January 30, 2005

GEORGE WILL -- "Bush is giving us the sort of big government I advocated in my book Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does." Andrew Sullivan calls Bush a "Bismarkian" on domestic policy -- I guess now add also these: Hegelian, neo-Platonist, Straussian -- i.e. a Willian.

Actually, Bush doesn't need to be any of those. Friedrich Hayek in his The Road to Serfdom described how incentives and government structure shaped the character of citizens -- and acted as sort of moral filter for political climbers. And certainly Hayek was no Hegelian -- nor a Straussian or neo-Platonist. Hayek also allowed for a "safety-net" and many other elements of the "welfare state" (you can look it up -- and I have). In his later works, especially Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 3, Hayek made the case for introducing non-malignant incentives into the welfare state -- as well as various competitive elements into the government structure for providing social services. You might even call it a welfare state conception with "ownership society" characteristics. Things like vouchers for eduction go back earlier -- to Hayek in his The Constitution of Liberty and Milton Friedman in his Capitalism and Freedom. So these ideas predate George Will -- by several decades. Perhaps Will even read this stuff in the 1960's when he was reading Hayek and Friedman at Oxford -- that is before the Hegel, before the Strauss, before the neo-Platonism. Posted by Greg Ransom