Trumping to Serfdom
Ryan Murphy of SMU has confirmed what F.A. Hayek wrote decades ago. It turns out Washington D.C. has more psychopaths per capita than anyplace else in the country. Insert my shock face here.
The best chapter of the seminal “Road to Serfdom” is ‘Why the Worst get on Top,’ where Hayek wrote,
Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do immoral things. The principle that the end justifies the means, which in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals, in collectivist ethics becomes necessarily the supreme rule. There is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole’, because that is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done.
The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd quotes the study,
“psychopaths are likely to be effective in the political sphere” and that “the occupations that were most disproportionately psychopathic were C.E.O., lawyer, media, salesperson, surgeon, journalist, police officer, clergyperson, chef, and civil servant.
Hayek wrote that psychopaths, er politicians, have to “weld together a closely coherent body of supporters”...appealing “to a common human weakness. It seems to be easier for people to agree on a negative programme – on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of the better off – than on any positive task.”
Think, the media, immigrants, the FBI, and now, gulp, Canadians.
Hayek continued,
The contrast between the ‘we’ and the ‘they’ is consequently always employed by those who seek the allegiance of huge masses. The enemy may be internal, like the ‘Jew’ in Germany or the ‘kulak’ in Russia, or he may be external. In any case, this technique has the great advantage of leaving the leader greater freedom of action than would almost any positive programme.
Trump’s surrounding characters are right out of central casting, starting with Rudy Giuliani, who, as Burt Blumert wrote, “Politically, Giuliani is like the horror film monster who refuses to stay dead.” Murray Rothbard said Giuliani was his least favorite politician.
As for Trump himself, when asked about comments made of Michael Milken’s sentencing, in a speech given in 1989 at the Libertarian Party convention, Rothbard said, “The other was Donald J. Trump, of all the nerve, saying ‘You can be happy on less money than that.’ What gall, what chutzpah!"
Chutzpah indeed. But, Rothbard hadn’t seen anything yet. Dowd, writes,
We knew Trump was a skinflint and a grifter. But the New York attorney general deeply documented just how cheesy he and his children are with a suit accusing the Trump charitable foundation of illegal behavior and self-dealing. It was just what Trump always accused the Clintons of doing.
Donald’s constant fibbing and contention that news is fake was anticipated by Hayek.
And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language.
America’s road to serfdom continues on.
