In 1944, Friedrich von Hayek wrote a small book called The Road to Serfdom. It remains, perhaps, his most famous work to this day. In it, Hayek explains that the German Nazis and Italian fascists were the direct successors of the ruling socialists who came before them. These movements came to power because only they could implement the socialists’ ideas, since the socialists recoiled from the realization that their plans could only be achieved through naked violence. The fascists had no such scruples, and so, through legitimate elections, they displaced the socialists and enacted their program.
Ukraine is a perfect illustration of this process. After all, by “program” one should understand not so much the theses written on paper, but the only available methods by which they can be implemented. Incidentally, the NSDAP program, if you removed a couple of blatant points from it, would today pass as a perfectly “liberal” one.
Twenty years of our history is a run down the road to serfdom. And the participants in this race are the Ukrainians themselves. For all twenty years, Ukrainians gladly surrendered power over themselves to the state.
In the early 90s, seeing a police uniform did not make you want to cross to the other side of the street. Petty officials walked around in greasy jackets, cheerfully taking every opportunity to “resolve the issue.” Today everything has changed significantly. Why? What was the cause? The cause was you.
Officials are a function of a piece of paper—a law or another order. Your connivance is what allows them to act arbitrarily without the paper. For a petty bureaucrat to turn into a big boss without changing posts, either the substance of the documents must change, or your connivance must change. In our case, both were happening.
Let us begin with the second one. For twenty years, Ukrainians did not object as officials expanded their power through informal means. Some decree, some resolution, or even just a “letter”—a document with mysterious legal force—would suddenly change things so that officials received more of your power. You could count on your fingers the cases when anyone objected at all, and even fewer cases when it was possible to stop the process. Rare exceptions here are, for example, the state’s repeated failures in its attempts to abolish the single tax. But otherwise, any initiative to limit freedom—that is, the appropriation by other people of your power over yourself—was silently approved, or even met with gleeful squeals from the progressive public, as, for example, with smoking restrictions in “public places” and the ban on tobacco advertising.
Now about the documents. For all twenty years, Ukrainians voted for a better life starting tomorrow. I would give the author of this slogan a marketing award, if such an award existed, because this slogan fully reflects the true aspirations of Ukrainians and the functions they would like to see in the state. Both in parliamentary and especially in presidential elections, the mob with exactly such a program always won. Moreover, throughout this entire time, the growth of such sentiments occurred both among voters and among politicians. This is not surprising, because parallel to this, the appropriation of your power over yourself was taking place, and since only this power—that is, freedom—can really make things “better” for you, things kept getting worse. This forced people to demand ever greater “improvement” from the state, which consisted of greater appropriation of your power, and so on. Of course, the process was far from linear, but, in general terms, the pattern is exactly this. As a result, in the 2009 presidential elections, we got the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians sharing the ideas of a better life starting tomorrow, because to our topic one should add Yanukovych’s voters along with Tymoshenko’s voters.
Broadly speaking, the ultimate goal that Ukrainians strive for is to do nothing themselves and to have the state do everything for them. To achieve this goal, the state must have the ability to act as it pleases and not be bound by various procedures and restrictions.
Fulfilling such powers requires certain qualities. A horse, in order to win races or haul heavy loads, needs to possess different abilities depending on the task. Such horses possessing the appropriate qualities are called elite. Or an example from the political sphere—an elite socialist is a Nazi. The same thing happens here. There is no need to be surprised or indignant about the Ukrainian authorities. These people are the result of natural selection, which does not stop for a second in their bureaucratic world. It is precisely this mob that is best suited to achieve the goals that you, as voters, set for them. Others simply cannot handle it here. And, by the way, something makes me think that Yanukovych is still far from the limit.