Megan McArdle, the "Jane Galt" of the Asymmetrical Information blog, is interviewed here. Excerpt:
Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Like almost everyone else who has moved from left to right, I was immensely influenced by Friedrich Hayek. A friend gave me a copy of The Road to Serfdom, which awed me when I first read it. I suppose other things of his are meatier, but that was my first inkling that there was another way to think about things, so it probably had the biggest influence.
Now, I probably just read too much, but I'm reminded of a comment I saw decades ago -- in Libertarian Review, I think -- to the effect that the fountainhead of the Chicago school of economic thought was not Mises or Menger, but Hayek -- and I'm reminded, as well, that Ayn Rand had little use for Hayek.
In a letter to Rose Wilder Lane, dated August 21, 1946, Rand wrote:
As an example of our most pernicious enemy, I would name Hayek. That one is real poison. Yes, I think he does more harm than Stuart Chase. I think Wendell Willkie did more to destroy the Republican Party than did Roosevelt. I think Willkie and Eric Johnston have done more for the cause of Communism than Earl Browder and The Daily Worker. Observe the Communist Party technque, which asks their most effective propagandists to be what is known as "tactical nonmembers." That is, they must not be Communists, but pose as "middle-of-the-roaders" in the eyes of the public. The Communists know that such propagandists are much more deadly to the cause of Capitalism in that "middle-of-the-road" pretense.
Rand also had little use for that other Golden Boy of the Chicago School, Milton Friedman. This Q&A is available in Ayn Rand Answers:
Have you seen Milton Friedman's program Free to Choose on public television?I saw five minutes of it; that was enough for me, because I know Friedman's ideas. He is not for capitalism; he's a miserable eclectic. He's an enemy of Objectivism, and his objection is that I bring morality into economics, which he thinks should be amoral. I don't always like what public television puts on, but they have better programs than Free to Choose -- the circus, for instance. (Ayn Rand Answers, page 43)
Now perhaps some of you think she judged Friedman too harshly. Here's Friedman talking to a libertarian magazine:
Reason: You were involved in the development of the withholding tax when you were doing tax work for the government in 1941-43?Friedman: I was an employee at the Treasury Department. We were in a wartime situation. How do you raise the enormous amount of taxes you need for wartime? We were all in favor of cutting inflation. I wasn't as sophisticated about how to do it then as I would be now, but there's no doubt that one of the ways to avoid inflation was to finance as large a fraction of current spending with tax money as possible.
In World War I, a very small fraction of the total war expenditure was financed by taxes, so we had a doubling of prices during the war and after the war. At the outbreak of World War II, the Treasury was determined not to make the same mistake again.
You could not do that during wartime or peacetime without withholding. And so people at the Treasury tax research department, where I was working, investigated various methods of withholding. I was one of the small technical group that worked on developing it.
One of the major opponents of the idea was the IRS. Because every organization knows that the only way you can do anything is the way they've always been doing it. This was something new, and they kept telling us how impossible it was. It was a very interesting and very challenging intellectual task. I played a significant role, no question about it, in introducing withholding. I think it's a great mistake for peacetime, but in 1941-43, all of us were concentrating on the war.
I have no apologies for it, but I really wish we hadn't found it necessary and I wish there were some way of abolishing withholding now.
"No apologies for it." Just like that. The magazine interviewing him describe him as an "advocate for freedom." This is the guy lauded by so many conservatives and libertarians over the last few decades, the guy whose main accomplishment is the withholding of people's incomes because the state "needs" it. And I guess they still do, because I've had taxes withheld on my income since the early Seventies.
Am I just nitpicking? I think not. For decades now, William F. Buckley, Jr. has been peddling the fiction that he read Rand and the Objectivists out of the conservative movement, and others have repeated it. Libertarians and Objectivists are said to be natural allies who have much in common with many conservatives.
We do not. I agree with Rand that those writers and thinkers who compromise on capitalism have done more good to the Communist cause than to their own, and I'd extend the same compliment to those who vote Republican year after year because a Willkie or a Reagan or a Dole -- or a pair of Bushes -- represents the lesser of two evils. Well, here we are.
One's premises matter. I'm glad for Megan that she's no longer a leftie. I like her blog, too, and I've had it in my blogroll for years. But I note that she still refers to herself as an environmentalist, and I try not to be swayed by illusions about what is what. So I insist on observing distinctions.
And fans of Milton Friedman, take a hint: jeez, when you're trying to increase the reach and power of the state, and your main opponent is the IRS...you think that maybe what you're pushing might be pretty damn evil?
Posted by Craig Ceely at June 16, 2007 03:55 PM