progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL retrofit the locomotive to stop producing sparks, to plant the crops further back from the tracks, or, perhaps, to simply let the crops burn." This is an essential principle of individualism. There are externalities, they have societal costs and the individual making the decision to impose the costs must bear the responsibility or reimbursing those upon whom he has laid the costs. The question as stated above is to find the rule to allocate the costs justly which will have the overall least cost. This is not what we have in a neo-progressive world. The neo-progressive defaults to the Government being the cost re-distributor, and doing so under a redistributive manner aligning its interest with their established distributive justice principles. 5.3 F. A. HAYEK Friedrich Hayek was born in Vienna in 1899 and come to prominence in the 1930s as the countervailing influence on the then changing theories of Economics, soon to be called macro-economics. Hayek came from what was the Austrian Scholl of Mises and settled in London where he had his greatest initial influence communicating with Keynes and then in 1950 to University of Chicago surrounded by the growing influence of the Chicago School of economics. Coming from Vienna, and having seen the flow of extremes from Socialism, Communism, the Nazis and the like gave him a view of governments in their extreme levels of operation. He was an avowed anti-socialist and one can see this influence throughout his work. Yet he is influenced by the Vienna mindset, the mindset that gave rise to such things as the Logical Positivists and many other idea sets which had their time on the stage of 20th century intellectual debate. Yet one can see Hayek mature as he spends time in London and this is best evidence in the evolution of his thought from his 1944 work The Road to Serfdom and his 1976 work, Law Legislation and Liberty. 5.3.1 The Hubris of the Knowable To better understand Hayek it is useful to start by looking at his Nobel Prize speech. It was a warning to economists that their move to the use of sophisticated equations and models were a hubris upon which they could see their own demise. The economists were taking to themselves the techniques of physics and engineering, the use of complex mathematical models, which they then purported to reflect reality in an economic world and prognosticate the future and to tell Government what should be done. To this Hayek gave warning. In Hayek's Nobel Lecture in 1974, entitled The Pretence of Knowledge he states 119 : 119 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html Page 112
The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL "If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success", to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society - a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals." The essence of Hayek's lecture was simply that macroeconomics is not a science, and the attempt to treat it as such and to guide an economy as one would use astrophysics to guide a spacecraft would be at the very least fool hardy. Indeed one look no further than many of the current texts on macroeconomics and see the hubris the authors have in stipulating certain dogma as to how the economy works. The inherent flaw in much of their logic is that whatever game they believe agents in the economy are playing, by whatever rules, they fail to take into account two factors, the random occurrences which happen from time to time and the deliberate actions taken by agents to work against the stipulated rules to effect increased segmental profit. Namely the simply theory of "sticky wages" denies the fundability of alternatives via increased automation, outsourcing or use of foreign assets. Yet there is something in Hayek that may give a slight glimpse of hope. This was presented in 1974, an interesting time, for several key things were happening then. First, biology which Hayek calls a field which deals with essential complexity was unmodellable in a manner akin to physics, was dramatically changing at that very time. Specifically Hayek in his talk says: "Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information? It is probably not surprising that those impressed by the example of the physical sciences should find this position very unsatisfactory and should insist on the standards of proof which they find there. Page 113
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progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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