My column today is on the way conservative hyperbole about the Democrats' fairly moderate domestic accomplishments -- from health insurance reform that preserves the private system to regulating the financial industry after its practices helped usher in an economic crisis -- obscures actual threats to liberty relates, I think, to the larger conversation folks like Will Wilkinson and David Frum have been having about Fred Hayek. Ezra Klein articulates better than I could what liberals actually want here, and it's not serfdom:
At this point, the liberals I know are excited by the prospect of a few things. Extending health insurance -- probably private -- to all Americans. Reducing health-care costs for all Americans, as that will leave them with more of their income to spend on what they wish. Doing something about carbon emissions, preferably through market signals like a carbon tax or cap-and-trade. And, in my case, some sort of early-childhood education system. Marx would be very disappointed, but Hayek, I think, would be quite comforted.
Hayek might be comforted if he were looking at liberals' domestic policy agenda. But Wilkinson writes:
There, Hayek draws out the difference between "a free country" and "a country under arbitrary government". A country counts as free only if its government is bound by the rule of law, which, according to Hayek, "means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand". Typically, these rules, once fixed, are written down and then published through official state organs. The idea is that politically-determined rules need to be relatively fixed and publicly known in order to create a stable and certain framework in which individual planning and complex social coordination can flourish. The goal of replacing arbitrary government with the rule of law implies for Hayek, among other things, that executive discretion ought to be reduced "as much as possible".
What we have is an ongoing war in which executive discretion is being maximized in ways that conservatives don't find frightening because they're not directed at them. But it's hard for me to imagine that warrantless surveillance and the authority to target for killing American citizens suspected of terrorism, fits Hayek's stated principles of a "free country," where government actions are "bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand," especially given that our understanding of such policies is hampered by the fact that the executive has declared the way they are implemented to be state secrets. I don't think you get more arbitrary than the government stating it's allowed to do something that may deprive another human being of their life, but no one is allowed to know anything about it. For some reason, when it comes to national security, all these freedom lovers check their Hayek at the door.
UPDATE: In case it's unclear, I'm not talking about Wilkinson, who briefly mentions "the growing list of new executive powers claimed under the Bush and Obama administrations," on his list of things Hayek would see as arbitrary, but rather conservatives who have appropriated Hayek's more apocalyptic language in arguments against things like the Affordable Care Act.
