Mitch Daniels on How Libertarians Can Govern
The Governor of Indiana promotes a new philosophy of libertarianism and selects the books that have influenced him most.
Two of the books you’ve chosen are about freedom and two are about social dynamism. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, I would say, is about both. It’s also the first of these books to be published, in 1944. Do you want to start with that one?
Hayek, when I thumb back through it and look at what I marked when I first read it, was the book that, to me, convincingly demonstrated what was already intuitive: namely, the utter futility, the illusion of government planning as a mechanism for uplifting those less fortunate. I read it together with dozens of other books, but the way he dissected and depicted the inexorable tendencies in statism to self-perpetuation of bureaucracies, matched what I thought was the evidence I saw around me.
What stage were you in life when you first encountered The Road to Serfdom?
Well, post-college. In my mid 20s, probably.
Did you recall it having a fairly profound effect on you at the time?
I think it did. That could be said of one or two of these others as well, especially the Friedman: something that clarifies and confirms an intuition or a tentative empirical judgment you’ve come to. At the time, in the 1970s, it wasn’t hard to look at the wreckage, and say, ‘This isn’t working – and the more government tries to do, the more bureaucracies it piles up, the more regulations it writes, the less well off people at large seem to be…’
You’re a sitting governor [of Indiana], you’ve been an OMB [US Office of Management and Budget] director and you deal day to day with people who want to plan stuff – everything from zoning commissions to the legislature. How does this book inflect how you deal with that?
With humility and caution. I think I would say that this is something you’ll see in the Postrel book as well, probably in several of these books. They led me to a view that government clearly has to establish rails around certain behaviour and economic activity. But simplicity, clarity of the rules, a caution about over-prescriptiveness in how to achieve a certain outcome or prevent a certain externality from happening – I think I probably first saw a lot of that in Hayek.
For instance, I remember my first day on this job. We did a ton of things, we wanted to emphasise that a lot of change was afoot. But I went over to see our biggest regulatory agency – we had hundreds of people in the room or on the phone. It was an environmental management agency and I told them then, and I’ve told them since, that we did not intend to weaken or moderate a single rule that I knew of, in terms of environmental standards. But I said that what we were determined to do was to make regulation consistent, predictable and quick. We worked very hard on that. We measured to see if we were getting there. So I guess that, if you say, correctly, that this job involves overseeing necessary regulatory activity, that mentality came in some part from books like Hayek’s.
Hayek, when I thumb back through it and look at what I marked when I first read it, was the book that, to me, convincingly demonstrated what was already intuitive: namely, the utter futility, the illusion of government planning as a mechanism for uplifting those less fortunate. I read it together with dozens of other books, but the way he dissected and depicted the inexorable tendencies in statism to self-perpetuation of bureaucracies, matched what I thought was the evidence I saw around me.
What stage were you in life when you first encountered The Road to Serfdom?
Well, post-college. In my mid 20s, probably.
Did you recall it having a fairly profound effect on you at the time?
I think it did. That could be said of one or two of these others as well, especially the Friedman: something that clarifies and confirms an intuition or a tentative empirical judgment you’ve come to. At the time, in the 1970s, it wasn’t hard to look at the wreckage, and say, ‘This isn’t working – and the more government tries to do, the more bureaucracies it piles up, the more regulations it writes, the less well off people at large seem to be…’
You’re a sitting governor [of Indiana], you’ve been an OMB [US Office of Management and Budget] director and you deal day to day with people who want to plan stuff – everything from zoning commissions to the legislature. How does this book inflect how you deal with that?
With humility and caution. I think I would say that this is something you’ll see in the Postrel book as well, probably in several of these books. They led me to a view that government clearly has to establish rails around certain behaviour and economic activity. But simplicity, clarity of the rules, a caution about over-prescriptiveness in how to achieve a certain outcome or prevent a certain externality from happening – I think I probably first saw a lot of that in Hayek.
For instance, I remember my first day on this job. We did a ton of things, we wanted to emphasise that a lot of change was afoot. But I went over to see our biggest regulatory agency – we had hundreds of people in the room or on the phone. It was an environmental management agency and I told them then, and I’ve told them since, that we did not intend to weaken or moderate a single rule that I knew of, in terms of environmental standards. But I said that what we were determined to do was to make regulation consistent, predictable and quick. We worked very hard on that. We measured to see if we were getting there. So I guess that, if you say, correctly, that this job involves overseeing necessary regulatory activity, that mentality came in some part from books like Hayek’s.
Hayek goes in two directions: one is the value of freedom in and of
itself, and the other is freedom as instrumental in creating a dynamic
economy. Two of your books are about freedom per se, including Milton
Friedman’s Free to Choose. Friedman is one of the few authors who have made it on to multiple lists, so why Free to Choose as opposed to Capitalism and Freedom or A Monetary History of the United States? What is the role of Friedman in your thinking?
I could have flipped a coin and honestly, in my own mind, I wasn’t drawing the neatest of separations between these books. I think that Free to Choose probably is there because it expressed best to me the moral – I hate to say superiority – but the moral underpinnings of free economics, if one starts from the premise that the highest value is the autonomy and dignity and freedom of the individual. I thought it was Friedman who best summarised why that value is best protected and promoted by property rights, by free economic voluntary exchange. I suppose it’s there less for its economic analysis, which is very compelling to me but you can find it in a lot of other places, than for the moral emphasis that runs through it.
It’s a clear, simple, very readable statement of the value of freedom.
Exactly. Most people, I believe, would credit the book – and the preceding television shows maybe even more so – for conveying that profound insight to those of us who are not as brilliant as he.
The book was published in January 1980 concurrent with or just after the TV series you mentioned. This was right at the time the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary were about to start, and the Reagan campaign was just gearing up when this book came out. In some ways it becomes the political manifesto of an era.
Yes. It’s very telling.
I could have flipped a coin and honestly, in my own mind, I wasn’t drawing the neatest of separations between these books. I think that Free to Choose probably is there because it expressed best to me the moral – I hate to say superiority – but the moral underpinnings of free economics, if one starts from the premise that the highest value is the autonomy and dignity and freedom of the individual. I thought it was Friedman who best summarised why that value is best protected and promoted by property rights, by free economic voluntary exchange. I suppose it’s there less for its economic analysis, which is very compelling to me but you can find it in a lot of other places, than for the moral emphasis that runs through it.
It’s a clear, simple, very readable statement of the value of freedom.
Exactly. Most people, I believe, would credit the book – and the preceding television shows maybe even more so – for conveying that profound insight to those of us who are not as brilliant as he.
The book was published in January 1980 concurrent with or just after the TV series you mentioned. This was right at the time the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary were about to start, and the Reagan campaign was just gearing up when this book came out. In some ways it becomes the political manifesto of an era.
Yes. It’s very telling.
The other book on freedom on your list is Charles Murray, What It Means to Be a Libertarian. Are you a libertarian?
By his definition I guess I’d say so. Like all these labels these days, a lot of them have been transmuted out of their original meaning. For instance, I’m what would have been called a liberal in the 19th and early 20th century.
And still would be in Europe.
Yes, I guess in Europe that’s still the case.
By his definition I guess I’d say so. Like all these labels these days, a lot of them have been transmuted out of their original meaning. For instance, I’m what would have been called a liberal in the 19th and early 20th century.
And still would be in Europe.
Yes, I guess in Europe that’s still the case.
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