The stifling morality of the Far Left

At His Majesty’s suggestion, I have been reading Hayek’s classic The Road to Serfdom. 

I was struck by this passage:

… To direct all our activities according to a single plan presupposes that every one of our needs is given its rank in an order of values which must be complete enough to make it possible to decide among all the different courses which the planner has to choose. It presupposes, in short, the existence of a complete ethical code in which all the different human values are alloted their due place.

The conception of a complete ethical code is unfamiliar, and it requires some effort of imagination to see what it involves. We are not in the habit of thinking of moral codes are more or less complete. The fact that we are constantly choosing between different values without a social code prescribing how we ought to choose does not surprise us and does not suggest to us that our moral code is incomplete. In our society there is neither occasion nor reason why people should develop common views about what should be done in such situations. But where all the means to be used are the property of society and are to be used in the name of society according to a unitary plan, a “social ” view about what ought to be done must guide all decisions. In such a world we should soon find that our moral code is full of gaps….

The essential point for us is that no such complete ethical code exists. The attempt to direct all economic activity according to a single plan would raise innumerable questions to which the answer could be provided only by a moral rule, but to which existing morals have no answer and where there exists no agreed view on what ought to be done….

To which the answer of the Far Left is to invent such a code. I believe this moral code, rarely acknowledged but essential to any scheme of central planning, is at the heart of such phenomenon as political correctness and the green movement.

It will doubtless be objected that it is the Far Right, not the Far Left, that seeks to impose a complete moral code on society. I agree that the Far Right seeks to impose such a code — if by Far Right you mean fascism. However, Hayek is adamant that the Far Right is, in fact, little different from the Far Left in almost all practical respects. Neither has much to do with the center-right, which recent polls suggest is the political stance most characteristic of the average American. The topology of the political spectrum is that of the real projective line, in which negative infinity is the same point as positive infinity, so that if you go all the way to the Left, you arrive essentially at the same place as if you had gone all the way to the Right.

The point is that the Far Left is as guilty as the Far Right of attempting to impose a complete moral code on society. This may not seem obvious to those who are used to thinking of moral codes as proscriptions against forbidden conduct. But a moral code prescribes what is desirable as well as what is forbidden. Consider the example of “reproductive freedom” (sexual license), which may strike some as the counterexample disproving my thesis. He who promotes nearly unlimited sexual license has taken a moral stance on sexual conduct as surely as he who promotes sexual conservatism. The dead giveaway is the insistence on funding both birth control and abortion out of the public purse, which we were falsely promised would not take place under Obamacare.

(Mind you, I have no objection to birth control per se, particularly when practiced by its most ardent advocates.)

Some of you may be wondering why His Majesty, who is noted for his authoritarian tendencies in politics, would have me reading Hayek. My own first thought was that this was an ordinary exercise in “knowing your enemy.” No doubt that is part of it, but, in addition, His Majesty is nothing if not pragmatic. He privately admits that neither he nor any number of his bureaucrats can possibly be expected to plan the economic activities of an entire Galaxy. However, the construction of a Death Star and an Imperial Fleet, not to mention all that cloning, requires a massive coordination of labor and resources, and this in turn requires the maximization of government revenues. Hayek has quite a lot to say about how to make an economy as vibrant and productive as possible, and then His Majesty’s economists need only determine where the maximum of the Laffer curve lies, with due allowance for maximizing revenues from future growth. That’s plenty difficult without any serious attempt at central planning.

Of course, one must keep up the facade for the sake of the Trade Federation, which expects His Majesty to protect their monopolies; the Banking Guild, which expects His Majesty to underwrite their investment risks; the Congress of Intergalactic Labor Organizations, which expects His Majesty to enforce wage and price controls; and countless similar constituencies who expect His Majesty to protect them from anything like an actual free market, with its brutal competition. But His Majesty has found new ways to motivate them. If they object to the wholly unexpected level of competition under Imperial rule, he need but mildly ask them if they think they’re being treated … unfairly … and leave it to their imaginations to conjure up terrible visions of what would happen to them if the Emperor actually did treat them the way they deserve.

So far, it’s proven effective at keeping them from seeing that, in fact, they already get no special consideration. His Majesty is quite brutal about competitive bids for government work, and he doesn’t much care how the winning firm thought they could make such a low bid. His Majesty knows better than to permit cost-plus contracts, so, at worst, I get to choke the living sin out of incompetent managers and put the rest of the company into Imperial receivership. It beats being poked in the photoreceptor with a burnt stick.