Hayek and Sowell: Titans

There is a reason free speech and problem solving go together.

In The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek noted that collectivism means the end of truth.

Hayek noted:

“To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own. This is brought about by propaganda and by complete control of all sources of information.”

The same could be said of the end of free speech.

It isn’t enough to be able to say something, others need to be able to say something back.

When I was a young engineer, LEAN and Six Sigma was just getting started in American industry, one of the first problem solving processes I learned was 8D or the eight disciplines of problem solving.  

One critical step (all 8 are) is to implement interim corrective actions - before heading up to problem solving, the team should fix the effect of the problem, especially on customers. It might involve actions like sorting to isolate the items affected and replacing the defective parts before the product reaches customers.

This temporary step is mainly to prevent the problem from reaching the market and customers, which might become a competitive disadvantage and reduce customer loyalty. It is also to stabilize the output of the process and protect your customers until you have time to solve the problem.

Think about this step in the context of illegal immigration.

Once the flow of the problematic process is controlled, the next step involved is the determination of root causes, which is an interrogative process. You ask a lot of questions, collect a lot of data and then sort through them using several tools to filter out the symptoms until you get down to what is really causing the problem.

This is a feedback cycle with you pushing questions out while taking information in. Sometimes the information is pure observable data – measurements, machine settings, environmental conditions – but often the data includes the observation of operators, inspectors, maintenance personnel and even customers.

It takes two-way communication to accumulate good human data and often, that human data lends important insight to the problem. Imagine what it would be like to intentionally limit what the operators could say or for the government to limit what observable data you could take.

That would make problem solving almost impossible.

But that is how government, especially when it is controlled by left - a group that simply does not understand data at all – does problem solving.

Thomas Sowell, the Hayek of our time, wrote about why the leftists in government always find the solution to every problem is more government:

“All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget that correlation is not causation. For example, the New York Times crusaded for government-provided prenatal care, citing the fact that black mothers had prenatal care less often than white mothers — and that there were higher rates of infant mortality among blacks. But American women of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino ancestry also had less prenatal care than whites — and lower rates of infant mortality than either blacks or whites.”

So, if you were really interested in solving the problem, the first thing you would notice is the contradiction in the data and ask, “What other reason could there possibly be that there were different infant mortality rates between groups that received roughly the same amount of pre-natal care.

But all the left sees is an “inequality” and to them, that means more government, that the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Sowell makes a similar case for the left’s go-to, seeing racism in everything. He notes:

“When statistics showed that black applicants for conventional mortgage loans were turned down at twice the rate for white applicants, the media went ballistic crying racial discrimination. But whites were turned down almost twice as often as Asian Americans — and no one thinks that is racial discrimination.”

“It’s racism!” screams the left. “See, we knew it! The only solution is more government!”

Again, a massive deviation in the data – but the question behind the question is never asked because the “problem solvers” have found their answer. Unfortunately for the people who are suffering, that “answer” is the information that satisfies the left emotionally, it isn’t the endpoint.

If we aren’t allowed to ask the obvious questions because some arbitrary authority defines our line of thought as “disinformation” or “conspiracy theory”, we can never break through to the root cause – and that’s the real reason the left wants to squelch speech.

These are the reasons we on the right grow frustrated quickly with the left’s asinine attempts at solutions.