By Stephen Smoot
Friedrich A. Hayek was born in the same empire (Austria-Hungary) and in the same generation as Adolf Hitler. Both spent years of their young adult lives in the Hapsburg capital of Vienna.
The Austria-Hungary of the time had important features that shaped the worldview of the two men. Its suffocating bureaucracy and endless slate of laws and regulations hampered innovation, choked economic growth, and kept the formerly prosperous and powerful empire moving toward poverty and decline. Austria-Hungary also evolved to be defined by its ethnic diversity. Emperor Franz Josef famously knew each of the 15 major languages spoken in his realm.
Both men drew lessons learned from the plight of the Empire that stumbled into World War I and faced Imperial death at the hands of the Allies. Hayek saw a state and people tied down by too much government while Hitler blamed the Empire’s decline and his own poverty on its cosmopolitan diversity – especially its Jewish population.
Both served in World War I, Hayek in the field artillery of the Austro-Hungarian armed forces, Hitler as a corporal and dispatch runner for the army of the German Empire.
Hitler served as a teacher to Hayek in a way. After World War II, Hayek wrote down his conclusions in “Road to Serfdom.”
“Road to Serfdom” outlines the highway to dictatorship. Hayek explains that wartime planning that organizes the economy inspires leaders in peace to seek the same level of organization. Over time, society grows accustomed to ever-expanding planning. The process, however, grows cumbersome when competing groups advocate for competing plans. Farmers and urbanites, for example, often have conflicting viewpoints and conflicting worldviews.
Both clamor for strong leadership to implement their favored plan over another. This leads to increasing calls for authoritarian, then totalitarian government while the rights and freedoms of individuals and the people collectively diminish.
As government power grows, it attracts individuals who favor wielding that authority in their own hands. Hayek quotes “a distinguished American economist, Professor Frank H. Knight” who states “the probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation.”
Hayek also asserts that the more power a government holds, the more apt it is to create its own truth. He says bluntly that “collectivism is the end of truth.” Vaclav Havel, a dissident against the Czechoslovakian Communist government in the 1980s and post Communist president of Czechoslovakia, then the post Velvet Revolution Czech Republic, in his essay “The Power of the Powerless” also cites the inability of those living under totalitarianism to “live within the truth” without social or governmental applied consequences.
Or as George Orwell wrote in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.”
As deference to “experts” becomes part and parcel of the system, important decisions are taken out of the hands of elected officials and made more often by bureaucratic “experts” who often have little direct connection to the scenarios inspiring their choices.
Until last week, the planners reigned supreme in the United States Government, until the Supreme Court held up its hand, standing “athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it,” as William F. Buckley once stated as a description of conservatism itself.
In 1984, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Chevron U.S.A. Inc vs. Natural Resources Defense Council Inc that judges should defer to federal agencies’ rules when they were reasonable and also when Congress had provided only ambiguous enabling legislation.
Except for the people, businesses, and freedom itself, this served as a win-win. Federal agencies could manufacture interpretations within the law on a very broad spectrum. The United States Congress could intentionally write ambiguous enabling legislation and avoid the blame when federal agencies put teeth in the rules that bit down on the interests of the people and violated rights and freedoms.
Through this precedent, the Environmental Protection Agency tried to impose $30,000 per day fines on a farm in Hardy County for having excessive dirt. The United States Supreme Court, however, ruled that this regulation application was unreasonable.
The logical end of delivering power and authority from the hands of elected officials into those of appointed bureaucrats who do not answer to the people is clear. America’s democratic-republic system over time degenerates into a fig leaf for an imperious bureaucracy that only answers to the President if it answers to anyone.
Eliminating what is called the Chevron Deference has thrown federal agencies and those who support expert planning as a primary source of rules and regulations into a panic.
What the ruling last week actually accomplished, however, was rolling back the federal government’s ability to arbitrarily ruin individuals and industries with capricious and unnecessary regulations while also forcing elected officials to become accountable for the results and impacts of the laws that they pass.
It also restores both the letter and spirit of Article 1 Section 1 of the United States Constitution that reads “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”
Not federal agencies. Not the President. Only the Congress of the United States.
