That isn't Hayek either, though. Some Hayekians, yes, but Hayek himself was in favor of safety nets, and even argued positively for them in a number of places. He grouped basic healthcare along with fire protection and a police service as the minimal services a state should provide, and also supported a subsistence-level guaranteed minimum income (as a direct transfer payment, rather than as some complex combination of food stamps, rent control, housing subsidy, unemployment insurance, etc., etc.). One of his arguments was that a background safety net promotes individual freedom by lessening tribalist instincts--- if there's no safety net, people will cling to things like their church or ethnic group for a safety net, out of fear of being left out in the cold.
I think we all take these models too far -- including fans of Hayek. I wasn't saying that everybody should subscribe to some school of thought. All I was saying is that when politicians use the terms "jobs" and "education", they mean certain things. For "job" they mostly a 9-5 job paying taxes, perhaps with some kind of benefit package, usually with some larger-corporation. When they say "education" they mean some sort of accredited institution that produces degreed folks. Not always, but a lot of the time. We've created these complex, well-funded, intricate, and powerful systems around the "normal" usage of these concepts. With lots of vested interests. Not bad people, or any of that. Just big systems to understand what these words mean and control how we relate to them.
The problem is that a huge swath of people are finding places to create value that don't involve working 9-5 at the mill any more. And an even greater number of folks are getting educated in ways that didn't even exist ten years ago.
Yes, if you a want a social welfare net by all means advocate for one. All I'm saying is that when some guy gets on TV and says we need to spend more money on education in order to produce jobs for the 21st century? Those terms are so far out of whack with what's actually happening as to make the solution worse than the initial problem. Unless your mental model has some small degree of fidelity with reality, your conversations and solutions will never work.
So I think it's entirely possible to separate creating a model of how things actually work -- which may have parts from Hayek or anybody else -- and applying that model to political discussions to get what we'd all like in a society. I had no intention of taking the discussion towards Hayek and letting the sick and poor die in the streets. I'm just pleading with authors like this to at least pick up some ideas from some other folks and take a look to see if the models -- words and relationships -- you are using actually reflect what's happening. Model creation is different from model application. It has to be.
A system that produces 10 year behind laws is fine for an economy that grows over decades, but if there really is a "technological revolution" that can greatly boost economic growth so it doubles not in decades but in years, then the 10 year old laws will become untenable. Unfortunately, this'll have to happen before we even think about the possibility of changing how Presidents, Congresses and Parliaments work.
I worry though, the industrial revolution happened after political, cultural change. "Reinforcement of confidence in the rule of law, which followed establishment of the prototype of constitutional monarchy in Britain in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the emergence of a stable financial market there based on the management of the national debt by the Bank of England, contributed to the capacity for, and interest in, private financial investment in industrial ventures." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
At the moment, just as then, the governing system is the biggest roadblock to societal growth. In 1688, the parliamentarians overthrew the king of england. Today, however, it'd be lucky if we had a single dictator we can overthrow which would solve all our problems. (Except for some of us from Egypt, etc.)
The irony of my point is... Since our political systems are so entrenched and unchangeable we're unlikely to ever see the sort of societal changes you speak of. The things that've started to happen, will stagnate and stop growing. Therefore, 10 year behind laws will continue to be sufficient for our needs.
This is Hayek 101, and I agree with it strongly in terms of society being a 'complex system' that is difficult/impossible to do much about in a centrally controlled way.
Where I get off that train though is the idea that we should just dump the human leftovers of "creative destruction" (ok, that's not Hayek, but another Austrian, Schumpeter) into the garbage. No government support, no health care, no education, no nothing. They failed, they can go die in the streets, unless "private charities" happen to step in, but by all means let's not create a society-wide system to prop up the inevitable losers in a market-based system to minimum sustenance levels.
I much more strongly identify with Warren Buffet's way of thinking: by all means, get the government mostly out of the way and let markets do their work. But then step in and give people who didn't come out so well a helping hand to get back on their feet. That's not "central planning", that's a safety net.
> Take a look at the comments on this thread. Everybody gets out their favorite political pinata and beats on it. Is this a very productive type of article for this site?
Absolutely not, let's please flag it and ask the moderators to ban these kinds of articles, as they beget political discussions, where we go round and round and round: you can look up very similar sorts of discussions on usenet from the 1980ies if you do some poking.