Este trecho é do último livro de Tony Judt,
Thinking the Twentieth Century (estou pela metade):
The three quarters of century that followed Austria’s collapse in the 1930s can be seen as a duel between Keynes and Hayek. Keynes, as I was saying, begins with the observation that under conditions of economic uncertainty we would be imprudent to assume stable outcomes and therefore had better devise ways to intervene in order to bring these about. Hayek, writing quite consciously against Keynes and from the Austrian experience, argues in The Road to Serfdom that intervention - planning, however benevolent or well-intentioned and whatever the political context - must end badly. His book was published in 1945 and is most remarkable for its prediction that the post-World War II British welfare state already in the making should anticipate a fate similar to that of the socialist experiment in post-1918 Vienna. Starting with socialist planning, you would end with Hitler or a comparable successor. For Hayek, in short, the lesson of Austria and indeed the disaster of interwar Europe at large boiled down to this: don’t intervene, and don’t plan. Planning hands the initiative to those who would, in the end, destroy society (and the economy) to the benefit of the state. Three quarters of a century later, this remains for many people (especially here in the U.S.) the salient moral lesson of the twentieth century.
(...)
It is as though what had taken place in Austria was a debate between planning and freedom, which was never the case, and as though it were self-evident that the course of events which led from a planned city to authoritarian repression and ultimately fascism can be summarized as a necessary causal relationship between economic planning and political dictatorship. Relieved of its Austrian historical context and, indeed, even of the very historical reference, this set of assumptions - imported to the U.S. in the suitcases of a handful of disabused Viennese intellectuals - has come to inform not just the Chicago school of economics but all significant public conversation over policy choices in the contemporary United States.
Isso provocou uma discussão interessante na blogolândia em Inglês. Começou com este post do
Tyler Cowen, que diz que Judt foi injusto na caracterização do Hayek. O Crooked Timber
discutiu aqui, com uma leitura do próprio Hayek. Por fim, o
Moneybox aponta uma inconsistência no pensamento de Hayek sobre o estado de bem-estar social (e o
Crooked Timber, de novo, dá mais referências). Pena Judt não estar mais entre nós para seguir alimentando a polêmica.
Ah, no primeiro post do Crooked Timber foi possível encontrar esta pérola entre os comentários:
I would certainly be happy if I was generally regarded as being as dishonest and as ignorant as Tony Judt. After achieving that, I think I’d try to become as poor as Donald Trump and as ugly as Jude Law.
