I wrote today about the connection between economic freedom and political freedom in the context of Brazil. While many of the activities of right-wing former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro were straightforwardly denounced as “democratic backsliding” by international observers, troubling actions by left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seem to be escaping attention. Some are even praising Brazil’s authoritarian move to ban X, formerly Twitter, under his watch.
My point in writing is that we shouldn’t be surprised that a socialist like Lula, who opposes economic freedom, isn’t a defender of other freedoms. I referenced Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman to make that point.
Another book that makes that point is The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek. That book turned 80 this year, and Samuel Gregg has an article on it for the Acton Institute.
“In a way, much of Road involves Hayek extending Tocqueville’s logic by showing the ratchet effect in the belief that it is worth giving up some liberty to secure other seemingly good ends,” Gregg wrote. You can see that same instinct in the demands from some that governments fight “misinformation” by restricting free speech, which is what Lula is claiming Brazil has done by banning X. No doubt lies are harmful, and it would be great if nobody lied. But giving up liberty to prevent the dissemination of lies is not a good trade.
The ratchet effect is that it is hard to get that liberty back once it is given up. “A key ingredient of Hayek’s argument is that as it becomes clear that the trade-off has not delivered what was promised (or has even produced negative unintended consequences), the response of those advocating for, say, a more equal wealth distribution is not to concede that it was a mistake to diminish liberty,” Gregg writes. “Instead, they invariably insist that they require more power—and therefore that society may have to accept less freedom—to achieve the desired goal.”
Gregg continues:
By “liberty,” Hayek does not simply mean the freedom to make one’s free choices so far as they are compatible with the liberty of others to do the same, or freedom from the arbitrary wills of others. He also has in mind the rule of law: something that is indispensable for any free society. It is not for idle reasons that Hayek devoted an entire chapter of Road to the ways in which gradual shifts away from markets toward economic planning progressively compromised the rule of law. After all, interventionism that aims at rearranging the distribution of wealth cannot help but result in the government intentionally treating people unequally.
That’s exactly the sort of interventionism that socialists support as a matter of course. Contrary to its assertions of equality, socialism requires the unequal treatment of persons under the law for the purposes of redistribution. It’s not a big leap between saying that some people’s money is more important than others’ to saying that some people’s speech is more important than others’. And of course, the people who decide what’s important and what’s not are politicians and the bureaucrats they control, who will make those decisions in their own interest, not the public’s.