As I am working my way through Hayek, I have two more points to respond to briefly (I apologize, just as I did in the case of Kuhn, for arguing with a book without providing background for those who haven’t read it, but, just as with Kuhn, the book is short and the issues readily comprehensible for almost anyone, I believe). Firstly, he claims that a free society is distinct from a despotic one in that a free society is governed by laws, while a despotic society is governed by arbitrary power. In this case laws are not defined as whatever the government decrees but rather rules based on general principles which are not discriminatory for or against any particular individual or group. I think this mostly valid, but insufficient. One can easily think of social systems, such as Islamic sharia, which are totally consistent, universally applied and yet utterly tyrannical. The problem is their excessive rigidity and all-embracing nature. A society needs a relatively large scope for unregulated action to be truly liberal, and even the actions directly addressed must provide for more than one course of action–in other words restrictive but not proscriptive. Even something as seemingly intuitive and fundamental as “thou shalt not kill,” for example, if taken totally rigidly and proscriptively, would rule out not only war and executions but also accidents and self-defense. Again, I don’t know if this was really an error on Hayek’s part or merely an overly convoluted line of argument, but I believe that at the least it simplifies the issue to imagine the essential dichotomy as being between a society that allows multiple courses of action and one that permits only one.

Secondly, and this is not a point on which I disagree with Hayek but rather one in which I felt the need to add an additional principle to come round to agreement with him, is the always tricky matter of the inherent inequalities in a liberal society that arise from such things as unearned income by way of inheritance and the like. Hayek resolves the issue by casting it as a choice of the lesser of two evils, arguing that there is no impartial means of income redistribution and that whatever the flaws in allowing people to accumulate income they didn’t earn pales by comparison to ceding someone or group the power to determine what income people deserve. This is true as far as it goes, but I still think it pays too much regretful homage to the mirage of equality of wealth and feel that the legitimacy of inheritances and so forth can be more solidly established on the following grounds. In my opinion for a government to forbid or consfiscate these is essentially to outlaw or rather to monopolize generosity. Consider: all gifts are by their nature unearned. Nevertheless the act of giving, or more particularly giving that which one has earned, that is to say altruism, is the highest of human impulses. To confiscate that which is given as a gift is to take on the responsibility of determining who is the most deserving of it and thus to obviate the whole nature of gift-giving. Therefore, to mandate against them is tantamount to forbidding the most virtuous of human acts. To me this is an a priori wrong just in the way that an insistence on “equality” above all else is an equally wrong tribute to envy, the lowest of humans emotions.