Today marks the birthday of the great economist Friedrich Hayek. Born on this date in 1899 in Vienna, Hayek devoted his life to economic education. Perhaps his best known work is “The Road to Serfdom,” published in 1944.
As well-summarized by Gerald O’Driscoll for the Cato Institute, Hayek’s core thesis “is that one intervention inevitably leads to another. The unintended consequences of each market intervention are economic distortions, which generate further interventions to correct them. That interventionist dynamic leads society down the road to serfdom.”
Collectivist ideologies, from Nazism to Marxism, will inevitably lead societies down the same doomed road.
In 1976, he devoted a volume of his “Law, Legislation, and Liberty” trilogy to the demented notion of “social justice.”
“What we have to deal with in the case of ‘social justice’ is simply a quasi- religious superstition of the kind which we should respectfully leave in peace so long as it merely makes those happy who hold it, but which we must fight when it becomes the pretext of coercing other men,” he wrote. “And the prevailing belief in ‘social justice’ is at present probably the gravest threat to most other values of a free civilization.”
While skeptical that the concept even has a coherent meaning, Hayek understood that commitments to “social justice” ultimately leads those in or seeking power down very dark paths. Individuals are stripped of their dignity and sorted according to the whims of the social justice plan. Market processes are disregarded, and private property something that must be owed to some other at the discretion of the mini-tyrant who thinks they are doing the “just” thing.
“What I hope to have made clear is that the phrase ‘social justice’ is not, as most people probably feel, an innocent expression of good will towards the less fortunate, but that it has become a dishonest insinuation that one ought to agree to a demand of some special interest which can give no real reason for it,” he wrote.
This editorial board honors Friedrich Hayek today because his ideas are as relevant today as ever. With one party far down the social justice road and the other declining into populist mush, we can only remind people that better ideas are out there.