Is capitalism indifferent to the form of government? Not in its pure form of market capitalism.
Just like competition and free markets are indispensable for economic success, democracy and freedom are essential for a good system of government and the rule of law. For this reason, capitalism and democracy are often said to go hand in hand.
Yet, there are some on the right and left who still believe the opposite. Some take such view on the basis of a mistaken interpretation of democracy and capitalism, while others simply dislike the outcomes of both systems.
Democracy is “Government of the people, by the people, for the people”. This form of government is achieved through majority rule by people's representatives, subject to the constitutional separation of powers and the rights of the minorities, who are elected periodically on the basis of one person one vote.
The alternatives to democracy can be gathered into two groups – totalitarian and authoritarian. Totalitarian regimes are typically governed by a despot or a small group of leaders, invoking an ideology or religion as the general basis for all aspects of life, where any form of opposition is brutally repressed. Authoritarian regimes are a softer version with less dogmatism in terms of ideology or creed, and granting some level of economic and religious freedom as long as their personal enrichment and hold on power is not challenged.
Former examples of totalitarian regimes include Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR, while living examples can be found now in countries like North Korea and Saudi Arabia. Today, the classification as totalitarian or authoritarian in countries like Iran, Russia or China is controversial.
For instance, the classification within a given category is not indifferent to the regime evolution, and in this sense one may say that China is moving towards an authoritarian regime while Russia is moving towards a totalitarian system, although, objectively, now there is still more freedom in Russia than in China. Likewise, the distinction between democratic and authoritarian regimes is also controversial in countries like Singapore.
In fact, nowadays, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes do not follow an open anti-capitalist ideology and may even portray as strong capitalist supporters, as long as their rule is not challenged.
The two standard yardsticks to judge the evolution of a political regime are the direct state involvement in the economy and the exercise of civic freedoms under the rule of law. These do not necessarily preclude regimes with strong leaders or with one-party long-term dominance.
However, these inevitably end up creating a self-perpetuating elite that will oppose any competition. To overcome such danger the pursuit of liberalism constitutes an important antidote to preserve both capitalism and democracy.
Indeed representative democracy and capitalism share similar problems in terms of governance. As sometimes I remind my students, there is a remarkable similitude between shareholders and electors. For instance, elections are the equivalent of the shareholders annual meeting, asset managers are similar to political parties, the board of directors resembles the parliament, and the executive officers the government while the senior managers are like the top civil servants.
Therefore, they share similar challenges. For instance, in terms of representation, the need to avoid a divorce between the electors and the elected is analogous to the separation between shareholders and management. Likewise, the rise of self-perpetuating insider elites in political parties is similar to that found in the selection of company board members.
Not surprisingly, the false alternatives to representative democracy, namely direct and “guided” democracy, have an equivalent in the attempts to extend voting rights to non-shareholders and on collusion to adopt rules restricting voting rights.
In conclusion, capitalism and democracy are two distinct but mutually-reinforcing systems. When in pursuit of their true form – market capitalism and representative democracy – they are inseparable. Temporary moves away from any one of them is only possible for short periods or under perverse forms of capitalism.
Showing posts with label totalitarianism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label totalitarianism. Show all posts
Monday, 24 August 2015
Tuesday, 28 September 2010
Hayek vs. Keynes: The role of government and the dangers of totalitarianism and economic decadence
There is currently a generalized view of Keynes as the paragon of state intervention and of Hayek as the quintessential laissez-faire economist. Both views are wrong.
Keynes basic philosophy, as stated in his General Theory, is that governments should be entrusted with “the task of adjusting to one another the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest” to prevent effective demand deficiency. For him, the state should decide how much to produce (to achieve full-employment) while individuals should decide what to produce, with which resources (labor and capital) and to whom it should accrue.
For Hayek popular terms like “full employment”, “planning”, “social security”, and “freedom from want” were the fool’s-gold words, often invoked with catastrophic consequences, as in Germany where the full-employment between 1935 and 1939 was achieved at the expense of expropriating, deporting or killing 600 thousand Jews. For him monetary policy cannot provide a real cure except by a general and considerable inflation. Moreover, for him the rising monopolization of the economy was not inherent to capitalism (economies of scale) or justified by technological necessities but was instead the result of collusive agreements promoted by public policies.
Given the circumstances when they were writing, we can understand Keynes’ fear of recurrent massive unemployment destroying capitalism as well as Hayek’s alarm about the danger that rising government control would inevitably lead to a totalitarian state. However, after more than 70 years, and with the benefit of hindsight, we may now question if such fears were warranted.
After all, some of the totalitarian regimes were military defeated (e.g. the German Nazis and Italian Fascists), some imploded through inefficiency (e.g. communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) or have postponed their demise by embracing authoritarian mercantilist capitalism (e.g. the Chinese communists).
Equally, the subsequent recessions and accompanying massive unemployment were overcome without major social unrest, partly due to the generalization of unemployment insurance.
Nevertheless, we should not forget the tremendous losses caused by such collectivist experiments. The more than 60 million of casualties during the World War II started by Hitler, the 15 million victims of Stalin's reign of terror in the 1930s and Mao’s more than 20 million victims in the 1950s and 1960s during the so-called Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Also pointless has been the waste of manpower as result of involuntary unemployment experienced in many countries ruled by collectivist (mostly socialist) regimes in 2009, namely: Zimbabwe (95%), Turkmenistan (60%), South Africa (24%), Spain (19%) or Tunisia (16%).
Given this grim past, the question is: could it have been avoided if the policy advice of Keynes and Hayek were more widespread and better understood? If not avoided it could at least be minimized. In particular this would be so, if the “prophets’ followers” shared their common care for capitalism.
Instead, most followers continued to ignore them on this, as well as the failure of all past predictions by both friends and foes of capitalism that it was doomed to fail. All such theories, from Karl Marx surplus value theory of capital accumulation, to Schumpeter’s claim that that the success of capitalism would lead to a form of corporatism and a fostering of values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals, Milton Friedman’s theory on the suicidal nature of capitalists to Solzhenitsyn's attack on the commercialized nature of Western culture have been proved wrong.
Even more importantly, all attempts to create a pragmatic so-called “third-way”, from the recent British experience by Tony Blair’s New Labor, the Czech and Hungarian attempts to create a democratic socialism in 1968 and 1956, to the more distant Fascist “third way” of the 1930s, aimed at keeping the best of socialism and capitalism ended up dramatically retaining the worst of both systems, creating more collectivism, corruption and inequality.
For Keynes or Hayek there was no alternative to capitalism or “third-way”, simply a choice about the degree of government intervention in the economy. While assessing the supply of goods and services not provided by the private sector or the regulation aimed at promoting a level playing field, Keynes, the politician, was obviously more compromising about accepting a substantial role for the government while Hayek, the theorist, was more puritan.
Some types of state capitalism (notably the Scandinavian type) have now shown that fears about the rise of authoritarianism as a result of greater state involvement in the economy, as feared by Hayek, do not materialize until a high level of public spending as a percentage of GDP is reached (about 50%). Equally, the rising share of government in the economy has some smoothing effect on the business cycle as advocated by Keynes, but after a certain level (again, about 50%) it triggers a slowdown in productivity and consequent economic decadence. Thus, Keynes and Hayek’s views are correct within a given range of state intervention, but its limits are imprecise and poorly understood.
Keynes basic philosophy, as stated in his General Theory, is that governments should be entrusted with “the task of adjusting to one another the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest” to prevent effective demand deficiency. For him, the state should decide how much to produce (to achieve full-employment) while individuals should decide what to produce, with which resources (labor and capital) and to whom it should accrue.
For Hayek popular terms like “full employment”, “planning”, “social security”, and “freedom from want” were the fool’s-gold words, often invoked with catastrophic consequences, as in Germany where the full-employment between 1935 and 1939 was achieved at the expense of expropriating, deporting or killing 600 thousand Jews. For him monetary policy cannot provide a real cure except by a general and considerable inflation. Moreover, for him the rising monopolization of the economy was not inherent to capitalism (economies of scale) or justified by technological necessities but was instead the result of collusive agreements promoted by public policies.
Given the circumstances when they were writing, we can understand Keynes’ fear of recurrent massive unemployment destroying capitalism as well as Hayek’s alarm about the danger that rising government control would inevitably lead to a totalitarian state. However, after more than 70 years, and with the benefit of hindsight, we may now question if such fears were warranted.
After all, some of the totalitarian regimes were military defeated (e.g. the German Nazis and Italian Fascists), some imploded through inefficiency (e.g. communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) or have postponed their demise by embracing authoritarian mercantilist capitalism (e.g. the Chinese communists).
Equally, the subsequent recessions and accompanying massive unemployment were overcome without major social unrest, partly due to the generalization of unemployment insurance.
Nevertheless, we should not forget the tremendous losses caused by such collectivist experiments. The more than 60 million of casualties during the World War II started by Hitler, the 15 million victims of Stalin's reign of terror in the 1930s and Mao’s more than 20 million victims in the 1950s and 1960s during the so-called Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Also pointless has been the waste of manpower as result of involuntary unemployment experienced in many countries ruled by collectivist (mostly socialist) regimes in 2009, namely: Zimbabwe (95%), Turkmenistan (60%), South Africa (24%), Spain (19%) or Tunisia (16%).
Given this grim past, the question is: could it have been avoided if the policy advice of Keynes and Hayek were more widespread and better understood? If not avoided it could at least be minimized. In particular this would be so, if the “prophets’ followers” shared their common care for capitalism.
Instead, most followers continued to ignore them on this, as well as the failure of all past predictions by both friends and foes of capitalism that it was doomed to fail. All such theories, from Karl Marx surplus value theory of capital accumulation, to Schumpeter’s claim that that the success of capitalism would lead to a form of corporatism and a fostering of values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals, Milton Friedman’s theory on the suicidal nature of capitalists to Solzhenitsyn's attack on the commercialized nature of Western culture have been proved wrong.
Even more importantly, all attempts to create a pragmatic so-called “third-way”, from the recent British experience by Tony Blair’s New Labor, the Czech and Hungarian attempts to create a democratic socialism in 1968 and 1956, to the more distant Fascist “third way” of the 1930s, aimed at keeping the best of socialism and capitalism ended up dramatically retaining the worst of both systems, creating more collectivism, corruption and inequality.
For Keynes or Hayek there was no alternative to capitalism or “third-way”, simply a choice about the degree of government intervention in the economy. While assessing the supply of goods and services not provided by the private sector or the regulation aimed at promoting a level playing field, Keynes, the politician, was obviously more compromising about accepting a substantial role for the government while Hayek, the theorist, was more puritan.
Some types of state capitalism (notably the Scandinavian type) have now shown that fears about the rise of authoritarianism as a result of greater state involvement in the economy, as feared by Hayek, do not materialize until a high level of public spending as a percentage of GDP is reached (about 50%). Equally, the rising share of government in the economy has some smoothing effect on the business cycle as advocated by Keynes, but after a certain level (again, about 50%) it triggers a slowdown in productivity and consequent economic decadence. Thus, Keynes and Hayek’s views are correct within a given range of state intervention, but its limits are imprecise and poorly understood.
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