Posted on 05/03/2007 10:08:46 AM PDT by ventanax5
In his last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), Friedrich Hayek drily underscored the oddity:
The intellectuals’ vain search for a truly socialist community, which results in the idealisation of, and then disillusionment with, a seemingly endless string of “utopias”—the Soviet Union, then Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Nicaragua—should suggest that there might be something about socialism that does not conform to certain facts. It should, but it hasn’t. And the reason, Hayek suggests, lies in the peculiar rationalism to which a certain species of intellectual is addicted. The “fatal conceit” lay in believing that, by exercising his reason, mankind could recast society in a way that was at once equitable and prosperous, orderly and conducive to political liberty.
(Excerpt) Read more at newcriterion.com ...
Looking forward to reading the long article. Kimball is an excellent writer.
Darn, I thought it was Selma Hayek.
Great post. Hayek was a genius
MONEYQUOTE:
‘“It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once”: that sentence from Hume stands as an epigraph to The Road to Serfdom. It is as pertinent today as when Hayek set it down in 1944.’
Please see also...
Thanks, bump for later
Great article!!
I loved it so much, I’m changing my tagline to include the quote from Orwell.
If you don’t first acknowledge the depravity of man, then your scheme for utopia is doomed from the start. The genius of the American experiment was designing a system to withstand the evil in men’s hearts, not pretend it didn’t exist.
photos?
Oh...damn...I thought this was about Salma....(chuckle)
Never mind.
We aim to please!
Bump for later read...I think it was kimball who said we are in a time when the study of a culture that puts a bone in it’s nose has become as worthy of study as the culture that puts a man on the moon...
Thank you for posting this.
I think Smith, Hayek and Toqueville were true geniuses.
Toqueville was better than Nostradamus. The following passage in the article is a perfect prediction of the “nanny state”.
“Hayek, like Tocqueville, saw that in modern bureaucratic societies threats to liberty often come disguised as humanitarian benefits. If old-fashioned despotism tyrannizes, democratic despotism infantilizes.
“It would,” Tocqueville writes, resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves… . It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? … [This power] extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; … it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
Is there a rule about that also? I thought it was just a rule about... uhmm a certain beautiful blonde famous conservative female commentator.
Thank you
too bad she hooked up with some french idiot and got knocked up.
Absolutely. The Founding Fathers were schooled and steeped in history and Christianity. They understood the failures and causes of failures of government. They understood the baseness of humankind. Their invention was analogous to designing for ‘fault tolerance’ in the reliability of systems.
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