Peter Boettke's call for charitable readings before damnations is reasonable  
and simpatico.    
  
I do object, though, to his use of "interventionism" in the Hayek sense, and  
even more in the vulgar sense. It has become a codeword and shibboleth for a  
particular world-view that developed when labor and landless proletarians  
generally began to have some influence, however meager, on the state. Before  
the Wagner Act, for example, most of the power of the state was marshaled  
against labor, while corporations ran wild. Before the Emancipation  
Proclamation the state enforced slavery. Adam Smith noted that the state was  
mainly involved in protecting property. That was not intervention?  
  
A similar phrase is "social engineering", usually said with a sneer. Our  
former city utilities Director, for example, called it social engineering to  
provide lifeline power and water rates for customers with low incomes; but  
not to use declining block rates to help the biggest customers, that's  
different!   
  
Chicago Schoolers call it intervention to impose a minimum wage law, but are  
silent on the greater intervention of the payroll tax and withholding  
(Milton Friedman's baby) and retail sales taxes. Unearned increments to land  
values are given preferential low tax rates, or virtual exemption often,  
while nurses and industrial toilers and brain surgeons are subject to the  
full fury of tax rates on "ordinary" income. Did Hayek ever call that  
"intervention"?  
  
"Intervention" and "social engineering" are used when the customary  
domination of public policy by the rich, huge, and powerful is modified,  
however slightly.  
  
Did Hayek use them more objectively? His popularity on the chicken-a-la-king  
circuit leads one to doubt it. I am open to conviction, and hope I am wrong,  
but as Harry Truman said, "Show-me".  
  
Mason Gaffney