Unfortunately, the basic lesson about intervention has not been learned by the people who need to learn it most: the makers of U.S. foreign policy. A large number of them still seem to believe that they can design the world any way they like and that even if there are unintended consequences, these will be less negative than the positive they hope to achieve. In that sense, they have what Mont Pelerin Society founder Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit.” Hayek applied the term to people who believed that governments could plan economies with many good results and few bad ones. But the term applies just as much to the conceit of foreign policy makers.
In his classic 1945 article in the American Economic Review, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Friedrich Hayek drove the final intellectual nail in socialism’s coffin by pointing out that, in the absence of a price system, a central government body could not have enough information to plan an economy. The information is decentralized in bits and pieces in millions of minds.
Although Hayek never applied this thinking to foreign policy, it does apply. A government that intervenes in another country’s affairs faces a similar information problem. The small number of government policy makers at the center have even less information about the foreign country than they have about their own country. The problem, then, becomes one of knowing which countries they should intervene in and, beyond that, even if they appear to have good grounds for intervening, how to intervene.
This is from David R. Henderson, “The Case Against an Interventionist Foreign Policy,” Defining Ideas, May 28. It’s a transcript of a speech I gave at the Mont Pelerin Society regional meeting in Fort Worth on May 21.
READER COMMENTS
Eric Hanneken
May 30 2019 at 4:39am
Seems sensible. What did Tim Kane say in response to that?
Thaomas
May 30 2019 at 6:18am
Good point in the extreme, but since all foreign relations are “interventions” to some extent, it does nothing to help draw useful lines. Should USAID not try to get countries to adopt less distorting trade restrictions? That’s intervention, after all.
Jon Murphy
May 30 2019 at 6:37am
It’s not so much about drawing lines as creating presumptions. “Drawing lines” implies creating a checklist of conditions necessary before intervention. “Creating presumptions” is about a means of thinking about the situation.
What Dr. Henderson is talking about here is a presumption of non-interventionism, as the intervention is often worse than the problem. I’m other words, intervening is not about meeting an arbitrary checklist, but rather a burden of proof that the intervention is necessary. Like how the presumption of innocence in a trial is not about merely checking boxes (“do they have means, motive, and opportunity?”) but a burden of proof (“does the evidence show that the person is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?”).
Thaomas
May 31 2019 at 6:41am
My point is that since almost everything IS “intervention” a presumption against “intervention” is not a very useful guide to foreign policy. What principles guide us to override the presumption?
Jon Murphy
May 31 2019 at 7:26am
But not everything is an intervention (or almost an intervention). Very few things are.
If everything is an intervention, then nothing is an intervention.
Jackson Mejia
May 30 2019 at 6:34am
I wonder if the knowledge problem is even greater at the foreign level than the domestic level. At least at the domestic level, it is possible for government to have some bureaucrats at local levels absorbing some inarticulable knowledge, even if not to a sufficient degree and without the necessary accoutrements (e.g., a price system). But at the foreign level this is generally impossible. Even when the intervening power has local bureaucrats on the ground, these bureaucrats have so little understanding of their cultural context that any potentially useful knowledge is bound to be misinterpreted or simply missed. Then I suppose there are incentive issues, but that’s for a different day.
Ryan Murphy
Jun 2 2019 at 2:19pm
“I am convinced Reagan is right not to reduce arms expenditure. World peace depends upon America staying strong. We already have so many atomic weapons that a nuclear war would mean the end of civilization: so the discussion as to whether arms increases intensify the threat of war is nonsense. In fact it’s no longer a question of whether nuclear war can be avoided or not; the real problem is whether we have got ourselves into a situation in which the Soviets can intimidate us to such an extent that we knuckle under completely. We can’t afford that kind of weakness. Ergo, the West must stay at least as strong as the Soviet Union. It is a complete delusion—not, I think, necessarily a malicious one but to some extent Communist-inspired—when they try to make us believe that the arms increases needed to achieve a balance increase the threat of nuclear war. Instead it becomes less. I don’t believe any Russian is daft enough to start a nuclear war. But if ever the Soviets are in a position to intimidate us with military superiority, they won’t hesitate to do whatever they want.”
-F.A. Hayek
Source: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/07/friedrich-hayek-cold-warrior.php
Jon Murphy
Jun 2 2019 at 3:03pm
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a strong military, but that does not imply then that interventionism is desirable or wise.
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