ROSTEN: If you were to take 90 percent of the graduating students of the colleges of
the United States and ask them what a bank or a banker does, what percentage do you think
would answer to your satisfaction?
HAYEK: Hardly any.
(Both laugh)
ROSTEN: Yet they have all been exposed to banks, bankers, economics, and professors.
How many of them would know what an executive does?
HAYEK: Well, that is extraordinarily difficult to explain-- that I know from my own experience.
The business schools are doing quite a good job, but the economics students know nothing about it.
ROSTEN: The ignorance of people about the
things they vote about is, of course, very depressing. The feeling that one must temper
one's disillusionment with the fact that these are very complicated, and to utter a heresy
not all people are intelligent. And you run into the problem of what the fate of the democracy
will be when the crises become more acute and depend on more "technical signals," to
use your word, or "information," to use mine.
HAYEK: Well, I'm very pessimistic about this.
You see, my concern has increasingly become that we call democracy a system in which it
isn't really the opinion of some majority which governs but the necessity of paying
off any number of special interests. Unless we change the organization of our democratic
system, democracy will-- I believe in democracy as a system of peaceful change of government;
but that's all its whole advantage is, no other. It just makes it possible to get rid
of what government we dislike, but that omnipotent democracy which we have is not going to last
long. What I fear is that people will be so disgusted with democracy that even they will
abandon even its good features.
ROSTEN: If you had magical powers and were
to set about restructuring the system-- A friend of mine, in making a witticism, prompted
me to retort by saying, "That's a good rule; let's pass a law that for every law that Congress
passes it must simultaneously repeal twenty others."
HAYEK: Twenty others; yes, I agree. (Laughs)
ROSTEN: At least twenty. But what would you do?
HAYEK: Oh, in the long run, the only chance
is to alter our constitutional structure and have no omnipotent single representative assembly,
but divide the powers on the traditional idea of a separation of powers, have one which
is confined into true legislation in the sense of general rules of conduct, and the other
a governmental assembly being under the laws laid down by the first: the first being unable
to discriminate; the second, in consequence, being unable to take any coercive action except
to enforce general laws. Because of the present system, see, I believe
Schumpeter is right in the sense that while socialism can never satisfy what people expect,
our present political structure inevitably drives us into socialism, even if people do
not want it in the majority. That can only be prevented by altering the structure of
our so-called democratic system. But that's not necessarily a very, very slow process,
and I don't think that an effort toward reform will come in time. So I rather fear that we
shall have a return to some sort of dictatorial democracy, I would say, where democracy merely
serves to authorize the actions of a dictator. And if the system is going to break down,
it will be a very long period before real democracy can reemerge.