigies of Salmon Rushdie or US presidents aren’t necessarily backward, fundamentalist Muslims – many are educated, moderate Muslims who don’t wish to live alongside western liberalism, but want to replace it with a modern, internationalist Islam.

While modern, “moderate” Islam may be less extreme than the Islamic fundamentalism of radical traditionalists like the Taleban, it’s still strongly anti-Western. Islamic moderates may be more progressive and egalitarian than fundamentalists in Afghanistan and Sudan, but they still support religious interference in politics, commerce, law and scientific research and have little respect for western notions of free speech (if they did they wouldn’t be so touchy about a few cartoons in a Danish newspaper).

The most worrying aspect of modern Islam though, isn’t so much it’s cultural incompatibility with western values as its aggressive internationalism.

Echoing the dangerous “grow or die’” ideology of radical-liberal communism, modern Islam seeks to spread itself around the globe, undermine long established cultures and knock over rival ideologies.

If moderate Muslims were particularists, with little interest in spreading Islamic views to non-Islamic countries, than you wouldn’t see so many Muslims around the globe protesting about ‘anti-Islamic’ events in far-off countries like Israel and Denmark. Since the native Danes for example, aren’t Muslims, they have no obligation to respect Allah in there own country. Only if Danes travel to Muslim countries and insult Allah do Muslims have a right to complain.

Modern liberalism is also an aggressive, internationalist ideology and there’s a danger that further liberal attempts to integrate Muslims into western society will only make Muslims more globalist and therefore more determined to undermine their host nations and network with Muslims in other countries to oppose western interests.

As a globalist ideology Islam also has the potential to be much more dangerous than communism, since communism was a secular ideology that fell out of favour when it was unable to provide inspiring real-world examples of its over-hyped potential.

Rather than ambitiously attempting to assimilate Muslims in a liberal manner, some European New Right thinkers believe Muslim immigrants should actually be supported in their efforts to remain culturally distinct. In their view, Muslims should be encouraged to built their own mosques, live in distinct areas if they chose to, set up there own schools and follow their own customs where practical.

That way the host populace doesn’t need to seriously compromise it’s own culture to appease the Muslims, and the Muslims immigrants are taught to appreciate the thinking behind particularist polices such as immigration restrictionism.

Since liberalism also preaches equality and materialism, and reduces traditional religion to a mere lifestyle accessory, semi-westernised immigrants who are unable to compete economically are likely to blame their hosts for their NAM (non-economically assimilated minority) status and seek solace in a globalist ideology/religion. Conversely, immigrants who are able to remain culturally distinct will be less inclined to directly compare themselves with their hosts in narrowly material terms and so will have less reason to want to undermine the host culture.

Instead of seeing a war between liberalism and Islam, the European New Right sees a war between particularism and globalism in which modern Islam and post-war western liberalism are both threats that need to be contained by strengthening sovereign states and opposing globalist NGOs.

There are however a couple of areas where it is difficult to argue with the assertive assimilation approach of right liberals like Wilders. These are language and freedom of speech.

Without freedom of speech particularists will not be able to get there message across, and there will be no way to contain either Islam or liberalism’s excesses.

If Muslims living in western countries find such free speech offensive then too bad.

Similarly, all immigrants, Muslim or otherwise, should have to learn to speak the language of their host nation. It simply isn’t possible for a modern nation to function if a significant percentage of the population is unable to speech the dominant language.

People who can’t speak English in English-Speaking countries for example, can’t understand the law and culture of the country in which they live, and can only work in a limited range of jobs within there own ethnic clique. This makes them a liability to both themselves and their host country.

Leave a Comment » | Assimilation, Islam, Liberalism, Nationalism | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

The noisy fruits of liberalism

February 1, 2009

While boy racers are a minor nuisance throughout the developed world, they’ve started reaching plague proportions in some of New Zealand’s provincial cities.

Recently a documentary was shown on German T.V, which revealed the extent of the boy racer problem in Christchurch, much to the annoyance of the local tourist industry that portrays the moderately sized city as a relaxing, “English” influenced lifestyle destination (the inner city’s English appearance is debatable, given that it’s rapidly being overtaken by Asian noodles bars, junk shops and 7-11s, but that’s another story).

Christchurch businesses have been complaining about the incessant late night noise of young bogans (Australasian for chavs) in the inner suburbs for some years now, and the problem doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

This sharp rise in “white trash” behaviour is troubling for a country which has traditionally regarded itself as more civilised and understated than the U.S or Australia.

Echoing the planned settlement vision of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who failed to take into account the then undiscovered reality of regression to the mean, former NZ Prime Minister Rob Muldoon famously stated that when New Zealanders immigrated to Australia they raised the IQ level on both sides of the Tasman.

Given the genetic level-playing field between Aussie and Kiwi Caucasian youth, the sharp rise in boy racer culture in NZ must be due to social or economic differences (gosh, I’m beginning to sound like a socialist here!)

The most obvious difference is the easy availability of imported second-hand Japanese cars in New Zealand, which the Australian’s restrict to protect their domestic car industry. Naturally with so many dirt cheap ‘rice rockets’ on the market, the streets are filled with the sound of ill-tuned rotary engines, over-blown exhausts and bowel-dropping car stereos.

Helping this proto- Mad Max behaviour is liberal policing – in particular, the modern police preference for revenue gathering over punishment.

A straightforward way of containing these young hoons, would be to take their cars off them and put them in a crusher. Not only would this take a lot of old sports cars off the streets, but, coupled with proposed restrictions on the age on Japanese imports, would increase the cost of old high performance cars so fewer boy racers could afford them.

Unfortunately, such a straight forward and illiberal approach is frowned upon – why deprive boy racers of their cars when we can fine them instead, thus providing more jobs for police, lawyers and car dealers. Subsequently, our streets (and court rooms) are filled with boy racers that everyone complains about, but no one really wants to deal with.

3 Comments | Liberalism, miscellaneous curmudgeonry | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

« Previous Entries