Gerson vs. Hayek

Micheal Gerson, in today’s Washington Post, says that conservatism is perched precariously between two competing schools of thought. On one hand, he says, there’s the libertarian strain, that which upholds "individual economic choice" and is devoted not just to some nebulous view of limited government, but to actively opposing government.

He doesn’t think much of this side, and argues that, instead, conservatives should embrace a limited government that feels an "obligation to protect" that is not "purely private" and that "the goal directing all our methods must be the common good."

He singles out Hayek and von Mises as thinkers not to look to, even though they spoke to his ideas long ago. Let’s look, for example, at what Hayek said about the notion of "the common good" in The Road to Serfdom:

The “social goal,” or “common purpose,” for which society is to be organised, is usally vaguely described as the “common good,” or the “general welfare”. . . It does not need much reflection to see that these terms have no sufficiently definite meaning to determine a particular course of action. The welfare and the happiness of millions cannot be measured on a single scale of less and more. The welfare of a people, like the happiness of a man, depends on a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations.

Gerson wants conservatives to ignore this thinking, presumably because it renders moot his fluffy ideas about a conservatism with large public obligations, that sees limited government as a nice idea mostly just fall-back rhetoric for opposing liberal plans. For him, conservatism is just a friendly sort of diet-liberalism, one that rejects the Goldwaterite ideas on which the modern conservative movement was founded. That sounds nice, and it probably plays well at the Washington Post, but it’s a pretty thin string on which to hang the future of conservatism.