What is a Planner?
To be honest, the definition that Hayek gives beats around the bush, but he does describe the Planner’s as someone who creates a power of “a magnitude never known before,” which can mean that they are the higher powers that are trying to control the world during this time, figuratively or literally. However, through some interpretation and outside research, I have concluded that when Hayek refers to the Planner’s, he is referencing those who insist on having a centralized plan in the government. In fact, most of Hayek’s argument in this excerpt is about how having a centralized plan is completely detrimental to society and lists extensive evidence and reasons as to why it will fail and why it is harmful.
Why are Planner’s Bad?
Well to start, from what I can tell, Hayek believes that every form of government besides a democracy is bad and harmful to society, but he particularly dislikes centralized planning, which almost always leads to totalitarianism, in his opinion. For starters, totalitarianism and planning are in direct contrast to individualism, which Hayek credits to the Christian religion and the Renaissance for starting and popularizing among society. And of course, Hayek is a huge proponent of individualism, not only because he is American and strongly dislikes socialism or any form of totalitarianism, but also because he is a strong believer in the statement “private property is the most important guarantee of freedom,” which directly corresponds to the notion that The Law talked about a few lectures back. Secondly, Hayek does not believe, rightfully so, that socialism and freedom cannot exist together. On paper, centralized planning looks like a utopia, the perfect solution, but time and time again in practice, it gets proven that the two ways of living will never work in harmony with each other. You cannot have a socialist society and retain freedom without corrupting one, if not both, of the ideas. On the economic side of things, he has a very libertarian view: he believes that “once earned, we are free to spend the money as we wish,” which could never happen in a totalitarian society. Like Hayek said, unfortunately, you cannot separate economic ends from the rest of life because whether we like it or not, money CAN buy happiness and can also buy power, and in the wrong hands, the seemingly utopian-like socialist country turns into a full-blown fascist dictatorship.
Realities of Planning
Like socialism, central planning takes away all forms of competition in the economic markets, so consumers are stuck with the options they are given and cannot create their own. Beginning in the late 19th century Germany, an experiment was being conducted, which ended up leading to the first giant monopolies in the German markets, and during that time, Germany made a deliberate decision to quell all of the competition, which inevitably lead to the first totalitarianism-like society. Here lies the great danger of centralized planning: organized capital and organized labor directly support and grow the monopolist industries. It is like the genie from Aladdin, it collects great, unimaginable power, and shoves it into a small containment where there is no room for anything else, and whoever wields that power controls everything. To make another entertainment reference that crossed my mind when reading this sentence, “we are not absolutely tied to a job that has been chosen for us… nothing makes conditions more unbearable than [knowing] that no effort of ours can change them,” I immediately thought of The Giver by Lois Lowry. The book was set in what looks like a socialist setting where, and let us giggle at the symbolism, everything was grey; all the clothes, buildings, and even people were grey because there were no thoughts, no imagination, only the sameness that was forced upon them by the government. They even went as far as to assign jobs to everyone as soon as they came of age based on their hobbies and where they spent the most time volunteering, “highly encouraged” of course. Anyways, when I read that sentence, I immediately thought of the over-exaggerated “dystopian” society that I used to read about for fun in middle school, only to now realize that it was not an over-exaggeration and that it could very easily be a reality for some people in different countries today.
Last Thoughts
After mostly getting through this excerpt, because I will not lie it was somewhat difficult for me, and reflecting on it a little, a couple of ideas from Hayek stuck with me. The first is the notion that planning is the downfall of society. Now Hayek did not say that directly, but the way he spoke about planning, it sure felt as though that is what he was saying between the lines. And after thinking and rationalizing while writing this paper, I can start to agree with him. If we use his definition of planning plus our previously designated definition of socialism, there is no way planning would ever be successful in practice and would most certainly cause a downfall in a society that is larger than the size of Rhode Island (and even then, that might be too big with access to social media). Just to brush the surface of why centralized planning and “utopias” do not work in society, not everyone has the same idea of a “perfect society,” and they never will because the fact is, we are humans, not robots. Try as they may, the government cannot program us all into liking the same ideas and ways of life. And secondly, Hayek says that for something like a centralized plan or socialist society to actually work, it would have to have ABSOLUTE equality, not greater equality. This is virtually impossible though because someone will always have more power and that someone will always use it to benefit them and not society. Again, this goes back to the idea that utopias are impossible in a real society, and not in books (but even then, the genre is called dystopian not utopian). Overall, even though this was written in the ’40s of last century, the same principles still apply: yay democracy, boo everyone else!
Works Cited
Hayek, Friedrich a. The Road to Serfdom. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.