Risk of undeserved loss was deliberately required to discipline individuals into market submission

Evidence

In a relatively wealthy society, Hayek acknowledged, ‘some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and capacity to work, can be assured to everybody’; but security against ‘undeserved loss’ can never be. Although we may sympathise with someone who finds all his hopes disappointed through no fault of his own, he argued, we cannot remedy his situation without destroying the competitive market order. The risk of such loss was necessary to discipline individuals to submit to the market order and adapt themselves to its imperatives. To compensate those whose risks do not pay off would interfere with the feedback mechanism through which the market directs our activities where they are most needed. Hayek contended that the discipline of the market could only be escaped by a retreat to the security of the barracks. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 209

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This fundamentally reframes the standard justification of the welfare minimum: Hayek’s minimalism is not about leaving people alone but about deploying insecurity as an instrument of discipline against them. It inverts the humanitarian reading entirely.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’ and the idea that freedom and security are mutually conditioning, as well as to the reader’s existing ‘Sacrifice’ article theme of structural suffering. — connects to: New financial markets require coercive persuasion of members to create initial liquidity — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 691; The discourse of risk retroactively legitimizes any market outcome. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 343; Casinos normalize risk so market failure loses its political charge — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 274