Where Are the Omelets; L. W. Reed

Ideas and Consequences by LawrenceW. Reed • Government Where Are the Omelets? '0 n ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs." Translation: "One can't expect to make an omelet without breaking eggs." With those words in 1790, Maximilian Robespierre welcomed the horrific French Revolution that had begun the year before. A consummate statist who worked tirelessly to plan the lives of others, he would become the architect of the Revolution's bloodiest phase-the Reign of Terror of 1793-94. Robespierre and his guillotine broke eggs by the thousands in a vain effort to impose a utopian society based on the seductive slogan Hliberte, egalite,fraternite." But, alas, Robespierre never made a single omelet. Nor did any of the other thugs who held power in the decade after 1789. They left France in moral, political, and economic ruin, and ripe for the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. As with Robespierre, no omelets came from the egg-breaking efforts of Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini either.

The French experience is one example in a disturbingly familiar pattern. Call them what you will-leftists, utopian socialists, radical interventionists, collectivists, or statists-his tory is littered with their presumptuous plans for rearranging society to fit their vision of "the common good," plans that always fail as Lawrence Reed is president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (www.mackinac.org), afree market research and educational organization in Midland, Michigan, and chairman ofFEE's Board ofTrustees. 17 they kill or impoverish other people in the process. If socialism ever earns a final epi taph, it will be this: "Here lies a contrivance engineered by know-it-alls and busybodies who broke eggs with abandon but never, ever created an omelet." Every collectivist experiment of the twenti eth century was heralded as the Promised Land by statist philosophers. "I have seen the future and it works," the intellectual Lincoln Steffens said after a visit to Uncle Joe Stalin's Soviet Union. In The New Yorker in 1984, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the Soviet Union was making great economic progress in part because the socialist system made "full use" of its manpower, in contrast to the less efficient capitalist West. But an 846-page authoritative study published in 1997, The Black Book of Communism, esti mated that the communist ideology claimed 20 million lives in the "workers' paradise."

Similarly, The Black Book documented the death tolls in other communist lands: 45 to 72 million in China, between 1.3 million and 2.3 million in Cambodia, 2 million in North Korea, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in Vietnam, 1 million in Eastern Europe, and 150,000 in Latin America. Additionally, all of those murderous regimes were economic basket cases; they squandered resources on the police and mili tary, built vast and incompetent bureaucracies, and produced almost nothing for which there was a market beyond their borders. They didn't make "full use" of anything except 18 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY. OCTOBER 1999 police power. In every single communist coun try the world over, the story has been the same: lots of broken eggs, no omelets. No exceptions. F. A. Hayek explained this inevitable out come in his seminal work, The Road to Serf dom, in 1944. All efforts to displace individ ual plans with central planning, he warned us, must end in disaster and dictatorship. No lofty vision can vindicate the use of the brute force necessary to attain it. "The principle that the end justifies the means," wrote Hayek, "is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule."

The worst crimes of the worst statists are often minimized or dismissed by their less radical intellectual brethren as the "excesses" of men and women who otherwise had good intentions. These apologists reject the iron fist and claim that the State can achieve their egalitarian and collectivist goals with a velvet glove. But whether it is the Swedish "middle way," Yugoslavian "worker socialism," or British Fabianism, the result has been the same: bro ken eggs, but no omelets. Have you ever noticed how statists are con stantly "reforming" their own handiwork? Education reform. Healthcare reform. Wel fare reform. Tax reform. The very fact that they're always busy "reforming" is an implic it admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times. The list is endless: Canadian health care, European welfarism, Argentine Peronism, African postcolonial socialism, Cuban com munism, on and on ad infinitum. Nowhere in the world has the statist impulse produced an omelet. Everywhere-it yields the same: eggs beaten, fried, and scrambled. People worse off than before, impoverished and looking else where for answers and escape. Economies ruined. Freedoms extinguished.

It is a telling conclusion that statists have no successful model to point to, no omelet they can hold up as the piece de resistance of their cuisine. Not so for those of us who believe in freedom. Indeed, economists James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and Walter Block in their survey, Economic Freedom of the World: 1975-1995, conclude that "No coun try with a persistently high economic freedom rating during the two decades failed to achieve a high level of income. In contrast, no country with a persistently low rating was able to achieve even middle income status. . . . The countries with the largest increases in economic freedom during the period achieved impressive growth rates." Perhaps no one explained the lesson of all this better than the French economist and statesman Frederic Bastiat more than 150 years ago: "And now that the legislators and do-good ers have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all sys tems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." 0 Wilhelm Ropke: A CentenaryAppreciation by Richard M. Ebeling O n January 30, 1933, German president Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. One week later, on February 8, Wilhelm Ropke, a 32-year-old professor of economics at the University of Marburg, delivered a lecture in Frankfurt am Main with the title "End of an Era?"