Andrew,  
  
You know better ... self-defeating and self-contradictory ... is different than
deterministic.  To say that interventionism generates unintendend and undesirable
consequences from the point of view of the advocates of the interventionism does not by
necessity lead to increased interventionism. They could decide to abandon their idea about
interventionisms ability to satisfy the goals sought and push for another policy IF THEY
CHANGED THEIR THEORY OF THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS.  The Mises-Hayek position is one of
instability and incoherence of the proposed interventionism to meet the goals stated.  It
is a question of means/ends analysis, holding the policy makers theory constant.
  
But if agent theories about means/ends don't change, then additional contradictions will
be introduced into the system.
  
I find it somewhat puzzling on this list that theoretical contributions in political
economy that helped explain the contradictions of the welfare/warfare state that arose in
the 1960s and 1970s (that even left wing intellectuals like Claus Offe understood), and
the collapse of real-existing socialism in the 1980s and 1990s could be so easily
dismissed as "unrealistic" and "dreadful".
  
You really do not have to agree with a position to admit that it has some merit to its
position if you take the time to read authors in even a mildly charitable manner.
  
The sort of interpretation of the Road to Serfdom and of Hayek that has been offered is
extremely strange. The ridiculous claims that have been made about Hayek (from Reder's
claims to more recent claims about authoritarianism) seem to be tolerated by historians of
thought in a way that NO OTHER historical character in economics would be subjected to on
such "thin" grounds of evidence.  We have far more damaging evidence on Keynes, for
example, than we do of Hayek yet we do not resort to those sort of guilt by association
claims. Yet when defenders of Hayek perk up, they are often dismissed as ideological
crazies.
  
Perhaps the notion of the hermeneutics of suspicion should be turned back on all these
"readings".  But if we did that, what would happen to mutual understanding and "truth
tracking"?  No perhaps the best strategy for scholarship is to insist on "charitable
readings" and to ask those offering "suspicious readings" to rethink what they are
proposing.
  
Pete Boettke