Jim's blog entry on his TCS piece defending Google and China doesn't really tell the whole story; you should read the TCS piece yourself. I've read it several times now. My first reaction was one of mild shock, a sense that Jim was promoting totalitarianism over democracy. Then I sensed a Kissingerian realpolitik emerging. But now, after a third read, I think I've come closer to Jim's muses on this piece -- F.A. Hayek and Frank Knight.

These two major thinkers of the 20th century were friends, and contrarians to society. Hayek, renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner, is known for many things, but one is his bombshell book Road to Serfdom. The Austrian, writing in 1944 as an Austrian turned German dictator was causing war across Europe, had this pessimistic outlook:

What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as "the general welfare." Without total agreement on the ends of planning, central planning will be rather like a journey where most travellers disagree over where they want to go. The result is they may all make a journey which most of them do not want at all.

Democratic assemblies cannot function as planning agencies. They cannot produce agreement on everything - the whole direction of the resources of the nation. The number of possible courses of action will be legion. Even if a congress could, by proceeding step by step and compromising at each point, agree on some scheme, it would certainly in the end satisfy nobody.

Now that was a dark time, and US democracy still hasn't slipped into a nation of servitude despite numerous attempts at misguided central planning. However, Frank Knight likely would have argued that a totalitarian model is more efficient than democracy -- he once claimed that the key to a slave economy was ensuring that the slaves had little freedom and no idea of the true disparities in living standards between slave and master; then, they'd work dutifully and without resistance. He was speaking in broader, state-level terms.

Much of what the influential University of Chicago economics professor said and wrote was meant to provoke (and it often did). But Knight -- who was given page proofs of Road to Serfdom by Hayek before publication -- had made known his own skepticism regarding democracy in a 1939 speech titled "The Case for Communism: From the Standpoint of an Ex-Liberal." Democracy, Knight said, had a flaw lacking in communism -- too much talk. In fact, this speech gave birth, in what Knight said he hoped would be his claim to immortality, to Knight's 3 Rules of Talk, which I'll paraphrase:

1. Cheap talk drives from the market that talk which is less cheap.

2. The more intelligent two debaters are, the more likely they are to disagree, and the more vehement their disagreements will become over time.

3. (Knight admitted this was related to #2) The more an issue is debated, the further the participants will be to a consensus.

In a totalitarian state these rules aren't very relevant, of course. Yet any student of Knight's knows he was hardly an advocate for communism or any other totalitarian model; he liked to find fault with everything, and if he himself had a fault it was failing to suggest better alternatives.

Hayek, of course, wasn't predicting the end of democracy, but rather was warning against democratic governments embracing central planning, as that leads to tyranny. So I think Jim, with his modest TCS essay browbeating democracy and adopting a pragmatic viewpoint of totalitarian dictators, has put himself in fine company.