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Friedrich Hayek and Frank Meyer both wrote in what might be called the modern classic liberal tradition. Both stressed the practical importance of individual rights -- especially property rights -- as a way to limit the power of government and to prevent many kinds of discrimination and harm.

In his most famous book, The Road To Serfdom (1944) Hayek described the damaging effects of expanded government economic controls (and, hence, weaker individual property rights):

How even a formal recognition of individual rights, or of the equal rights of minorities, loses all significance in a state which embarks on a complete control of economic life, has been amply demonstrated by the experience of the various Central European countries. It has been shown there that it is possible to pursue a policy of ruthless discrimination against national minorities by the use of recognized instruments of economic policy without ever infringing the letter of the statutory protection of minority rights. This oppression by means of economic policy was greatly facilitated by the fact that particular industries or activities were largely in the hands of a national minority, so that many a measure aimed ostensibly against an industry or class was in fact aimed at a national minority. But the almost boundless possibilities for a policy of discrimination and oppression provided by such apparently innocuous principles as "government control of the development of industries" have been amply demonstrated to all those desirous of seeing how the political consequences of planning appear in practice. [Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 86]

Frank Meyer believed that the weakening of property rights and the rise of the welfare state carried with it harmful consequences. For example, it meant the decline of independent people who could function as critics of government.

An independent middle class does not mean high-salaried technologists, professionals, and managers, economically dependent upon conformity to the norms of the social machine....It means literal independence, economic independence, for a sufficient number of persons, with fortunes ranging from what used to be called a modest competence upwards, to provide a stable center to the social order -- whether this independence arises from personal ownership and management of enterprise or from income derived from land or investment. This is the public opinion which has passed judgment upon the claims of the powerful and the persuasive in all free modern societies.

The elimination of this independent, informed, and critical court of final appeal and its replacement by an undifferentiated mass subject to the emotions of the mob have been the necessary prelude to the establishment of every despotism since the devotees of Rousseau's General Will and St.-Just's Nation, invoking the Terror against the Girondins, made the mob of Paris the arbiter of France's destinies. It is possible in the span of a generation or two to eliminate such a middle class without terror or physical liquidation. Inheritance taxes, which eat away the substance of families who concern themselves not with the accumulation of money, but with carrying forward and developing the tradition of the civilization; a steeply graduated progressive income tax, which almost entirely inhibits the possibility of establishing an estate and founding a family free from the external pressures of society: these will in the space of a few decades destroy all independence, except that of a few very wealthy families. [Mayer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, p. 108]