Response: Hayek

This week I am responding to The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek.

It seems to me that for Hayek, the most important value, which should be preserved at all costs, is individual freedom of choice. I may be not fully understanding or oversimplifying his position, but he seems to think that any restriction of individual choice will propel us rapidly down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. While reading this week’s selections, I couldn’t help but feeling that his viewpoint comes from a place of privilege (I’m using it a casual sense, not in his sense). He writes with contempt about restrictions which would turn individuals into means “to be used by the authority in the service of such abstractions as the ‘social welfare’ or the ‘good of the community’” (96). Even restrictions intended to aid the common good are dangerous in Hayek’s eyes.

I am not very educated in politics or economics, but I do a lot of volunteer work with social justice, so I thought about his argument in terms of Fair Trade. For those who don’t know, Fair Trade is a certification process that ensures that growers in other countries are paid fair wages for their labor and use sustainable agricultural procedures. You can read more about it here. It’s especially important in industries like the chocolate industry, in which slave labor and the exploitation of children is a huge problem. So, in that light, it’s hard for me to take Hayek’s obsession with individual choice seriously. A certification like Fair Trade does, in fact, individual choice. When a chocolate brand agrees to supply only Fair Trade chocolate, it is agreeing to submit itself to certain restrictions. So yes, it does decrease the freedom of choice of the chocolate makers.

However, let’s look at the other end of the spectrum. What about a young African boy, living in forced labor on a chocolate plantation? Without a labor restriction like Fair Trade, what options would he have? Continue to live as a slave on the chocolate farm, run away to try to find other options in an area where chocolate plantations are nearly the only option, or to try to make his way in a world where he has no education or qualifications to recommend him. Hayek wrote about the power that a monopoly holds over consumers—in this case, the owner of the chocolate plantation holds a monopoly on food and shelter as far as the boy is concerned. So how likely is the boy to leave a life of forced labor, when it is his only known source of life and sustenance? In this case, a labor restriction like a Fair Trade certification would give that boy more individual freedom of choice. If he lived on a Fair Trade farm, his family might have enough money to give their children more options, even potentially an education. So, a restriction in the name of the “social welfare” or the “good of the community, “abstractions” of which Hayek writes with scorn, does in face increase individual freedom of choice, just for those at the bottom of the economic spectrum, not those at the top. It seems to me that Hayek is only really concerned for the maintenance of individual choice for himself and others in his class, as he disregards the idea that measures which benefit the “common good” benefit many individuals, allowing them greater freedom of choice in what they do with their lives.

Again, I may have misunderstood his argument and have just gone a Fair Trade rant for no reason. He may be referring to other types of restrictions (government imposed, rather than voluntary). But as a supporter of Fair Trade, I couldn’t help getting irritated at his dismissal of the individual freedoms of agricultural workers in developing countries as merely elements of some abstract “social welfare.”