[1] Liberty - Adam Smith

The great achievement of his famous discussion about the division of labour was the recognition that men who were governed in their efforts, not by the known concrete needs and capacities of their intimate fellows, but by the abstract signals of the prices at which things were demanded and offered on the market, were thereby enabled to serve the enormous field of the 'great society' that 'no human wisdom and knowledge could ever be sufficient' to survey. In spite of the 'narrowness of his comprehension' individual man, when allowed to use his own knowledge for his own purposes...was placed in a position to serve men and their needs, and use men and their skills, who were wholly outside the range of his perception.

The great society indeed became possible by the individual directing his own efforts not towards visible wants but towards what the signals of the market represented as the likely gain of receipts over outlay.

The practices by which the great commercial centres had become rich were shown to enable the individual to do much more good and to serve much greater needs than if he let himself be guided by the observed needs and capacities of his neighbours.

It is an error that Adam Smith preached egotism: his central thesis said nothing about how the individual should use his increased product; and his sympathies were all with the benevolent use of the increased income.

He was concerned with how to make it possible for people to make their contribution to the social product as large as possible; and this he thought required that they were paid what their services were worth to those to whom they rendered them.

But this teaching nevertheless offended a deeply ingrained instinct that man had inherited from the earlier face-to-face society, the horde or the tribe, in which through hundreds of thousands of years the emotions were formed which still govern him after he has entered the open society. These inherited instincts demand that man should aim at doing a visible good to his known fellows (the 'neighbour' of the Bible).

These are the feelings that still, under the name of 'social justice', govern all socialist demands and easily engage the sympathies of all good men, but which are irreconcilable with the open society to which today all the inhabitants of the West owe the general level of their wealth.

The demand for 'social justice', for an assignment of the shares in the material wealth to the different people and groups according to their needs and merits, on which the whole of socialism is based, is thus an atavism, a demand which cannot be reconciled with the open society in which the individual may use his own knowledge for his own purposes.

The recognition that a man's efforts will benefit more people, and on the whole satisfy greater needs, when he lets himself be guided by the abstract signals of prices rather than by perceived needs, and that by this method we can best overcome our constitutional ignorance of most of the particular facts, and can make the fullest use of the knowledge of concrete circumstances widely dispersed among millions of individuals, is the great achievement of Adam Smith.

F.A. Hayek, Adam Smith (1723-1790): His Message in Today's Language, Daily Telegraph, London, March 9, 1976

[67] News from Absurdistan - From a Slave's Point of View

Yesterday, I had a conversation about state-ordained bans of smoking, an issue that I will have to write about more fully soon.

I was told that publicans are faced with divergent views on the matter, and that some of them seem not to be able or willing to handle the controversy by taking a personal stance on how the issue should be dealt with on their own private property.

So let the state decide.

(The fact that some pubs, indeed a large number of them, are privately owned is characteristically overlooked when people argue about smoking in "public places".)

Diversity of opinion, diversity in the way in which people decide to go about shaping their property and private sphere is too much of a burden on the individual in modern-day Germany.

So let the state decide.

Some think parents should treat their children one way, some think they should treat them differently. It is hard to decide how to treat your children in the face of so much diversity.

So let the state decide.

This is common sense in Germany.

I suspect, this is one of the reasons why Germans are dying out (more of them dying than being borne), while pet animals - especially cats and dogs - are on the rise.

For those having unlearned the art of personal responsibility, children are, indeed, too much of a challenge.

By contrast, pets do not have to be dealt with "democratically" - with them, you do not have to give up what you should be standing for, because a tyrannical majority overrules your conviction, and - by the constant application of that force - moulds your beliefs until you cannot tell them from what you are only being told to think and do.

Actually, remote control of what you are all about, crude incursions into your conscience, the collectivisation of morality will keep encroaching upon you even though you prefer to raise pets rather than children (in the hope to be left with something genuinely of your own) - but then: pets are just pets, are they not - like yourself, lucky or unlucky, as the case my be, depending on the fortuity of whatever happen to be the whims of your owner.

We are taught to think that the state owes us a living, and forget that by assuming this attitude, we increasingly owe the state our life.