💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~jmq › news › 2010-07-30-hayek-gatto.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 17:59:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Hayek and Gatto on the Rule of Law
... [T]he term laissez-faire is a highly ambiguous and misleading description of the principles on which a liberal policy is based. Of course, every state must act and every action of the state interferes with something or other. But that is not the point. The important question is whether the individual can foresee the action of the state and make use of this knowledge as a datum in forming his own plans, with the result that the state cannot control the use made of its machinery, and that the individual knows precisely how far he will be protected against interference from others, or whether the state is in a position to frustrate individual efforts. The state controlling weights and measures (or preventing fraud and deception in any other way) is certainly acting, while the state permitting the use of violence, for example, by strike pickets, is inactive. Yet it is in the first case that the state observes liberal principles and in the second that it does not. Similarly with respect to most of the general and permanent rules which the state may establish with regard to production, such as building regulations or factory laws : these may be wise or unwise in the particular instance, but they do not conflict with liberal principles so long as they are intended to be permanent and are not used to favour or harm particular people.
The Rule of Law was consciously evolved only during the liberal age and is one of its greatest achievements, not only as a safeguard but as the legal embodiment of freedom. As Immanuel Kant put it (and Voltaire expressed it before him in very much the same terms), "Man is free if he needs obey no person but solely the laws". As a vague ideal it has, however, existed at least since Roman times, and during the last few centuries it has never been as seriously threatened as it is to-day.
-- Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
St. Paul's New Testament letters to the congregations (which later coalesced into the Christian movement) have something to say to us all about what needs changed in the way we school. For Paul, excessive regulation ruins the quality of life and corrupts leadership by requiring bureaucrats to enforce the rules, and more officials to regulate those officials. Ad infinitum.
In many different words, Paul repeats over and over that the new congregations won't find salvation by following the old rules. Eliminate the religious background for a minute and what Paul faced was the school problem of our own day -- the conflict between interest groups whose income and status derives from keeping things as they are, and an insurgency whose needs have been neglected by the entrenched management and which demands profound change.
Translated into contemporary idiom, Paul says make up the rules as you go along to fit individual cases. As long as the root principle of love is honored, then things will work out.
The political establishment of Paul's day was the ancient Israel of the Mishnah, a stupendous collection of rules for even the most obscure circumstances like the height from which someone should pour water on a manure pile. Like modern bureaucratic schooling, there can be little adaptation to particular cases, the system is wedded to certainty. Find a thief? Cut off his nose! Find an adultress? Stone her to death! When in doubt, don't think -- follow the rules.
The new insurgency travelled a different road. If someone steals your coat, give him your cloak, too; if someone strikes your left cheek, turn the right one to be struck, too. Unto this last: pay workmen who labor half a day the same wage as those who labor a whole day.
Rule book people find these pronouncements maddening, incomprehensible. Our forced schooling has brought back the rule-choked social environment of Paul's day, and our surveillance society has provided the technology to punish deviants which Paul's lacked. Through the three-headed rule monster of school and college, corporations, and government, American society has been radically de-individualized, one in every five American jobs is some form of oversight over the behavior of others.
It is six times more likely you will end up in jail in the United States than it is in Communist China (which now possesses the ability to ruin America economically by cashing in its loan to us). Six times more likely to rot in jail here than in China. All by itself that fact should cause you to re-evaluate the road that leadership -- of all our political parties and corporations -- has committed us to walking. It is the schools which keep us on that road.
-- John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
The authors of the two quotes above could hardly be coming from more disparate backgrounds. Friedrich Hayek experienced the emergence of socialist and collectivist sympathies in his native Germany before emigrating to the UK, where in later decades he observed a similar shift in attitudes among the people of his newly adopted country. Hayek penned The Road to Serfdom as a warning to the English-speaking world (i.e., the UK and the USA) of what might happen if we deemphasized individual freedom in favor of collectivist solutions to our economic and social troubles. John Taylor Gatto, raised in a close-knit rural Pennsylvania community that strongly valued independent learning and individual freedom, enjoyed a rich career as an educator in New York City schools. There Gatto observed first-hand the straitjacket-like forces that robbed his students of their individuality and ambition, churning out essentially identical copies of the ideal industrial worker (or post-industrial consumer), who would unquestioningly obey the demands of her job (or follow the latest trends in the marketplace). As a result of his observations, Gatto retired from teaching and started writing about the ulterior agenda behind public schools and their assembly-line methods.