"Because justice refers to rules of individual conduct. And no rules of the conduct of individuals can have the effect that the good things of life are distributed in a particular manner. No state of affairs as such is just or unjust: it is only when we assume that somebody is responsible for having brought it about. Now, we do complain that God has been unjust when one family has suffered many deaths and another family has all of its children grow up safely. But we know we can't take that seriously. We don't mean that anybody has been unjust. In the same sense, a spontaneously working market, where prices act as guides to action, cannot take account of what people in any sense need or deserve, because it creates a distribution which nobody has designed, and something which has not been designed, a mere state of affairs as such, cannot be just or unjust. And the idea that things ought to be designed in a 'just' manner means, in effect, that we must abandon the market and turn to a planned economy in which somebody decides how much each ought to have, and that means, of course, that we can only have it at the price of the complete abolition of personal liberty."This strikes me as almost the logical maximum of the conservative tendency to assume that the moral content of doing nothing is automatically nothing. You only risk doing wrong when you decide to do something in the first place. But this way of thinking about it is completely wrong.
Let's stipulate Hayek's point that justice refers only to rules of individual conduct. One half of his argument is that the "natural," laissez-faire market distribution of resources, since it is not designed by any individual, can be neither just nor unjust. The other half is that the only way to try to introduce justice into the distribution of economic resources is to have a completely planned economy and that this would constitute the "complete abolition of personal liberty." Even granting the original syntactic basis of his argument, both of these propositions are false.
Consider Hayek's assertion that an undesigned economy by definition cannot be just or unjust. The crux of his argument is that, since the market is "a mere state of affairs," there is really no one short of god to assign moral responsibility for the outcomes of that market. But suppose that the laissez-faire market outcomes are reasonably well predictable, and predictably include outcomes like a fairly large amount of poverty. Now imagine that The Government decides that it will refrain from any intervention in the economy, in the Hayek-approved manner, and will therefore accept the market state of affairs. Do we really think that The Government does not deserve to be judged, morally, on the results of this decision? That the legislators who voted to submit their constituents to the whims of the marketplace should not be held accountable for the justice or injustice of the outcomes of that vote? The point is, deciding to let abstract market forces decide everything is a decision. We can disagree about whether market capitalism is really as bad as what I'm about to analogize it to, but Hayek's argument would seem to indicate that if a flood were sweeping through a town and someone made the decision not to jump into the water and save a few people's lives, that decision would have no moral content because, after all, the flood is a mere state of affairs, not designed by anyone. I think the absurdity of this as a moral rule should be rather obvious.
And I think that the same mistake underlies Hayek's excessive pessimism about the idea of the social market economy. If you accept the idea that any result of abstract market forces can have no moral value, can be neither just nor unjust, then you must also admit that the only way to make economic outcomes just is to have some individual actors assign them. But this idea is wrong. And in the absence of Hayek's mistaken insistence that the decision to be inactive automatically has only a neutral moral character, we can see that there are clearly ways to make market outcomes more just that do not destroy the fundamentally market-oriented character of the economy. It's a fairly simple framework, really: you tax rich people and use that money to provide both an assortment of public goods and services for all citizens and to provide income support for poor people. Once you allow yourself to begin the justice analysis of market outcomes it's really quite hard to argue that such a policy would not make the world a more just place. Moreover, it's clear that the market is still very much intact, though modified. Prices are still acting as a guide to action. If you structure the progressive tax scheme and the welfare scheme in non-paternalistic ways, you don't even distort anyone's incentives very much, you just reduce overall economic inequality. The idea that the only way to make the economic world more just is to create a totally planned economy is a conclusion only forced upon us by the wrong-headed insistence on closing our eyes to anything that happens after we decline to act.
As an aside, I'd just like to note that the very last thing Hayek says is wrong and simple-minded, too, though in a different manner. He says that we can only have justice at the price of "the complete abolition of personal liberty." This is untrue. What is true is that, if you accept everything Hayek has said up until that point (which you shouldn't!) then the price of a just economy would be the complete abolition of economic liberty. And I don't think economic liberty is unimportant; that's part of why I don't actually support the idea of a totally planned economy of the sort he fears. But economic liberty is not the whole of liberty. I can't imagine that anyone would claim that a planned economy per se, as opposed to just an absolute totalitarian regime, would remove all personal discretion as to what books to read, or which TV programs to watch, or whom to sleep with. There's a lot to life that is not economic, and I should think that even the most restrictively planned economy would not be able to oppress us in our non-economic lives. This is another mistake conservatives sometimes make, and especially the kind of "classical liberal" who is really just an American libertarian, perhaps paying lip service to the idea of civil liberties but clearly never really caring about them. There is liberty involved in deciding what profession you want to pursue, or which goods you want to consume, but there is also liberty involved in deciding whom you want to date, or how you want to spend your leisure time.
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