March 23, 2017 marks exactly 26 years since the death of Friedrich August von Hayek (1899 - 1992) - the great Austrian economist, philosopher, public figure and 1974 Nobel laureate in the field of economics. Friedrich von Hayek was a consistent supporter of the fundamental theory of the "open society", and one of the most prominent thinkers of our recent history. Hayek's contemporaries note that he was "lucky" and he was able to see "the rise and fall of fascism, National Socialism and Soviet communism."
Friedrich August von Hayek
And it so happened that in the twentieth century, the appearance of the economic picture of the world was determined by the views of only two, however, outstanding scientists: the father of the market economy - Friedrich von Hayek and Lord John Maynard Keynes, who was the founder of the foundations of state planning and interventionism in the capitalist system, that is, the market management.
Friedrich von Hayek believed that the main trouble of the socialists is that they always promise the people more than they can really give, since in this case all the knowledge necessary to govern their society is ultimately collected and processed by the sole power. They do not understand, or rather do not want to understand that modern society basically exists on the application of scattered knowledge, by which there is no central command structure, and even more so one person, whoever he is - Duce, Fuhrer, Caudillo, Paul Pot, Baby Doc”or the general secretary, he will not be able to process and use purely physically. However, socialist doctrines gained great popularity after the end of the First World War, during which all the belligerent countries had to create a centralized military economy based on the principles of administrative planning. And in these critical conditions they did it. But when the war ended, they wanted to solve the problems of economic management in the same way in the conditions of the onset of peace.
So in the 30s of the twentieth century, two schools emerged in political economy. The first turned to socialist principles in the economy and considered necessary state control of all economic activity in the country. The second school, headed by Friedrich von Hayek, sharply criticized such government intervention in the country's economic life. At the same time, he has repeatedly argued that the demand for equality in the material situation, in his opinion, can be achieved only by a totalitarian government, using the methods of the "Gestapo".
John Maynard Keynes was a representative of the Cambridge School of Economics. Since 1931 Friedrich von Hayek has lectured at the London School of Economics, including lectures on the most urgent problem of that time, the "Great Depression".
In 1935 he published the book Collectivist Economic Planning: A Critical Study of the Possibilities of Socialism. The answer to this was the book by John Maynard Keynes, published in 1936: "The General Theory of Employment, Income and Money." One of the historians of the time wrote about the theory outlined in it as follows: “The fact that Keynes's economic system offered painless solutions to difficult problems and was politically possible guaranteed its popularity; all collectivists, socialists, liberals and even conservatives like McMillan rushed to accept it … To challenge Keynes's theory, it was necessary to be reactionary and, as they said, adamant."
Friedrich von Hayek responded with the book "The Road to Slavery", published in 1944 and brought Friedrich von Hayek worldwide fame. This book was translated in 20 countries of the world, and in the USSR it was published in 1983.
W. Churchill liked the ideas of The Road to Slavery, and he constantly repeated to his ideological opponents, the Laborites, that socialism is somehow connected with totalitarianism and contemptuous admiration for the state. He even gave a speech, which was called "Speech on the Gestapo."
Nevertheless, it was not he who won the elections in 1945, but Laborist Clement Uttley, who promised the British full employment for the entire population. During the period from 1945 to 1951, a wave of nationalization took place in Great Britain: they nationalized the English bank and such industries as coal, civil aviation, telecommunications, transport, electric energy companies, gas and mining enterprises, iron and steel production - just all those industries British industry, where many millions of British workers worked.
And although it was still not possible to achieve full employment, Keynes's theory became dominant in many countries of the world for many years. Hayek's response was the Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947, which gave the world such Nobel Prize winners and public figures as Karl Popper, Milton Friedman and Ludwig Erhard, the creator of the economic miracle in Germany and subsequently Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1963 to 1966.
In 1950, Friedrich von Hayek became a professor at the University of Chicago, where he worked until 1962. Here he wrote the book "The Constitution of Freedom" (1960), which was published on the eve of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the writing of the book "On Freedom" by the great 19th century English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873).
People do not like to think, let alone follow the advice of smart people, since they themselves are mostly deeply ignorant. But even such people by the 70s of the twentieth century began to notice that in all countries with a centralized economy, inflation suddenly jumped sharply, and the promised decrease, and, moreover, significant, unemployment, as Keynes had promised everyone, did not happen. … The works of Friedrich von Hayek were immediately in demand by the Thatcher administration in England and the Reagan government in the United States, which, on Hayek's recommendations, began to reduce government spending, abolished state control in the economy, and took the path of limiting the monopoly influence of trade unions.
In 1991, Friedrich von Hayek's long-term work was awarded the Freedom Medal, the highest and most honorable civilian award in the United States. In 1988, his work appeared in three volumes: "Law, Legislation and Freedom", which explored the legal norms necessary for the maintenance and development of a free society. In an environment of high inflation and equally high taxation, it is this book that provides intellectual support for market reforms and provides grounds for an optimistic view of the modern industrial development of society. The last work of Friedrich von Hayek was the work "Pernicious Arrogance - the Intellectual Fallacy of Socialism", published in 1988.
Friedrich von Hayek died on March 23, 1992 at the age of 93 in the city of Freiburg-Breisgau, having seen the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the long-awaited unification of Germany and the decline of the era of world communism. Hayek personally observed the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and, as his family said, really wanted to visit Moscow.
But the main result of the works of Friedrich von Hayek was a convincing victory over Keynes, which showed the advantage of the decentralization of the economy, the victory of self-organizing synergetic systems of spontaneous order over any state control in public life. He proved that public order in a civilized society can be carried out without administrative coercion and orders issued from above. Well, the fall of the socialist economic system took place in front of millions of people, and they all saw the correctness of the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek.
In the era that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Hayek's ideas for a transitional period in Russia, no longer socialist, but not yet fully marketable, are more than relevant. The fact is that the main enemy for modern Russia, as well as for Russia after 1861, has become fear of the developing new capitalist economy and the nostalgia that arose on its basis for the old communist regime. It is obvious that today we are faced with more and more attempts to discredit the market economy and the fundamental principles of a democratic social order. It is being conducted both with the aim of justifying the well-known policy of the "red terror" and state non-economic coercion to essentially free labor. It seems to many, and perhaps not only it seems, that they see the dangerous features of the return of the country in the 30s of the twentieth century - a period that, by the way, has already received an interesting name in scientific literature “feudal socialism”.
Then the country's economy was characterized by undeveloped trade relations, surrogate money, patriarchal and semi-patriarchal economic ties, and natural exchange, as well as state regulation and pronounced official patriotism, which A. Bogdanov warned about in his novel "Red Star" in his time. Well, the ideology of state power, or rather its foundation, was the Russian Orthodox idea of the 19th century. It is an idea at the level of belief in "holy communism", because even its economic theory never really existed. The only person in the USSR who, by the way, dared to write "The Political Economy of Communism" was the chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR N. Voznesensky, who was shot in 1949 in the "Leningrad case".
Well, the manipulation, and very inept, of public opinion for the purpose of unattainable "unanimity", significant ideological (and inevitable) demoralization of society, as well as the presence of a purely military manic-depressive syndrome, in many respects cause the opposition of government and society. Recently, there was an interesting article on VO that the authorities today are betting on large monopolies, that one can do anything, while others cannot do anything in the same way. But Hayek wrote about this in due time. “Each has a special place: one is given to rule, the other to obey,” he noted. The spontaneous nature of economic relations is replaced by a "vertical of power" in the form of the military organization of the state, which, as you know, is the easiest to manage. The goal of the economy is not the prosperity of the country's citizens, but "economic security." The spirit of entrepreneurship is beginning to be replaced by the heroic spirit of the nation, which is clearly illustrated by the articles about the "legendary Hiberborea", the homeland of the "Great Rus", the Egyptian pyramids, in which the Slavic princes are buried, and the bearded god Quetzalcoatl - of course Russian, who sailed from across the sea on a raft. Kon-Tiki also has a beard, and, therefore, he was an ancient Rus!
However, Hayek raises an interesting question, why is this and "why are people so condescending to pressure from the state and so distrustful of the market?" Why don't they raise the question of the need to limit the power of officials in the country? Why are laws not being adopted to limit the functions of government, as many European countries have done? After all, everyone understands that it is impossible to live in a society where capitalism de facto exists, and de jure is still largely socialism.
But here again, thanks to Hayek's scientific works, we have three imperatives of social progress: free movement of capital ("economic freedom"), protection of private property and private entrepreneurship, which ensures the realization of a person's personal capabilities for the productive work chosen by him, as well as desire use your individual freedom as a means of your own development. As a result of the adoption of such imperatives and the market reconstruction of the old state social mechanism, a system of laws of "self-organizing" or "spontaneous order" based on the principles of the market economy of a free society will be created and will begin to work stably.
Friedrich von Hayek was optimistic about the collapse of the Berlin Wall and thought that someday people will taste freedom and prosperity and want to preserve for themselves the freedom of a spontaneous social order based on the power of private property. Hayek's life is an example of selfless service to an open society, so that people themselves can understand the simple truth that their own freedom and well-being depend only on themselves. And only in this way it will be possible to defeat corruption in the upper echelons of power, and by no means with the help of photographs from satellites.
However, our people were no less talented, including such a philosopher as Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev. He proposed to "formalize" the territory of Russia, i.e. evaluate the entire land of the country in monetary terms. In the future, he believed, one should not interfere with the sale of land, including land, through the Commodity and Raw Materials Exchange, which would allow the market to monitor the turnover of land as a commodity. The land should be sold, not distributed to the population on one hectare. Berdyaev believed that literally everything is subject to accounting and counting: forests, and water, and subsoil, and earth, and what is on land or in water. And from here there is only one step for such a profitable society and promising taxation on resources, when the maximum taxes are paid by those who enrich themselves from the sale of natural resources, and those who strain their minds, no matter how much they receive, pay only for renting premises. This is where there is simply a "gold mine" for Russians rich in talents, the new Kulibins and Kalashnikovs! One should also agree with N. A. Berdyaev that only the land market can provide stable paper money emission and allow the maximum increase in the volume of money supply in circulation in the country. The capitalization of the state, as the aggregate capitalization of national enterprises, includes, first of all, the value of the land on which the enterprises are located. And this is practically all that should be done in order for the economic miracle of 1913 to be repeated right before our eyes.
