Thursday, October 15, 2009
Conservatives & Libertarians (Part II)
As a short addendum to my earlier post on conservatives and libertarians, I just wanted to post a link to an article by Friedrich Hayek entitled "Why I Am Not a Conservative." This article, then, could serve as the libertarian counterpart to Russell Kirk's essay on conservatism's superiority to libertarianism.
One of the essential differences between conservatives and libertarians, according to Hayek, is the conservatives' "fondness for authority." This fondness for authority is based on its "fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces" and its "lack of understanding of economic forces." All of this is "difficult to reconcile with the preservation of liberty." Fighting words?
For those of you not familiar with Hayek, he was a famous economist (Nobel Prize laureate in 1974), and one of the key figures in the Austrian school of economics. In other words, he was a libertarian or a classical liberal. His most famous book, at least among the general public, is the now classic Road to Serfdom in which he attacked the creeping socialism of every major political system in the world at the time--Communist Russia, Nazi Germany, the New Deal in America, and similar programs in the other Western democracies.
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Of course, one of the key issues between many conservatives and libertarians is Christianity. For instance, Ayn Rand was a rabid atheist. Yesterday, I subjected myself to a lecture by a member of the Ayn Rand Institute who called for an "ethical revolution." He also averred that we have been on the road to socialism "for the last 2,000 years" because of the ethic of selflessness. He later clarified that he was indeed attacking Jesus for saying that we should love our neighbor.
A colleague of mind made an interesting comment about the Randians today: If all action is, and OUGHT TO BE selfish, why are they sharing their insight with the rest of us? Why are they trying to free us from the chains of our selflessness? That seems like a rather, well... generous thing to do. Even altruistic. I do hope the Ayn Rand Institute is making money hand over fist (or at least having glory heaped upon itself), else it stands in danger of being a terrible contradiction.
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