David Boaz

The Washington Post reports:

[Maryland Gov. Wes] Moore is not close to accomplishing his moonshot goals — among them, eliminating child poverty and reducing the overincarceration of young Black men — but has faced little criticism for it. He heads into a second year with less‐​favorable financial headwinds and even more aspirations. Among them: growing the state’s economy, helping women who want to rejoin the workforce and fixing a yawning affordable housing crisis — complex problems that take time and deep resources to address.

Sigh. So many assumptions built into that last phrase, “complex problems that take time and deep resources to address.” Time, maybe. Change takes time. But more resources than the state of Maryland has? Not really.

Take a look at the problems:

• eliminating child poverty. The best way to eliminate poverty is to eliminate the regulations that block investment, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Growth means more and better jobs.
• reducing the overincarceration of young Black men. Repeal laws against the use and sale of drugs, and other victimless crimes, and then you won’t be arresting and incarcerating so many young Black men. Save jail for violent or dangerous criminals. No new resources needed. Indeed, resources are freed up for other purposes. Also, Baltimore in particular has terrible schools. Give families, including poor families, a chance to choose better schools.
• growing the state’s economy. Deregulation and lower taxes would help. Take a look at the policies of the states that score highest on economic freedom, New Hampshire, Florida, and South Dakota, or even number 18, Virginia.
• helping women who want to rejoin the workforce. The deregulations noted above will mean more jobs for everyone.
• fixing a yawning affordable housing crisis. Let. People. Build. More. Housing.

So many problems, and so many people whose immediate instinct is, “What new government program or agency can solve this problem that government programs have not solved in years?” Try asking, “Are there government programs that are preventing people from improving this situation?”

The major themes of eighteenth‐​century [English] radical libertarianism [were] brought to realization here. The first is the belief that power is evil, a necessity perhaps but an evil necessity; that it is infinitely corrupting; and that it must be controlled, limited, restricted in every way compatible with a minimum of civil order. Written constitutions; the separation of powers; bills of rights; limitations on executives, on legislatures, and courts; restrictions on the right to coerce and wage war—all express the profound distrust of power that lies at the ideological heart of the American Revolution and that has remained with us as a permanent legacy ever after.

Consider what classical liberalism stood for in the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was against the power of the church and for the power of the market; against the privileges of kings and aristocracies and for dignity of the middle class; against a society dominated by status and land and in favor of one based on markets and merit; opposed to religion and custom and in favor of science and secularism; for national self‐​determination and against empires; for freedom of speech and against censorship; for free trade and against mercantilism. Above all, it was for the rights of the individual and against the power of the church and the state.

On December 1, 1982, F. A. Hayek became Cato’s first Distinguished Lecturer. Cato had supported his work for several years, and he was later named a Distinguished Senior Fellow — an honor to be sure, but not quite up to the level of his 1974 Nobel Prize.

Hayek’s life spanned the 20th century, from 1899 to 1992. In his youth he thought he saw liberalism dying in nationalism and war. Thanks partly to his own efforts, in his old age he was heartened by the revival of free‐​market liberalism. John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker that “on the biggest issue of all, the vitality of capitalism, he was vindicated to such an extent that it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the twentieth century as the Hayek century.”


Back in 2010 the New York Times said that the Tea Party “has reached back to dusty bookshelves for long‐​dormant ideas. It has resurrected once‐​obscure texts by dead writers [such as] Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” (1944).” I responded at the time,

So that’s, you know, “long‐​dormant ideas” like those of F. A. Hayek, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, who met with President Reagan at the White House, whose book The Constitution of Liberty was declared by Margaret Thatcher “This is what we believe,” who was described by Milton Friedman as “the most important social thinker of the 20th century” and by White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers as the author of “the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today,” who is the hero of The Commanding Heights, the book and PBS series by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, and whose book The Road to Serfdom has never gone out of print and has sold 100,000 copies this year.

On the occasion of Hayek’s 100th birthday, Tom G. Palmer summed up some of his intellectual contributions:

Hayek may have made his greatest contribution to the fight against socialism and totalitarianism with his best‐​selling 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. In it, Hayek warned that state control of the economy was incompatible with personal and political freedom and that statism set in motion a process whereby “the worst get on top.”


But not only did Hayek show that socialism is incompatible with liberty, he showed that it is incompatible with rationality, with prosperity, with civilization itself. In the absence of private property, there is no market. In the absence of a market, there are no prices. And in the absence of prices, there is no means of determining the best way to solve problems of social coordination, no way to know which of two courses of action is the least costly, no way of acting rationally. Hayek elaborated the insights of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, whose 1922 book Socialism offered a brilliant refutation of the dreams of socialist planners. In his later work, Hayek showed how prices established in free markets work to bring about social coordination. His essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” published in the American Economic Review in 1945 and reprinted hundreds of times since, is essential to understanding how markets work.

But Hayek was more than an economist. As I’ve written before, he also published impressive works on political theory and psychology. He’s like Marx, only right. Tom Palmer noted:

Building on his insights into how order emerges “spontaneously” from free markets, Hayek turned his attention after the war to the moral and political foundations of free societies. The Austrian‐​born British subject dedicated his instant classic The Constitution of Liberty “To the unknown civilization that is growing in America.” Hayek had great hopes for America, precisely because he appreciated the profound role played in American popular culture by a commitment to liberty and limited government. While most intellectuals praised state control and planning, Hayek understood that a free society has to be open to the unanticipated, the unplanned, the unknown. As he noted in The Constitution of Liberty, “Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.” The freedom that matters is not the “freedom” of the rulers or of the majority to regulate and control social development, but the freedom of the individual person to live his own life as he chooses. The freedom of the individual to break old molds, to create new things, and to test new paths is the mark of a progressive society: “If we proceed on the assumption that only the exercises of freedom that the majority will practice are important, we would be certain to create a stagnant society with all the characteristics of unfreedom.”

Reagan and Thatcher may have admired Hayek, but he always insisted that he was a liberal, not a conservative. He titled the postscript to The Constitution of Liberty “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” He pointed out that the conservative “has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force. The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to tolerate much that we dislike.” He wanted to be part of “the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution.” And I recall an interview in a French magazine in the 1980s, which I can’t find online, in which he was asked if he was part of the “new right,” and he quipped, “Je suis agnostique et divorcé.”

Hayek lived long enough to see the rise and fall of fascism, national socialism, and Soviet communism. In the years since Hayek’s death economic freedom around the world has been increasing (until a hopefully temporary dip during the Covid pandemic), and liberal values such as human rights, the rule of law, equal freedom under law, and free access to information have spread to new areas. But today liberalism is under challenge from such disparate yet symbiotic ideologies as resurgent leftism, right‐​wing authoritarian populism, and radical political Islamism. I am optimistic because I think that once people get a taste of freedom and prosperity, they want to keep it. The challenge for Hayekian liberals is to help people understand that freedom and prosperity depend on liberal values, the values explored and defended in his many books and articles.

Hayek came to Cato once more, for a small lunch. I have a picture from that event that I especially like because it looks like it’s just myself and Hayek at the table. Except for the dozen or so wine and water glasses of tablemates who weren’t in the camera shot.

“Exclusive Interview with F. A. Hayek,” Cato Policy Report, vol. 6, no. 3, May/​June 1984.

“An Interview With F. A. Hayek,” Cato Policy Report, vol. 5, no. 2, February 1983.

We will differ from the dominant political traditions primarily when they try to use the powers of the state to impose their particular values on the larger community. We will oppose contemporary liberals when they fail to distinguish between a virtue and a requirement. We will oppose contemporary conservatives when they fail to distinguish between a sin and a crime.

Newspaper headlines proclaim that President Biden has issued a “massive, sweeping, wide‐​ranging” executive order on artificial intelligence. And no one seems to be saying that whatever the content of the order is, “massive, sweeping, wide‐​ranging” regulations should not be issued by one man.

President Biden, members of Congress, and the judiciary should take a look at the White House’s own website, where they would read: “Under Article II of the Constitution, the President is responsible for the execution and enforcement of the laws created by Congress.” Not to make the laws, but to execute and enforce them. If AI needs government attention, it should come from Congress.

Biden is not the first president to believe that his office was invested with kingly powers. Both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama used executive orders to grant themselves extraordinary powers to deal with terrorism. Lawmaking by the president, through executive orders, is a clear usurpation of both the legislative powers granted to Congress and the powers reserved to the states.

Clinton aide Paul Begala once boasted: “Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kind of cool.” President Obama declared: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation.… I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone, and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.” President Donald Trump upped the ante: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

One of the great concerns of the Founders was to rein in executive power. Thus they wrote a Constitution to divide and limit the powers of all elected officials. But they thought that each branch would be jealous of its own authority and would not tolerate a usurpation of its power by the other branches. Somehow Congress and the courts have lost their taste for conflict with the executive.

No matter what agenda the president seeks to impose by executive order, Congress should stop him. The body to which the Constitution delegates “all legislative powers herein granted” must assert its authority. In a constitutional republic, one man should not have kingly powers — and the Constitution doesn’t grant them to him.

Authoritarian—and not just authoritarian—governments typically see national history as an important way to shore up support for the regime. China is probably the most prominent example of that right now, as Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party reinforce their efforts to teach every Chinese citizen the glories of the party’s history and to conceal the truth about such crimes as the land‐​reform campaigns of the early fifties, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and the Tiananmen Square massacre. But a new book reveals the efforts of unofficial historians to make sure the truth is not lost.

The book by Ian Johnson is Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future. Ian Buruma has a long and informative review in the New Yorker:

Johnson’s underground historians are mostly concerned with unearthing and keeping alive forbidden memories of the past. Official Party history, imposed on China’s population, is also a matter of official forgetting. Many people born in China after 1989 have never heard of the Tiananmen massacre. Many of the young people who lived through the Cultural Revolution, in the nineteen‐​sixties and early seventies, would have had limited knowledge of the Great Leap Forward, in the late fifties and early sixties, when Mao’s crackpot schemes for industrial and agricultural transformation caused tens of millions of deaths from starvation. And many of those who starved may not have been fully aware of the land‐​reform campaigns of the early fifties, when vast numbers of people were murdered as class enemies, because they owned some land (as Mao’s father did, but that is a fact Party ideologues prefer to keep quiet).

The book’s title comes from a secretly mimeographed magazine, Spark, that began in 1960. It lasted only two issues, “and some of the contributors were executed as ‘counter‐​revolutionaries’ after spending years in prison under horrifying conditions.” But it inspired “the writers, the scholars, the poets, and the filmmakers who found the courage to challenge Communist Party propaganda.”

Johnson describes efforts over many decades and also ongoing work today. Of course, “None of this work can be released in China.… But Johnson’s underground historians are mostly concerned with unearthing and keeping alive forbidden memories of the past. Official Party history, imposed on China’s population, is also a matter of official forgetting.”

It’s an inspiring story. And of course China is not the only country trying to craft an official history that may veer far from the truth. The Soviet Union pioneered official history and official forgetting before Mao came to power and before George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty‐​Four. After the fall of the USSR the dissident and human rights activist Vladimir Bukovsky, who late in life was a Cato senior fellow, devoted much of his efforts, along with organizations as Memorial, to exposing the crimes of the Communist Party.

Of course, history is a concern of liberal and democratic countries as well. Shakespeare wrote plays that promoted the claims and the achievement of the Tudor dynasty, which was most pleasing to Queen Elizabeth I. The American Founders believed that the study of history is our best guide to the present and the future. The authors of the Federalist Papers wrote of history as “the oracle of truth” and “the least fallible guide of human opinions.” From their study of history they learned of the ancient rights of Englishmen, the importance of individual virtue in preserving freedom, and the dangers of power and thus the necessity of constraining and dividing it.

History helps us to understand the development of our civilization, including the ideas that shape it. Often the ideas that we now regard as universal principles arose in response to particular circumstances. Magna Carta and similar medieval charters reflect the struggle to constrain the power of kings. From such guarantees of specific liberties, eventually liberty developed. The rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights reflected particular historical experiences: with religious wars, censorship, confiscation of property, the Star Chamber, and the constant tendency of government to seek more power.

People get much of their understanding of government and policy from history. The way we view the Constitution, slavery, Jim Crow, the industrial revolution, the robber barons, the New Deal, and other historical events shapes our view of the present. And in a liberal society we’re not always going to agree on the lessons or even the facts of history.

Scholars such as Frances Fitzgerald have written about past battles over how to tell the American story. And of course we’re having heated disputes today over how to understand and teach American history.

But for now I want to focus on the courageous efforts of Chinese citizens who have given so much to keep the truth alive. And I’ll also note that we at the Cato Institute have done our very little bit to introduce dissident ideas into China.

During the post‐​Mao opening Cato held conferences on liberty, limited government, and free markets in China in 1988, 1997, 2000, and 2001. The 1988 conference, featuring Milton Friedman, numerous Chinese scholars, and a Friedman meeting with Premier Zhao Ziyang, was surely the first conference on market liberalism in Chinese history. Papers from the conference were published in both English and Chinese (English title Economic Reform in China), as were papers from the 1997 conference (China in the New Millennium). Several Cato books have been published in China: my Libertarianism: A Primer (later updated as The Libertarian Mind) in 2012, Johan Norberg’s books In Defense of Global Capitalism and Progress, Randal O’Toole’s Gridlock and The Best‐​Laid Plans, and just last month the Cato Handbook for Policymakers.

Ian Johnson is telling an important story of heroic Chinese people who for more than 60 years have been making sure historical truth is not lost in a great country.

It’s hard not to despair at the state of public policy discussion these days. Every day’s newspaper contains another bad idea from politicians, pundits, and wonks from across the political spectrum, from rent control to corporate subsidies to trillion‐​dollar handouts to costly regulations to red vs. blue cultural war games. It could keep an entire institute busy analyzing, criticizing, and warning about looming policy errors. As bad as the current climate is, though, I was reminded this week that we’ve lived through worse policy enthusiasms.

In his recent book Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness, Timothy Sandefur describes the intellectual climate that those “founding mothers of libertarianism” faced in the Hoover‐​Roosevelt Depression years:

Between 1917 and 1919, agencies such as the War Industries Board and [Herbert] Hoover’s U.S. Food Administration appeared to vindicate Progressive beliefs in government planning. A decade later, many—including Hoover himself—pointed to that precedent, arguing that the Depression was analogous to a world war and should be dealt with in the same way.

That was the basis for the idea that General Electric’s president Gerard Swope proposed in September 1931. He recommended that the federal government create a system of industrial cartels under which all compa­nies of more than 50 employees would be assigned to a trade association vested with authority to dictate the types and amounts of goods and ser­vices businesses could provide, and how much they could charge. This would prevent “destructive” competition, by giving companies the power to prohibit their competitors from reducing prices or introducing new or improved products, which would “stabilize” the economy and ensure full employment. “Industry is not primarily for profit but rather for ser­vice,” Swope declared. “One cannot loudly call for more stability in busi­ness and get it on a purely voluntary basis.” Although hardly the only such proposal—it mimicked the corporatism already being implemented in Italy and Germany—the Swope Plan gained the most attention and would later form the blueprint for the National Industrial Recovery Act. But at the time, Hoover labeled it “fascism” and rejected it as “merely a remaking of Mussolini’s ‘corporate state.’”

Many similar schemes were offered by prominent intellectuals, includ­ing historian Charles Beard, who proposed “A Five‐​Year Plan for America” on the Soviet model, and New Republic editor George Soule, whose 1932 book A Planned Society proposed political control over the entire economy. These writers, said one of Soule’s colleagues, “were impatient for the com­ing of the Revolution; they talked of it, dreamed of it.” And they were not alone. That same year, novelist Theodore Dreiser published Tragic America, which he had originally planned to call A New Deal for America. It advo­cated the overthrow of capitalism and the replacement of the Constitution with a government that would control industry in the style of the Soviet Union, where he thought communism was “functioning admirably.”…

Dreiser probably changed his title because A New Deal had already been taken by economist Stuart Chase, whose book of that name also appeared in 1932. Chase—who considered it “a pity” that “the road” to socialist revolution in America was “temporarily closed”—looked forward to the day when the government would seize all industry and “solv[e] at a single stroke unemployment and inadequate standards of living.” It would do this, he said, by compelling all individuals to “work for the community.” The government should forbid high interest rates, stock market speculation, the manufacturing of “useless” products, the creation of new clothing styles, businesses “rushing blindly to compete,” and other “ways of making money”—and it should do so “by firing squad if necessary.” The 44‐​year‐​old Chase was inspired by the “new religion” of “Red Revolution,” which he found “dramatic, idealistic, and, in the long run, constructive.” “Why,” he asked, “should the Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?”

A system of industrial cartels under which all compa­nies of more than 50 employees would be assigned to a trade association vested with authority to dictate the types and amounts of goods and ser­vices businesses could provide, and how much they could charge. A Five‐​Year Plan. Political control over the entire economy. Replacement of the Constitution with a government that would control industry in the style of the Soviet Union. Seize all industry. Compel all individuals to “work for the community.”

As bad as our policy dialogue is in 2023, we don’t hear mainstream commentators calling for five‐​year plans and top‐​down control of the entire economy. It seems that libertarian and free‐​market ideas, along with our experience of overweening government in the United States and especially in other countries, have had some influence.

At the time, though, these ideas were not just wishful thinking by ivory tower academics. Consider some commentary from March 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated as president.

In his inaugural address Roosevelt declared, “We must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline.… I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.” And if Congress didn’t promptly pass his agenda, “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.…The people of the United States … have asked for discipline and direction under leadership.” And as Sandefur reports, plenty of people who ought to have seen themselves as guardians of constitutional liberty fell in line:

Fearful Americans cannot have been reassured by the February editorial in Barron’s that advocated “a mild species of dictatorship,” or by Walter Lippmann’s advice to the new president that same month—“You have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers”—or by the New York Times reporter who proclaimed in May that Americans had given Roosevelt “the authority of a dictator” as “a free gift, a sort of unanimous power of attorney.… America today literally asks for orders.” Publisher William Randolph Hearst—who admired Mussolini and Hitler so much that he gave them columns in his newspapers—financed a propaganda film called Gabriel over the White House, which premiered days after the inauguration and depicted the new president being guided by heaven to declare martial law, unilaterally cure the Depression, execute criminals, and end all war. Even the Nazi Party celebrated Roosevelt’s commitment to all‐​encompassing power with a story in its newspaper lauding what it called “Roosevelt’s Dictatorial Recovery Measures.”

In some ways the real counterattack on this collectivist, centralist mindset began a decade later with the publication in 1943 of Paterson’s The God of the Machine, Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, Rand’s The Fountainhead, and in 1944 of F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. But as our current challenges illustrate, this intellectual battle is far from over.