Recently, we have been discussing a number of issues relating to the difficulty of making liberty popular, for instance Eric Larson's post on "We Need to Explain Why the Depression Happened..."
Following up on Eric Larson's piece, Eric Parks provides in his post "The Blessings of Liberty" another example of how the case for liberty can be made in a cogent, compelling and clear manner.
It is reassuring that there are large supplies of positive arguments for liberty. We should amply avail ourselves of them.
I would like to draw attention to a constant difficulty for those arguing in favour of freedom, only to strengthen Larson's and Parks' approach which takes the errors of a political system unfriendly toward liberty and shows how freedom would provide real solutions:
The below excerpt goes a long way toward explaining why freedom disappeared in America to the extent it has, and why the supposed party of freedom became indistinguishable from the (Social) Democratic party of America,
Friedrich Hayek writes under the heading
Freedom can be preserved only by following principles and is destroyed by following expediency
From the insight that the benefits of civilization rest on the use of more knowledge than can be used in any deliberately concerted effort, it follows that it is not in our power to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable. Although probably all beneficial improvements must be piecemeal, if the separate steps are not guided by a body of coherent principles, the outcome is likely to be a suppression of individual freedom.
The reason for this is very simple, although not generally understood. Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known. The direct effects of any interference with the market order will be near and clearly visible in most cases, while the more indirect and remote effects will mostly be unknown and will therefore be disregarded. We shall never be aware of all the costs of achieving particular results by interference. [Though Parks and Larson do show that many of the costs can be made visible, G.T.]
And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. Our choice will regularly appear to be one between a certain known and tangible gain and the mere probability of the prevention of some unknown beneficial action by unknown persons.
If the choice between between freedom and coercion is thus treated as a matter of expediency, freedom is bound to be sacrificed in almost every instance. As in the particular instance we shall hardly ever know what would be the consequence of allowing people to make their own choice, to make the decision in each instance depend only on the foreseeable particular results must lead to the progressive destruction of freedom. There are probably few restrictions on freedom which could not be justified on the grounds that we do not know the particular loss they will cause.
That freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages was fully understood by the leading liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century, one of whom describes liberalism as 'the system of principles'.
Such is the chief burden of their warnings concerning 'What is seen and what is not seen in political economy' and about the 'pragmatism that contrary to the intentions of its representatives inexorably leads to socialism'.
All these warnings were, however, thrown to the wind, and the progressive discarding of principles and the increasing determination during the last hundred years [written in the 197Os, G.T.] to proceed pragmatically is one of the most important innovations in social and economic policy. (Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 1, p. 56pp)
How "expedient" or "pragmatic" policies wreak havoc on society can be seen, amongst other things, from the way inflation and deflation are being handled in the absence of an understanding of and respect for principles.
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