Dissident Veteran For Peace: Keynes on Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom"

Dissident Veteran For Peace

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." —Alexis de Tocquevile. Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter XV.

With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Keynes on Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom"

In my opinion it [The Road to Serfdom] is a grand book. We all have the greatest reason to be grateful to you for saying so well what needs so much to be said. You will not expect me to accept quite all the economic dicta in it. But morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in a deeply moved agreement. ... I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say we almost certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share your own moral position. ... Moderate planning will be safe enough if those carrying it out are rightly oriented in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue. This is in fact already true of some of them. But the curse is that there is also an important section who could be said to want planning not in order to enjoy its fruits, but because morally they hold ideas exactly the opposite of yours, and wish to serve not God but the devil. -Letter of John Maynard Keynes to Friedrich Hayek

Source: Nicholas Wapshott. Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics (New York: Norton & Co., 2011) p. 198.

I've posted this quote not as a blanket endorsement of Hayek's book but because I was surprised to read that Keynes actually had something good to say about it--shows you how little I know about Keynes, I suppose. I mainly agree with the Libertarian critique of the state. It's been a long time since I read The Road to Serfdom so I can't say if this is true of Hayek but what I generally find lacking in Libertarian rhetoric is an acknowledgement of and grappling with the real threat to liberty posed by private, as opposed to state, power. As if to confirm that it turns out that General Motors bankrolled the distribution of a cartoon version of the The Road to Serfdom, which was first published in Look in February 1945 (see video below).

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