![]() I also suspect they would mean radically different things to different people and that most people have no clue whatsoever what society is or what government is in particular. I suspect that if you asked people on the street to define each of these words, you would find they do not all mean the same to most people. “One manifestation of this is the incredible confusion between the terms “country,” “nation,” “state” or “government,” and “society.” They seem to all mean the same…” ![]() In Buchanan, there can be redistribution of income as long as some individuals (strong men and bullies, for example) can negotiate it in their favor because everybody knows that their condition would be better in anarchy and that, without such a bribe, they won’t agree to the social contract. Joe can want and succeed to impose his preferences on redistribution, but this is the only sort of (coercive) social welfare function that can exist. Note–and this is crucial–that none of these theorists believes that there exists a “social welfare function” that can reconcile everybody’s preferences on income distribution. De Jasay is an extreme and anarchist Humean theorist, for whom all social life is determined by conventions it is a valid question to ask whether this can conflict with markets (de Jasay thinks not). In Buchanan, the main political institutions are determined by a social contract. It’s a bit more complicated in Buchanan and de Jasay. I think that if you reread Hume, Smith, and Hayek, you will find that much, if not most, of society is regulated by the non-price mechanisms that are conventions and institutions. I don’t (and shouldn’t) want to minimize the importance of your interrogation. In Europe, some countries that credit strict containment measures with helping to curb the contagion began taking steps to reopen their societies after a month of lockdown. ![]() It is in the Wall Street Journal of April 7 (“ Global Coronavirus Death Toll Passes 81,000 as Some Lockdowns Tighten“): This way of speaking, which looks like voodoo sociology and politics, must have seen innocuous to the three reporters, their editor, and the copy-editor involved, vindicating Hayek. ![]() Apparently a society belongs to its country, as Fanny and Lenina could have said. I found another example of the collectivist and at best confusing way of speaking (at worst, it’s tyrannical). (See also my “ The Vacuity of the Political ‘we’,” Econlib, October 6, 2014.) Of course, those who incarnate the “we” rule over the rest of us we really belong to them, like under the “plantation state” evoked by Anthony de Jasay in the last chapter of The State (1985, 1998). One manifestation of this is the incredible confusion between the terms “country,” “nation,” “state” or “government,” and “society.” They seem to all mean the same, because they are all “us,” and as Fanny and Lenina thought “we” all belong to “us”. “So long as we speak in language based on erroneous theory, we generate and perpetuate error,” he writes. Hayek, the Nobel economics laureate, devotes a whole chapter of The Fatal Conceit (1988) to “Our Poisoned Language.” He complains that our language is plagued by archaic tribalism, animisn, and their modern incarnation, collectivism. Fanny explains to Lenina that she must be promiscuous because “everyone belongs to everyone else.” Lenina repeats what must seem a truism to her.į.A. The title of this post is borrowed from a character in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), where politically-correct snowflakes and easy women are one.
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