The big stories of the week revolve around big government, which mean big theft, which is not unrelated to socialism:
Tag: Hayek
William Easterly looks at the inherent callousness at the heart of modern talk of “development.” His starting point, below, is the big difference in ideas between 1974’s dual winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Gunnar Myrdal and F.A. Hayek. Myrdal supported a double standard. Hayek did not.
Myrdal also promoted a huge assumption we still live with today: that of the benevolent dictator, the one who gets all the credit for progress. The common folk, you see, are just pawns in the dictator’s hands.
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Video: Hayek on Social Justice
It’s a mirage, saith he, a fantasy:
Actually, this is a Bill Buckley interview not only with Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, but also with George Roche, president of Hillsdale College … from quite a while ago.
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Tea Readers
According to a New York Times article by Kate Zernike, the “Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts.” A strange way of saying that Tea Party folks are reading, learning, and studying ideas older than those of, say, Paul Krugman.
Tea Partiers are reading classics … but ones not recognized as such by the New York Times:
- Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
- F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
- Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
Huh? That third book serves as an oddity on the list. It’s a handbook on street-level ways to effect political change. The left’s loved it for years. Now it’s in the hands of people with scant interest in mass expropriation or heavy, vindictive regulation, or a vast, tax-funded gimme-gimme state.
The article cites the “Austrian School of Economics” — a brand of economics that includes many of the most important free-market thinkers — as an important force, but merely mentions its 20th century leader, Ludwig von Mises, as if a duty. Bastiat, a French economist who died before the school was founded, is lumped in with Mises and Hayek, perhaps because he’s so radically anti-taxation that the Times hopes by mentioning his ideas over and over, readers might dismiss him as a nut.
That could backfire. Some of the Times’s smarter readers might become curious, reading Bastiat and Mises and Hayek with the notion of learning something.
Maybe they’ll even read the Constitution.
Wow. What a revolutionary thought.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Last week I noted the revival of interest in F.A. Hayek’s classic political tract, The Road to Serfdom. This week? The ongoing revival of interest in Hayek’s theory of boom and bust.
According to economist Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., today’s debate about stimulus spending mirrors the debate in the Great Depression between John Maynard Keynes and Hayek. Republished letters from October, 1932, Times of London, are eerily up-to-date.
The letter from Keynes and his allies, arguing that spending — any spending whatsoever — would spring the economy out of depression strikes me as a tad bizarre. All spending is equal? Make that several tads bizarre.
Can you say déjà vu?
The Hayekian response seems at once more sophisticated as well as commonsensical. For instance, Hayek recommended an immediate repeal of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff. He recognized a major factor for the Depression’s low expectations and business doldrums: The trade-killing legislation that hit the New York Times’s front page the day before Black Tuesday, 1929.
O’Driscoll and other economists have been making much of the enduring significance of the Hayek-Keynes debate. But there are differences between the Depression and now, aren’t there?
Back then, the loss part of the profit-and-loss system hadn’t been so completely undermined by recovery policy. Today we have bailouts, and these only increase risk-taking, likely to make the next bust even bigger — and today’s Keynesianism perhaps worse than the disease itself.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.