That kind of work would be on the short list of ideas/topics that might lure me into academia, but whenever that thought gets too strong I take a nap. Usually it passes pretty quick.

Anyway, I think we’re in agreement about the contours here. I guess one way of summing up my frustration with the vulgar hayekian critique is that guys like Brooks want to indiscriminately pin the High Modernist tail on donkeys that don’t necessarily merit it. There’s a big missing step in Brooks’ argument that he just assumes away, like an underpants gnome.

And on the other hand, there’s the unspoken extent to which High Modernist ideas and undergird actually existing capitalism. It’s a bit of tightrope act to hew to a rigourous Hayekian doctrine that says that planning _inside_ the firm is great and good, but planning *outside* the firm, at the state level, is verboten, while ignoring the reality that capitalist economic practices in the US depend on a huge, centrally-planned, govt project – the US Interstate system.*

That’s not an attempt to render all Hayekian critiques illegitimate or say that they’re incoherent, but it is an appeal for better Hayekians. It’s the equivalent of returning a student paper covered in red ink, and saying, “you need to do better than this.”

Now I really want to read Scott’s book. It’s been on my list forever; time to dive in.

* Not that I want to defend the US highway system as an instance of a top-down technocratic project that turned out to be a _good idea_. I’m just saying, it is a huge factor in just about every aspect of industry and commerce in the States. So it’s probably a good idea for any conservative doing a Hayekian five-finger exercise to remember that.

But it’s funny: the Hayekian critique is essentially an argument against technocracy. (Which I’m hugely sympathetic to!) But here’s the thing: lots of people who are directly responsible for “top-down” “social-engineering” projects weren’t dyed-in-the-wool technocrats.

Yes, the progressives/New Dealers/New Class were politicians, and bureaucrats, and experts (as I think Burke would say, “calculators”). But they were more than just that. In the North American context, they were from a vast, dizzying array of backgrounds: upper class Northeast, political “refugees”/dissidents from the South, and American Great Plains/Canadian Prairie yeoman families.

Ugh, the more I think about this, the more disgusted I am with Brooks. Here’s a decently smart, literate guy, who is practising hackwork. Look, people argue strongly against the stimulus/spending bill without resorting to this kind of shitty intellectual history. Brooks is disappointing. We need opposition voices, but not like this. What a total courtier, a fraud, a toady. What a tool.

One line of thinking I’d like to see brought to bear against this vulgar-Hayekian trope is to actually attack the core of the argument. Whenever someone like Brooks name-drops Hayek in an op-ed and argues that that these top-down, imposed solutions are going to plop us in the handbasket and kick us right along the slippery slope to hell/serfdom, it would be a beautiful, masterful stroke to demolish the “top-down”, social-engineering concept. It would be like jumping into the X-wing & hitting that metre-wide exhaust pipe & taking out the superstructure with one shot.

What I mean is, attack the idea that government programs in the Western industrial democracies have been the top-down social-engineering projects that Brooks thinks they’ve been.

Heres’ the thing: a lot of these top-down social-engineering schmibertarian bete noires, were more often than not ad hoc solutions cobbled together to address human & social needs on the fly. (And many of them were essentially Bismarckian in inspiration: motivated by the fear of governments that if they didn’t address those needs, then somebody else – the socialists – would seize power in order to address them. Why is this reality ignored by conservatives? Seriously, a return to the Coolidgean status quo was not the only alternative to the New Deal, neither in the US or anywhere else. )

I think there’s a lot of ground to win back here from Brooks. I’m more familiar with the Canadian context, so I’ll refer to it. Our health care system is centrally planned, yes, but to trace its origin back to a bunch of nebbish city-wonks obsessed, Le Corbusier-like, with controlling the levers of society is just barmy nonsense. Thats not what happened. Tommy Douglas was a Prairie boy. Canadian medicare was an attempt to step in and solve actual problems for actual people. Yes, it’s entirely possible that it has some serious, serious flaws and has created big – huge – problems of its own. But it’s just funny to read into it some grand theoretical scheme. It’s been touch and go, jerry-rigged, held together with duct-tape right from the beginning.

I’ll acknowledge that Progressivism as both a historical ideology, and as a timeless tendency, can be potentially dangerous/misguided/utopian, but in return Brooks ought to admit that not every big-government program is motivated by pure High Progressivist ideology. Sometimes, it’s just that people wanted to get shit done.

Hayek is a neat guy. (I’m pretty sympathetic to the Burkean-Hayekian vein. Haven’t read Oakeshott yet, but he seems cool.) I have a soft spot for Austrian thinking, which makes me unusual among my Canadian lefty peers, I guess. Remember Jim Henley talking about the application of Hayek to foreign policy (in Iraq)? I’m constrained by time, so I won’t post a link, but it’s a brilliant bit of blogging. But Henley also revealed the failure of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in another blog post, in which Jim essentially said, “let’s look at Western Europe: what do we see? A robust welfare state, a market-socialist streak, and rotating parliamentary coalitions of (lower case) christian democrats, social democrats, and greens. Where is the Serfdom, given that Western Europe has walked down the Road? “) That was a real simple, but devastating, observation.

Anyways, to bring it back to Brooks, this is an argument that is eminently winnable by someone with the polish and the swagger to more or less hit Brooks in the jaw; ie take it to him. If he wants to talk about Hayek, let’s bloody well talk about Hayek. And when that’s done, then hit him with a Disraeli right cross, and make him dizzy.

I’ve wondered how much lousy op-ed writing can be explained by the deadlines. When I see something really awful (like the op-ed which suggested that Obama was to fit to be president because fat people would be so envious they wouldn’t vote for him), I imagine an op-ed writer with no ideas facing a deadline. I’m sure it’s more common and less blatantly disastrous for op-ed writers to crank out cliches rather than trying to come up with something original.