Freedom in One Lesson

50.

The More Complex the Society, the Less
Government Control We Need

Americans live in a complex world. Those who argue for more statism often claim that the more complex the society, the more government control we need. They assert that even if liberty was appropriate in a horse-and-buggy age (when, for example, America began as a country), it cannot possibly be so now.

When I hear such an assertion, I first consider whether the world we face today really is more complex than in the distant past. Regarding technology, the world is clearly more complex; however, with regard to how many different skills and abilities someone in that distant past needed to survive, I am not so sure. Individuals in the past might have to build their own houses, prepare their own lands, grow their own crops, hunt their own meat, make their own clothes and shoes, fight off threats to themselves and their property with a flintlock rifle, and so on.

I look at my life in today’s world, and it seems far simpler. I do have to use some technology in areas related to my job, but I don’t need any of those skills from the horse-and-buggy era, and I don’t need to know anything about a vast range of technologies that my quality of life depends on today. In our highly interdependent world, markets allow me to confidently rely on others who specialize in the skills I have use for but do not possess, at least when governments don’t get in the way. It reminds me of the words of Alfred North Whitehead in his 1911 book An Introduction to Mathematics that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them” (Whitehead 1911).

Even if I accepted the assertion that we now live more complex lives, it is a non sequitur to conclude that we require more government control as a result. The reason that it is a non sequitur is well expressed by Leonard Read, who spent much of his life fighting fallacies that fueled attacks on liberty, in “The More Complex the Society, the More Government Control We Need” (Read 1962f ): “Unless a person can demonstrate competence at exploding socialistic error, he is not likely to gain wide audiences for his views about the wonders wrought by men who are free.”

Read begins the article by quoting an unnamed college president attending a Foundation for Economic Education seminar: “Your free market, private property, limited government theories were all right under the simple conditions of a century or more ago, but surely they are unworkable in today’s complex economy. The more complex the society, the greater the need for government control; that seems axiomatic.”

The response, which Read describes as necessary because it is an “oft-heard, plausible, and influential fallacy” that “leads directly and logically to socialistic planning,” is described in just two paragraphs.

Let us take the simplest possible situation—just you and I. Next, let us assume that I am as wise as any president of the United States who has held office during your lifetime. With these qualifications in mind, do you honestly think I would be competent to coercively control what you shall invent, discover, or create, what the hours of your labor shall be, what wage you shall receive, what and with whom you shall associate and exchange? Is not my incompetence demonstrably apparent in this simplest of all societies?

Now let us shift from the simple situation to a more complex society—to all the people in this room. What would you think of my competence to coercively control their creative actions? Or, let us contemplate a really complex situation—the . . . people of this nation. If I were to suggest that I should take over the management of their lives and their billions of exchanges, you would think me the victim of hallucinations. Is it not obvious that the more complex an economy, the more certainly will governmental control of productive effort exert a retarding influence? Obviously, the more complex our economy, the more we should rely on the miraculous, self-adapting processes of men acting freely. No mind of man nor any combination of minds can even envision, let alone intelligently control, the countless human energy exchanges in a simple society, to say nothing of a complex one.

In those two paragraphs, the rebuttal starts from a simple situation in which one person is clearly not competent to dictate the choices of another. When the complexity is raised, the gap between what is needed to be competent and what any person or group of persons can know grows.

It seems to me that Read here does an excellent job of communicating the core of Friedrich von Hayek’s message in his immensely important article “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” In a nutshell, Hayek’s point is that adequately informed economic decision-making requires information specific to “time and place,” which only those involved in a particular market exchange can, by way of changing prices, possess. Central planning, by contrast, throws away a great deal of that valuable information in the process of centralizing it.

At a time when a supposedly efficient socialism was widely believed to be the wave of the future, Hayek showed that its necessary conditions for success could not possibly be true because throwing out valuable information necessarily throws away wealth, making efficient socialism an oxymoron rather than an enticing future.

Read’s brief discussion provides a good introduction to Hayek’s ideas. In fact, much of Read’s writing was intended to do just that. It is still worth reading Read, whether for someone open-minded enough to begin thinking more carefully about liberty or someone who wants to become better at communicating the powerful case for it to others.