Hayek’s letter to the editor, published in The Times on December 21, 1976, and republished in the supplied 2022 version, offers a compressed intervention in a debate about European economic imbalance. Responding to a report of Roy Jenkins’s concern about Germany’s different position from France, Britain and Italy, Hayek recasts the disparity as a consequence of national policy choices.
The solution is the simplest, most obvious possible.
This assertion is the letter’s rhetorical pivot. What Jenkins presents as a fundamental problem of imbalance becomes, for Hayek, a straightforward matter of changing policy. His confidence dispenses with discussion of institutional coordination or the particular economic circumstances of the four countries.
That the latter three countries abandon their socialist policies, and they will in a few years be where Germany has arrived now by this method.
The proposed remedy also supplies the letter’s causal claim: Hayek attributes Germany’s position to the policy course he recommends to its neighbours. Germany functions as an example to emulate, not as a source of imbalance requiring correction. His prediction of convergence “in a few years” makes the prescription emphatic, but the letter neither defines the socialist policies at issue nor provides evidence for the projected outcome.
The work’s significance lies in this compact argumentative reversal: an international disparity is treated as the result of domestic political choices. Its movement from reported concern to confident prescription captures Hayek’s opposition to socialism without developing a detailed comparative economic analysis.
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