Hayek on Social Insurance

By Dylan Matthews

Jennifer Schuessler has a great short essay in the New York Times Book Review looking at the reception of Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" over the years, including this can't-be-made-enough point:

But unlike some of his champions in 2010, Hayek didn’t oppose all forms of government intervention. “The preservation of competition,” he wrote, is not “incompatible with an extensive system of social services — so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields.” This qualification, however, was left out of a comic-book version of “The Road to Serfdom” printed in Look magazine in 1945 (and distributed as a pamphlet by General Motors), which showed well-intentioned regulation giving way to more sinister forms of control.

As a side note, that Look magazine comic adaptation is hilarious, and includes great lines such as, "If you're fired from your job, it's apt to be by a firing squad," and imagery like an agent of the socialist state oppressing citizens by snapping their golf clubs in half.

Going further than Schuessler, it's worth noting that Hayek does not only accept a limited welfare state, but specifically singles out health care as an area where the state should provide a safety net:

There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.

Emphasis mine. Now, Hayek obviously isn't an idol of liberal economic policy folks for a whole batch of reasons, not least the central premise of Road to Serfdom that the sorts of social democratic policies being pursued in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe during and after World War II would open the door to totalitarianism. But it's more than a little jarring to hear him invoked in opposition to a health care bill that's, if anything, less ambitious than the sort of thing he's talking about here.

-- Dylan Matthews is a student at Harvard and a researcher at The Washington Post.