Guru of Right inspired new U.K. leaders

Press, 10 May 1979, Page 16

Guru of Right inspired new U.K. leaders

By

HUGH HERBERT

ill the “Guardian,” London

“You must sit on my right — I am deaf on the left. It is a source of many political jokes.” That’s not surprising. Professor Friedrich August von Hayek, 80 this month, is the guru of the new Right in Britain, the major European proponent of the market economy.

For 40 years he has proclaimed that individual freedom is inseparable from economic freedom, and that socialism is the surest way to lose both. Egalitarianism and the concept of social justice are for him mirages on the desert road to slavery. His latest book — the last volume of “Law, Legislation and Liberty,” published last month — ends castigating not merely Marx, but Freud. Because Freud, via psychology, has ruined our educational and penal systems, shifting blame and responsibility that should belong to the individual on to the shoulders of society at large.

Gurus cannot choose their disciples, and Professor Hayek’s most famous followers in Britain are, in rough order of their conversion: Mr Enoch Powell, Sir Keith Joseph (now Britain’s Secretary for industry), and Mrs Margaret Thatcher. But if the guru cannot choose, maybe he gets the disciples he deserves, and Professor Hayek says he is “very happy” with the ones he has acquired. “But I would never presume to advise Mrs Thatcher, My task is to create a public opinion in which a sensible policy is possible. My aim is

to make politically possible what is politically impossible. Unfortunately, politicians have - to accept public opinion.” The main problem for his Conservative followers, he says, is whether they can persuade the rest of their party. “On trade union reform, Mrs Thatcher is perfectly sound, but she does not have her party completely behind her to do what I would have advised her to do. I would have thought it essential, in this election, to have a clear mandate to reform trade union law.”

By that, he means getting rid of the closed shop, “threatening” forms of picketing, and what he regards as the curiously British practice on demarcation. For Professor Hayek, capitalist monopoly may be acceptable — if it is efficient and if there is no formal obstacle to the re-emergence of competition. Trade union monopoly is a different can of worms.

Professor Hayek says that if he were still living in Britain — he has retired to his native Austria — he would vote Conservative. But he would never join that party, for reasons he set out in his massive 1960 volume, “The Constitution of Liberty” — that conservatism may slow the slide into socialism, but not reverse it; or as Evelyn Waugh put it, the Tories never put the clock back a single minute. Professor Hayek is essentially a nineteenth-century

liberal, who might have joined the Liberals under Gladstone. He has never belonged to any party, because no party has ever accepted his views. They were all for decades galloping towards socialistic ends in the wake of Keynes. He is a tall, hawk-nosed man who retains his Viennese accent and whose mind was indelibly marked by the experience of his first job in the Austrian civil service. “I was appointed in October, 1921, at a salary of 3000 Austrian crowns. I regarded that as a great deal. After 10 months, I was being paid one million crowns—l had to be, because no one could have been expected to live on the salary at which I was appointed.” On pay day, the wives of his married colleagues—he was still single then—used to wait outside the office, seize the money from their husbands, and dash off to the market to spend it before it could shrink any further in value. His most insistent economic warnings—and for years, his most unheeded — were to be about inflation. In 1931, Professor Hayek accepted a chair at the London School of Economics, became a naturalised British subject, a few years later and by the beginning of the war was already arguing—in a memo to Beveridge, then the L.S.E.’s director — that Nazism was not “a capitalist reaction against socialism,” but a form of socialism itself. That was the seed that, in 1944, produced “The Road to Serfdom,” still his best remembered book, and the

essential statement of his arguments against socialist planning. Professor Hayek is one of the main sources for the belief that less government is, by definition, better government. “I recognise two forms of government power,” he says today. “To provide a framework for the market; and to provide services that the market cannot provide.” And British government, in his view, has failed in both: the market is hobbled by State intervention, and where it supplies services the market initially cannot, the State claims a monopoly that prevents the effective emergence of competitors later.

But doesn’t freedom include the right to bargain away part of that freedom for some other benefit, like security? “For the individual yes. But

I doubt if the majority has the right to bargain away on behalf of the minority.” For Professor Hayek, freedom is the absence of coercion, and is assured by basic laws of “just conduct,” to which the majority give assent and to which everyone without exception is subject. Democracy is simply the system for electing a government to administer those laws. Democracy, in the Hayekian definition, is not the will of the majority imposed on the minority for specific ends, however socially desirable the majority may believe those ends to be. So social justice and equality are impossible. Because they involve positive discrimination—which means that some are treated more equally than others—and no government has the perfect

knowledge of every man’s condition to make discrimination by the state acceptable. In a Hayekian world, he acknowledges, freedom does not mean that we shall not be miserable. Some of us, anyway.. Professor Hayek started as an economist — his Nobel Prize is for economics — and turned his attention to the political condition of man. But not to politics. For an economist, he says, becoming involved in government is corrupting. “You become a two-armed economist. You know that joke? An American boss advertised for a one« armed economist. When he was asked why, he said: ‘I don’t want an economist who says on the one hand this, on the other hand that’.”