I’m reading The Constitution of Liberty by Hayek. In some ways he seems to be making a utilitarian argument for liberty, and I’m not keen on utilitarian arguments. However, it makes sense to understand why freedom from coercion, which I think of as an end in itself, leads to the wider benefits it does. He also does a good job of pointing out the various lesser things that people can mean when they talk about freedom, such as the freedom to do things. In fact I realise I should rename my blog category “civil liberties” to just “liberty”, (pluralised liberties are a different and lesser concept than Hayek’s liberty as freedom from coercion). If I did that it might affect permalinks, though.
Anyway, I’ve long been convinced that what is termed “inequality”, that some people are richer than others, is not a bad thing per se. The argument I’ve heard before comes from Norberg, who points out that if everyone gets twice as rich inequality doubles. Hayek makes a different kind of argument.
If today in the United States or Western Europe the relatively poor can have a car or a refrigerator, an airplane trip or a radio, at the cost of a reasonable part of their income, this was made possible because in the past others with larger incomes were able to spend on what was then a luxury. The path of advance is greatly eased by the fact that it has been trodden before. It is because scouts have found the goal that the road can be built for the less lucky or less energetic. What today may seem extravagance or even waste, because it is enjoyed by the few and even undreamed of by the masses, is payment for the experimentation with a style of living that will eventually become available to all.
This seems obvious especially if you think about consumer electronics. I have a high definition television, a Playstation 3 and a HD-DVD player. They were expensive, (and one of them will soon be obsolete because I have also helped pay for one of the necessary mistakes that all this experimentation leads to) but not as expensive as they were. They will get cheaper and more people will have them, just as they can now buy a DVD player from Asda for £20 while I bought one for £200 soon after they first became available.
Hayek goes further: “There is no way of making generally accessible new and still expensive ways of living except by their being initially practiced by some.”
Indeed, if manufacturers had to wait until *everyone* could afford a HDTV before selling them to anyone, they would never have been developed in the first place. The same applies to central heating and expensive medical treatments.
Hayek goes further still: “There can be little doubt that the prospect of the poorer, ‘undeveloped’ countries reaching the present level of the West is very much better that it would have been, had the West not pulled so far ahead.”
This link between inequality and progress means that if government tries to achieve equality through wealth redistribution, progress will slow because there will be no rich people to sell new and expensive things to. This is important because…
…most of the gains of the few do, in the course of time, become available to the rest. Indeed, all our hopes for the reduction of present misery and poverty rest on this expectation. If we abandoned progress, we should also have to abandon all those social improvements that we now hope for. All the desired advances in education and health, the realization of our wish that at least the large proportion of the people should reach the goals for which they are striving, depend on the continuance of progress. We only have to remember that to prevent progress at the top would soon prevent it all the way down, in order to see that this result is really the last thing we want.
