Dictatorship Chic

In the trajectory laid out by F.A. Hayek in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, dictatorship is the end game of a period of immense government failure

• The ruling class begins tinkering with the normal function of markets and society with some high goal in mind (think: virus eradication) and the results are the opposite of what is intended
• At this point, there is a choice to make: continue with the supposed inefficiencies of democracy or move to full-on dictatorship
• After the onset of the Great Depression, the notion of democracy fell into widespread disrepute in elite circles. Everyone agreed that freedom and democracy really have seen their day. They are ill-suited to the planning needs of the day, which require power from the top and expertise throughout the administrative bureaucracy.
• All elite circles came to believe in a "mild species of dictatorship"
• A few minutes ago, I read an editorial in the Washington Post by Thomas Geoghegan that just appeared last week. It takes on the administrative state directly and says outright that such a beast is nowhere in the Constitution and yet it makes law daily. We have to have it because democracy is so inefficient!
   

  1. The inaction may have been survivable in the past, when Congress was merely too dysfunctional to deal adequately with health care, labor law or many other issues….This is true for any parliamentary body in a republic — it is incapable of turning on a dime to educate itself and take emergency actions on technical or scientific questions.
  2. The great debate between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and despotism, between a government by the people and a government imposed upon the people is here at last.
  3. If the planet continues to burn, while this virus or a new one continues to ravage it, we will need a far more flexible Constitution with an administrative state that may need to be larger, not smaller, than the one that the court is trying to shrink.
  4. The court’s conservative majority is out to shrink the administrative state in favor of decision-making by Congress, but it’s a Congress incapable of deciding much at all.
  5. In the trajectory laid out by F.A. Hayek in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, dictatorship is the end game of a period of immense government failure.
  6. A national crisis can generate all the conditions necessary for an end to freedom and democracy, as we should have learned in the interwar period.

https://brownstone.org/articles/dictatorship-chic/