On “The Road to Serfdom” by F. A. Hayek ****

This author was recommended to me by someone who found out I was doing an economics reading list. I was not really looking forward to this work, as it Hayek was someone I'd never heard of and he seemed more of a minor figure such that reading him would take from others I would otherwise read as part of this list. When I read a bit about him, I was even more put out; he sounded like a huge right-wing, free-market capitalism fan, for which I already had a few such books on my list. I figured Smith and Marx to be enough in terms of older classics, Keynes and Galbraith for moderns, and then the rest would be applied and contemporary.

And indeed, as I started out on this book, Hayek's hit me in a lot of wrong ways. He seemed just too big a fan of the free market without any sort of government oversight. But as I read further, he made more and more sense—and he also seemed at times to contradict himself. That is, he seemed very heavy on avoiding government intervention in the economy, but then would backtrack and say that some intervention was okay. In some ways, it reminded me of the way Elizabeth Warren claims to be a friend of capitalism—but only capitalism done the right way.

What Hayek's book is really doing is arguing against socialism—whether on the right or the left. He was writing near the end of World War II, when the troubles that had risen to the fore in Germany with the National Socialists were very apparent. And he was fearful, he notes, that too many other nations, such as the United States and Britain, were drifting toward the same sort of socialist frenzy under the inane idea that socialism solves problems and creates a more equitable society. (He notes that this is actually more a book on politics than on economics, which seems true, save the economics has much to do with his political views.)

Here's where Hayek's big critique of such thinking really gives one much to ponder. He notes that when the government imposes its will on the forces of the market in the name of providing equity, it denies freedom to the people it rules. A planned economy essentially means that certain people will not be able to do as they wish, be it start a particular type of business, sell a particular item, or do a particular job. In that sense, socialism leads inevitably to totalitarianism. In this way of thinking, I would have to agree. The problem, of course, is that simply letting the market dictate things doesn't necessarily lead to a greater amount of freedom; that's because when a private corporation corners a market, now it's just the private corporation that dictates one's ability to start a new business, sell a particular item, or do a particular job. Which are you going to ask to control your fate? Hayek doesn't spend much time on this latter possibility—except he does at some point note the problems with monopolies. In that sense, he seems to imply that ultimate economic freedom for people can only exist when we are talking about small-time capitalists, not multinationals that control the fate of millions. And in that, too, I would agree, save that some industries require such an outlay of capital that they are impossible to run with such a small footprint. The guy down the street cannot decide that he's going to start building commercial airplanes with a small savings or a small loan; there are reasons there are really only a couple of viable commercial airplane manufacturers. In those sort of endeavours, it seems we really do have to fall back on either government involvement or a near monopoly.

And just as one thinks Hayek is espousing total free markets, he pulls back, admitting in places that the government does have a role to play. It is there to keep markets fair (this is where I thought of Warren), so that fraud and monopoly don't twist the market in ways that remove opportunity for everyone. He even at some point notes that the government should be involved in health care, which seems very much more of a socialist kind of argument in many people's views. Once the government starts getting involved in such things, it seems, it warps the market—that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's really a matter of the tradeoff one is willing to make, where one is willing to cede authority and freedom in the hope that a central-planning bureaucrat will be able to do better. I wouldn't want to live completely at the whim of the free market, nor would I want to live totally under the thumb of a government decision maker. Where that balance is is hard to say.

A late chapter in the book discusses a kind of world government. There, he argues against a socialist world government, noting that were we to have such, certain nation-states would insist on cornering the market in certain areas. There would not be the sharing of resources as one would hope. Instead, there would be resentment, the keeping down of certain nations and of the development of their own industries. Instead, he advocates a kind of world government that instead of mandating things would simply prohibit certain things—what sounds to me in some ways what would become the United Nations. One nation, for example, cannot invade another, lest all the other nations then unite to keep such an invasion from happening. Thus, we would have peace. Of course, the issue with this is apparent from the lack of success the UN has had. I mean, it requires other nations to be willing to sacrifice to stop another nation from taking advantage of others. But beyond that, what's the difference between a prohibition and a mandate? On some level, are they not similar things? If we refrain from mandating that a nation provides a living wage to its citizens, but prohibit a nation from starving its people, what's the difference?

Anyway, in the end, I'm glad Hayek was recommended to me. I found it particularly interesting reading in our current times.

On “Cold-Case Christianity” by J. Warner Wallace *****

After hearing an interview with the author, I'd been looking forward to reading this for probably a few years and finally got ahold of a copy. It was worth the wait. Granted, the early going portions of the text were a bit disappointing, but as Wallace moves deeper into his arguments, the case gets more and more compelling. There isn't much that is necessarily suprising; it's all basic Christian apologist argument, but Wallace is pretty thorough.

What the author does here is essentially discuss how the manner in which one goes about solving a criminal case based on evidence and testimony actually fits well with what evidence has been left for us in the Bible about Jesus's life and work. He starts early on by discussing the basic argument that skeptics have against the Bible: namely, that miraculous/supernatural events do not compute with what we understand about the known world. Indeed, if one is a materialist, that is the end of the conversation right there. But Wallace claims that witness testimony of the supernatural can't be disregarded, especially when there are so many witnesses. For my own self, I've been somewhat skeptical of the idea that our five senses explain everything about the world around us; it seems a bit bold to try to claim that all knowledge can be gathered from the “physical” world; there might well be things that we can't see/hear/touch/smell/feel that are real and existent. As such, one can't necessarily dismiss all things that don't fit with our material limitations, even if there is nothing we can glean about things outside of them without some sort of revelation. But we can see, as Warner himself notes in one chapter, the material results of such supernatural power—that is, one chapter is devoted to the creation, wherein Wallace essentially runs down the various well-trodden arguments for creation versus some other less than satisfactory argument for the origin of life and the universe. But in that sense, the book, in its earliest chapters, where it's running through these well-rehearsed arguments alongside his police life, the book seems a little predictable.

The deeper in Wallace gets, however, the more intriguing the work becomes. That's because he begins to summarize some ideas that are somewhat less explored in standard apologetics and theological works, and he does it in a way that is very much easy for a lay reader to understand. I recognized some of the scholarly work that I've seen others write in Wallace's text, but made much more accessible. Some of that work is in books I've managed to check out of the college library, but said books are at such high academic prices I'll never likely purchase a copy; now, I have those arguments, scriptures, and quotes in Wallace's book, and it's nice to have those summations put into such easy to access form. I especially enjoyed section 2 of the book, where he is as much talking about being a detective as he is about examining the evidence. His main point in this section is that, yes, one can still argue other things about the evidence presented, but are those arguments the most logical? the simplest? I think Wallace presents a good point here. We can accept the evidence handed down to us; that is in fact the simplest explanation for all that we know about Jesus. Or we can, by contrast, settle on something that is much harder to defend, some sort of conspiracy theory. It doesn't fit the evidence as well or as simply, but if one is a materialist, such an argument fits with the world one knows. It's really a matter of which one you're going to choose.

On “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” by John Maynard Keynes ***

I was looking for a book by Keynes for my economics reading list and chose this one. It wasn't quite what I was looking for insofar as it didn't really seem focused on what folks call “Keynesian economics.” Then again, I didn't really want some really scholarly text, and that was one main reason I settled on this one: because it was, I read, intended for a popular audience. By that, however, the “popular” audience was very much that of its day. There wasn't much in here that I felt invested in in our day.

That said, the book is an interesting snapshot of one of the concerns of its day, and in it, one can see that Keynes had some foresight. The text largely criticizes the conditions of the peace treaty coming out of World War I, one that was very draconian in the manner in which it treated Germany and that was not in keeping with the assurances Germany had been given when it surrended. He shows how the punishment, the payment forced on Germany by the winners of the war, was unsustainable. It took away chunks of land that Germany had had, some indeed of the most productive land. It asked Germany to repay based on a degree of production that it was incapable of, especially without that land. And it rewarded nations that were not as damaged by the war as certain others and that could have likely sustained the losses—namely Britain and in turn the United States (which Britain was indebted to and thus was repaying), as opposed to nations like France, which suffered much more substantial losses and whose payment was likely more justified.

The result, Keynes hints, is one that is actually not going to resolve issues that it hopes to resolve and instead is likely to lead to the renewal of hostilities, because the German population is not going to be willing to be taxed into poverty for war debt with no end in sight. Such are the arguments, and such, of course, is what came to be.