The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain. Anthony Seldon

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СКАЧАТЬ between liberal (macroeconomic) and socialist (microeconomic) planning with which Sir Alec Cairncross has made us familiar.²¹

      One obvious feature of the claims for post-war macroeconomic management is the claim to novelty. This even bursts through the staid prose of the White Paper: ‘The Government are prepared to accept in future the responsibility for taking action at the earliest possible stage to arrest a threatened slump. This involves a new approach and a new responsibility for the State.’²² Here was an explicit contrast with the old belief that trade depression automatically brought its own corrective. ‘In these matters,’ it was proclaimed, ‘we shall be pioneers.’²³

      The peroration to the White Paper sets its economic aspirations within a political framework: ‘The Government believe that, once the war has been won, we can make a fresh approach, with better chances of success than ever before, to the task of maintaining a high and stable level of employment without sacrificing the essential liberties of a free society.’²⁴ So far, so uplifting. The implicit objection here, of course, was that mounted in its classic form by F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. As Hirschman has shown, Hayek’s critique of the welfare state can be seen as an example of the argument that such a proposal, far from achieving the best, would actually jeopardize the good.²⁵ As such it is essentially political, asserting the incompatibility of regulation with liberty. The sort of planning associated with full-employment policies was equally his target: indeed more so, since he seized on the essentially macroeconomic nature of the project to bring out its danger.

      Many separate plans do not make a planned whole – in fact, as the planners ought to be the first to admit – they may be worse than no plan. But the democratic legislature will long hesitate to relinquish the decisions on really vital issues, and so long as it does so it makes it impossible for anyone else to provide the comprehensive plan. Yet agreement that planning is necessary, together with the inability of democratic assemblies to produce a plan, will evoke stronger and stronger demands that the government or some single individual should be given powers to act on their own responsibility. The belief is becoming more and more widespread that, if things are to get done, the responsible authorities must be freed from the fetters of democratic procedure.²⁶

      This gave the special reason – though of course there were many others – ‘why “liberal socialism” as most people in the Western world imagine it is purely theoretical, while the practice of socialism is everywhere totalitarian’.²⁷ The support of the Labour Party for planning was not wholly surprising, but Hayek hinted at the futility as well as the jeopardy which lay in train: ‘It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it.’²⁸ Such arguments entered into post-war Conservative propaganda, albeit often in a watered-down form.²⁹

      If Hayek’s political argument against Keynesianism was much the same as his argument against the welfare state, and was unsurprisingly directed against broadly the same opponents, it should likewise be unsurprising that this famous economist also mounted a specifically economic argument. In its weak form this rested on the futility of trying to buck the market; in its strong form, which should not be overlooked, it pointed to perverse effects. Hayek contested Keynes head-on, asserting a dichotomous view of the available economic strategies:

      Both competition and central direction become poor and inefficient tools if they are incomplete; they are alternative principles used to solve the same problem, and a mixture of the two means that neither will really work and that the result will be worse than if either system had been consistently relied upon.³⁰

      Keynes took issue with this view, in the course of an otherwise highly emollient private response to Hayek: ‘I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say that we almost certainly want more.’³¹ He remained wholly unmoved by Hayek’s fundamental economic contention that this sort of planning was dysfunctional, whereas for Hayek a nightmare scenario was already foretold: ‘if we are determined not to allow unemployment at any price, and are not willing to use coercion, we shall be driven to all sorts of desperate expedients, none of which can bring any lasting relief and all of which will seriously interfere with the most productive use of our resources.’ The prospect was of ‘an inflationary expansion on such a scale that the disturbances, hardships, and injustices caused would be much greater than those to be cured’.³²

      What is plainly disclosed, of course, as these spiralling counter-effects progressively cancel the early gains, is an economic situation worse than the problems which these naive expedients were designed to remedy in the first place:

      There will always be a possible maximum of employment in the short run which can be achieved by giving all people employment where they happen to be and which can be achieved by monetary expansion. But not only can this maximum be maintained solely by progressive inflationary expansion and with the effect of holding up those redistributions of labour between industries made necessary by the changed circumstances, and which so long as workmen are free to choose their jobs will always come about only with some delays and thereby cause some unemployment: to aim always at the maximum of employment achievable by monetary means is a policy which is certain in the end to defeat its own purpose. It tends to lower the productivity of labour and thereby constantly increases the proportion of the working population which can be kept employed at present wages only by artificial means.³³

      Here is a different case from the political argument with which the polemical author of The Road to Serfdom is generally identified: a case, however, which is easily assimilated with the rest of the oeuvre of the great apostle of economic liberalism. Hayek’s distinctive doctrinaire approach has often been contrasted with the abhorrence of rationalism which is to be found in writers like Oakeshott. Yet there is another face to Hayek’s argument which is far more conservative than liberal in its justification of ‘men’s submission to the impersonal forces of the market’ – the more so when this was justified by an appeal to such forces as superstition. Such a commendation of conservative instincts appealed to a deeper rationale than vulgar rationalism. ‘It may indeed be the case that infinitely more intelligence on the part of everybody would be needed than anybody now possesses, if we were even merely to maintain our present complex civilisation without anybody having to do things of which he does not comprehend the necessity’, Hayek enjoined. ‘The refusal to yield to forces which we neither understand nor can recognise as the conscious decisions of an intelligent being is the product of an incomplete and therefore erroneous rationalism.’³⁴

      It was Keynes, not Hayek, who captured the ear of the opinion-forming elite in post-war Britain. In particular, the canonical status of the General Theory was now assured, as much by vague invocation as by specific citation. The White Paper went as far as was decent in making this plain:

      the Government recognise that they are entering a field where theory can be applied to practical issues with confidence and certainty only as experience accumulates and experiment extends over untried ground. Not long ago, the ideas embodied in the present proposals were unfamiliar to the general public and the subject of controversy among economists. To-day, the conception of an expansionist economy and the broad principles governing its growth are widely accepted by men of affairs as well as by technical experts in all the great industrial countries.³⁵

      In the two post-war books commissioned by Penguin from Labour and Conservative spokesmen, giving their cases access to a mass paperback market, there are differences of emphaisis, as one would expect. Thus Quintin Hogg’s account is imbued with caution:

      Unemployment can temporarily be mitigated, and perhaps eliminated in a country, notwithstanding its international character, by government action which artificially increases demand in any way. This, however, means to some extent adopting СКАЧАТЬ