National Conservatism Will Lead Us To Greater Socialism

Source: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

American Compass is the new “think” tank created by the National Conservative movement to persuade voters to adopt socialist economic policies. A recent article, Planning for when the market cannot, attacks the great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek and his explanation of knowledge in the market:

“Ultimately, Hayekian critiques of government planning are compelling only insofar as one is willing to ignore practical reality. His theories may have been adequate as anti-Soviet propaganda, but they are completely useless as a guide for policy.”

Rubio Needs To Choose Christianity Over Statism

Source: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

At the Federal Trade Commission Building in Washington, D.C. are two large statues titled “Man Controlling Trade.” They were commissioned in the late 1930’s near the height of America’s love affair with socialism and depict muscular men controlling the powerful draft horses of the market for the “common good.”

The myth that the state can control the market and make it produce what bureaucrats want and reward those whom bureaucrats deem worthy is ancient and harder to kill than zombies. Even in the 1930s intelligent people understood that free markets create wealth (reduce poverty) in almost miraculous ways. Marx admitted as much. But markets don’t make everyone equally wealthy, as the envious demand, and they don’t create the utopias of socialist fantasies. Of course, neither does socialism.

So, many people dream of harnessing the wealth generating power of markets to the socialist’s fantasies and having their Kate and Edith, too. The problem is that the power of the market lies in its being free, much as Samson’s strength was in his hair. Markets have always existed. Even the USSR had them. They have rarely been free. Freedom empowered existing markets in China to lift half a billion people from starvation poverty in a single generation.