TGIF: Utopianism May Be Hazardous to Your Health | The Libertarian Institute
Posted by M. C. on January 15, 2022
So, people, believe what you want and recognize everyone else’s right to the same freedom. Replace your divots! Don’t be fragile — be antifragile; in order for someone to give offense it is necessary that someone else take it. Don’t be that someone. Don’t look for your identity or life’s meaning in what you take offense at.
Finally, let’s each of us agree not to turn to the state to support “my tribe.”
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-utopianism-hazardous/
Beware those who claim to have a detailed blueprint for the ideal society. If such a person thinks you stand in the way, you may get run over. That’s how it is with utopians. They want everything just so, and woe betide those who disagree.
The repeated attempts at creating ideal societies haven’t gone so well. To name just a few, see France 1789, Russia 1917, Italy 1922, Germany 1933, Eastern Europe 1945, China 1949, Cambodia 1976, Venezuela 1999.
The problem is that the architects of utopia have little tolerance for those who aren’t wholeheartedly with the program. Any departure from the plan is a move away from the ideal. Dissenters must be dealt with.
In The Road to Serfdom, which still belongs on everyone’s reading list, F. A. Hayek pointed out that a big problem with socialist or fascist central planning — which is another way of saying utopianism — is that regular people will assuredly upset the plan just by attending to their own lives — so they cannot be left free to do so.
Hayek also noted that even if everyone agreed in principle that some kind of top-down social plan was desirable, they certainly would not agree on its details. In a world of scarcity, that would be a problem because everyone’s preferences couldn’t be accommodated. Moreover, Hayek went on, the endless debates over the plan could well give rise to a dictator who promised to stop the idle chatter and act decisively. So much for the promise of democratic planning.
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This entry was posted on January 15, 2022 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Tagged: Central Planning, F. A. Hayek, fascist, Socialist, The Road to Serfdom, Utopianism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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