Honorable mention goes to Garet Garrett for “Hayek on Individualism” :When we reduce the abstraction "political power" to its operational reality, to the way it actually works, we see how it feeds on reform. Every proposal to improve man's lot by political measures calls for the enactment of a law or an official edict. The law presupposes that some people are not doing what they ought to do or are doing something that ought not to be done. Hence, the purpose of the law is to regulate human behavior. The very premise of the law is that violation or evasion will ensue from its enactment, that it will not be self-enforcing; therefore, the heart of the law is a punishment clause. No law is worth the paper it is printed on without such a clause, and no law has any effect unless it is implemented with a corps of enforcers. Therein lies the secret of the accumulation and perpetuation of political power.
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The bureaucrats are people, not unlike the people whose direction is entrusted to their care under the law; they too are bent on getting the most out of life with the minimum of exertion, and they too adjust their thinking to the means at hand. They develop an occupational frame of mind, a bureaucratic psychology. It is sui generis, or becomes so after a period of inurement. The mind of the bureaucrat can be compared, and without invidious intent, with the criminal mind in that it takes its shape from the peculiarities of the trade. Like the criminal, the bureaucrat is removed from the disciplines of the market place, gaining his living not by production but by predation. There the similarity ends, because the trade of the bureaucrat is legalized and does not suffer from social disapproval; in fact, because the bureaucrat is presumed to be a "civil servant," his trade acquires an aura that neither the thief nor the producer can hope for.
The bureaucrat likes his job. ... But his job depends on law, not on production, and therefore his primary concern is in law, its enactment, its perpetuation, its enlargement. The more law the better; which is another way of saying that his mind is keenly attuned to the possibilities of reform. The proliferation of reforms means the proliferation of bureaucratic jobs, with a corresponding abundance in honorifics and opportunities for the ambitious. Thus, a vested interest in reform appears, developing both a class-conscious distinctness and the skills necessary to its perpetuation and advancement. The bureaucracy is an aristocracy of office; it is vital to this aristocracy that offices once established be perpetuated, even though the occasion that brought them into being is long past, and that those which cannot be kept alive be replaced by others. The vested interest sees to it that the power of the State does not diminish.
... In our "democratic" era, when parliaments make laws, it is the bureaucrat who phrases them, who prepares the supporting arguments (which legislators mouth), who estimates (or underestimates) the costs of operation, who sets up the machinery (jobs) to implement the laws. And when a law in operation does not effect the solution of the problem it was supposed to solve, but produces problems of its own, it is the bureaucracy that comes up with correctives. Ideologically, the bureaucracy is always "leftist" (if by that term is meant the enlargement of State power), not so much by persuasion but because of personal interest and the psychology of the trade. A bureaucrat is a socialist, or communist, because his business requires him to think like a socialist or a communist.
Once a law enters the statute books it is beyond the purview of those who made it, the legislators or the king, and becomes the special, private province of those who operate it. The more numerous and prolix the laws, the more important and the more self-sufficient are the operating specialists. No part-time legislator (whose principal concern is in getting elected) or king (preoccupied with enjoyment) can possibly make his way through the labyrinth of law without a guide. Thus the real governing body of the country is its practicing bureaucracy, whose prospects brighten with each reform that becomes law.
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The net profit of reform is the accumulation of State power; the net loss is borne by Society. ... Lenin was the archreformer of all times, in that his reforms culminated in the largest, the most arbitrary, and the most ruthless bureaucracy the world has ever known.
True individualism is not equalitarian. It [says Hayek] "can see no reason for trying to make people equal as distinct from treating them equally. While individualism is profoundly opposed to all prescriptive privilege, to all protection, by law or force, of any rights not based on rules equally applicable to all persons, it also denies government the right to limit what the able or fortunate may achieve. It is equally opposed to any rigid limitation of the position individuals may achieve, whether this power is used to perpetuate inequality or to create equality. Its main principle is that no man or group of men should have power to decide what another man's status ought to be, and it regards this as a condition of freedom so essential that it must not be sacrificed to the gratification of our sense of justice or of our envy.
"If all men were completely equal in their gifts and inclinations, we should have to treat them differently in order to achieve any sort of social organization. Fortunately, they are not equal; and it is only owing to this that the differentiation of functions need not be determined by the arbitrary decision of some organizing will but that, after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level … There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal."
False individualism, on the other hand, deriving from Rousseau and the French revolution, is equalitarian. "The deepest cause which made the French Revolution so disastrous to liberty was its theory of equality," said Lord Acton. "Democracy and socialism," said De Tocqueville, "have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference; while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
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