Romance in Politics

William Pfaff, relentless anti-romantic, points the finger at idealistic free marketeers and calls a spade a spade. “Business,” he writes, “has always looked for a theoretical basis for its anti-regulation position in the classical liberal economic case for the efficiency of markets.” In other words, barring bald greed, there’s always a Theory behind the sort of radical free-marketism that brought us the recent credit crash. It might be the iced cocktail of Ayn Rand or the billy club of Jonah Goldberg’s Nazis were Liberals! revisionism.

More recently it found support in the largely politically-motivated arguments of F.A. Hayek during the second world war, in his book The Road to Serfdom. Hayek, of Austrian origin, said that every form of regulation [like Roosevelt’s] tends towards the authoritarian state, and eventually towards totalitarianism. This argument had a great influence on Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and their policies of business deregulation.

However belief in the unregulated market and unregulated business is actually an expression of Romantic faith in the merits of untrammeled humanity, born in innocence, as Rousseau said, with a natural sense of justice which education and civilization (and regulation!) stifle.

This belief in man’s innocence of sin and natural goodness has been the basis for virtually all of modern liberal and progressive thought, as well for Marxism and anarchism.

In general, when it comes to government, the less the better. But romance and radicalism get you nowhere. What the nonsense of two W. administrations has shown is that good government is better than none at all. Never mind that Bush was full of (chuckling, incoherent) “small government” words and delivered (harhar) more government, a more powerful White House, the bloated bureaucracy of two expensive wars, and a record-setting deficit.

     posted 1 August 2008 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. This kind of reminds me of a conversation my 65-year-old wealthy business leader father and I had not long ago. My point was that he was “Generation Me,” I was “Generation X” and my 25-year-old brother was “Generation Look At Me.”

    Anyway, cool conversation…he got completely flustered,though, by a simple question: “In a healthy economy, who is more important: yourself or others.” “Myself,” was his first response. “So it’s all about you?” “No, I’m just most important.” “So you are more important than everyone else?” “Yes, er, no, well, yes I guess if I want to have the things I want or need. But that doesn’t mean I’m the only important thing.” “Just always the most important?” “Yes, I guess. Can we change the subject?” “So that’s why the economy is doing well?” “Yes. No really, I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

    It’s total 1980s “Me Generation” blowback happening. They learned in their 30s and 40s from the mentors in the 1980s to grab what you can when you can grab it. That was my point to him. I thought of that reading all this.

    e

    — e    Aug 3, 07:00 am    #