“Between them these two books sum up our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.”
Review of The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek & The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus, reviewed in The Observer (1944-04-09.
Emphasis mine. Orwell might have known his stuff about fascism, but his economics knowledge is nil.
I posted about this previously, it can be found here:
While I still like Orwell’s novels, particularly 1984, Animal Farm, and Burmese Days after researching into his asburd paradoxes I realize that he wasn’t a staunch defender of freedom as many claim him to be.
Now, you won’t often find me defending statists, but George Orwell is, in my opinion, a worthy cause.
To begin with at some point in high life he identified himself as an anarchist, or at least sympathised with them. Granted, he was never a capitalist, but that’s besides the point. It’s silly to claim that he’s not a defender of freedom, he did have a very limited of economics but to my knowledge he never deeply ventured into economics, so he can be forgiven. So it’s going a bit far to say that he’s not a defender of freedom, he merely had a flawed conception of what freedom was, and he can be forgiven.
Even if you don’t accept this, he was a good novelist and if more people realized that 1984 isn’t so much of a warning as it a picture of today then we’d be far better off. 1984 is a great novel and it has taught a good deal many people about the nature of government even if they don’t fully understand the message. I say I owe my being a libertarian to Ron Paul, but it was Orwell who first made me a realise a good deal many things.
You made a statement that he followed two tenets of Socialism in a sense. If you are affirmed in such a theory then why can’t you show where you learned it from? Is it asking too much to have you back up your statements with factual referencing?
By conscription, I imply one person using force to get another to provide defense at the first person’s terms. This is not free will. And, yes, this is conscription from a minarchist state.
