Well, most humans' brains, at least.

Here's some interesting speculation. I bring this up partly because, as I noted last post, I'm reading Hayek's Road to Serfdom now. I started it once many years ago, then lost it. I wish I'd finished it then. It's a much more appealing defense of some my libertarian leanings than the Randian arguments I more commonly hear. It's also much more in line with some of my core beliefs about how to approach societal issues. Where Rand's work (her fiction, at least -- I haven't read any of her nonfiction, since Atlas Shrugged so bored me) focuses on super-people heroes and venal, moronic villains to make her libertarian crusade essentially one about morality, Hayek's argument (at least thus far -- I'm only 1/2 way through Road to Serfdom) is not focused on the great heroes whose work will be bequeathed to us all, nor on the evil geniuses who might thwart them.

Hayek's argument that economic freedom is essential for personal freedom and for political freedom. To be precise, this economic freedom is freedom of individual action, not freedom from economic need. He bases his argument on the effects of economic freedom on the individual -- any individual, not just Rand's John Galts who might be thwarted by socialists from saving the world with a single insight. He also bases much of his argument on human nature, which is, to me, a much stronger foundation for an argument about social structures than trying to insist on a certain set of moral axioms from which all good things follow. I think questions of social organization are largely empirical ones (and difficult ones), and that those idealistic social planners who start with, "Wouldn't it be nice if all people..." have already lost the argument, because you can't mandate away human nature. And you can't get uniformity among people on pretty much anything. (Sadly, Hayek notes, the nearest to uniformity you can get large groups of people strong enough to have it define a government is when that unifying issue is something negative, like hatred of the other.)

Another advantage of Hayek over Rand is that Hayek doesn't paint the would-be central planners who hold such idealistic convictions as evil, or stupid. He just thinks their beliefs, coupled with actual human nature, lead to a dead end (as has, I think, been demonstrated repeatedly in recent history). A successful central planner needs near-perfect knowledge of people's abilities, wants, and needs. That's simply impossible (at least so far, but I'm betting Google, Apple, Amazon, and WalMart are working on the problem); no state infrastructure can even hope to collect a small fraction of the data needed, or even a small fraction of the data generated when individuals make transactions every day as indicators of these abilities and needs. Worse yet, Hayek argues, the infrastructure the central planners build in this fruitless pursuit can be used by actual evil people (Stalin, Hitler, Mao) to do much greater harm than could be caused by a non-centrally controlled economy.

I wonder what Hayek would make of China today -- a central thesis of some of Hayek's writing is that economic freedom is essential for personal and political freedom. He is very convincing in this argument. He does not take nearly as clear a stand about the other direction -- that is, he does not strongly assert that political freedom is necessary for economic freedom (and he does hint at times that it's possible that this assertion is not necessarily true). Perhaps this is why libertarians don't embrace him as much as they embrace Rand. Hayek embraces the need for governance and for some clear, consistent regulation. Above all, he embraces a Rule of Law, not the rule of men that is the cornerstone of central planning.

Hayek's focus on the impact of economic freedom versus central planning on the average person is what's most compelling about his work. He doesn't primarily argue that the socialists will stifle the geniuses. He argues that the socialists will stifle nearly everyone a little bit, and that those little bits aggregate to a great big giant bit. (Coupled with the power of compound growth, well, witness the success of the free market economies over the centrally-planned ones over the last two centuries, or the effect of increased economic liberation in China.) It's not sexy, but I think his core point is sound -- it's strengthening the small steps that allow civilizations to take large strides. And curtailing the small steps of nearly everyone prevents us from making the huge strides that will allow the poorest among us in 30 years to live lives that are richer than nearly everyone today. (A point missed by people who lament income inequality today, I think.)

Perhaps these were also Rand's points in her works, but the two books of hers I read/skimmed are filled with so much nonsense and repetition that they cover up whatever more compelling points exist in them. To be fair, I started skimming Atlas Shrugged a few hundred pages in, and stopped dead when I hit the hundred page Galt speech. Regardless, I think Hayek (or, at least the first half of Road to Serfdom) makes a much better champion of sensible libertarian views than Rand, and hardcore libertarians would be better off adopting that line more than Rand's.

Nuts, I really was planning to finish Road to Serfdom before writing all this... I hope the book doesn't go off the rails from here. It does have its weak points, but by and large, he nails a lot of my deep distrust of central planning, and does so from ground I'm much more comfortable standing on than I am standing on the view of personal property rights as a moral issue. Fighting the battle of "economic freedom versus central planning" over what's "moral" and what's not misses the point. It allows the central planners to answer with the alleged morality of serving "the greater good" being greater than that of serving the individual. Instead, fighting the battle from Hayek's view is more powerful and more accurate -- the would-be central planners "greater good" is best served by Hayek's individual economic freedom.