Must-Read: John Quiggin: The Political Is Personal

Must-Read: I have often wondered and never manage to get completely straight in my mind how economics lost its utilitarian roots–how it went from saying “this is a good policy because it advances the greater good of the greater number” to “competitive free-market allocations are good because they are Pareto-optimal, and we do not prefer any particular Pareto-optimal allocation because that would be a question not of science but of values and politics, and non-Pareto-optimal allocations are bad.” It has puzzled me particularly because the claim that we cannot say X is better than Y because they are not Pareto-ranked is not, in general, raised when the policy at issue issue is a GDP-increasing and either distributionally-neutral or inequality-increasing policy like tariff reductions or cuts in capital taxation…

John Quiggin: The Political Is Personal: “Pareto’s larger body of anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian thought… culminated…

…at the end of his life, in his embrace of Mussolini’s fascism. This led me to… Renato Cirillo, in 1983, defending Pareto against the charge of being a precursor of fascism… [because] Pareto:

manifested consistently a strong attachment to a type of liberalism not dissimilar to the one later attributed to Mises and Hayek…

These are rather unfortunate examples, in view of Mises writings in praise of fascism and work for the Dollfuss regime, and (even more), Hayek’s embrace of Pinochet, at the very time Cirillo was writing…. I’ve come to two conclusions…. First, for serious writers on political theory, political engagement is and ought to be the rule rather than the exception…. Someone whose political theory doesn’t lead them to have and express views on the great political issues of their day probably doesn’t much of interest to say about theory either…. Second, it makes no sense to look at the theoretical writings and ignore the political commitments…. It is easy to construct readings of Pareto, Mises and Hayek in ways that make them appear either as friends or as enemies of political liberalism. Their (remarkably similar) actions make it clear which reading is correct…. Their brand of liberalism is hostile to democracy and indifferent to political liberty, making them natural allies of any fascist regime which adheres to free-market orthodoxy in economics.

Eventually, of course, ideas outgrow their creators to the point where original intentions…. But… as long as a writer is regarded as having any personal authority, the weight of that authority must be assessed in the light of their actions as well as their words.

Nicholas Gruen: “Nice post John…

…As an admirer of Hayek’s basic insight… his lack of sympathy for the weak and powerless has always saddened me. The opposite is true of Adam Smith….

John Quiggin: “Read Hayek, but with Chile in mind at all times. That’s where his ideas ended up…

…so, whatever merit they may have, either (a) they were wrong in crucial respects; or (b) he didn’t understand and act on his own ideas. I think (a) is clearly correct. Everything he wrote, from Road to Serfdom onwards presents socialism and social democracy as an existential threat, to which a man on horseback is preferable. And his version of liberalism is one in which political liberalism is subordinated to the preservation of property rights. Applied to Chile, this implies support for Pinochet.

May 18, 2015

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