Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;
Anger about economic inequality in the United States dominated the presidential election. But while polemics about the issue have flourished across the political spectrum, clarity has not.
Lack of clarity about inequality has been around for a long time. Look, for example, at the Illinois state constitution, adopted in 1970. It sought to “eliminate poverty and inequality.”
Note the linkage of poverty and inequality. It sounds good. Who wouldn’t want to eliminate both of them?
But think it through.
Eliminating poverty is obviously good. And, happily, it is already happening on a global scale. The World Bank reports that the basics of a dignified life are more available to the poorest among us than at any time in history, by a big margin. Shanghai, a place of misery not very long ago, now looks like the most modern parts of the United States, though with better roads and bridges. The real income of India is doubling every 10 years. Sub-Saharan Africa is at last growing. Even in the rich countries, the poor are better off than they were in 1970, with better food and health care and, often, amenities like air-conditioning.
We need to finish the job. But will we really help the poor by focusing on inequality?
Anthony Trollope, the great English novelist, gave an answer in “Phineas Finn” in 1867. His liberal heroine suggests that “making men and women all equal” was “the gist of our political theory.” No, replies her radical and more farseeing friend, “equality is an ugly word, and frightens.” A good person, he declares, should rather “assist in lifting up those below him.” Eliminate poverty, and let the distribution of wealth work.
Economic growth has been accomplishing exactly that since 1800. Equality in the most important matters has increased steadily, through lifting up the wretched of the earth. The enrichment in fundamentals for the poor matters far more in the scheme of things than the acquisition of more Rolexes by the rich.
What matters ethically is that the poor have a roof over their heads and enough to eat, and the opportunity to read and vote and get equal treatment by the police and courts. Enforcing theVoting Rights Actmatters. Restraining police violence matters. Equalizing possession of Rolexes does not.
The Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it this way: “Economic equality is not, as such, of particular moral importance.” Instead we should lift up the poor, in the style of Trollope’s radical liberal, to a level Mr. Frankfurt labeled “enough” — enough for people to function in a democratic society and to have full human lives.
Another eminent philosopher, John Rawls of Harvard, articulated what he called the Difference Principle: If the entrepreneurship of a rich person made the poorest better off, then the higher income of the entrepreneur was justified. It works for me.
Photo
CreditDanny Schwartz
It is true that conspicuous displays of wealth are vulgar and irritating. But they are not something that a nonenvious principle of public policy needs to acknowledge.
Poverty is never good. Difference, including economic difference, often is. It is why New Yorkers exchange goods with Californians and with people in Shanghai, and why the political railing against foreign trade is childish. It is why we converse, and why today is the great age of the novel and the memoir. It is why we celebrate diversity — or should.
A practical objection to focusing on economic equality is that we cannot actually achieve it, not in a big society, not in a just and sensible way. Dividing up a pizza among friends can be done equitably, to be sure. But equality beyond the basics in consumption and in political rights isn’t possible in a specialized and dynamic economy. Cutting down the tall poppies uses violence for the cut. And you need to know exactly which poppies to cut. Trusting a government of self-interested people to know how to redistribute ethically is naïve.
Another problem is that the cutting reduces the size of the crop. We need to allow for rewards that tell the economy to increase the activity earning them. If a brain surgeon and a taxi driver earn the same amount, we won’t have enough brain surgeons. Why bother? An all-wise central plan could force the right people into the right jobs. But such a solution, like much of the case for a compelled equality, is violent and magical. The magic has been tried, in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. So has the violence.
Many of us share socialism in sentiment, if only because we grew up in loving families with Mom as the central planner. Sharing works just fine in a loving household. But it is not how grown-ups get stuff in a liberal society. Free adults get what they need by working to make goods and services for other people, and then exchanging them voluntarily. They don’t get them by slicing up manna from Mother Nature in a zero-sum world.
We could use state violence to take wealth from billionaires like Bill Gates and give it to the homeless, achieving more equality. (Mr. Gates is in fact giving away his fortune, to his credit.) Short of expropriation, we can and should join in supporting a safety net, keeping the violence to a minimum. K-12 public education, for example, should be paid for by compelled taxes on all of us. But we should not be doing a lot more.
As a matter of arithmetic, expropriating the rich to give to the poor does not uplift the poor very much. If we took every dime from the top 20 percent of the income distribution and gave it to the bottom 80 percent, the bottom folk would be only 25 percent better off. If we took only from the superrich, the bottom would get less than that. And redistribution works only once. You can’t expect the expropriated rich to show up for a second cutting. In a free society, they can move to Ireland or the Cayman Islands. And the wretched millionaires can hardly re-earn their millions next year if the state has taken most of the money.
It is growth from exchange-tested betterment, not compelled or voluntary charity, that solves the problem of poverty. In South Korea, economic growth has increased the income of the poorest by a factor of 30 times real 1953 income. Which do we want, a small one-time (though envy-and-anger-satisfying) extraction from the rich, or a free society of betterment, one that lifts up the poor by gigantic amounts?
We had better focus directly on the equality that we actually want and can achieve, which is equality of social dignity and equality before the law. Liberal equality, as against the socialist equality of enforced redistribution, eliminates the worst of poverty. It has done so spectacularly in Britain and Singapore and Botswana. More needs to be done, yes. Namely, more growth, which is sensitive to environmental limits and will require a proliferation of rich engineers. Let them have their money from devising carbon-fixing techniques and new sources of energy. It will enrich all of us.
To borrow from the heroes of my youth, Marx and Engels: Working people of all countries unite! You have nothing to lose but stagnation! Demand exchange-tested betterment in a liberal society.
ACROSS the cobbles of Vienna’s Michaelerplatz the world of empires, waltzes and mutton-chop whiskers glowers at the modern age of psychoanalysis, atonal music and clean shaves. In one corner, the monumental, neo-baroque entrance to the Hofburg palace, seat of the Habsburgs; in the other, the Looshaus, all straight lines and smooth façades, one of the first buildings in the international style. This outcrop of modernism, designed by Adolf Loos, was completed in 1911, less than 20 years after the dome-topped palace entrance it faces. But the building embodied such a different aesthetic, such a contrary world view, that some wondered whether a society that produced such opposites in quick succession could survive. The emperor Franz Joseph is said to have kept the curtains drawn so he would not have to look at the new world across the square.
The sceptics were right. Imperial Viennese society could not survive. But the ideas and art brought forth during the fecund period of Viennese history from the late 1880s to the 1920s endured—from Loos’s modernist architecture to Gustav Klimt’s symbolist canvasses, from Schoenberg’s atonal music and Mahler’sSturm und Drangto Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Those Viennese who escaped Nazism went on to sustain the West during the cold war, and to restore the traditions of empiricism and liberal democracy.
This ferment was part of a generational revolution that swept Europe at the end of the 19th century, from Berlin to London. But the Viennese rebellion was more intense, and more wide-ranging. And it provoked a more extreme reaction. Hitler arrived in Vienna from the Austrian provinces in 1908 and developed his theories of race and power there. Vienna was thus the cradle of modernism and fascism, liberalism and totalitarianism: the currents that have shaped much of Western thought and politics since Vienna itself started to implode in 1916 until the present day. It has been the Viennese century.
What distinguished pre-1914 Vienna from most other European capitals, and what gave the Viennese school its particular intellectual tang, was that it was an imperial city rather than a national capital. Vienna was the heart of an Austro-Hungarian empire of about 53m people that stretched from Innsbruck in the west almost as far as the Black Sea in the east. After 1867 the empire was divided into two: a Magyar-dominated Hungary, ruled from Budapest, and a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic, multilingual other half, ruled from Vienna. In deference to its multinational character, this half was not called Austria but was often referred to as Cisleithania, named after a tributary of the Danube.
In the second half of the 19th century Franz Joseph’s subjects poured into the city: Italians, Slovaks, Poles, Slovenians, Moravians, Germans and, especially, Czechs. By 1910 Vienna had a population of 2m, the sixth-biggest city in the world. Fortunes made in the fast-industrialising empire, many by Jewish and assimilated Jewish families such as the Wittgensteins and Ephrussi, changed the urban landscape. Their enormous palaces adorned the Ringstrasse, the city’s most elegant boulevard. By 1914 Jews made up about 5% of Cisleithania’s population. They did not enjoy rights as a nationality or language group, but benefited from full civil rights as individuals. As Carl Schorske, the greatest historian of the period has written, they “became the supranational people of the multinational state, the one folk which, in effect, stepped into the shoes of the earlier aristocracy. Their fortunes rose and fell with those of the liberal, cosmopolitan state.”
Vienna was a mixture of classes and nationalities, faiths and worldviews. Order aWiener melangein a Viennese coffee-house today, suggests Steven Beller, a historian of Austria, stir the hot milk into your bitter coffee, and imperial Viennese culture emerges, a dissolving of differences to produce something fresh. The Viennese cultural elite encouraged intellectual collisions to give birth to the new. “There was sperm in the air,” as the writer Stefan Zweig somewhat off-puttingly put it.
Amid a babble of peoples and languages—one in which, as elsewhere at the time, gender roles were being redefined—Viennese thinking was driven by an urge to find universal forms of communication. It aimed to discover what people had in common behind the façade of social convention, “to show modern man his true face”, in the words of Otto Wagner, an architect. Out of this came some of the most important intellectual schools of the 20th century, as well as the influential, and often highly eccentric, characters who went with it. These included one Sigmund Freud, who developed psychoanalysis in Vienna, in order to expose the common archetypes of the unconscious.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” remains the most famous text of Viennese philosophy. The pioneering logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, dominated by Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap (both originally from Germany) was probably of greater influence, setting the scene for modern analytical philosophy with its strong affinity for the sciences. The most accomplished of the circle was Otto Neurath. On top of his philosophy, he revolutionised the transmission of knowledge with new ways of translating complex information into simple, graphic pictograms: to make knowledge accessible was to make it democratic. All sorts of formats for data visualisation in use today can be traced back to these “Isotypes” (example on next page).
The Viennese school also pushed into new fields, such as, famously, sex. Before Freud, there was Richard Krafft-Ebbing, who studied in Graz before coming to Vienna and in 1886 published “Psychopathia Sexualis,” the first attempt to apply some rigorous methodology to the study of sexuality. He drew on court cases to analyse homosexuality and bisexuality (albeit often in Latin). His work popularised the terms sadism and masochism. (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, eponym to the latter and author of “Venus in Furs,” though a subject of the emperor, was not Viennese.)
It was partly the emperor himself who opened the way to modern sensibilities. Ultra-conservative in taste he may have been, but Franz Joseph’s duty was to all the peoples of his empire, and he tried to guarantee the freedoms—of movement, of religion, of the press and of equal rights—that the liberal constitution of 1867 enshrined. So Europe’s crustiest old monarchy often supported some of the most avant-garde artistic projects of the day, such as the Vienna Secession movement of 1897, in the interests of strengthening the universal language of art and architecture that might unite the empire. Secession artists were engaged to design the empire’s postage stamps and currency. The emperor might have drawn his curtains against the Looshaus, but he let it be built.
Anschluss and after
The tensions and collisions so fruitful to the cultural life of its capital were less salutary for the empire as a whole. Assailed by the rising forces of nationalism, particularly pan-Germanism, the cosmopolitan state began to crumble. The influx of peoples to Vienna provoked increasing resentment among the German working class; immigrant Czechs in particular proved willing to work for less money in worse conditions. At the same time Czech, Serbian and other nationalists increasingly agitated for independence.
Jews, as the supranational people of the multi-ethnic state, readily became the target of every nationalist enemy of the empire. Georg Schoenerer, son of a successful Viennese industrialist, was the first to turn anti-Semitism into a political programme, denouncing the “sucking vampires” who knocked at the “narrow-windowed house of the German farmer and craftsmen”. Unemployment, rising prices and a lack of housing in Vienna fuelled the anger of many Germans after 1900, leading to frequent riots and violent attacks on other nationalities. Karl Lueger channelled Schoenerer’s anti-Semitism into a political movement, campaigning to be mayor on the slogan “Vienna is German and must remain German”. His explicit rejection of the multi-ethnic character of Vienna brought him into direct conflict with the emperor. Lueger won a majority on the city council to elect him mayor in 1895, but for two years Franz Joseph nobly refused to appoint him because of his anti-Semitism. Eventually, in 1897, Franz Joseph bowed to popular pressure, and Lueger ruled the city until 1910. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I: Gustav KlimtThat, essentially, was the beginning of the end of liberal Vienna. After the war and the end of the monarchy there was a brief flourishing of progressive social democracy in the city, the era of “Red Vienna”. But all the time, in the new, truncated republic of Austria the more conservative provinces slowly tightened their grip on the country. In 1933 Engelbert Dolfuss seized power in the name of Austrofascism, which gave way to Nazi fascism in 1938 with theAnschluss. Hitler, who moved to Vienna from Linz in upper Austria, had been transfixed by Schoenerer and, particularly, Lueger. He hungrily absorbed all his hero’s complaints about the Jews and the mixing of “races”; he called the Viennese a “repulsive bunch”. Thus liberal Vienna had produced its exact opposite: militant nationalism and anti-Semitism. During the interwar years these forces gradually took hold of the new Austria and from the 1920s onwards many began to flee abroad. One of the last out, in 1938, was Freud.
Most of the exiles went to Britain and America, where they were often gratefully received. The most valuable aspect of Viennese thinking for the West at the time was the application of up-to-date “scientific” methods to fields that had previously been left to amateur theorising, or that had been altogether neglected. This transformed many aspects of life.
The Viennese tended to be more persuasive than the intellectual competition
Take the work of Charlotte Buehler, a pioneer in child psychology. She was born in Berlin to Jewish parents, but moved to Vienna, together with her husband Karl, in 1922. At the University of Vienna, through painstaking direct observation, the Buehlers worked out their influential response-testing techniques: ways to calibrate a child’s development, through the accomplishment of gradually more complex tasks. These tests are, in effect, still in use today. By six months, an infant should be able to distinguish between a bottle and a rubber doll. At 18 months, he or she was expected to respond to the order “No”.
Often the Viennese intellectuals leapt ahead by transferring knowledge gained in one discipline to others, gloriously indifferent to the mind-forged manacles that have come to stifle modern academia and research. In America, several Viennese-trained devotees of Freud used the tools of psychoanalysis to revolutionise business. Ernest Dichter, author of “The Strategy of Desire,” transformed the fortunes of companies through marketing that purposely tapped into consumers’ subliminal desires.
Another example was Paul Lazarsfeld, the founder of modern American sociology. Born of Jewish parents, he studied maths in Vienna, completing his doctorate on Einstein’s gravitational theory, and thereafter applied his expertise in data and quantitative methods to what became known as opinion, or market research—finding out what people really feel about anything from television programmes to presidential candidates. In Vienna in 1931 he conducted the first scientific survey of radio listeners, and also co-wrote a revolutionary study of the devastating social and psychological impacts of unemployment. His team of investigators conducted what is now called “field research”, meticulously recording the results of face-to-face interviews with laid-off factory workers in the town of Marienthal.
Moving to America in 1933, Lazarsfeld went on to found the Columbia University Bureau for Social Research. His team was the first to use focus groups, developed with Dichter, his one-time student, and statistical analysis to delve into the mysteries of voter and consumer preferences or the impact of the emerging mass media. Lazarsfeld and others thus helped revivify moribund, antiquarian modes of inquiry, and re-equip them with the latest Viennese techniques, often saving entire Western intellectual traditions from decrepitude, or possibly extinction.
Pilgrims on the mountain
Of no field was this truer than political economy, where the “Austrian school” of men like Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek strongly influenced the revival of liberalism and conservatism in the West after the second world war. These three were all quintessential products of late Habsburg Vienna. They were born in very different parts of the empire: von Mises of Jewish parents in Galicia (now Ukraine); Schumpeter of Catholic German-speaking parents in Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic; and Hayek in Vienna itself. Yet they were all schooled in the same liberal intellectual discipline.
Von Mises and Hayek, one of his students, saw earlier than most that by the interwar years the liberal era in Europe was being overwhelmed by the collectivism and totalitarianism of the right and the left. They subsequently devoted their lives to reversing the tide. Hayek, like the best of Vienna’s intellectuals, combined technical expertise in economics with a wide breadth of inquiry; as well as economics, he published on law, sociology and more. His greatest contribution was to restore intellectual rigour to the free-market school, expositing in detail the “price mechanism” to show that socialist economics could not possibly work in theory, let alone practice.
But Hayek was not just a dry theorist. He was also a relentless circus-master for the liberal cause. Emigrating to Britain in 1931, he was the author of the first call to arms for the liberal fightback, “The Road to Serfdom,” published in 1944. This was provocatively dedicated to the “Socialists of all Parties”, implying that at the end of the second world war all Britain’s political parties, including Winston Churchill’s Conservatives, had drifted into collectivism by advocating the welfare state.
To organise the fightback he founded the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) in 1947. Named after the Swiss mountain where the first meeting was held (simply because the founding members couldn’t agree on a more appropriate alternative), the MPS was Hayek’s own Circle for liberalism. It fused the Viennese liberals in exile, including Karl Popper, who had just publishedThe Open Society and its Enemies, with their embattled fellow-travellers from Germany, France, Britain and America, most notably Milton Friedman. Over the next decades the MPS spawned scores of think-tanks around the world dedicated to spreading the word of the Austrian school. Politicians often attended their meetings. The “Chicago school” of economists was made up largely of MPS members. After decades of quiet campaigning, Hayek’s ideas were taken up again by a subsequent generation of politicians in the mid-1970s, including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
The consensus on free markets and democracy won in the 1980s remained intact for decades—a tribute, in part, to the intellectual efforts of Franz Joseph’s Viennese. It also provides a clue as to why they have been so influential in the West. The Viennese school placed the lived experience of individuals—rather than the abstractions of class, race and nationalism favoured by their opponents—at the heart of their intellectual enterprises. Thus the empirical research of a Buehler or a Lazarsfeld tended to work with the “the crooked timber of humanity”, as Immanuel Kant put it, rather than trying to straighten it out, as Marxists, fascists and all systematisers try to do. After a lecture by John Maynard Keynes, always the systematiser, Vienna-born Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management theory, saw the distinction in clear relief: “I suddenly realised that Keynes and all the brilliant economic students in the room were interested in the behaviour of commodities, while I was interested in the behaviour of people.” For this reason alone, the Viennese tended to be more persuasive than their competitors. Furthermore, the stress on the individual also chimed with the exigencies of an exhausted West taking on the Soviet Union in the cold war after 1947. The Viennese émigrés were vital in sharpening the intellectual and cultural claims of liberal democracy at a time when many young people in the West had deserted to more fashionable leftist causes. They were swiftly promoted to university posts and other influential positions by their Anglo-Saxon admirers. The Viennese could articulate a more convincing defence of freedom because they had direct personal experience of the totalitarian enemy.
However, the freedom that the Viennese espoused came at a price; self-expression could be accomplished only by intellectual rigour and self-discipline. Even at the time this was too much to bear for many of Vienna’s young, several of whom committed suicide as they fell short of their own high standards—three of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brothers took their own lives. Today, if this year’s elections are any guide, politicians and demagogues seem content to wrap themselves in the language of freedom while abandoning any obligations to intellectual rigour or self-discipline. The Viennese century has ended. Its legacy is fraying.
A "descoberta" desta foto na internet, totalmente por acaso, me fez lembrar de um antigo texto que fiz, sobre um novo estilo de vida, tentando imitar esses simpáticos bichinhos: 1356.
“Minha vida de koala: fábula fabulosa (à
la manière de La Fontaine)”, Brasília, 19 nov. 2004, 3 p. Digressão ligeira
sobre uma reencarnação ideal, a partir de uma ideia formulada em Washington, em
7/09/2003. Postado no blog Diplomatizzando
(20/11/2011; link: http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2011/11/minha-vida-de-koala-um-texto-pra-jamais.html).
Será que ainda se aplica?
Minha vida de koala
fábula fabulosa
(à la manière de La Fontaine)
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
(www.pralmeida.org)
E
se eu não fosse quem eu sou?
A
pergunta faz sentido, sobretudo se colocada no contexto da herança deixada
pelos “anos de chumbo”, nas décadas de 60 e 70, quando muitos opositores ao
regime militar então em vigor tiveram de assumir outras identidades, de maneira
a resguardar a segurança pessoal ou a dos familiares. Alguns aderiram à nova
identidade e gostaram tanto da “personalidade alternativa” que preservaram a
vida do alter ego mesmo depois de
plenamente restabelecida a democracia no Brasil.
Não
foi o meu caso, mas ainda assim a pergunta toca numa corda sensível, já que
implica que eu poderia ter nascido sob outro nome, ter tido uma outra história
de vida, ter sido uma pessoa completamente diferente daquela que se apresenta
agora sob esta identidade de funcionário público e professor universitário,
completamente desprovido desta aparência anódina de intelectual de gabinete. Eu
bem que poderia ter sido, a despeito deste ar tranqüilo de “combatente da
pluma”, um perigoso contraventor da lei e da ordem, um “subversivo” como então
se dizia, um marxista enragé (e engagé) ou então um anarquista
franco-atirador, tão ameaçador da saúde das instituições en place quanto o libertário radical que de fato eu sou atualmente.
Tampouco foi o meu caso, mas caberia considerar seriamente a hipótese levantada
acima, pelo menos teoricamente, e talvez até mesmo hipoteticamente, num terreno
situado externamente à espécie humana.
Sim,
vejamos: se eu não fosse este bípede leitor e escrevinhador, com este jeito de
eternamente distraído e sempre absorto em alguma leitura atrasada, o que eu
poderia ser? Ou melhor: o que eu gostaria de ser? Boa pergunta esta, mas a
resposta já foi dada acima, assim que o resto da fábula não apresenta mais
surpresas, apenas curiosidades.
Com
efeito, considerando todas as possibilidades disponíveis no reino animal – não,
eu não estava considerando nada nos reinos vegetal ou mineral – e as
alternativas indicadas no caso de um cidadão pacato como este que vos fala e
escreve, fiquei bastante tentado a, numa segunda (ou em qualquer outra)
encarnação de vida, formular ao todo poderoso senhor criador de todas as coisas
meu desejo de voltar ao mundo como koala. Pausa para explicar essa do
“criador”, num texto de um “materialista vulgar”, ou pelo menos um
“irreligioso” assumido. A justificativa é perfeitamente lógica: num exercício
que se pretende de “reencarnação”, o mínimo que se poderia querer, como fiat inescapável, é a existência de um
criador supremo, que fica brincando com a vida da gente, dando a um sapo a
conformação de um príncipe, a uma barata a beleza de Nefertite ou a um fracote
poderes de Napoleão (mas existem muitos concorrentes neste caso).
Pois
bem, por que, exatamente, eu gostaria de ser esse estranho animal do tão
distante continente australiano? Por algumas razões muito simples: aprendi que
o koala passa 80% do seu tempo dormindo, 10% comendo e os 10% restantes apenas
esperando a próxima refeição ou o próximo dodô (sitting-by, dizem os australianos). Para quem só passa 20% do seu
tempo dormindo, essa perspectiva é verdadeiramente fabulosa, digna de algum La
Fontaine do sono. Não sei se os koalas são todos funcionários públicos do
Serviço Zoológico Nacional da Austrália, mas esse emploi du temps me parece bom para aposentados, preguiçosos ou
hedonistas de maneira geral (o que eu ainda não sou, mas um dia chegarei lá).
Trata-se de uma repartição de ocupações que melhor reflete um ideal de cultura
zen, contemplativa, que não pode fazer nenhum tipo de mal à humanidade, à
condição, obviamente, que se tenha de onde tirar o alimento.
Os
ecologistas mais radicais por certo me apoiariam nessa reencarnação, pois eles
estão sempre querendo nos fazer voltar ao equilíbrio da vida natural,
distanciada da vida agitada da civilização e seus nefastos efeitos poluidores.
Como isso não parece perto de ocorrer na minha vida terrena, vejamos como eu
poderia organizar minha vida para me aproximar daquela distribuição fabulosa de
tempo, desde que invertendo, está claro, a repartição de tarefas para melhor
refletir minhas prioridades de vida.
Atualmente,
passo 60% do tempo trabalhando (no meu emprego assalariado e em tarefas
acadêmicas auto-assumidas), 20% dormindo e o quinto restante numa variedade de
ocupações familiares, locomotoras, alimentícias e duchísticas (sem esquecer a
lista do supermercado). Não está mal, mas poderia estar melhor se eu tivesse um
modo koala de ser. Vejamos como isso seria possível.
Eu
acordaria às 11 horas da manhã, não precisaria ler as últimas notícias daquele
chatérrimo jornal conservador do qual sou assinante, não correria para
consultar e-mails, não teria, sobretudo, de sair correndo de casa para o
trabalho, tentando demonstrar a mim mesmo que as muitas horas empregadas
durante a noite em leituras sonolentas e em navegações na internet são de fato
“úteis” para aquele novo trabalho que pretendo terminar ainda nesta manhã (hélàs, ainda não foi desta vez). Não
precisaria mais usar gravata nem paletó e poderia sair de casa sem lenço e sem
documento.
Ou
melhor: eu não sairia, eu ficaria. Eu simplesmente desceria lentamente do meu
galho-cama para o galho-cozinha, me serviria de algumas folhas de eucalipto e, voilà, já teria ganhado metade do meu
dia. A caminho (lentamente) do galho-biblioteca, eu daria um bom-dia à patroa e
às crianças, não teria de me ocupar do horário da escola, do dever de casa, das
compras de supermercado, da arrumação da mesa da sala, da retirada de jornais
do dia anterior e, sobretudo, de lavar a louça das refeições. Em muito menos
tempo do que se emprega para dizer saperlipopette,
eu teria alisado os pêlos, lambido os beiços do resto de suco de eucalipto e
estaria pronto para me dedicar ao esporte favorito de todo koala: dormir (não
sei quando eles arrumam tempo para a reprodução da espécie).
Mas,
alto lá: eu sou um koala diferente. Nasci e me criei no galho-biblioteca, para
onde devo ter sido arrastado por alguma lufada dos bons ventos australianos. Desde
então me acostumei a dormir no meio dos livros, a caminhar lendo livros, a
sonhar com livros e a me imaginar vivendo uma vida só de leituras e de resenhas
de livros. Ainda vou fazer isso e talvez nem precise de uma outra encarnação;
esta mesma daria conta do recado. Só preciso de um orçamento do tamanho do da
Library of Congress, de uma boa rede à sombra das palmeiras, de um estoque de
água mineral com gás, de um laptopwireless dotado de dictavoice e de uma assinatura da The New York Review of Books. O resto é supérfluo, inclusive as
palmeiras (na verdade detesto exibicionismos).
Ainda
vou fazer isso, ainda que possa demorar mais um pouco: só me falta aprender a
gostar de folhas de eucalipto (que devem ser horríveis…).
Moral da história: você não precisa deixar de
ser quem você é, para fazer aquilo que mais lhe dá prazer na vida: basta um
pouco de imaginação e paciência de koala…
Foundation for Economic Education, Monday, December 26, 2016
The First World War was the watershed of the twentieth century. Itself the product of antiliberal ideas and policies, such as militarism and protectionism, the Great War fostered statism in every form. In Europe and America, the trend towards state intervention accelerated, as governments conscripted, censored, inflated, ran up mountains of debts, co-opted business and labor, and seized control of the economy. Everywhere “progressive” intellectuals saw their dreams coming true. Thee old laissez-faire liberalism was dead, they gloated, and the future belonged to collectivism. The only question seemed to be: which kind of collectivism?
Bismarck won out, and the welfare state was eventually copied everywhere in Europe.
In Russia, the chaos of the war permitted a small group of Marxist revolutionaries to grab power and establish a field headquarters for world revolution. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx had concocted a secular religion with a potent appeal. It held out the promise of the final liberation of man through replacing the complex, often baffling world of the market economy by conscious, “scientific” control. Put into practice by Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, the Marxist economic experiment resulted in catastrophe. For the next seventy years, Red rulers lurched from one patchwork expedient to another. But terror kept them firmly in charge, and the most colossal propaganda effort in history convinced intellectuals both in the West and in the emerging Third World that communism was, indeed, “the radiant future of all mankind.”
The peace treaties cobbled together by President Woodrow Wilson and the other Allied leaders left Europe a seething cauldron of resentment and hate. Seduced by nationalist demagogues and terrified of the Communist threat, millions of Europeans turned to the forms of state worship called Fascism and National Socialism, or Nazism. Though riddled with economic error, these doctrines promised prosperity and national power through integral state control of society, while fomenting more and greater wars.
The Rise of the Welfare State
In the democratic countries, milder forms of statism were the rule. Most insidious of all was the form that had been invented in the 1880s, in Germany. There Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, devised a series of old-age, disability, accident, and sickness insurance schemes, run by the state. The German liberals of the time argued that such plans were simply a reversion to the paternalism of the absolutist monarchies. Bismarck won out, and his invention — the welfare state — was eventually copied everywhere in Europe, including the totalitarian countries. With the New Deal, the welfare state came to America.
Still, private property and free exchange continued as the basic organizing principles of Western economies. Competition, the profit motive, the steady accumulation of capital (including human capital), free trade, the perfecting of markets, increased specialization — all worked to promote efficiency and technical progress and with them higher living standards for the people. So powerful and resilient did this capitalist engine of productivity prove to be that widespread state intervention, coercive labor-unionism, even government-generated depressions and wars could not check economic growth in the long run.
Mises demonstrated that economic calculation without private property was impossible.
The 1920s and ’30s represent the nadir of the classical-liberal movement in this century. Especially after government meddling with the monetary system led to the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, dominant opinion held that history had closed the books on competitive capitalism, and with it the liberal philosophy.
If a date were to be put on the rebirth of classical liberalism, it would be 1922, the year of the publication ofSocialism,by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. One of the most remarkable thinkers of the century, Mises was also a man of unflinching courage. InSocialism,he threw down the gauntlet to the enemies of capitalism. In effect, he said: “You accuse the system of private property of causing all social evils, which only socialism can cure. Fine. But would you now kindly do something you have never deigned to do before: would you explain how a complex economic system will be able to operate in the absence of markets, and hence prices, for capital goods?” Mises demonstrated that economic calculation without private property was impossible, and exposed socialism for the passionate illusion it was.
Mises’s challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy opened the minds of thinkers in Europe and America. F.A. Hayek, Wilhelm Roepke, and Lionel Robbins were among those whom Mises converted to the free market. And, throughout his very long career, Mises elaborated and reformed his economic theory and social philosophy, becoming the acknowledged premier classical-liberal thinker of the twentieth century.
The "Old Right"
In Europe and particularly in the United States, scattered individuals and groups kept something of the old liberalism alive. At the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago, academics could be found, even in the 1930s and ’40s, who defended at least the basic validity of the free-enterprise idea. In America, an embattled brigade of brilliant writers, mainly journalists, survived. Now known as the “Old Right,” they included Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, H. L. Mencken, Felix Morley, and John T. Flynn. Spurred to action by the totalitarian implications of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, these writers reiterated the traditional American creed of individual freedom and scornful distrust of government. They were equally opposed to Roosevelt’s policy of global meddling as subversive of the American Republic. Supported by a few courageous publishers and businessmen, the “Old Right” nursed the flame of Jeffersonian ideals through the darkest days of the New Deal and the Second World War.
With the end of that war, what can be called a movement came into being. Small at first, it was fed by multiplying streams. Hayek’sRoad to Serfdom,published in 1944, alerted many thousands to the reality that, in pursuing socialist policies, the West was risking the loss of its traditional free civilization. In 1946, Leonard Read established The Foundation for Economic Education, in Irvington, New York, publishing the works of Henry Hazlitt and other champions of the free market. Mises and Hayek, now both in the United States, continued their work. Hayek led in founding the Mont Pelerin Society, a group of classical-liberal scholars, activists, and businessmen from all over the world.
Millions of Americans in all walks of life had all along quietly cherished the values of the free market, and private property.
Mises, unsurpassed as a teacher, set up a seminar at New York University, attracting such students as Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner. Rothbard went on to wed the insights of Austrian economics to the teachings of natural law to produce a powerful synthesis that appealed to many of the young. At the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Aaron Director led a group of classical-liberal economists whose specialty was exposing the defects of government action. The gifted novelist Ayn Rand incorporated emphatically libertarian themes in her well-crafted best-sellers, and even founded a school of philosophy.
Predictable Hostility
The reaction to the renewal of authentic liberalism on the part of the left — “liberal” — more accurately, social-democrat-establishment was predictable, and ferocious. In 1954, for instance, Hayek edited a volume entitledCapitalism and the Historians,a collection of essays by distinguished scholars arguing against the prevailing socialist interpretation of the Industrial Revolution. A scholarly journal permitted Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Harvard professor and New Deal hack, to savage the book in these terms: “Americans have enough trouble with home-grown McCarthys without importing Viennese professors to add academic luster to the process.”
Other works the establishment tried to kill by silence. As late as 1962, not a single prominent magazine or newspaper chose to review Friedman’sCapitalism and Freedom.Still, the writers and activists who led the revival of classical liberalism found a growing resonance among the public. Millions of Americans in all walks of life had all along quietly cherished the values of the free market, and private property. The growing presence of a solid corps of intellectual leaders now gave many of these citizens the heart to stand up for the ideas they had held dear for so long.
In the 1970s and ’80s, with the evident failure of socialist planning and interventionist programs, classical liberalism became a world-wide movement. In Western countries, and then, incredibly, in the nations of the former Warsaw Pact, political leaders even declared themselves disciples of Hayek and Friedman. As the end of the century approached, the old, authentic liberalism was alive and well, stronger than it had been for a hundred years.
And yet, in Western countries, the state keeps on relentlessly expanding, colonizing one area of social life after the other. In America, the Republic is fast becoming a fading memory, as federal bureaucrats and global planners divert more and more power to the center. So the struggle continues, as it must. Two centuries ago, when liberalism was young, Jefferson had already informed us of the price of liberty.
