Sheldon Richman’s column today compares George Orwell and F.A. Hayek. They were contemporaries and knew each other’s work.
What’s striking about Orwell is that, despite his insights into totalitarianism and the fact that he was willing to challenge some of the shibboleths of collectivism, he was not able to get out of the box of leftist thinking about the essence of capitalism. He wrote, for example, that capitalism leads to war. That’s a staple of the leftist mind, sort of a firewall against thinking that would lead to the collapse of the crucial idea that the state must, absolutely must, intervene in the economy. Orwell couldn’t get past it, even though Hayek had forcefully argued that true capitalism leads to peace and commerce, not war.
