Is there any hope?
Thomas Woods’s “Meltdown” is going to make the New York Times Bestseller List. Holy cow!
I’ve been thinking about whether there is actually any hope for a genuinely free-market critique of statism and government interventionism breaking through into some kind of critical mass amidst our current travails.
In the 1930s, nobody seemed to notice the abject failure of the New Deal, which, instead of discrediting government economic “management” forever, served as the opening chapter in an era of a vastly enlarged centralized state that has continued to this day. And now who knows what we’re in for? Now, as before, laissez-faire is written off as utterly discredited. Is there any more hope for opposition now than there was during the Depression?
On the one hand, you’ve got Woods hitting the NYT Bestsellers with a full-throated Austrian-school manifesto. And there’s the Ron Paul phenomenon — with the hodgepodge character of the Paulite movement, there are some inherent centrifugal forces acting against its keeping any coherence, and the end of the presidential campaign inevitably led to some loss of momentum. But that’s counteracted by the newfound attention to Paul’s pronouncements in light of his dire predictions pretty much coming true, and the emergence of some promising Paul-affiliated follow-on organizations.
And we also have the Mises Institute, constantly churning out new freedom-minded scholarly work and popular polemics, and making a tremendous volume of scholarship available for free to all through its invaluable and heavily-trafficked Web site.
On the other hand, Henry Hazlitt wrote editorials for the New York Times during the 1930s. Can you imagine?
Austrian economics has never dominated the academy, but in the 1930s, F.A. Hayek had a prominent post — and a formidable reputation — at the London School of Economics.
But little laissez-faire outposts in the establishment did nothing to stop the onslaught of statism during the 1930s, and those lights didn’t last long before they were extinguished. Hayek was eclipsed by Keynes, and The New York Times is The New York Times. I guess that’s just the nature of establishments — they represent powerful interests by definition, and power inevitably seeks more power. There’s no room there for decentralizers.
I mean, look what happened to the conservative movement when it became inextricably wedded to the Republican party. From Goldwater to George W. Bush. “Extremism in the defense of libery is no vice” to TARP.
It seems that if there’s any prospect for meaningful opposition, it’s through the kind of new pathways being forged by today’s alternative Right.
So maybe there’s some hope after all.
February 19th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Mark,
I would agree with you that if there is hope to be found, it is in the prospect of an “alternative” right rising. Of course, the problem with that presecription is that, if the alternative right is to have any hope of forging a new path, it necessarily has to capture the imaginations of a large number of people. It will, in other words, have to become a new movement conservatism. Perhaps it just a failure of my own imagination, but I cannot conceive of how this will come about practically without this new movement’s descension into the same sort of party politics as led the Republican Party down its path.
Perhaps the nature of all reform is that it is cyclical. A movement rises, captures the imagination of a segment of the population, ascends to power through the formation of bloc alliances with others who share common goals, becomes a major movement, and degrades due to its love of the power that it has seized. If so, even the Paulite movement will inevitably degrade to the point where its primary goal is to enlarge its tent in order to retain power.
It seems as though those of us who wish to retain our Constitutional form of government with its coincident freedoms are doomed to spend a long time in the wilderness crying out and attracting followers. And just when we begin to enjoy the fruits of those labors, we will find ourselves needing to form a new following to counter the excesses of the one we birthed. In the end, the little success that is ultimately achieved by an ascendant “alternative right” will be measured in terms of having slowed the decay of freedom and not in rolling back the abuses.
Sorry to be so gloomy. Huge spending (and ultimately taxing) packages tend to do that to me.
February 19th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
[...] (Willmoore) wrote an interesting post over at Spinline in which he posed the question of whether there is hope for laissez-faire economics [...]