NB the similarities

When Vaclav Klaus speaks about the communism he lived under and its intellectual partners, it sounds like he is describing the Labor/Green/ABC alliance in Australia today:

The communist politicians needed their intellectual fellow-travelers.  They needed their “dealings in ideas”, their “shaping of public opinion”, their apology of the inhuman, irrational and inefficient regime. They needed their ability to supply them with general, abstract and utopian ideas. They especially needed their willingness to deal with the hypothetical future instead of criticising the very much less rosy reality.

...The question is what kind of ideas is favoured by the intellectuals. The question is whether the intellectuals are neutral in their choice of ideas with which they are ready to deal with. Hayek argued that they are not. They do not hold or try to spread all kinds of ideas. They have very clear and, in some respect, very understandable preferences for some of them. They prefer ideas, which give them jobs and income and which enhance their power and prestige.

They, therefore, look for ideas with specific characteristics. They look for ideas, which enhance the role of the state because the state is usually their main employer, sponsor or donator. That is not all. According to Hayek “the power of ideas grows in proportion to their generality, abstractness, and even vagueness”. Hence it is not surprising that the intellectuals are mostly interested in abstract, not directly implementable ideas. This is also the way of thinking, in which they have comparative advantage. They are not good at details. They do not have ambitions to solve a problem

...They were not “valued” (or evaluated) by the invisible hand of the market but by the very visible hand of the rulers of that society. To my great regret many intellectuals were not able (or did not want) to understand the dangerous implications of such an arrangement.

As a result of this, and, again, it was no great surprise to me, after the fall of communism, in our suddenly free society, where many (if not all) previous constraints were removed practically over night, the first frustrated and openly protesting group were the intellectuals – “journalists, teachers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, and artists” (to quote Hayek). They were protesting against the unpleasant constraints created by the market. They found out very rapidly that the free society (and free markets) may not need so much of their service as they were used to in the past. They especially understood that their valuation by the impersonal forces of supply and demand may be not only less favorable than their own self-valuation (and Robert Nozick is right when he says that “intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people”) but even less favorable than that of politicians and bureaucrats of the old regime. They became, therefore, the first visible and noisy critics of our new free society we had been dreaming of having for decades.

The compplete text of the article is @ : http://www.klaus.cz/clanky/2171 and makes for interesting reading.