“Even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.”

Obama’s Road to Serfdom

by Lloyd Billingsley

Barack Obama has his pen and his phone and as this report notes, the President of the United States is poised to bypass Congress and “use his control of federal agencies to impose his progressive agenda on the economy and society throughout 2014.”

This is more evidence that Barack Obama has not read Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, the 1944 book endorsed by John Maynard Keynes “in deeply moved agreement” both philosophical and moral. Hayek’s book nevertheless remains enlightening about president Obama and his administration in several ways.

Last year in a piece on ObamacareWashington Post columnist Michael Gerson cited Hayek on the challenge of technocratic planning: limited information. The knowledge, Hayek wrote, “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”

According to Hayek, a Nobel laureate in economics, the dispute is not about “whether planning is to be done or not.” Rather, the key question is whether the planning is to be conducted “centrally, by one authority” or “divided among many individuals.” Obamacare purports to plan health care for an entire nation. By any standard, that has not worked out well.

The federal website was dysfunctional but Obamacare bosses opted to roll it out anyway. Federal officials remained uncertain how many people had “enrolled” and whether enrollees had in fact secured a policy. Among other technical and economic problems, the federal website remains insecure and state exchanges have troubles of their own.

“So maybe the problem is not Obama or Sebelius,” Gerson wrote, “but rather a government program that requires superhuman technocratic mastery.” That validates Hayek on the information problem. Another section of his “grand book,” as Keynes called it, may be even more relevant.

That would be Hayek’s chapter on “Why the Worst Get on Top” in societies trending toward central control. In those, the dominating element is “the general demand for a quick and determined government action.” Therefore it is “the man or party strong enough to ‘get things done’ who exercises the greatest appeal.” But for such a man and his party, the problems range far beyond the lack of information.

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