The Latest from Cafe Hayek

(Don Boudreaux)

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Ian Rowe writes beautifully, in today’s Wall Street Journal, about the arrogance and dangers of the ignorant racism that today parades as enlightenment. A slice:

The narrative that white people “hold the power” conveys a wrongheaded notion of white superiority and creates an illusion of black dependency on white largess. This false assignment of responsibility, while coming from an authentic desire to produce change, can create a new kind of mental enslavement.

Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, exposed this concern at a 2019 event sponsored by the Manhattan Institute titled “Barriers to Black Progress: Structural, Cultural or Both?” Mr. Loury was challenged with the proposition that before black people address factors within their locus of control—such as high levels of single parenthood, which create a greater likelihood of child poverty—white people’s racist attitudes and actions need to be resolved. “You just made white people, the ones who we say are the implacable, racist, indifferent, don’t-care oppressors, into the sole agents of your own delivery,” Mr. Loury said. “Really?”

David Henderson insists, correctly and rightly, that black livelihoods matter. A slice:

Economists often discuss the harmful effects of the minimum wage as an “unintended consequence.” In fact the effects were intended. Even as late as 1957, when U.S. Senators could get away with being openly racist, Senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA), at a hearing on the minimum wage, argued for increasing the minimum wage to protect white workers in the North from competition with black workers in the South.

Jeffrey Tucker – rightly angered by the stupidity of the coronavirus lockdowns – is not surprised that a free society is much smarter than are any of the individuals whose choices and actions give rise to social order. A slice:

The trouble is that a well functioning society can create an illusion that it all happens not because of the process but rather because we are so damn smart or maybe we have wise leaders with a good plan. It seems like it must be so, else how could we have become so good at what we do? Hayek’s main point is that it is a mistake to credit individual intelligence or knowledge, much less good governments with brainy leaders, with civilizational achievements; rather, the real credit belongs to institutions and processes that no one in particular controls.

In the Wall Street Journal, John Tierney reviews Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. A slice:

While industrialization causes a short-term rise in carbon emissions, in the long term it’s beneficial to the environment as people move to cities, allowing farmland to revert to nature, and as prosperity enables them to switch to cleaner and more compact forms of energy. Carbon emissions decline as people move from wood to coal to natural gas, and then ultimately to what Mr. Shellenberger calls the safest and cleanest source: nuclear energy, the only practical technology for drastically curtailing carbon emissions, if only green activists would stop trying to shut down nuclear plants.

Richard McKenzie separates the myths from the realities about Adam Smith.

Juliette Sellgren’s discussion with food-policy expert Baylen Linnekin is excellent.

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page v of the 1969 Arlington House edition of Ludwig von Mises’s 1944 Yale University Press book, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (available free-of-charge on-line here):

At the bottom of all totalitarian doctrines lies the belief that the rulers are wiser and loftier than their subjects and that they therefore know better what benefits those ruled than they themselves.

DBx: Indeed. And it’s therefore reasonable to argue that the greater are the numbers of decisions removed from the hands of individuals choosing and acting in the private sphere, the more closely does society take on characteristics of totalitarianism.

The state of society in general, and of the economy in particular, is not a toggle. Society and the economy are never, in practice, fully free or completely totalitarian. Within the freest real-world societies there loom some ideas and policies that make that society less free than it would otherwise be. Within the most totalitarian real-world societies, individuals manage to find some spheres, however small, in which they are free to act against the wishes of state officials. And it’s a matter of judgment, not science, when a society’s suppression of freedom by the state has become so expansive and determined that that society has earned the awful title “totalitarian.”

But a society need not be totalitarian, or even close to being totalitarian, in order to be infected with interventions that move it along the spectrum from “free” toward “totalitarian.” No interventions motor such a move more than do efforts of state officials to ‘direct’ the economy by suppressing people’s voluntary commercial choices and replacing these with resource-allocation decisions made by political authorities.

Protective tariffs alone might be insufficient to render a society totalitarian. But the use of protective tariffs moves a society in a totalitarian direction. By using such tariffs, a relatively small number of state officials deny to millions of persons the right to peacefully spend their incomes as these persons see fit. Resources in that society come to be more under the control, not of their owners, but of the state. Even if (contrary to all reality) these state officials are all earthly saints, and even if (contrary to all reality) their protectionist schemes ‘work’ economically exactly as protectionists promise, this protectionism nevertheless is a totalitarian virus within a society that is perhaps otherwise healthy and free.

Whenever some pundit, professor, or politician clamors for protective tariffs or for export subsidies, that person clamors for use of totalitarian methods, even though he or she is not clamoring for totalitarianism and would be horrified to realize the totalitarian nature of the policy ‘tools’ he or she proposes. And when this pundit, professor, or politician expands his or her call from tariffs and subsidies into more comprehensive industrial policy, that person calls for society to move even further along the spectrum from free to totalitarian.

The fact that even rather comprehensive industrial policy in some particular place and time might be insufficiently repressive to convince some reasonable people to label that society “totalitarian” does not mean that that society is not more infected with the totalitarian virus than it would be without industrial policy. Do not forget that all persons who advocate industrial policy believe that individuals spending and investing their own incomes do not do so as well as would state officials.

(Don Boudreaux)

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Cafe Hayek patron Felix Finch, in agreeable response to this post, sent to me the following e-mail, which I share here with his kind permission:

I had a friend who was an astrologer, and from talking about it, I believe it was a substitute for being an engineer — it has calculations, tables, formulas, esoteric data (double war time daylight savings adjustments) — all the trappings of being an engineer, without needing four years of college. I’ve often thought the same thing applies to politicians — they see caricatures of business people in movies and TV shows, all the shouting, the commands, the abrupt genius decisions — Where is that Jones report? Tell Jones he’s fired! We’ll build that plant anyway! — and that is what politics provides, all the trappings of Hollywood business people, without the need for the long years of experience and hard work.