Take for example the issue of bureaucracy. Most bureaucracies are seen as terribly inefficient. The average person may even rant about how terrible the DMV or post office is (no matter how much it tries to appear like a normal business). Most people may understand that the problem has to do with incentives, but they will still probably think there is no choice but for the State to perform such functions. They likely believe that making a few changes or putting in the right bureaucrats can fix things.

Today’s document, Henry Hazlitt’s New York Times review of Ludwig von Mises’s Bureaucracy, shows why we come to view bureaucracies as inefficient. They simply lack the knowledge and incentive to perform efficiently no matter how benevolent the bureaucrats may be. As Hazlitt states, “For the main thesis of Professor von Mises is that bureaucracy is merely a symptom of the real disease with which we have to deal. That disease is excessive State domination and control.”

The issue, as Mises puts it, is whether society should be organized on the basis of private ownership or government control of the means of production. Should goods and services be provided by market or State bureaucracies. It’s one or the other; there is no compromise. With each you get a different set of incentives as well as a different ability to collect and use the information necessary to make efficient decisions.

In a totally free market a private firm (or department within) is guided by the profit motive. It has discretion to expand and experiment as it sees fit. If it fails it will know and if it succeeds it will be rewarded. Bureaucracies, on the other hand, are not guided by the profit motive. The quality of their work cannot be judged in monetary terms. They can have little-to-no discretion since their work must be centralized and operate under the detailed controls of their superiors. Market value cannot be attached to their “product.” In other words, they cannot engage in economic calculation.

The irony is that the decentralized market may seem chaotic and out of control, but in reality it produces efficient outcomes. Resources get channeled to where consumers most want them, to the betterment of everyone. On the other hand, the seeming control of centralized State power is actually a mess of inefficiency that is simply unable to achieve the stated ends.

Incentives do matter, and correcting those incentives starts with picking the right institutions for our society to operate under. Once we understand this, we will choose the free market.

Download Hazlitt’s Review of Mises’s Bureaucracy here.  

In his book, Peikoff, who became Ayn Rand’s intellectual heir, explains the parallels between America and Nazi Germany. This is not about the atrocities the Nazi’s perpetrated, but the ideas rampant in Germany that lead to the rise of National Socialism. The irrationalism and collectivism concerning the nature of man, knowledge, morality, and politics, in Peikoff’s opinion, all helped give rise to the terrible acts of the Nazi State and threaten America in a similar way.

Sadly, we have not improved. The Occupy Wall Street movement, while correctly seeing a problem, is mostly pointing their fury in the wrong direction, attacking the productive sector of our economy. In seeing evil in businessmen, they miss the point, and they fail to understand how wealth is created. It is true that much of Wall Street is in bed with the State, but is more government the correct solution to that problem?

This mistake made by the OWS movement should surprise no one. The movement is strongly steeped in collectivist thinking (sometimes creepily so). The movement truly believes it fighting for liberty. Individuals, in their eyes, seem to have a right to freedom from debt, freedom from need, etc. And it is the State that is to deliver us all from these chains caused by capitalism. But what they fail to see is that it is the State that is at fault in the first place, and giving more power to the State empowers it to perform the atrocities that Childs believes defines the history of the twentieth century.

If we continue down this path we may find that the stronger parallel may actually be to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a parallel that  is just as dangerous, if not more so. Businessmen will not take the antibusiness rhetoric forever; eventually the rise in State power will drive their production down more and more. In the novel Rand correctly shows how such a situation would be devastating. With the lack of business comes a desperate attempt by the State to set things right and to do so by force and planning, which sets us exactly on the road to serfdom that Hayek warned us about. But until we start to realize that the State is the negation of liberty and that freedom must be accompanied by self-responsibility, maybe the continuous growth of State power is exactly what we deserve.

Download Roy A. Childs, Jr.’s review of Leonard Peikoff’s Ominous Parallels here.

The closest the Soviet Union came to actual pure socialism was the period known as War Communism, 1918 to 1921. This period is unanimously seen as a disaster, even among socialists. Production fell in most if not all industries, and millions starved to death. From then on the Communist Party struggled to keep hold of both their Marxist ideology and their power. Naturally the latter took precedence, and as a result the price system, which they originally wanted to abolish, took on a larger and larger role. Henry Hazlitt discusses Josef Stalin’s struggle with exactly this problem in today’s document, the October 20, 1952, Newsweek Business Tides column, “Stalin as Classical Economist.”

The Soviets certainly liked to keep up appearances. At a glance the Soviet economy looked centrally planned. The planning board for each industry set output levels, and the State owned de jure all means of production. A closer look, however, revealed a different story. As Boettke and Anderson pointed out, the Soviet economy was closer to that of a mercantilist economy, a heavily regulated market economy effectively run by rent-seeking government officials and factory managers. De facto, the factory managers were the owners and residual claimants. They paid the State for the right to run the factory, and in return the State created a monopoly for them, just as in the mercantilist system of old.

Middlemen, known as the Tolkachi, worked on behalf of the State enterprises to sell surplus commodities on the one hand and purchase needed products on the other. They essentially created a market that allowed for economic calculation not possible under a pure socialist system.

This system of course was highly inefficient and unstable, but it allowed the Soviets to stay in power a lot longer than would have been possible under their socialist dream. As Hazlitt put it, “[B]ureaucratic price fixing is a farce, a fraud, and a disaster, . . . economic planners are presumptuous blind men groping in the dark, and . . . there is no substitute for free markets.” In reality, as Hazlitt shows of Stalin, the Soviet rulers were simply putting on a show. Playing the role of the productive socialist economy was capitalism itself.

Download Hazlitt’s “Stalin as Classical Economist” here. 

As the newsletter states, when the horrors of the Soviet system were pointed out, most socialists either denied the brutality or claimed a “middle way”. The newsletter raises a good question, “What middle way? Is freedom only halfway good? And is slavery only halfway bad?”

In fairness, most socialists are well-intentioned people and what they desire is planning with freedom. They believe that planning is a way of fixing the flaws in the economy and a way of achieving social justice. And they believed this can be done while maintaining liberty. What they fail to realize is the incompatibility of central planning and liberty. Given the impossibility of economic calculation in a socialist economy, the socialist means cannot achieve the socialist ends.

Central planning under democracy is certainly possible. The problem, however, is that it is unstable. Without economic calculation, planners cannot properly allocate scarce resources to their highest valued ends and so the desired ends cannot be achieved. This leaves the planners with two options, either abandon the intervention into the market, i.e. stop central planning, or increase the interventions, i.e. new and more planning.

Under democracy coming up with new plans to correct the failed old plans is easier said than done. Finding agreement is next to impossible. If central planning is to continue it requires a stronger arm to implement any new plan. This was the point F.A. Hayek was making in his book, The Road to Serfdom. Thus, to continue central planning socialists must abandon the ideals of freedom that they hold. In order to make one plan work more planning is necessary. Soon the end result is that the workers, whose lot this system is supposed to help, end up being treated as bad as, or in some instances, even worse than, cattle.

This makes slogans such as, “Let’s drop the holier than thou attitude, and meet them halfway,” impractical. In the long run, there is no middle way. Achieving planning and liberty is like having your cake and eating it too. While today the Soviet Union is gone and few advocate for outright central planning, this threat is far from gone. Distrust in the market to achieve efficiency and provide justice still exists. Through the failures of socialism in the last half century the calls for a middle way have never gone away. If we don’t learn the dangers of the middle way we will soon find out through experience. As Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” And most likely, that someplace else is not somewhere any of us want to be.

Download the Harvard Free Enterprise Society Newsletter Vol. II, No. 3 here.

Planning, even for freedom, inevitably leads to a totalitarian state due to the problems of economic calculation and bureaucratic inefficiencies. The efforts to plan, from both the right and left, were the real danger. Thus, Hayek was offering a warning to the countries of the west to avoid the paths taken by both Nazi Germany and the USSR. The analysis within the book traced out the unintended undesirable consequences of attempting democratic planning. Even these civilized attempts can end up with the result of a totalitarian state.

The book was written for the British audience and thus little was expected of it in the United States. In fact, Hayek, with the help of Fritz Machlup, attempted to find an American publisher with much difficulty. Three publishers rejected the book before the University of Chicago Press agreed to publish the it with just 2,000 copies in the first printing. When the book came out, however, it quickly sold out thanks to a laudable review by Henry Hazlitt on the front page of the New York Times book review section.

Over the years Hazlitt was often asked to tell how he helped make The Road to Serfdom a hit. Today’s document is a letter from Henry Hazlitt explaining just how this happened. The book became an even bigger hit after a condensed version appeared in The Readers Digest, again thanks in part to Hazlitt, as well as a cartoon version that appeared in Look.

Recently the book is once again seeing an increase in sales thanks, in part, to Glen Beck’s promotion. Both friends and foes, however, often miss the important message of the book. It frequently gets written off as an argument from the extreme right. Conservatives do use the book to attack the welfare state. This is different from the type of socialism Hayek was referring to; he meant the nationalization of the means of production, not extreme wealth redistribution through taxes and welfare programs. Though, in the preface to the 1976 edition Hayek did admit he believes such a system would lead to the same problems but in a longer and different way described in the book.

This does not make Hayek’s argument conservative. In fact, while Hayek did believe a certain level of conservativism was necessary in any stable society, it is not a social program and contains many dangerous tendencies that are paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring and as a result put it much closer to socialism than classical liberalism. In many ways Hayek is right. Conservativism is by its very nature bound to protect the established privilege and to lean on the power of government to protect such privilege. The classical liberal tradition, on the other hand, is the denial of all privileges.

The point is that the road to serfdom is a result of us giving up our own ability to run our own lives. Once we accept the top-down authoritarian worldview we create a sickness in ourselves, which leads to more trouble than even the most well-intentioned social planner would ever want. Ideas have consequences and planning, as Hayek traced out, leads to consequences few of us are willing to accept. As John Papola and Russ Roberts put it, what we want is the plans of the many not the plans of the few. Hayek’s book is only a warning but we should listen before it’s too late.

Download the Henry Hazlitt letter from January 30, 1975 about his role in the success of the road to serfdom here.

While it is an advertisement for the magazine, it does contain an important message, one that many “believers” in freedom often miss, which causes them to advocate, what the ad calls, the Trojan horse of interventionism and socialism within our walls.  As the ad says, “Diverse ‘isms’ that attempt to replace individual thinking and initiative can not grow or survive where love of freedom inhabits the heart of man.” In other words, knowing what freedom means or understanding what Leonard Read called the freedom philosophy is important for everyone in order to achieve and maintain a free society. Just to hammer it home, as former FEE economist F. A. “Baldy” Harper said, “The Man who knows what freedom means will find a way to be free.”  But saying you support freedom and wanting to be free are not enough. Liberty requires understanding as well.

While few would deny freedom is important to them, many will still willing throw chains on others. In a recent blog post economist Bryan Caplan brilliantly illustrates this. Looking at the ethics of strangers, on both the left and right, we can see the desire for freedom but also the willingness to deny freedom to others. Many on the left, despite their calls for wealth redistribution, will often take great offense to homeless people’s demands for their money. But they have no qualms with the State taking by force from others to help the poor. That’s hardly consistent.

Similarly, some on the right argue for closed boarders to protect American workers. A closer look, however, reveals this is not in line with freedom at all. As Caplan puts it, “People in the Third World are strangers, but we still have a moral obligation to leave them in peace.  Instead, we pass draconian laws forbidding these strangers to work for other complete strangers.  And for what?  To fulfill our fantastical obligation to maintain the wages of fellow citizens we don’t trust enough to give our kids a ride.”

Wanting to be free is one thing; it is a desire seen through most, if not all, of human history. But knowing why freedom is crucial for a prosperous and peaceful society is the only way to really achieve it. We need to know why property and the freedom to use it creates the markets that foster growth, and how interventions, such as wealth redistribution, distort and destroy wealth. We need to know that freedom of association for all is something that is part and parcel of the very same property rights. Freedom is not just for you. It is for everyone. Until we believe and understand this, the benefits of a truly free society will be out of reach.

This advertisement may be old but it should still sell because the world would be better off if more people read The Freeman.

Download The Freeman advertisement here.

In regards to Economics in One Lesson, I am not alone. In fact, Ayn Rand’s main competition very well may be Hazlitt’s fantastic introduction to economics. The book is revolutionary to so many because it corrects the misconceptions so many of us have towards the subject of economics. And, it not only points out the correct way to think about economics, it also shows just how entertaining and important it is, and in only one lesson!

Today’s document, a letter to Leonard Read on February 18, 1982, shows Hazlitt discussing one of the books that “almost” revolutionized his way of thinking, namely Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism. He says “almost” because he was never inclined toward socialism but it did change the way he thought about it. This should not be surprising if one knows Mises’s argument against this so-called “perfect in theory” economic system. Most see socialism’s weaknesses from the incentive problems they cause (which are certainly real) but Mises shows it is doomed to failure before it even starts. Socialism is impossible! Due to the central ownership of the means of production there is can be no exchange, without exchange there can be no prices, and without prices there can be no rational economic calculation. The lack of economic calculation makes it impossible for socialism to achieve the material wealth promised by the socialist dream. So, in Socialism (which expands upon his 1920 article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth“) Mises demonstrates not only that socialism is not perfect in theory but strictly impossible. Thus, Mises argument against socialism is certainly most likely to have a revolutionary impact on most people’s thinking, even if they were already against socialism.

While Socialism was certainly not the direct influence on Economics in One Lesson, that would be Bastiat’s essay “What is Seen and What is Not Seen,” it is clear to see why the lesson is so important. The economic system as a whole is very important, getting these institutions right is crucial. Thus, all the more reason to think about what happens in the long run and for everyone. If only we could get more people to read these revolutionary books.

Download the Letter from Hazlitt to Read on February 18, 1982 here.

In order to provide for those in need the government must take from the productive within society. In the long run this is an unstable process, which will result in society becoming more equal but a lot poorer. The reasoning for this is simple: people respond to incentives. Both the person with the need and the person with the ability don’t stand to gain much from working for themselves; as one’s needs will be provided and working hard will only be someone else’s gain.

Most people in this country, it can be assumed, respect private property. Few would condone the theft of ones private property or creative abilities. But this is only on the individual level. What Read, in this article, calls the double stand of morality is still alive and well. When it comes to the use of state power few have a problem taking from others for redistribution. We may not live in a pure socialist society but many of the ideas still run rampant. On many issues, such as health care (just to name one), people have no problem taking from some for the needs of others. Economist Bryan Caplan has even shown that liberty is more popular at the abstract level than it is for specific policies and that policies are more libertarian than what the public actually wants!

What the public fails to realize is that there is no difference between the belief in the authoritarianism of the majority and that of Stalin. Redistribution, even for those in need, requires constant coercion and will produce a type of social cooperation where few, if anyone, benefits in the long run. Capitalism may result in inequality but it also results in more wealth and prosperity for all because it is a system that allows individuals to act creatively unrestrained and uninhibited. Under this system an individual can only enrich themselves by making others better off.

Download Leonard E. Read’s “Victims of Social Leveling” here.

For advocates of liberty, the problem, beyond the wasted costs of collecting the data, is how critical data collection is for interventionist policies. Essentially the statistics are the only means of obtaining the knowledge necessary to “plan” and “reform”.

Businessmen and consumers, on the other hand, receive the information to achieve their plans through the market. This is possible because prices, which contain the relevant information needed by agents, act as signals. Given this, it’s no wonder Rothbard declares, “statistics, so vital to statism, its namesake, is also the state’s Achilles’ heel.”

This article is particularly interesting given the intellectual context within which the article was written. The majority of scholars at the time thought socialism was both morally and economically superior to capitalism. This is what Khruschev meant when he declared, “We will bury you!”

Intellectually, in the 50s and 60s, the failures of socialism were not attributed to the inherent difficulties of socialist planning but rather to institutional problems. The Socialist calculation debates, which took place in the first half of the century, were seen as over and many of the lessons were incorporated into a more sophisticated theory of planning. Mises and Hayek had lost but not without their ideas helping to fix the problems inherent to planning. Pure socialism was indeed impossible, as Mises showed, and was thus replaced by market socialist theories from economists like Abba Lerner (ironically a student of Hayek at LSE). To overly simplify, the market socialist systems attempted to mimic the market and to do so it needs statistics!

Still, in this article Rothbard goes against this intellectual grain and assumes that Mises and Hayek were right all along (which history now seems to agree with). Thus, in order to stop the planners, Rothbard proposes, the libertarian would do best to eliminate government statistics. While the context of our current times is certainly different, Rothbard’s point is no less important.

Download Clichés of Socialism number 57 here.

Part 1

Part 2

“The debate over health care in this country has brought in many players with skin in the game. Your coalition of surgical organizations is one group among many. These many groups include other physician groups, insurance companies, patient advocacy groups, pharma, and the like. I would bet that the individuals in these groups, including yours, want our country to have the best health care system for themselves, their families, and their patients. But look back to the first line of this paragraph. Did the “players with skin in the game” metaphor rankle you at all? It should have. If it did, maybe there is hope that given enough time you could actually learn enough history and economics to understand what is really wrong with our system. I would submit that we do not have a health care problem in this country, but we do most definitely have a government problem in this country.”

Read the full letter.

As we see in Moore’s new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore is offended by some truly offensive things: banks engaging in wild speculation without concern for the risk, taxpayer bailouts for banks and other businesses, cozy relations between Wall Street and Washington, politicians getting favors from companies that want benefits from government, and big institutions pushing less powerful individuals around. True, he’s offended by some inoffensive things as well, such as the cut in the 90 percent top income-tax rate nearly 30 years ago. But by and large, what he rails against should be railed against.

(Update: Moore gets the tax-rate story wrong, and I let it get by me. The 91 percent top marginal rate fell to 77 in 1964 and 70 in 1965; this was the Kennedy tax cut — I wonder why Moore didn’t say that Democrats John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were the rate cutters. Under Republican Ronald Reagan, whom Moore wishes to demonize for cutting taxes for the rich, the rate dropped to 50 and eventually to 28 percent. HT: Gary Chartier.)

Had he called his movie State Capitalism: A Love Story, I might be applauding (with some reservations). But he’s targeting the more ambiguous “capitalism,” which he uses interchangeably with “the free market.” He can be forgiven for this, however. Most people would say that the current U.S. economic system is capitalist. Moore has probably heard that all his life. He’d hear if he watched a Fox financial program. Would Ben Stein or Lawrence Kudlow disagree? Moore has also heard Republican politicians, George W. Bush, for example, praise the existing system, with all its deep government interventions, as capitalist. He did this even as he and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former chief of Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs, stampeded Congress into passing the $700 billion TARP bailout last year. Moore takes such people at their word: The free market is capitalism, and capitalism is what we have today.

Can we blame him for thinking this way?

Yes, it’s sloppy thinking, and had he been more curious and read beyond the confines of “Progressive” literature, he could have gotten the straight story. But many knowledgeable advocates of the free market contribute to the confusion by exhibiting what Kevin Carson calls “vulgar libertarianism,” or what Roderick Long describes as “the tendency to treat the case for the free market as though it justified various unlovely features of actually existing corporatist society.” How often have you heard a free-market advocate condemn pro-business intervention in one breath, then defend existing dominant corporations in the next — as though they did not arise in the interventionist environment just condemned? Pro-market is not the same as pro-business. If some market advocates don’t understand that, why should Moore? Vulgar libertarianism is a disconnect that makes the free-market philosophy look like a corporate apologetic. It’s done incalculable damage to the cause of freedom, in part by alienating potential allies. Who knows, maybe even Michael Moore.

Aversion to Profit

This may go a long way in explaining Moore’s aversion to profit — at least other people’s. He associates profit with business, which he associates with (state) capitalism. So for him, profit per se is suspect. But he should see a problem here. Does he think he’s exploiting moviegoers when his production company ends up with a profit? Do the co-ops and worker-owned firms he loves exploit their customers when they sell their products for more than their money costs? When two people barter, are they mutually exploiting each other because each gets more value than he gives up? To consistently oppose profit, one would have to oppose all human action, since every action aims at a surplus of subjective benefit over subjective opportunity cost.

Cornered like this, Moore might say he’s only the against excessive profits that capitalist market power permits. But now we’re back where we started. To the extent that intervention hampers competition by erecting barriers to entry — which is the usual effect, intended or not — protected firms are free to charge higher prices and reap more profits than would have been the case in an open market. Corporate power and privilege derive from political power and can’t exist without it. In contrast to existing capitalism, the truly free market would have no legal barriers to competitive entry, assuring that prices and returns are economically justified and not the fruits of privilege. Strictly speaking, entrepreneurial profit in a true market gets competed away because the very process of capturing them reveals valuable information to others and invites imitation. It takes innovation and efficiency — that is, superior service to consumers — to create new profits. Only the State permits business to make profits by withholding benefits from consumers.

But Moore doesn’t know this. What he “knows” is that the choice is between the current corrupt system — and it is corrupt — and some vaguely defined scheme of control by benevolent politicians, which he calls socialism and democracy.

In his movie Moore expresses affection for socialism, but he’s not clear what he means. He never advocates collectivization of the means of production or the abolition of markets. Instead he suggests that socialism means workers having a say in how the companies they work for are run. But why assume that’s anti-free market? He praises worker-owned companies and notes that hundreds of them exist in the United States today. He might be surprised to learn that these things are entirely compatible with the free market. In fact, it’s a perfectly libertarian intuition to abhor being subject to the arbitrary whim of anyone — yes, even a private employer. If government regulatory and tax obstacles to new competition and self-employment did not exist, workers would have their maximum bargaining power and widest array of alternatives. I imagine we’d see more departures from the traditional firm. People used to get their “social insurance” from mutual aid societies. Maybe in a true free market, we’d see a bigger role for the employment counterpart to these public, yet not governmental, organizations.

What would Moore think about a system in which no one could collude with politicians to legally plunder the rest of us for their own benefit and everyone was free to enter into any cooperative arrangements to produce and offer goods to others in voluntary exchange? Michael, that’s the free market!

FDR’s Second Bill of Rights

Of course, Moore naively looks to government to provide things. His movie laments that FDR died before he could see his Second Bill of Rights enacted. Roosevelt wanted government to guarantee everyone a good education, job, home, health care, and so on. Has Moore ever wondered where government would get the resources for this? He can’t really believe that somewhere there’s a massive pot of collective wealth waiting to be distributed. He must realize that the tax system would provide the money. But how can he not know that if government appears to penalize wealth creation with confiscation, less wealth will be created?

Moore is unaware that he commits the “Nirvana fallacy.” This is the erroneous idea that our choice is between the admittedly imperfect world we’re bound to live in if government leaves us alone and an imagined utopia in which benevolent and all-wise rulers oversee and regulate everything. Of course that is not the choice. Moore’s preferred system, whatever he calls it, would be run by individuals whose insight into the public interest would be no sharper and whose motives no purer than other people’s. However, since they would wield political power — which is the legal authority to compel obedience– they would be far more dangerous than anyone in a free market could ever be. He knows how corrupt politicians are. Why does he think different people would run things in his utopia? Does he really want them in charge of everyone’s job, education, health care, housing, pension, and the rest? It’s hard to understand why he isn’t uncomfortable with the idea of the people being tenants and employees of the State.

Whether he realizes it or not, Moore favors a system in which an elite necessarily would make critical decisions for the rest of us. He’d be incredulous to hear that, but if he ever comes to understand it, libertarians might end up with an unlikely ally.

Orwell, a man of the “left,” could not remain silent in the face of the horrors of Stalinism. Twice — during the Spanish Civil War and again at the dawn of the Cold War — he refused to permit his comrades to blind themselves to where their collectivism had led and could lead again. For his favor he was called a conscious tool of fascism, a stinging accusation considering he had gone to Spain to fight fascism. (But for a few inches, the bullet that penetrated Orwell’s neck in Spain would have denied us the latter warnings, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. We would have never known what the fascists had cost us.)

Hayek, a man of the “right,” risked ostracism and worse in 1944 by publishing The Road to Serfdom, in which this Austrian-turned-Briton, writing in England at the height of World War II, warned that central economic planning would, if pursued seriously, end in a totalitarianism indistinguishable from the Nazi enemy. That couldn’t have been easy to write at that time and place — central planning was much in vogue among the intelligentsia. While a good deal of the reception was serious and respectful, a good deal of it was not. Herbert Finer, in Road to Reaction, called Hayek’s book “the most sinister offensive against democracy to emerge from a democratic country for many decades”; it expressed “the thoroughly Hitlerian contempt for the democratic man.”

Not surprisingly, it was The Road to Serfdom that brought Orwell and Hayek together in print. Orwell briefly reviewed the book along with Konni Zilliacus’s The Mirror of the Past in the April 9, 1944 issue of The Observer. The man who would publish Animal Farm a year later and Nineteen Eighty-Four five years later found much to agree with in Hayek’s work. He wrote:

Shortly, Professor Hayek’s thesis is that Socialism inevitably leads to despotism, and that in Germany the Nazis were able to succeed because the Socialists had already done most of their work for them, especially the intellectual work of weakening the desire for liberty. By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it. Britain, he says, is now going the same road as Germany, with the left-wing intelligentsia in the van and the Tory Party a good second. The only salvation lies in returning to an unplanned economy, free competition, and emphasis on liberty rather than on security. In the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often — at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough — that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.

This is a significant endorsement, for no one understood totalitarianism as well as Orwell. Indeed, in Why Orwell Matters, Christopher Hitchens points out that Nineteen Eighty-Four impressed Communist Party members behind the Iron Curtain. He quotes Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet and Nobel laureate, who before defecting to the West was a cultural attaché for the Polish communist government: “Orwell fascinates them [members of the Inner Party] through his insight to the details they know well…. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.” (An audio interview with Hitchens about Orwell is here.)

But true to his left state-socialism, Orwell could not endorse Hayek’s positive program:

Professor Hayek is also probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to “free” competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.

…Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.

Short Shrift

It’s disappointing to see Orwell give such short shrift to Hayek’s positive thesis. He is glib and dogmatic, which is unbecoming a serious intellectual such as Orwell. His ignorance of economics leaps from the page.

“[A] return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State.” It’s hard to believe that someone so familiar with Stalinism could have written that. Even without knowing much economics, could he really have thought that what goes on in market-oriented societies, even during depressions, could be worse than the famine Stalin inflicted on the Ukrainians, the show trials and executions, or the labor camps in Siberia?

“The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.” In a market producers compete to better serve consumers. The losers in that competition are not exiled or executed. They find other ways to serve consumers, just as producers are trying to serve them.

“Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led….” Where has monopoly arisen without the aid of the State? We find no market-generated monopoly in England or the United States. There, major business interests actively promoted protectionism and other interventions precisely to tamp down competition and protect their market shares. Of course, for many people, Orwell presumably among them, that is capitalism, a topic I return to below. (I should note that Hayek forswore laissez faire in his book, but that is a topic for another day.)

“[T]he vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment….” But that’s a false choice. Slumps and unemployment, as Hayek and his mentor Ludwig von Mises taught, are products of central-bank manipulation of money and interest rates, that is, of government not of the free market. The Great Depression, which must have been on Orwell’s mind, was no exception. The real choice is between freedom and security (including mutual aid) on the one hand, and State “regimentation,” slumps, and unemployment on the other.

I must pause here to focus on Orwell’s disgraceful use of the word “regimentation.” I say “disgraceful” because he committed the sin he himself so eloquently condemned in his justly famous essay “Politics and the English Language”: the sin of euphemism. In that great essay he wrote:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so”. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

Regimentation is the least of what goes on under a totalitarian regime.

Capitalism versus the Free Market

“Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war.” I think that part of the problem for Orwell is that a truly free market is not among the possible options. For him and many others, the choice is between a system run for employers and one run for workers. (The preferable alternative is not obvious.) In this view, the former is capitalism, sometimes dressed up as “the free market,” and the latter is socialism. We shouldn’t be too hard on Orwell for thinking this way, for many defenders of the market are just as careless when they write about mixed economies such as the one in the United States. Despite pervasive government intervention, we often hear business conduct defended because “under capitalism” consumers have the power to punish firms that ill-serve them. Tell that to consumers who chose not to buy GM and Chrysler cars. Tell that to people who lost land through eminent domain so that a big-box chain might prosper. Generations of business-inspired intervention to some extent must have rigged the market against consumers and workers. If not, what are the economists complaining about?

As for his inclusion of war in his list, let it be said that the scramble for markets and other economic objectives cannot be a sufficient condition for war. War requires the State, that is, the socialization of costs through taxation and conscription.

One wonders how Orwell avoided despair. He couldn’t accept (state) capitalism, and he saw the totalitarian tendencies of socialism up close. Yet he could write, “There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.” (Emphasis added.)

Hadn’t he just read Hayek’s Chapter 11, “The End of Truth,” in which Hayek described how a serious commitment to central planning must produce “contempt for intellectual liberty”?

The word “truth” itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, which has to be believed in the interest of unity of the organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.

The general intellectual climate which this produces, the spirit of complete cynicism as regards truth which it engenders, the loss of the sense of even the meaning of truth, the disappearance of the spirit of independent inquiry and of the belief in the power of rational conviction, the way in which differences of opinion in every branch of knowledge become political issues to be decided by authority, are all things which one must personally experience — no short description can convey their extent.

But of course Orwell had experienced those things in Spain and knew how it was in Russia. He certainly put a heavy burden on that word “somehow.” How restoring the concept of right and wrong to politics would make central planning either decent or practical is a mystery no one has solved. (Of course, Mises had long before shown that socialism could not be practical because without prices arising out of the exchange of privately owned means of production, the socialist planner could not make rational calculations with respect to what should be produced, in what manner, and in what quantities.)

To end on a partly optimistic note, though Orwell presumably would not agree, central economic planning is not on the modern agenda. The threat today is not state socialism. It’s bureaucratic corporatism dressed up as progressive democracy.

All these things and more are symptomatic of the modern age, but the problems we face today are the legacy of a movement that occurred more than a century ago: the Progressive Era, which ran from the late 1800s to the end of World War I.  Because most people are not aware of Progressivism and its legacies, I would like to educate the readers a bit.

First, and most important, Progressivism is portrayed by historians as a time of “reform,” in which people fought against the alleged ills created by industrial growth and capitalism.  According to the pundits, American businesses were monopolizing the economy, “gobbling up the wealth,” and leaving most Americans worse off in their wake.  Railroads supposedly were victimizing Americans with their rebates and long and short-haul rates.

Second, Progressives believed that they could apply “scientific principles” to political-economic decisions in order to make U.S. society a better place to live.  Among the things that Progressives advocated were a stronger executive branch (exemplified by the Progressives’ Progressive Teddy Roosevelt), centralization of the political structure, and the creation of “independent” agencies supposedly insulated from politics.  The crown jewel of the agencies was the Federal Reserve System.

The notion was that market systems and the relatively decentralized and congressionally dominated political system of the United States were “outdated” and could not be quickly marshaled for Progressive causes.  Furthermore, the relatively decentralized systems of education, both government and private, were unacceptable to Progressives, such as John Dewey, who believed that children must be trained to serve the state, which was to be the embodiment of all of society.

In 1913, thanks to a number of congressional initiatives and addition of amendments to the Constitution, the United States saw the establishment of the Fed, the national income tax, and direct election of U.S. senators, who until then were appointed in most states by the state legislatures.  It was, according to Prof. Thomas DiLorenzo, the “Revolution of 1913.”

Perhaps it is not surprising that a great Progressive cause, World War I, followed soon afterward, with the United States entering in 1917.  As Murray Rothbard noted in his essay “World War I as Fulfillment,” the war permitted the intellectuals to impose nearly all their ideas, from industrial cartelization to prohibition of alcoholic beverages, on American citizens.

Although many of the features of the war economy disappeared during the 1920s, the Fed and the income tax remained, and the former would play a major role in dragging the United States into the Great Depression.  If World War I was the Progressives’ war, the Great Depression was the era in which many Progressive ideals could be put into place permanently.

Fast forward to 2009.  We have seen the Fed create two consecutive financial bubbles that have broken, the collapse of the Progressive-style entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and yet another attempt by the government to create that ultimate Progressive goal, nationalized medical care.  We have seen the executive branch operate almost unencumbered by Congress and the courts bail out one firm after another and create a number of “czars” to oversee everything from Wall Street to the automobile industry.

Indeed, the Progressive “solutions” to our current set of economic problems are no solutions at all; they are the cause of the economic downturn.  From the Fed to the staggering weight of government spending and debt, we can see that Progressivism truly has run its course.  Unfortunately, while it runs its course, Progressivism also is running this country into the ground.  The solution is not more government power.  The solution is liberty. It is high time we rediscovered our roots of freedom.

[download id="75"]

[download id="74"]

[download id="71"]

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written a column (January 28, 2009) full of withering hatred and contempt for many of today’s most prominent businessmen, first and foremost the heads of the Wall Street Banks. She singles out Citigroup and Merrill Lynch in particular, denouncing the first for going ahead with taking delivery of a $50 million luxury jet at the very time the firm was losing billions, and the last CEO of the second, John Thain, for spending $1 million to redecorate his office, also in the midst of his firm’s suffering major losses.

Her column leaves the reader with a view of these people and, by implication, of practically the whole economic class to which they belong, i.e., virtually all businessmen and capitalists, as having a mentality that combines the worst features of Marie Antoinette and Nero. The former, of course, was Queen of France until 1793, when she was beheaded. She is famous for allegedly having said in response to being informed of the peasantry’s lack of bread, “Let them eat cake.” And Nero was the Roman emperor who is known for having fiddled while Rome burned, and who died in 68 AD, committing suicide when he learned that the Roman Senate had ordered that he be flogged to death.

Having led her readers to such an assessment of these people, she concludes her column with the declaration, “Bring on the shackles. Let the show trials begin.” If they do begin, Dowd will be there, perhaps with knitting needles, in the role of a modern-day Madame Defarge, the Dickens character who knitted while watching aristocrats being guillotined during the French Revolution.

The day after Dowd’s column appeared, a news story in The Times reported that, “Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year. That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller.”

The day after that, President Obama called the bonuses “shameful.”

The Fate of Capitalism

It is very easy to interpret the kind of facts that have been described, as an indictment of the capitalist system, which is exactly how they are being interpreted. Millions of people have lost their jobs; millions more fear that they will lose theirs. These millions cannot avoid the further fear that they and their families will be utterly impoverished. And they are being led to blame their losses on capitalism, in large part by being led to blame it on the persons of individual businessmen or capitalists whom they perceive as hateful.

What is present and being inflamed is the psychology of an angry mob. Its sympathies are with innocent victims who have suffered a great wrong. It’s sure it knows who is responsible and how. The next step will be for someone to yell, “Get a rope!”

Already, businessmen and capitalists are starting to cower in fear. Corporations are racing to get rid of their private jets. Next it will be their private dining rooms and limousines. Private profit and personal luxury at any level are in danger before the onslaught of a collectivist mentality that holds that if many are suffering, all must suffer, and, further, that those who do not suffer are responsible for the suffering of those who do. Anyone whose head is above the crowd will risk being a target.

This is the time for everyone to recall whatever instances in his life that he remembers when angry mobs turned out to be wrong. Perhaps it’s only a scene from a movie or book, in which someone is able to present a few facts that the mob doesn’t know and that begin to place things in a different, calmer light. Let me be that someone now and begin with one very important and fundamental relevant fact.

Today’s Economic System Is A “Mixed Economy,” Not Laissez-Faire Capitalism

And that is that even if all of the facts as presented were absolutely true, it would not imply any reason whatever to condemn capitalism. Capitalism is a system in which absurd, self-destructive behavior severely punishes whoever is guilty of it. Such people suffer losses, go bankrupt, and lose their ability to have significant further economic influence. Their example then serves as a lesson to others to avoid such behavior.

However, we are very far from having capitalism today, certainly not capitalism in its logically consistent form of laissez-faire capitalism. What we have today is a “mixed economy,” that is, a severely hampered, distorted form of capitalism. In such a system, such behavior can continue, thanks to government subsidies, grants of monopoly privilege and suppression of competition, and now by means of government “bailouts.”

A mixed economy is an economy which remains capitalistic in its basic structure, but in which the government extensively intervenes with the initiation of physical force to compel actions that are against the interest of individuals and/or to prohibit actions that are in the interest of individuals. For example, today it compels people to pay an income tax, which is against their interest but which they pay in order to stay out of jail. It also prohibits them from engaging in various business mergers or paying wages below a certain amount, things which it would be to their interest to do but now do not, because they wish to avoid being fined or imprisoned. (In my recent article “The Myth that Laissez Faire Is Responsible for Our Financial Crisis,” I present an extensive description of the extent of government intervention.)

A mixed economy lacks the fundamental moral-political principles that are needed to determine what is proper or improper for a government to do. Its only principle, if one can call it that, is that the government can do anything that enough people believe will accomplish what they think is “good,” according to an undefined standard. Our mixed economy rests on the effective discarding of the United States Constitution, which placed severe limits on government power and thus stood as a bulwark in defense of an economic system that was almost one of laissez-faire. The Constitutional protections were discarded by a process of pretending that the Constitution could somehow “grow” or “evolve,” which actually meant nothing other than choosing to ignore it.

In a mixed economy, every significant-sized business must fear what the government can do to it. It needs protection, in the form of political connections. It secures these through appointing former government officials to its board of directors, paying such officials lavish consulting fees, and giving lavish campaign contributions to candidates for public office. In these ways it buys the protection it needs.

But soon businesses learn that their protectors can also be used to gain lucrative government contracts, government subsidies, and monopolistic privileges ranging from tariffs and licensing laws to antitrust suits against competitors. Thus, it is not long before the upper echelons of large firms become populated not only with men who cower before the government but also with those who seek to manipulate the government to their advantage, which is where we are today.

Certainly not all big businessmen are this way, and probably only a few of those that are, are so through and through. For the most part, they still have real jobs to do in running their companies, and to the extent they simply do those jobs, they are productive. But probably most big businessmen are morally compromised if only because they must live in fear of the government and are helpless to do anything about it.

Responsibility for the Financial Crisis

There is a sense in which an important sub-group of businessmen does have genuine responsibility for the present economic crisis and for all previous crises of financial contraction and deflation. This is the sub-group of commercial bankers.

Ironically, the way in which they have been responsible is by means of doing something that almost everyone very much wants them to do, above all, the government, and even when the crisis comes, still wants them to do or to get back to doing as soon as possible. This something is the practice of credit expansion. Credit expansion is the lending out of new and additional money that is created out of thin air, with the encouragement and support of the government. Governments value and encourage credit expansion both in the mistaken belief that it is a source of prosperity and in the knowledge that it is a ready source of money to finance government spending.

Credit expansion is what creates a delusion of prosperity while it lasts and economic depression when it ends. It is all that needs to be stopped to end the boom-bust cycle. (In this brief article, I must ask the reader who wants understand the process, and how to stop it, to be content merely with references to further reading, namely, Chapters XX and XXXI of Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action and Chapters 12 and 19 of my own Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Concerning the role of credit expansion in our present crisis in particular, please see my articles “The Myth that Laissez Faire Is Responsible for Our Financial Crisis,” “Our Financial House of Cards and How to Start Replacing It With Solid Gold,” and “The Housing Bubble and the Credit Crunch.”)

I want now to deal with the subjects of bonuses and corporate jets.

Bonuses

Granting bonuses to employees and buying jet planes are perfectly legitimate for private business firms. In today’s context, this means firms that have not received government bailout money.

Giving bonuses and buying jet planes are purely business decisions. It’s only a question of whether the bonuses motivate the employees who receive them to bring in profits to the firm that are greater than the bonuses paid, or not. If the answer is yes, then it makes sense to pay the bonuses.

To the chief executive of a privately owned, non-taxpayer supported Wall Street firm, the payment of bonuses even in a year of calamitous losses may appear as still making economic sense, at least if the firm expects to stay in business. This is because the bonuses are not paid to people who have incurred the firm’s losses. Those losses are in the assets the firm owns. They are not in its day-to-day trading operations, which may continue to be profitable.

The situation is analogous to that of a retail chain which has had massive losses because of such things as fire or hurricane damage to its warehouses, but whose stores are still making money. The Wall Street firm is still executing customers’ orders in buying and selling securities, it is still trading in currencies and in the futures markets, and still arranging mergers and acquisitions, and divestitures and breakups. All of these aspects of its business may well still be profitable.

The brokers and traders, the mortgage and acquisition specialists et al., and their various assistants and supporting staffs, have contributed very substantially to these operating profits. The same is true of many of the economic and financial researchers and analysts that the firm employs in connection with its still profitable operations. Money is set aside out of the year-end totals to pay bonuses to the members of such groups, based on their respective individual profitability. The bonuses are accumulated employee compensation, similar in nature to the commissions paid to retail sales clerks. If the firm expects to be in business in the following year, and wants to retain the services of these employees, who, despite the firm’s massive losses in its accumulated assets, have performed well, it probably needs to pay them their bonuses.

John Thain, the then president of Merrill Lynch tried to explain this fact to an interviewer, when he said, “If you don’t pay your best people, you will destroy your franchise” and they’ll go elsewhere, he said.

Ms. Dowd apparently does not know the difference between an operating profit and a balance-sheet loss. She apparently does not know the difference between the due of a successful salesman in a retail-store and the due of someone whose actions have served to burn down the store’s warehouse. But she does know how to be furious. She responded to this explanation by exclaiming:

Hello? They destroyed the franchise. Let’s call their bluff. Let’s see what a great job market it is for the geniuses of capitalism who lost $15 billion in three months and helped usher in socialism.

Despite her ignorance and her collectivism-inspired refusal to draw distinctions between individuals and their respective individual performances and responsibilities, Ms. Dowd does have something of a point. Namely, if because of the bankruptcy and closing of many Wall Street firms, there should be a glut of brokers and traders et al., then the remaining Wall Street firms would be in a position to reduce their compensation. But that would be something they would typically announce before the fact, not after the fact of an agreed-upon compensation having been earned.

***

My discussion of bonuses was in the context of the operations of a privately owned business firm, not one that has to be financially supported by the government and is operated with funds provided by taxpayers. In awarding bonuses after Merrill Lynch’s receipt of government bailout money, which started in September of 2008, Mr. Thain did not realize that he was no longer in charge of a private firm. He did not realize what difference this made to the fundamental character of his firm. Neither did very many other people at the time. But more on this later.

Corporate Jets

I turn now to the subject of corporate jets.

If a corporation can afford to buy a jet and having it will enable extremely high-paid executives to avoid wasting time waiting at airports and be able to be more efficient in working in the time spent in flight, then over time its purchase may actually save more money than it costs. If so, then it will be a good business decision to buy the plane.

It may even be a good business decision to buy it, if the executives who fly in it simply prefer it because it’s more comfortable and enjoyable. In such a case, even if the plane saves nothing in costs or not enough to justify its purchase, it can still make good economic sense for the firm to buy the plane. This will be the case if it is in a position to reduce the compensation paid to the executives in question by as much or more than the amount that it must expend for their personal benefit.

Thus, for example, if the plane falls short of covering its cost through increased productivity on the part of the executives by, say, $1 million per year, the firm will have the benefit of more satisfied executives at absolutely no net cost to itself, if it gets the executives to accept $1million less per year in monetary compensation. In that way, it is the executives who effectively bear the cost of the plane that is otherwise uncovered. And the firm will have whatever indirect monetary gains that may result from better satisfied executives.

Indeed, to the extent that the executives are willing to forgo an amount of compensation that is greater than what is required to cover any otherwise uncovered cost of the plane, the firm has a clear saving in monetary terms. Thus, if the executives can be paid $2 million less per year, while the otherwise uncovered part of the cost of the plane is still $1 million, the firm has a monetary saving of $1 million per year by buying the plane. (Today’s tax laws work in this direction. The replacement of $1 million in monetary compensation with $1 million in indirect compensation, serves to reduce the executives’ after-tax monetary compensation by perhaps as little as $500 thousand, while saving the corporation the full $1 million.)

Situations such as this actually occur all the time, throughout business. Again and again, firms provide fringe benefits that are of value to their employees but which do not cover their cost through increased productivity. They are motivated to provide them by being able to save more in what they would otherwise have to pay the employees in take-home wages than the cost of the fringe benefits.

For example, imagine the situation of employees having to choose between two employers. One of them provides air conditioning. The other does not. In the heat of summer, it is a comparative pleasure to work for the one, and extremely uncomfortable to work for the other. If the employees can earn $1,000 per week by working for the employer who provides air conditioning, and they value that air condition sufficiently, then in order to be induced to work for the second employer, they might require a wage of $1,100 per week. If that second employer can provide air conditioning at a cost to himself of, say, $10 per worker per week, then he will save $90 per worker per week if he provides it. Because in that case, he can obtain his workers for a take-home wage of $1,000 plus an air-conditioning cost of $10, instead of for a take-home wage of $1,100 plus no cost on account of air conditioning. Obviously, such conditions compel the employer to provide air conditioning. It is his recognition of such conditions that led the first employer to provide air conditioning to begin with, i.e., simply because employees value having it far more than the reduction in their take-home wages that is needed to pay for it.

This discussion has application to the $1 million office remodeling that so offended Ms. Dowd. Please keep in mind that the remodeling was commissioned in late 2007, when the executive in question started his position. At that time, Merrill Lynch had not yet received any government money and was thus still a fully privately owned company. The executive in question, John Thain, was a man in charge of the use of hundreds of billions of dollars of capital. And, therefore, if he was indeed the right man for the job, which is certainly what was hoped, was easily entitled to compensation at least as far into double-digit millions as that paid to Hollywood movie stars and leading athletes.

With this many millions in compensation, the value to him of $1 million more or less, may not have been terribly great. (Hollywood stars have weddings that cost more.) It may well have been far below the value he attached to spending his hours of working time in an office that was made to personally please him in every possible respect, and which he may have expected to occupy for many years. In such a case, instead of his firm paying him however many millions it otherwise would have paid him, it could pay him a million dollars less, or even more than a million dollars less. In that case, it was he who bore the cost of the office, out of compensation to which, in the judgment of the parties concerned, he was entitled.

Alternatively, it’s entirely reasonable that providing such an office and the optimum working environment that it provided, could be expected to improve his efficiency with respect to deciding the pattern of investment of his firm’s hundreds of billions of dollars of assets. It would not have taken a great deal of such improvement with respect to the use of sums so vast to be able to earn an additional billion or more of profit for his firm. Understanding this, the firm may well have given him his office in the belief that doing so would add vastly more to its profits than the cost of the remodeling.

When Ms. Dowd discussed this million-dollar office remodeling, her reaction was one of incredulity, outrage, and utter contempt. Here’s what she said (referring to an interviewer of the executive):

Bartiromo pressed: What was wrong with the office of his predecessor, Stanley O’Neal?

‘Well — his office was very different — than — the — the general décor of — Merrill’s offices,’ Thain replied. ‘It really would have been — very difficult — for — me to use it in the form that it was in.’

Dowd then asked in a triumph akin to that of crushing a cockroach:

Did it have a desk and a phone?

I can’t help wondering, if when Dowd may need a surgical operation someday, she will be satisfied if her surgeon has a table and a knife.

Bailouts

Government bailouts put everything in a different light. They give everyone in the country the right to second guess every decision of the firms that have received the bailouts, on the grounds that the money used by those firms is theirs, the taxpayers.

Understandably, the taxpayers become furious about things like bonuses, corporate jets, and expensive office remodelings. They see themselves simply as being made to pay for these things. This is because, unlike the shareholders of a private company, the taxpayers will never have any possible financial benefit even if the expenditures might actually be perfectly reasonable and well made if they took place in the context of a privately owned company. And unlike the shareholders of a private company, they were never given a choice about whether or not they wanted their funds to be turned over to this or that company. Their funds were simply seized in order that others might have the means with which to pay bonuses and financially profit from and/or personally enjoy such things as corporate jets and expensive offices.

Bailouts represent a collision between two incompatible modes of operation—between what Mises calls “profit management” and “bureaucratic management.” That is, they represent a collision between operation according to the principle of striving to make profits and avoid losses, which characterizes private business, and operation according to the dictates of rules and regulations, which characterizes government.

The companies bailed out expected to go on operating as private businesses, but with government money. That’s how the bailouts were advertised. But that is impossible.

Once government money enters the picture, the firms are effectively nationalized, even though the outward guise and appearance of private ownership may remain. This is because their operations are no longer based on profit-and-loss considerations but on satisfying the government and whatever sectors of public opinion are loud enough at the moment to influence the government’s decisions.

What precise actions the government will take are unclear at the moment and appear contradictory. For example, the front-page lead article of The New York Times of February 5, 2009 carries the headline “Executive Pay Limits Seek to Alter Corporate Culture,” followed by the subhead, “Obama Announces a $500,000 Cash Cap at Companies Getting Future Aid.”

Nevertheless, a careful reading of the article shows that $500,000 is a limit only on annual salary. Payment of stock options will still be possible, but they will not be able to be exercised until all of the company’s debt to the government is repaid. Even the limit on annual salary appears to be not very firm. In most cases, it can apparently be waived by means of a “nonbinding shareholder vote.”

The article declares:

Even the new rules allow companies some leeway. While giving shareholders a say in bonuses above the cap and restricting when stock incentives can be cashed in, the rules do not place limits on the size of such awards, which have become the biggest part of many compensation packages. In addition, the toughest new rules apply only to large companies seeking government assistance to survive.… And companies that seek aid but do not need exceptional government assistance can waive the $500,000 pay cap, as long as they submit their executive pay policies to a nonbinding shareholder vote.

Very significantly, the article notes that:

The rules would not prohibit a lower-level executive, like a stock trader or investment banker, from continuing to receive tens of millions of dollars in pay. (My italics.)

If this last is true, then one must wonder exactly what the brouhaha about bonuses was all about in the first place. Because, with this last provision, they appear to be back in, almost in full force.

The current version of the proposed pay caps is clearly contradictory and bound to disappoint Wall Street’s critics. It reads like a compromise forged of a competition between whose lobbyists could get to which politicos with the largest bribes or greatest threats first. At this point, there is no telling what the final proposal will look like. The Times’s article notes that “Officials also emphasized that several of the proposals would not be made final until after public comments had been considered.”

What would be required to satisfy the rhetoric of Wall Street’s critics would be the total abolition of bonuses and a maximum limit on total executive compensation in the nationalized firms to $500,000 for any one individual. That, of course, would mean the destruction of the nationalized firms as viable institutions.

With such a level of compensation, further discussion of such things as corporate jets and expensive office remodelings would disappear, at least as far as the nationalized firms were concerned. This is because the low pay ceilings on executive salaries, and thus the kind of low quality executives likely to be attracted, would eliminate the context in which an economic calculation could justify the purchase of a jet or an expensive office remodeling.

Executives whose salaries are limited to $500,000 are not going to be able to afford to accept the kind of reduction in take-home wages that would be necessary to cover any significant part of the cost of providing a jet or an expensive office remodeling. Nor is any enhanced productivity of such executives likely to be great enough to justify the cost. The head of a government controlled firm may inherit a luxurious office but all that he can afford or that can be afforded on his behalf is not very much more than a desk and a phone—and volumes of rules and regulations that he can consult and scrupulously follow, in order to be able to prove that whatever losses may strike his firm were not his fault.

But the destruction of bailouts is not limited to the crippling of the firms that are bailed out. It also taints the operations of the firms that are operating without bailouts. As already pointed out, they too have given up their jets and are keeping their heads down, despite the fact that economic rationality implies that they should keep their jets. They have been cowed by a raging hostility toward capitalism and wealth.

Symbolism

I quote the words of a prominent New York Times reporter, who sees the facts of the situation, even describes some that I omitted, and yet approves of what has happened. He writes:

When you get right down to it, the purchase of a new plane or an office renovation is pretty meaningless for companies as large as Citigroup or Bank of America [Merrill Lynch is now part of Bank of America]. It’s not unheard of for executives to spend $1 million or more on remodeling when they get the corner office. It’s pocket change. And companies can usually make a halfway decent business case to justify a new airplane. (It goes longer distances than older planes, can take more executives to meetings, allows the top brass to be more efficient and productive, etc., etc.) The question of whether bailout money was used to pay for these perks — as alleged by The New York Post, which broke the Citi airplane story — is, at best, ambiguous. Indeed, breaking the airplane contract and sending the jet back to the manufacturer will probably cost the bank more than keeping the plane. None of that matters. You could make the same argument about the auto executives who flew on corporate jets when they came to Washington to ask Congress for help: surely, it was a better use of their time to fly rather than drive from Detroit, as they did the second time around, after being spanked for taking the jets. That didn’t matter either. What matters is the symbolism. At a time when the country is in such trouble — and executives are asking for bailouts — anything that smacks of plutocracy is going to arouse justifiable populist anger. (Joe Nocera, “It’s Not the Bonus Money. It’s the Principle,” New York Times, January 31, 2009, p. B1. My italics.)

So here we have it. What the outrage is really all about is the hatred of great wealth and its possessors. The goal is to attack them in the name of an alleged duty of the individual to sacrifice his wealth, pleasure, and enjoyment, and ultimately his life, for the benefit of others less fortunate. Seen in this light, the furor raised about corporate jets, office remodelings, and the like is understandable. It is the kind of symbolism appropriate to a campaign on behalf of self-sacrifice and against the pursuit of happiness.

In sharpest contrast and opposition to the philosophy of self-sacrifice and to the role of government as the enforcer of sacrifice, stand these famous lines:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men….

These words are from the Declaration of Independence, which is the founding document of the United States. Their meaning is that the United States was established for the purpose of securing the right of the individual to pursue his own happiness, which includes material prosperity. In the United States, the individual and his rights are supreme. Government exists only in a subordinate role, that of a servant dedicated to protecting and securing the individual and his rights from the aggression of common criminals at home and of despots abroad.

What symbolism would be appropriate to this conception of the relationship between the citizens and their government? How would it differ from the present such symbolism?

The present symbolism depicting the relationship between the government and the citizen is that the head of the government, the President of the United States, has at his disposal, with no objection from anyone, Air Force One, which is a Boeing 747 jet plane that costs hundreds of millions of dollars and, when configured for commercial operation, carries more than 450 passengers. At the same time, howls of anger and fury go up when one of the largest private corporations in the country dares to order a 12-seat jet plane for $50 million.

The acceptance of this relationship symbolizes the total reversal of the relationship between government and citizen that the founding of our country was intended to establish and maintain. The symbolism appropriate to that relationship would be that while private citizens are free to fly in 747s, or Lunar Landers for that matter, depending only on how successful was their individual pursuit of happiness, the President of the country, who is merely the chief night watchman of the nation, and is its servant, is consigned to a 12-seater jet.

Of course, this is not to begrudge the President of the United States the use of a 747 in today’s world, in which he may require such a plane merely in order to have necessary means of communication at his disposal. But it is to remind all those seeking to deify the government and raise it above the citizens, that they are encouraging a servant to forget his place and to become the master of those whom it is his duty to serve.