F. A. Hayek is renowned for implacable opposition to the British National Health Service, on the grounds that it would inevitably make the UK a Stalinist nation. But it’s a myth. He says almost the exact opposite in his most-cited book, The Road to Serfdom. He was opposed to making some aspects of a health service mandatory, but he explicitly approved of such social programs as a Universal Basic Income and health care for all who want it.
He did oppose anything called Socialism that involved central planning, and he did say that that was the road to Nazism and Communism. But he supported programs to correct market failures and have the government do some things that private enterprise simply can’t.
Where did Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan get the idea that Medicare would be the end of a free society? The myth of F. A. Hayek and TheRoadtoSerfdom. How did it become a Wrong-Wing article of faith? Friedman made a lot of it up, pretending that Hayek approved of his wackadoodle economic fantasies.
That’s part of today’s story.
Milton Friedman said of TheRoadtoSerfdom
'Thisbookhasbecomeatrueclassic:essentialreading foreveryonewhoisseriouslyinterestedinpoliticsin thebroadestandleastpartisansense.'
Friedman’s fan clubs then set off a new round of hyperpartisanship, in which facts need not apply, that continues to this day. We call it Market Fundamentalism. That will be next week’s topic our topic in two weeks in this Diary series, after Woke Baby.
One of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free.
Ronald Reagan and the AMA Ladies Auxiliary [sic], Operation Coffeecup
Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine—Operation Coffee Cup
We have looked at two of the giants in real economics, Adam Smith and Leon Walras, who disposed of Mercantilism and Physiocracy. Now we turn to the sad story of an economic liberal hijacked by Wrong-Wingers.
Next we we will turn to the modern Mercantilists who have become the darlings of the owner class, the 1%, and their hirelings and hangers-on when they sold the Starve the Beast lie to the White patriarchal Christian Nationalist Supremacists, once a majority in the US, but no longer.