Opponents of the liberal market order often play fast and loose with the facts in order to discredit two of history’s greatest champions of the liberal market order, Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek.
Editor, The New York Review of Books
Editor:
Trevor Jackson writes of “the enthusiasm that free-market fundamentalists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman had for apartheid South Africa” (“’Never Too Much’,” January 16, 2025). But what Mr. Jackson treats as an established fact is, in fact, nothing of the sort.
Speaking in South Africa in April 1976, Friedman offered this advice:
The first thing you ought to do is to eliminate the barriers which you now impose on equal movements, on equal opportunity, for the various groups. A state cannot raise the income of anybody, but it can provide people with opportunities for developing themselves and using their own resources…. The problem is one of eliminating obstacles. I am not in favour of egalitarianism, in the sense of equal results. I see no merit in cutting down a tree in a forest that grows higher than the others in order to make them all equal. That is the egalitarian view. What you want to favour is the absence of the barriers, the absence of artificial impediments to the advancement of the individual in accordance with his capacity and ability.*
As for Hayek, the notion that he supported apartheid is rooted in ignorance, or disregard, of his lifelong deep skepticism of attempts to engineer social change. In 1978, Hayek offered in an interview a remark that many people have since misinterpreted as expressing support for apartheid. But here’s what Hayek actually said:
Suddenly it’s [that is, human rights] the main object and leads to a degree of interference with the policy of other countries which, even if I sympathized with the general aim, I don’t think it’s in the least justified. People in South Africa have to deal with their own problems, and the idea that you can use external pressure to change people, who after all have built up a civilization of a kind, seems to me morally a very doubtful belief. But it’s a dominating belief in the United States now (emphasis added).**
Neither of these scholars here expressed support – and much less enthusiasm – for apartheid. Instead, each man objected to the means popular among many political activists for dealing with that grotesque institution. Friedman called for eliminating all state-erected apartheid obstacles but warned of using the state to redistribute income. Hayek, always aware of society’s organic nature, cautioned of the dangers that lurk in efforts even by well-intentioned outsiders to impose their views on other peoples. Lasting and helpful change, in Hayek’s view, must come from below and within – from the hearts and minds of the people rather than from force imposed from above or without.
One can legitimately disagree with Friedman’s and Hayek’s unfavorable assessment of the means endorsed by many others for ending apartheid and dealing with its consequences. But it’s an intellectual cheap shot to infer “enthusiasm” for apartheid from Friedman’s and Hayek’s opposition to popular means for dealing with that instance of noxious, state-enforced racial discrimination.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030* See “The Milton Friedman View,” page 6.
** See Robert Chitester’s 1978 interview with F.A. Hayek, especially from the 16:30 mark to the 17:45 mark.
