Pun Salad

I first read Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty back sometime in the 1970s, a $3.95 doorstop paperback published by Henry Regnery Co. I noticed recently that the University of Chicago Press released this "Definitive Edition" back in 2011, with (apparently) some minor fixes to the footnoting and other references. And the Kindle version was on sale for a "mere" $18.99! (It's more now.) So I snapped it up and it eventually worked its way to the top of my non-fiction to-be-read cyberpile.

Reader beware: Hayek was not the most sparkling prose stylist; he's truly an Austrian economist/philosopher. And this means long paragraphs full of long, meandering, convoluted sentences. I had Google pick out an example concerning the "rule of law":

It is because the law-maker does not know the particular cases to which his rule will be applied, and it is because the judge who applies it has no choice in drawing the conclusions that follow from his existing premises and the particular facts of the case, that it can be said that in such a system it is the law and not the will of particular men which prevails.

Yes, you can untwist and dig out some meaning from that, but it's pretty abstract. After page after page, and at my age, … well, I didn't get as much out of the book as I should have. I think I did a better job in my first reading half a century ago.

But Hayek's main points are easy to summarize: his desired polity is one in which "coercion" (carefully defined) is minimized. This is accomplished by that "rule of law": clearly stated, generally applicable rules and not subject to the whims or interpretations of government bureaucrats.

He goes on to criticize how this should (but mostly doesn't) play out in the "welfare states" of the real world: labor unions, social security, "progressive" taxation, monetary policy, housing, agriculture, education, and research. Some of his observations are prescient, others not. (For example, he thought private-sector unionization was likely a permanent feature; he didn't foresee its long-term decline in the US.)

But he clearly saw the menace of "progressive" taxation, and he attacked it on its underlying sin against democracy:

That a majority, merely because it is a majority, should be entitled to apply to a minority a rule which does not apply to itself is an infringement of a principle much more fundamental than democracy itself, a principle on which the justification of democracy rests.

Our tax system has long since allowed the infringement of that fundamental principle, and in fact has gone past merely allowing the infringement, but eagerly embracing it.