[1] A Walk Through Liberty Garden - Principles and Expediency

"Freedom can be preserved only by following principles and is destroyed by following expediency

From the insight that the benefits of civilization rest on the use of more knowledge [dispersed across a given population] than can be used in any deliberately concerted effort [directed by government or any other commanding force], it follows that it is not in our power to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable."

(Hayek, "Law, Legislation and Liberty" [LLL], Volume 1, Chicago, 1973, p. 56. All additions, included in square brackets, [ ], are from the author of the blog.)

This passage is very important, as it contrasts the liberal ( = libertarian) view against the approach taken and accepted by the vast majority - certainly in Germany.

Due to the almost irresistible lure of a false analogy, the non-libertarian concept of government is widely adopted - i.e. the fundamental idea that a country needs to be "run" by government .

Our perceptions are geared toward controlled environments, for in life, we are quite naturally preoccupied with planned efforts such as managing the household budget, putting together a piece of furniture, and even much of science, which we study at school for years on end, tends to focus on scenarios that are under our control or ought to be (- ever noticed that physics is hardly ever dealing with more than two or three variables, relatively simple relationships, which admittedly may be very hard to find out about?)

By contrast, the unseen, roundabout and abstract is not within our natural purview.

Therefore, it is tempting to conceptualize as many aspects of life in terms of a controlled or controllable environment, which by definition contains a conveniently finite number of variables, a manageable set of operative factors . Thus, it is convenient to explain the fortune of an entrepreneur by the idea that he has exploited someone - taken away something from someone. It is much harder to reconstruct and have clear perceptions and strong feelings about an almost infinitely complex process in which the creation of an entrepreneur's fortune is truly embedded.

Incidentally, this kind of attention deficit vis-à-vis the complex gives anti-capitalist intuitions and prejudices an enormous advantage over accounts more faithful to the authentic goings-on.

In the 2001 edition of his "The Market System", Charles Lindblom writes: "Indeed, in our time the market system has become a global coordinator of cooperative performances of at least 2 billion people. No other method of social cooperation matches the market system in scope and detail. We are often disposed to give first place to the state as an organizer of cooperation. But no government has ever organized so many people in such an articulated and detailed assignment of performances...which lock many millions of people into specific coordinating roles. Moreover, there exists a global market system but no world state. Even within one country the market system organizes a detailed cooperation - millions of assignments to precisely defined roles - that state or government has rarely attempted and never accomplished." (p. 41)

We are dealing with an immensely intricate universe of relationships that can, at best, be accounted for in terms of an abstract pattern. It is not something that can be experienced in its whole.

Any effort to achieve this kind of coordination by fiat, any attempt to treat it as something within the purview of a planner has failed miserably, without ever coming remotely near to the quality and wealth produced by the market system.

Stalin and Mao brought about abject failure because they thought it within their power "to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable."

To all intents and purposes, this mindset is also characteristic of politicians in the West, who must sell to the electorate concrete goals, concrete causes and concrete effects, promising "to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable."

But then, what is required to make people coordinate spontaneously, thereby achieving feats "that state or government has rarely attempted and never accomplished"?

The answer: "[A] condition of liberty in which all are allowed to use their knowledge for their purposes, restrained only by rules of just conduct of universal application, is likely to produce for them the best conditions for achieving their aims; and...such a system is likely to be achieved and maintained only if all authority, including that of the majority of the people, is limited in the exercise of coercive power by general principles..." (Hayek, p.55)

The human individual has unfathomable potential, knowledge and purpose that can never be known and appreciated by central agents wielding power over him. To ensure that this potential is put to best use, people must not be told what to do, instead they ought to be left to their own devices and be restrained only by rules that guarantee to each an inviolable private domain within which he is free to act as he sees fit. Within that framework the nexus of mutual adaptations and cooperation is so vast and resourceful as to surpass any arrangements that can be effected by conscious design and command.

This is why I call our society an abstract order, it is not a controllable environment and can only be turned into a controlled environment in parts (always only in parts) on pain of terrible destruction in material and human terms.

It is essentially a self-generating order. As such it is subject to different rules than a controlled environment. The latter depends heavily on commands, specific directives, which reflect the intellectual and operative control of the maker.

A self-generating order, however, relies on rules designed to maximize the knowledge and operative capabilities dispersed among millions of people and that no single "maker" can ever acquire. That is why freedom is indispensable in a self-generating order of human beings.

"The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. The first requisite for this is that we become aware of men's necessary ignorance of much that helps him to achieve his aims. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in its more advanced forms which we call 'civilization,' rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he himself has acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not possess himself. " (Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Chicago 1978, p. 22)

By applying rules (of the command type) as if a ruling body were not subject to such limitations of knowledge, we reduce the intelligence of a society to the purview of a narrow selection of minds and, hence, force it to be infinitely less intelligent than it would be in the presence of free interaction among its members. Thus, the defence of civilization requires principles that defend the free interaction of people against the expediency of the moment or the expediency of a group. Free people, while able to follow their own aims and live by their personal values, generate far more and better knowledge than the pawns of a collective marshalled by the pragmatism of their leaders, which inexorably leads to socialism, the inefficient and inhumane outcome when a few commanding minds acquire the power to replace the hyperintelligence of a civilizatory order.

Freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages.

We need to adhere to strict principles in order to protect individual freedom, whose suppression has negative consequences that are hard to put a finger on, while the pragmatists' promises of concrete attainments take advantage of our propensity to value graphic stories:

"Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will not be known. The direct effects of any interference with the market order will be near and clearly visible in most cases, while the more indirect and remote effects will mostly be unknown and will therefore be disregarded. We shall never be aware of all the costs of achieving particular results by such interference." (LLL, Vol. 1, p.56)