A major advantage of limited government is that the most dangerous individuals can do only limited damage if they rise at the top of the state.
A recent book I am reading (and will review for Regulation) provides a good illustration. In More: The World Economy from the Iron Age to the Information Age, Philip Coggan writes (p. 210):
Ford was, like many other early auto leaders, both a visionary businessman and a thoroughly nasty person. In 1920 he published a series of pamphlets with the title The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which earned him a citation in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. As late as 1939 Ford sent Hitler a cheque for $50,000 on his birthday and, in the following year, claimed that “international Jewish bankers” had caused the outbreak of war. Louis Renault [the founder of the French automaker Renault] was another anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator; the British carmaker William Morris funded Sir Oswald Mosley, Britain’s wannabe Führer; and Giovanni Agnelli of Fiat backed Mussolini.
One should add to the list the names of many great scientists, artists, and even businessmen, who espoused socialist or communist causes—that is, fascism of the left. The rightist form of unlimited power is not the only dangerous one.
When acting on the free market, such dangerous men as those named by Coggan achieved some good, for the market obliges them to serve their fellow citizens if they want to prosper. It is easy to imagine the evil they would have wreaked at the helm of the powerful states of our time.
READER COMMENTS
David O'Rear
May 26 2020 at 7:33am
Coggan also points out that stimulating demand where it is inadequate works very well, austerity makes things worse, monetarists had a brief period of usefulness before being shown to be predominately wrong, and Republicans are die-hard fiscal hypocrites.
Excellent book.
Pierre Lemieux
May 26 2020 at 10:19am
David: From what I have read thus far, I would say that Coggan’s monetary and macroeconomic interpretations are among the weakest parts of his book. As an extreme Keynesian, he seems to believe that “aggregate demand” and trust in the state are what matter. If, upon the discovery of a new primitive tribe with subsistence production, the state were to give its members little pieces of paper adorned with a ruler’s picture, Holiday Inns would soon pop up everywhere!
Pierre Lemieux
May 26 2020 at 10:21am
Keynes himself, though, would likely have recommended fiscal instead of monetary policy: to create Holiday Inns, make the tribe members dig up holes and refill them.
Miguel Madeira
May 29 2020 at 7:52am
But giving little pieces of paper adorned with a ruler’s picture is fiscal policy.
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