Monbiot Bearing Greeks

A recent article in the Guardian sees the Greek failure as a battle between the rich and the poor, with flint-eyed evil plundering wide-eyed innocence.  And this is, of course, as in all modern questions, dialectic--which is to say resolvable only as one-sided and righteous. There has been no Greek input to the problem at all.
It is here: http://gu.com/p/4aemb/sbl 

This is a peculiar article but has this lovely and revealing line: "This is the true road to serfdom: disinventing democracy on behalf of the elite."
The Road to Serfdom is, of course, Hayek's classic book on economies. It is decidedly and famously anti-elitist. In it he argues that central planning is morally objectionable as it suppresses freedom. More, it is doomed to fail because it denies the small steps that occur in everyday life where decisions are made.

The objections to Hayek are very straight foreword but rarely made. Orwell said, "[A] return to 'free' competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the state." So, for Orwell, the people would be at the mercy of unscrupulous businessmen rather than unscrupulous politicians and, for some reason that I do not think history supports, he thinks powerful politicians can be benign. This, I think,  contains the basic conflict between Progressivism and the Hayek-conservative-de Tocqueville position: The irresponsible market versus the irresponsible government. But, again, it is more than a philosophical difference, it is practical. Hayak showed that manipulation of the economy, fueled too much by debt and not enough by productive income, sacrificed long term decisions for short term ones--the exact error we criticize single-quarter/bottom-line-obsessed companies for. Average people suffer when economic decisions are bad.
Surprisingly, Keynes said this of the book: "In my opinion it is a grand book...Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement." He thought it impractical. The elite always feel that liberty is impractical. They always know better.
None of these are new arguments. What is interesting about this article that it assumes the unelected, self appointed leaders of these organizations--the government agencies and the central banks--are not perversions of leadership and governance. They are, rather, some sort of creed, some kind of philosophy, that is more general and outreaching than simple lust for power, money and gratification. It is not seen as simple bad, uncontrolled government--on both sides. So, somehow, this philosophy sees an IMF member running naked after a cleaning woman in a four-star hotel hallway as an aberration rather than an example of their nature.
One can saddle these self-important predatory and arrogant characters with philosophy if one likes but applying Hayek's philosophy to them would be a serious reach.