A Classic Defense of Non-Interventionist Government
This volume is a beautifully prepared new edition of Wilhelm Röpke’s 1957 classic defense of the market economy and non-interventionist government. Röpke (1899-1966), a renowned German economist, lecturer, and writer, stood with Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and a few other intellectuals in the middle decades of this century to warn against the perils of what he called “centrism.” By this term he meant not what it means to most Americans (political namby-pambyism), but rather the tendency toward concentration of power in the hands of a few.
Röpke feared the crushing effects of big government, big business, and big labor on the forgotten, statistically insignificant individual. Reading this book of over 40 years ago reminds one of another great 1957 book, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Although poles apart on some questions (especially religion), Rand and Röpke both clearly identified the ominous social and political trends that were deforming the world, and both are worth revisiting.
The subtitle of Röpke’s book is The Social Framework of the Free Market. He seeks to show that the network of voluntary economic relationships we call the market requires a certain social framework. He writes, “Even if we conscientiously credit the market with certain educational influences, we are led back, therefore, to our main contention that the ultimate moral support of the market economy lies outside the market. Market and competition are far from generating their moral prerequisites autonomously.”
What the author has in mind, for example, are moral constraints on the means by which people go about trying to get what they want. Röpke writes, “A spirit of ever alert and suspicious rivalry, not too particular in the choice of its means, must not be allowed to predominate and to sway society in all its spheres, or it will poison men’s souls, destroy civilization, and ultimately disintegrate the economy.” He argued that what any society needs, if it is to protect the moral norms that make the market possible is a nobilitas naturalis, a natural “aristocracy of the public spirit”—that is to say, men and women whose integrity and moral authority would lead most others to follow their example.
I suspect that there is much truth in this breathtakingly politically incorrect idea. The support for the ethical basis of market dealings needs to come from moral authority figures. Without that support, we will slowly sink into barbarism. Unfortunately, Röpke’s thesis means that America is in grave danger. The way most Americans are educated today makes them almost impervious to any sort of leadership except by the idols of sports and popular music. Moreover, where does one see respected men and women emphasizing the importance of, say, the freedom of individuals to enter or decline to enter into contracts?
Röpke was a keen observer and elegant writer. Most of what he said is still true today, if not more so. Consider this attack on the tendency to turn economics into a branch of mathematics: “[S]uch concepts as the ‘elasticity’ of supply and demand, the ‘multiplier’ . . . and so on . . . simulate a scientific and mathematical precision which does not really exist. They are not physical constraints like . . . gravity, but relations dependent upon the unpredictable behavior of men.” Or this observation about left-wing moralists: “The moralist, with his lofty admonitions, becomes an intolerant hater and envier, the theoretical pacifist an imperialist when it comes to the practical test, and the advocate of abstract social justice an ambitious place-hunter.”
Sadly, the book also contains some sections that prove useful to enemies of freedom. Röpke was a population worrier. He emphatically did not want to see government in the family-planning and resource-planning business, but his alarmist statements are ammunition for those who do. And sometimes he sounds like an early Earth Firster: “We violate nature at every turn, even to the total disappearance of the countryside. . . .” Röpke would not have taken kindly to the Environmental Protection Agency with its blatant hostility to private property rights, but rhetoric like that almost inevitably promotes the “centrism” he deplored.
It is easy to ignore foibles like that, however, in a book having such an abundance of clear thinking. Over and over again, A Humane Economy reminds us of what is at stake in the battle between those who consistently defend freedom and those who won’t: “Once the mania of uniformity and centralization spreads and the centrists begin to lay down the law of the land, then we are in the presence of one of the most serious danger signals warning us of the impending loss of freedom, humanity, and the health of society.”
