road to serfdom hayek bak

spawned CTT denier, also indiv

see RR, road to serfdom, kochs

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-6-2023/

04.06.23 - 10:00AM

The Century Long PR Campaign to Connect Capitalism to Democracy

Guest: Naomi Oreskes is professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Her books include, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, and her latest with historian of science and technology Erik Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.

child labor pew sunoco NAM dupont paid for von mises and hayek to come to US u chic; the free mkt pjt blueprint (rewrite road to serfdom, milton does it; lect series wm volker fdn)

little hse on prarie

xian econ, norm v peale; billy g; $ sign of god favor (recycled the gospel? of wealth); commies are godless, thus god likes capitalism

hollywood no more grapes of wrath motion pix assoc w ayn rand; wrote censorship codes not crit bank rich ppl; [sinclair EPIC? ]; CoC

RR: ike ltr to bro sec secure ~ sm# and stupid; GE NY (convicted rig elec mkt) , horatio alger, very pop pgm; RR sends the speech to nixon; libtard bk list ; RR unites social and fiscal conservatives? xian?

1929 ~ libtard

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/excerpt-from-naomi-oreskes-the-big-myth/

excerpt:

this is the story of how American business manufactured a myth that has, for decades and to our detriment, held us in its grip. It is the true history of a false idea: the idea of “the magic of the marketplace.”

Some people call it market absolutism or market essentialism. In the 1990s, George Soros popularized the name we find most apt: market fundamentalism. It’s a quasi-religious belief that the best way to address our needs — whether economic or otherwise — is to let markets do their thing, and not rely on government. Market fundamentalists treat “The Market” as a proper noun: something unique and unto itself, that has agency and even wisdom, that functions best when left unfettered and unregulated, undisturbed and unperturbed. Government, according to the myth, cannot improve the functioning of markets; it can only interfere. Governments therefore need to stay out of the way, lest they “distort” the market and prevent it from doing its “magic.” In the late 20th century, market fundamentalism was cloaked in the seemingly ancient raiments of received wisdom. In fact, it was more or less invented in the 20th century.

Classical liberal economists — including Adam Smith — recognized that government served essential functions, including building infrastructure for everyone’s benefit and regulating banks, which, left to their own devices, could destroy an economy. They also recognized that taxation was required to enable governments to perform those functions. But in the early 20th century, a group of self-styled “neo-liberals” shifted economic and political thinking radically. They argued that any government action in the marketplace, even well intentioned, compromised the freedom of individuals to do as they pleased — and therefore put us on the road to totalitarianism. Political and economic freedom were “indivisible,” they insisted: any compromise to the latter was a threat to the former — any compromise at all, even to address obvious ills like child labor or workplace injury. Why did we ever come to accept a worldview so impervious to facts? A worldview Smith himself, often thought of as the father of free-market capitalism, would have rejected? How did so many Americans come to have so much faith in markets and so little faith in government?

Market fundamentalism is not just the belief that free markets are the best means to run an economic system but also the belief that they are the only means that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms. It is the belief in the primacy of economic freedom not just to generate wealth but as a bulwark of political freedom. And it is the belief that markets exist outside of politics and culture, so that it can be logical to speak of leaving them “alone.”

We are all familiar with the idea that, as Soros has summarized, “the doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest.” That’s the core argument Adam Smith made in 1776 and contented capitalists have accepted ever since. Market fundamentalists, however, depart from Smith by insisting there is no “common good,” merely the sum of all the individual private goods. For this reason, they reject government’s claims to represent “the people”: there are only people — individuals — who represent themselves, and they do this most effectively not through their governments, even democratically elected ones, but through free choices in free markets.

Milton Friedman, America’s most famous market fundamentalist, went so far as to argue that voting was not democratic, because it could too easily be distorted by special interests and because in any case most voters were ignorant. But rather than consider how special interests might be mitigated or how voters could be better informed, he maintained that true freedom was not expressed in the voting booth. “The economic market provides a greater degree of freedom than the political market,” Friedman said in South Africa in 1976, as he encouraged the citizens of that country not to fuss over apartheid, but to preserve and expand their market-based economy.

Friedman’s argument works when we are talking about the freedom to buy, say, shoes of any type. But it fails when we consider the larger picture, including deceptive advertising, aggressive and misleading PR campaigns, and what economists call “external costs”: costs that are invisible to or misunderstood by the shoe buyers, or that accrue to people who didn’t buy those shoes at all. Pollution is an external cost. What happens when the shoe manufacturer dumps toxic chemicals behind the plant and hides that fact from its workers, investors, and customers? Friedman downplayed the problem by giving it the friendly label of “neighborhood effects,” and claimed that any remedy would almost always be worse than the disease, because of the loss of freedoms or compromises to property rights typically associated with government regulations. In some cases, he may have been right. Regulations do compromise someone’s freedom in order to protect the freedom (and welfare) of others. When it comes to pollution, the “freedom” of factories to dump toxic wastes has been rightly rejected. When it comes to climate change, the “freedom” of corporations to sell oil, gas, and coal jeopardizes the rest of us. This creates a fundamental dilemma for the fundamentalists. But rather than rethink their arguments, market fundamentalists protect their worldview by denying that climate change is real or asserting that somehow “The Market” will fix it, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Friedman held that capitalism and freedom are two indivisible sides of the same coin, but this “indivisibility thesis” predates him by decades. In the early 20th century, it was promoted in the United States by a group of industrialists working under the umbrella of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). NAM and its allies used the thesis to argue against political reforms that today we take for granted, such as laws limiting child labor, establishing workers’ compensation, and creating the federal income tax. In the 1930s, they aligned themselves with the electricity industry and used the thesis to argue against the Rural Electrification Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and other elements of the New Deal. Mostly they lost these fights, in part because the thesis suffered a fatal flaw: it wasn’t true. Electricity was a case in point. Markets had failed to bring electricity to millions of Americans who wanted it, but the government had succeeded, and rural Americans were better off economically and no less free. Indeed, they were arguably freer than before, because they now had electrical appliances that reduced manual labor and electric lights to lengthen the usable day.

Because the indivisibility thesis had so little foundation in fact, American business leaders needed to find other ways to shore it up. One way was propaganda. In the 1920s, the National Electric Light Association (NELA) launched a massive campaign that included, among other things, the hiring of academics to rewrite textbooks and develop curricula to promote pro- market, antigovernment perspectives in emerging business schools and economics programs across the country. They also recruited experts to “prove” that private electricity was cheaper than public electricity, even when the available facts showed otherwise. In the 1930s, NAM reprised the effort, with a multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign to convince Americans that business and industry were working just fine, and that the real causes of the Great Depression were unionized labor’s unreasonable demands, coupled with the government’s excessive interference in business affairs and federal taxation that starved industry of the monies it needed to expand productive capacity. Well into the 1940s, NAM produced books, pamphlets, radio programs, lecture series, and documentary and feature films (and later television programs) designed to influence what newspapers had to say about the economy and American life, what teachers taught in the classroom, and, above all, what the American people believed.

Another strategy was to recruit sympathetic intellectuals to help give the myth credibility. For this, American businessmen relied on imports: the economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, leaders of the Austrian school of economics. In the 1940s, a group linked to NAM paid for Mises and Hayek to come to America, arranged for them to be hired at New York University and the University of Chicago, respectively, and worked assiduously to promote the economists’ ideas, both in business circles and among the American people generally. This included publishing a dumbed-down version of Hayek’s famous book “The Road to Serfdom” in Reader’s Digest and a cartoon version of it in Look magazine. In the 1950s, Ronald Reagan would encounter that Reader’s Digest version; decades later “The Road to Serfdom” would be promoted by right-wing radio hosts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and touted by influential Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz and House leader Paul Ryan.

Businessmen helped create America’s first libertarian think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), established in 1946 by Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce manager Leonard Read to peddle pro-market, antigovernment ideology. They also funded the Hayek-aligned Mont Pelerin Society, a cadre of mostly European economists, cultural commentators, and political theorists promoting a renewed commitment to free-market principles under the aegis of what became known as neoliberalism. And they would help Milton Friedman write his most influential book, “Capitalism and Freedom” — essentially a restatement of the indivisibility thesis — which would dramatically reshape the American cultural conversation in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1988, Reagan would award Friedman both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.

Few of Friedman’s readers knew that the book’s success was not the product of open competition in the marketplace of ideas: “Capitalism and Freedom” had been financed and nurtured by American businessmen, and it was the most public part of a much larger project. Reader’s Digest notwithstanding, the people who had brought Hayek to America had quickly concluded that his approach was too intellectual and too European to break through to the public.

Most Americans know that before becoming a politician Reagan was an actor, but fewer are aware that Reagan’s flagging screen career was revived by a job with the General Electric Corporation (GE). Reagan hosted the popular television show “General Electric Theater,” where each week his voice and face reached into tens of millions of homes, promoting didactic stories of individualism and free enterprise. At the same time, he traveled across the country on behalf of GE — visiting factories, making speeches at schools, and doing the dinner circuit in communities where GE had a presence — promoting the corporation’s stridently individualist antiunion and antigovernment vision.

Reagan’s mentor in this work was GE executive Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, whose antiunion tactics were so extreme they earned a name: Boulwarism. (They would also earn GE several indictments for federal labor law violations.) And while Reagan helped GE promote the ideology of free markets and free choice, the company conspired to rig electricity markets (an offense for which it would be successfully prosecuted in the 1960s). Boulware’s influence transformed Reagan’s politics. He went into GE a New Deal Democrat and came out an antigovernment conservative Republican. GE transformed Reagan’s political fortunes as well; he emerged from his time there with powerful backers in corporate America who helped him launch his career in elected office.

Reagan was known as the Great Communicator, and the success of American market fundamentalism was ultimately a triumph of public relations: its advocates built a myth and persuaded Americans of its truth. By the 1970s, what had begun as a self-interested defense of business prerogatives — one that was factually dubious and characteristically supported by gross distortions and misrepresentations of history — had been transmogrified into a seemingly intellectually robust body of thought.

Meanwhile, a network of libertarian think tanks, heavily funded by industries selling dangerous products including tobacco and fossil fuels, had been established to promote these views in schools, in universities, and in American life writ large. Among other things, these think tanks distributed free of charge millions of copies of Hayek’s and Friedman’s (and Ayn Rand’s) books. Meanwhile, progressive foundations mostly focused on specific issues — like saving whales or expanding access to education — not realizing that a larger ideological battle was under way. The myth spread, influencing American presidents from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, most recently, Donald Trump.

Americans in the early 20th century were largely suspicious of “Big Business” and saw the government as their ally. By the later decades of the century, this had flipped: many Americans now admired business leaders as “entrepreneurs” and “job creators” and believed it made more sense to count on the “magic of the marketplace” to solve problems than to engage government. Many Americans saw government as dead weight, taxation as unfair or even a form of theft. That they accepted these claims is proof of this story’s importance: propaganda and persuasion had worked. The people involved in this project were intellectually diverse and geographically dispersed, but they were also in important (and sometimes startling) ways interconnected. Theirs was not a conspiracy, but it was a network of people who knew each other, supported each other morally and financially, and used this mutual support to promote a singular myth.

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The Road to Serfdom - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org › wiki › The_Road_to_Serfdom

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:{The :{Road to Serfdom:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: (German: Der Weg zur Knechtschaft) is a book written between 1940 and 1943 by Austrian British economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. Since its publication in 1944, The :{Road to Serfdom:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: has been an influential and popular exposition of market libertarianism.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

**Pages**‎: ‎266

Dewey Decimal‎: ‎338.9 20

**Country**‎: ‎United Kingdom

**Published**‎: ‎1944 (‎Routledge Press‎, UK); 1944 ...

Publication · ‎Summary · ‎Reception

The Road to Serfdom | Mises Institute

mises.org › library › road-serfdom-0

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:{The description below is written for the Definitive Edition of :{Road to Serfdom:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: which is sold in the Mises Store and can be previewed here::(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

====

https://books.google.com/books?id=_pQ4DwAAQBAJ&dq=clarence+manion+radio+jbs&source=gbs_navlinks_s

https://books.google.com/books?id=_pQ4DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA143&lpg=PA143&dq=clarence+manion+radio+jbs&source=bl&ots=qEVnpcEVrf&sig=AzVRsdebtTi3aU5obZxXllsZhwQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjB07X2l7HeAhVjk-AKHQVLDREQ6AEwFnoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=clarence%20manion%20radio%20jbs&f=false

Hayek: A Collaborative Biography: Part IX: The Divine Right of the 'Free' Market

edited by Robert Leeson

reed larson natl rtw w/ manion and jbs

http://www.strangehistory.net/2015/11/12/review-the-truth-about-donald-mccormick/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek

Friedrich Hayek CH (/:{ˈhaɪək:(style="border-bottom:1px dotted"):}:/; German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈaʊ̯ɡʊst ˈhaɪɛk]; 8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992), born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek and frequently referred to as F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian-British economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for his "pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and ... penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena."^[1]

Hayek was a major social theorist and political philosopher of the twentieth century,^[2][3] and his account of how changing prices communicate information that helps individuals co-ordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics,^[4] leading to his Nobel Prize.^[5][6]

Hayek served in World War I and said that his experience in the war and his desire to help avoid the mistakes that had led to the war drew him into economics. Hayek lived in Austria, Great Britain, the United States, and Germany and became a British subject in 1938. He spent most of his academic life at the London School of Economics (LSE), the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg.

In 1984, he was appointed a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II on the advice of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for his "services to the study of economics".^[7][8] He was the first recipient of the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize in 1984.^[9] He also received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 from President George H. W. Bush.^[10] In 2011, his article "The Use of Knowledge in Society" was selected as one of the top 20 articles published in The American Economic Review during its first 100 years.^[11]

Life

[timeline]

Early life

Vienna to August von Hayekand Felicitas Hayek (née von Juraschek). Friedrich's father, from whom he received his middle name, was born in 1871, also in Vienna. He was a medical doctor employed by the municipal ministry of health, with a passion for botany, about which he wrote a number of monographs. August von Hayek was also a part-time botany lecturer at the University of Vienna. Friedrich's mother was born in 1875 to a wealthy, conservative, land-owning family. As her mother died several years prior to Friedrich's birth, Felicitas received a significant inheritance, which provided as much as half of her and August's income during the early years of their marriage. Hayek was the oldest of three brothers, Heinrich (1900–69) and Erich (1904–86), who were one-and-a-half and five years younger than him.^[13]

His father's career as a university professor influenced Friedrich's goals later in life.^[14] Both of his grandfathers, who lived long enough for Friedrich to know them, were scholars. Franz von Juraschek was a leading economist in Austria-Hungary and a close friend of Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, one of the founders of the Austrian School of Economics.^[15]Friedrich's paternal grandfather, Gustav Edler von Hayek, taught natural sciences at the Imperial Realobergymnasium(secondary school) in Vienna. He wrote systematic works in biology, some of which are relatively well known.^[16]

On his mother's side, Hayek was second cousin to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. His mother often played with Wittgenstein's sisters, and had known Ludwig well. As a result of their family relationship, Hayek became one of the first to read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when the book was published in its original German edition in 1921. Although Hayek met Wittgenstein on only a few occasions, Hayek said that Wittgenstein's philosophy and methods of analysis had a profound influence on his own life and thought.^[17] In his later years, Hayek recalled a discussion of philosophy with Wittgenstein, when both were officers during World War I.^[18] After Wittgenstein's death, Hayek had intended to write a biography of Wittgenstein and worked on collecting family materials; and he later assisted biographers of Wittgenstein.^[19]

Hayek displayed an intellectual and academic bent from a very young age. He read fluently and frequently before going to school.^[20] At his father's suggestion, Hayek, as a teenager, read the genetic and evolutionary works of Hugo de Vries and the philosophical works of Ludwig Feuerbach.^[21] In school Hayek was much taken by one instructor's lectures on Aristotle's ethics.^[22] In his unpublished autobiographical notes, Hayek recalled a division between him and his younger brothers who were only few years younger than he, but he believed that they were somehow of a different generation. He preferred to associate with adults.^[20]

The Illustrated London News in 1914

In 1917, Hayek joined an artillery regiment in the Austro-Hungarian Army and fought on the Italian front. Much of Hayek's combat experience was spent as a spotter in an aeroplane. Hayek suffered damage to his hearing in his left ear during the war,^[23] and was decorated for bravery. During this time Hayek also survived the 1918 flu pandemic.^[24]

Hayek then decided to pursue an academic career, determined to help avoid the mistakes that had led to the war. Hayek said of his experience, "The decisive influence was really World War I. It's bound to draw your attention to the problems of political organization." He vowed to work for a better world.^[25]

Education and career

University of Vienna, Hayek earned doctorates in law and political science in 1921 and 1923 respectively; and he also studied philosophy, psychology, and economics. For a short time, when the University of Vienna closed, Hayek studied in Constantin von Monakow's Institute of Brain Anatomy, where Hayek spent much of his time staining brain cells. Hayek's time in Monakow's lab, and his deep interest in the work of Ernst Mach, inspired Hayek's first intellectual project, eventually published as The Sensory Order (1952). It located connective learning at the physical and neurological levels, rejecting the "sense data" associationism of the empiricists and logical positivists.^[26] Hayek presented his work to the private seminar he had created with Herbert Furth called the Geistkreis.^[27]

During Hayek's years at the University of Vienna, Carl Menger's work on the explanatory strategy of social science and Friedrich von Wieser's commanding presence in the classroom left a lasting influence on him.^[21] Upon the completion of his examinations, Hayek was hired by Ludwig von Mises on the recommendation of Wieser as a specialist for the Austrian government working on the legal and economic details of the Treaty of Saint Germain. Between 1923 and 1924 Hayek worked as a research assistant to Prof. Jeremiah Jenks of New York University, compiling macroeconomic data on the American economy and the operations of the US Federal Reserve.^[28]

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background: none; white-space: nowrap;">Eugen Böhm von Bawerk</a></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Block" title="Walter Block" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">Walter Block</a></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boettke" title="Peter Boettke" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">Peter Boettke</a></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_DiLorenzo" title="Thomas DiLorenzo" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">Thomas DiLorenzo</a></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Fetter" title="Frank Fetter" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">Frank Fetter</a></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Garrison" title="Roger Garrison" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">Roger Garrison</a></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a class="mw-selflink selflink" style="text-decoration: inherit; background: none; font-weight: bold; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;">Friedrich Hayek</a></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Hazlitt" title="Henry Hazlitt" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">Henry Hazlitt</a></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Higgs" title="Robert Higgs" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">Robert Higgs</a></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe" title="Hans-Hermann Hoppe" style="text-decoration-line: none; 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Initially sympathetic to Wieser's democratic socialism, Hayek's economic thinking shifted away from socialism and toward the classical liberalism of Carl Menger after reading von Mises' book Socialism. It was sometime after reading Socialism that Hayek began attending von Mises' private seminars, joining several of his university friends, including Fritz Machlup, Alfred Schutz, Felix Kaufmann, and Gottfried Haberler, who were also participating in Hayek's own, more general, private seminar. It was during this time that he also encountered and befriended noted political philosopher Eric Voegelin, with whom he retained a long-standing relationship.^[29]

Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, before joining the faculty of the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1931 at the behest of Lionel Robbins. Upon his arrival in London, Hayek was quickly recognised as one of the leading economic theorists in the world, and his development of the economics of processes in time and the co-ordination function of prices inspired the ground-breaking work of John Hicks, Abba Lerner, and many others in the development of modern microeconomics.^[30]

In 1932, Hayek suggested that private investment in the public markets was a better road to wealth and economic co-ordination in Britain than government spending programs, as argued in an exchange of letters with John Maynard Keynes, co-signed with Lionel Robbins and others in The Times.^[31][32] The nearly decade long deflationary depression in Britain dating from Churchill's decision in 1925 to return Britain to the gold standard at the old pre-war, pre-inflationary par was the public policy backdrop for Hayek's dissenting engagement with Keynes over British monetary and fiscal policy. Well beyond that single public conflict, regarding the economics of extending the length of production to the economics of labour inputs, Hayek and Keynes disagreed on many essential economics matters. Their economic disagreements were both practical and fundamental in nature. Keynes called Hayek's book, Prices and Production, "one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read,” famously adding, "It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end in Bedlam.”^[33] Many other notable economists have also been staunch critics of Hayek, including John Kenneth Galbraith and later, Paul Krugman, who wrote: "the Hayek thing is almost entirely about politics rather than economics."^[34][35]

Notable conomists who studied with Hayek at the LSE in the 1930s and 1940s include Arthur Lewis, Ronald Coase, William Baumol, John Kenneth Galbraith, Leonid Hurwicz, Abba Lerner, Nicholas Kaldor, George Shackle, Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jha, Arthur Seldon, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, and Oskar Lange.^[36][37][38] Hayek also taught or tutored many other LSE students, including David Rockefeller.^[39]

Unwilling to return to Austria after the Anschluss brought it under the control of Nazi Germany in 1938, Hayek remained in Britain. Hayek and his children became British subjects in 1938.^[40] He held this status for the remainder of his life, but he did not live in Great Britain after 1950. He lived in the United States from 1950 to 1962 and then mostly in Germany but also briefly in Austria.^[41]

The Road to Serfdom

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Main article: The Road to Serfdom

Hayek was concerned about the general view in Britain's academia that fascism was a capitalist reaction to socialism and The Road to Serfdomarose from those concerns. It was written between 1940 and 1943. The title was inspired by the French classical liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on the "road to servitude."^[42] It was first published in Britain by Routledge in March 1944 and was quite popular, leading Hayek to call it "that unobtainable book," also due in part to wartime paper rationing.^[43] When it was published in the United States by the University of Chicago in September of that year, it achieved greater popularity than in Britain.^[44] At the arrangement of editor Max Eastman(an ardent socialist), the American magazine Reader's Digest also published an abridged version in April 1945, enabling The Road to Serfdom to reach a far wider audience than academics. The book is widely popular among those advocating individualism and classical liberalism.^[45]

Chicago

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In 1950, Hayek left the London School of Economics for the University of Chicago, where he became a professor in the Committee on Social Thought. Hayek's salary was funded not by the university, but by an outside foundation.

Hayek had made contact with many at the U. of Chicago in the 1940s, with Hayek's The Road to Serfdom playing a seminal role in transforming how Milton Friedman and others understood how society works.^[46] Hayek conducted a number of influential faculty seminars while at the U. of Chicago, and a number of academics worked on research projects sympathetic to some of Hayek's own, such as Aaron Director, who was active in the Chicago School in helping to fund and establish what became the "Law and Society" program in the University of Chicago Law School.^[47] Hayek, Frank Knight, Friedman and George Stigler worked together in forming the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international forum for libertarian economists. Hayek and Friedman cooperated in support of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, later renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an American student organisation devoted to libertarian ideas.^[41][48]

Midway Plaisance

Hayek's first class at Chicago was a faculty seminar on the philosophy of science attended by many of the University's most notable scientists of the time, including Enrico Fermi, Sewall Wright and Leó Szilárd. During his time at Chicago, Hayek worked on the philosophy of science, economics, political philosophy, and the history of ideas. Hayek's economics notes from this period have yet to be published. Hayek received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954.^[49]

After editing a book on John Stuart Mill's letters he planned to publish two books on the liberal order, The Constitution of Liberty and "The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization" (eventually the title for the second chapter of The Constitution of Liberty).^[50] He completed The Constitution of Liberty in May 1959, with publication in February 1960. Hayek was concerned "...with that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society."^[51] Hayek was disappointed that the book did not receive the same enthusiastic general reception as The Road to Serfdom had sixteen years before.^[52]

Freiburg, Los Angeles, and Salzburg

University of Freiburg, West Germany, where he began work on his next book, Law, Legislation and Liberty. Hayek regarded his years at Freiburg as "very fruitful".^[53] Following his retirement, Hayek spent a year as a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he continued work on Law, Legislation and Liberty, teaching a graduate seminar by the same name and another on the philosophy of social science. Primary drafts of the book were completed by 1970, but Hayek chose to rework his drafts and finally brought the book to publication in three volumes in 1973, 1976 and 1979.

University of Salzburg from 1969 to 1977; he then returned to Freiburg, where he spent the rest of his days. When Hayek left Salzburg in 1977, he wrote, "I made a mistake in moving to Salzburg." The economics department was small, and the library facilities were inadequate.^[54]

Nobel laureate

On 9 October 1974, it was announced that Hayek would be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, along with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. The reasons for the two of them winning the prize are described in the Nobel committee's press release.^[55] He was surprised at being given the award and believed that he was given it with Myrdal to balance the award with someone from the opposite side of the political spectrum.^[56]

During the Nobel ceremony in December 1974, Hayek met the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Hayek later sent him a Russian translation of The Road to Serfdom.^[56] He spoke with apprehension at his award speech about the danger the authority of the prize would lend to an economist,^[57] but the prize brought much greater public awareness of Hayek and has been described by his biographer as "the great rejuvenating event in his life."^[58]

United Kingdom politics

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In February 1975, Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the British Conservative Party. The Institute of Economic Affairs arranged a meeting between Hayek and Thatcher in London soon after.^[59] During Thatcher's only visit to the Conservative Research Department in the summer of 1975, a speaker had prepared a paper on why the "middle way" was the pragmatic path the Conservative Party should take, avoiding the extremes of left and right. Before he had finished, Thatcher "reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty.Interrupting our pragmatist, she held the book up for all of us to see. 'This', she said sternly, 'is what we believe', and banged Hayek down on the table".^[60]

...

Hayek's views on dictatorship

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Friedrich Hayek and dictatorship

Hayek sent António de Oliveira Salazar a copy of The Constitution of Liberty(1960) in 1962. Hayek hoped that his book—this “preliminary sketch of new constitutional principles”—“may assist” Salazar “in his endeavour to design a constitution which is proof against the abuses of democracy.”^[117]

Hayek visited Chile in the 1970s and 1980s during the Government Junta of general Augusto Pinochet and accepted being named Honorary Chairman of the Centro de Estudios Públicos, the think tank formed by the economists who transformed Chile into a free market economy.^[117]

Asked about the liberal, non-democratic rule by a Chilean interviewer, Hayek is translated from German to Spanish to English as having said, "As long term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. [...] Personally I prefer a liberal dictatorship to democratic government devoid of liberalism. My personal impression – and this is valid for South America – is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government." In a letter to the London Times, he defended the Pinochet regime and said that he had "not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende."^[118][119] Hayek admitted that "it is not very likely that this will succeed, even if, at a particular point in time, it may be the only hope there is.", he explained, however, "It is not certain hope, because it will always depend on the goodwill of an individual, and there are very few individuals one can trust. But if it is the sole opportunity which exists at a particular moment it may be the best solution despite this. And only if and when the dictatorial government is visibly directing its steps towards limited democracy."

For Hayek, the supposedly stark difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism has much importance and Hayek places heavy weight on this distinction in his defence of transitional dictatorship. For example, when Hayek visited Venezuela in May 1981, he was asked to comment on the prevalence of totalitarian regimes in Latin America. In reply, Hayek warned against confusing "totalitarianism with authoritarianism," and said that he was unaware of "any totalitarian governments in Latin America. The only one was Chile under Allende". For Hayek, however, the word 'totalitarian' signifies something very specific: the want to “organize the whole of society” to attain a “definite social goal” —which is stark in contrast to “liberalism and individualism”.^[120]

Influence and recognition

Hayek's influence on the development of economics is widely acknowledged. Hayek is the second-most frequently cited economist (after Kenneth Arrow) in the Nobel lectures of the prize winners in economics, which is particularly striking since his own lecture was critical of the field of orthodox economics and neo-classical modelisation.^[121] A number of Nobel Laureates in economics, such as Vernon Smith and Herbert A. Simon, recognise Hayek as the greatest modern economist.^[122] Another Nobel winner, Paul Samuelson, believed that Hayek was worthy of his award but nevertheless claimed that "there were good historical reasons for fading memories of Hayek within the mainstream last half of the twentieth century economist fraternity. In 1931, Hayek's Prices and Production had enjoyed an ultra-short Byronic success. In retrospect hindsight tells us that its mumbo-jumbo about the period of production grossly misdiagnosed the macroeconomics of the 1927–1931 (and the 1931–2007) historical scene".^[123] Despite this comment, Samuelson spent the last 50 years of his life obsessed with the problems of capital theory identified by Hayek and Böhm-Bawerk, and Samuelson flatly judged Hayek to have been right and his own teacher, Joseph Schumpeter, to have been wrong on the central economic question of the 20th century, the feasibility of socialist economic planning in a production goods dominated economy.^[124]

Hayek is widely recognised for having introduced the time dimension to the equilibrium construction and for his key role in helping inspire the fields of growth theory, information economics, and the theory of spontaneous order. The "informal" economics presented in Milton Friedman's massively influential popular work Free to Choose (1980), is explicitly Hayekian in its account of the price system as a system for transmitting and co-ordinating knowledge. This can be explained by the fact that Friedman taught Hayek's famous paper "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945) in his graduate seminars.

In 1944 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy,^[125] after he was nominated for membership by Keynes.^[126]

Harvard economist and former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers explains Hayek's place in modern economics: "What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the [un]hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy."^[127]

By 1947, Hayek was an organiser of the Mont Pelerin Society, a group of classical liberals who sought to oppose what they saw as socialism in various areas. He was also instrumental in the founding of the Institute of Economic Affairs, the free-market think tank that inspired Thatcherism. He was in addition a member of the Philadelphia Society.^[128]

Hayek had a long-standing and close friendship with philosopher of science Karl Popper, also from Vienna. In a letter to Hayek in 1944, Popper stated, "I think I have learnt more from you than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski." (See Hacohen, 2000). Popper dedicated his Conjectures and Refutations to Hayek. For his part, Hayek dedicated a collection of papers, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, to Popper and, in 1982, said that "ever since his Logik der Forschung first came out in 1934, I have been a complete adherent to his general theory of methodology".^[129] Popper also participated in the inaugural meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Their friendship and mutual admiration, however, do not change the fact that there are important differences between their ideas.^[130]

Hayek also played a central role in Milton Friedman's intellectual development. Friedman wrote:

"My interest in public policy and political philosophy was rather casual before I joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. Informal discussions with colleagues and friends stimulated a greater interest, which was reinforced by Friedrich Hayek's powerful book The Road to Serfdom, by my attendance at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, and by discussions with Hayek after he joined the university faculty in 1950. In addition, Hayek attracted an exceptionally able group of students who were dedicated to a libertarian ideology. They started a student publication, The New Individualist Review, which was the outstanding libertarian journal of opinion for some years. I served as an adviser to the journal and published a number of articles in it...."^[131]

Hayek's greatest intellectual debt was to Carl Menger, who pioneered an approach to social explanation similar to that developed in Britain by Bernard Mandeville and the Scottish moral philosophers in the Scottish Enlightenment. He had a wide-reaching influence on contemporary economics, politics, philosophy, sociology, psychology and anthropology. For example, Hayek's discussion in The Road to Serfdom (1944) about truth, falsehood and the use of language influenced some later opponents of postmodernism.^[132]

Hayek and conservatism

Hayek received new attention in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of conservative governments in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. After winning the United Kingdom general election, 1979, Margaret Thatcher appointed Keith Joseph, the director of the Hayekian Centre for Policy Studies, as her secretary of state for industry in an effort to redirect parliament's economic strategies. Likewise, David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's most influential financial official in 1981 was an acknowledged follower of Hayek.^[133]

Hayek wrote an essay, "Why I Am Not a Conservative" (included as an appendix to The Constitution of Liberty), in which he disparaged conservatism for its inability to adapt to changing human realities or to offer a positive political program, remarking, "Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves." Although he noted that modern day conservatism shares many opinions on economics with classical liberals, particularly a belief in the free market, he believed it's because conservatism wants to "stand still," whereas liberalism embraces the free market because it "wants to go somewhere." Hayek identified himself as a classical liberal, but noted that in the United States it had become almost impossible to use "liberal" in its original definition, and the term "libertarian" has been used instead. In this text, Hayek also opposed conservatism for "its hostility to internationalism and its proneness to a strident nationalism," with its frequent association with imperialism.^[134]

However, for his part, Hayek found libertarianism a term "singularly unattractive" and offered the term "Old Whig" (a phrase borrowed from Edmund Burke) instead. In his later life, he said, "I am becoming a Burkean Whig." However, Whiggery as a political doctrine had little affinity for classical political economy, the tabernacle of the Manchester School and William Gladstone.^[135] His essay has served as an inspiration to other liberal-minded economists wishing to distinguish themselves from conservative thinkers, for example James M. Buchanan's essay "Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism".

His opponents have attacked Hayek as a leading promoter of neoliberalism. A British journalist, Samuel Brittan, concluded in 2010, "Hayek's book [The Constitution of Liberty] is still probably the most comprehensive statement of the underlying ideas of the moderate free market philosophy espoused by neoliberals."^[136] Brittan adds that although Raymond Plant (2009) comes out in the end against Hayek's doctrines, Plant gives The Constitution of Liberty a "more thorough and fair-minded analysis than it has received even from its professed adherents".^[136]

In Why F A Hayek is a Conservative,^[137] British policy analyst Madsen Pirie claims Hayek mistakes the nature of the conservative outlook. Conservatives, he says, are not averse to change – but like Hayek, they are highly averse to change being imposed on the social order by people in authority who think they know how to run things better. They wish to allow the market to function smoothly and give it the freedom to change and develop. It is an outlook, says Pirie, that Hayek and conservatives both share.

...

9/16/15 10 am kpfa 2 ltrs/day even xmas, peers begged to fight civil vs keynes

http://www.desmog.uk/2014/12/16/friedrich-von-hayek-s-free-market-legacy

When free-marketeer, Friedrich von Hayek, died in 1992 he left a legacy of neoliberal think tanks that would work against climate change. The DeSmog UKepic history series takes a look back at his life.

Friedrich von Hayek died in Freiburg, Germany, aged 92, on 23 March, 1992 – a few months after the Soviet Union voted for its own dissolution.

The funeral was attended by around one hundred family members and invited guests. It was a overcast and windy day. Vaclav Klaus, the finance minister and future prime minister of the former communist Czech Republic arrived late.

Hayek, the recipient of the Nobel Prize, had lived a fascinating life during a tumultuous period of history. He remained convinced of the “spontaneous order” of the free market and that inequality was an inescapable feature of human existence.

From his deathbed he told a reporter: “I believe in general that the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind”.

The Right Circumstances

His life is evidence of what a single man can achieve in the right circumstances, and as fellow neoliberal Antony Fisher would have said, the embodiment of the fact that ideas have consequences. He was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom by President George Bush Senior in 1991, for example, but had been too frail to attend in person.

In 1947, Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society(MPS), an international group of economists, historians and philosophers; he was convinced the MPS was crucial to the triumph of neoliberalism around the world.

However, as his biographer Alan Ebenstein would note: “Hayek was virtually forgotten in England during the 1950s and '60s. The London-based Institute of Economic Affairs [IEA]…became almost the only organization that continued to promote him and his work in the country during this period.”

In the United States, Hayek would also be directly involved with the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute. These think tanks, each tied to the Koch family’s fossil fortune, would each play a role in the rise of climate denial during the 1980s and ‘90s.

Not For All Men

Hayek's free market philosophy did not mean total freedom for all men though.

He was, during his life, a keen supporter of General Augusto Pinochet,whose death squads tortured and murdered thousands of citizens following the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile during a military coup in 1973.

“Don't confuse totalitarianism with authoritarianism,” Hayek said of Pinochet. “I don't know of any totalitarian governments in Latin America. The only one was Chile under Allende. Chile is now a great success. The world shall come to regard the recovery of Chile as one of the great economic miracles of our time.”

Communism, therefore, was not despised because of the violence of revolution but instead because it posed a real threat to the private property of the wealthy. Hayek believed that only people who were over the age of 45 should be allowed to vote, and that people receiving benefits should have the right withdrawn.

Neighbourhood Effects

However, Hayek also considered himself an environmentalist; he supported the World Wildlife Fund and the National Trust in the UK.

He had argued that it is “often impossible to confine the effects of what one does to one's own land to this particular piece; and hence arises those 'neighbourhood effects' which will not be taken into account so long as the owner has to consider only the effects on his property. Hence also the problems which arise with respect to the pollution of air or water and the like.”

This statement should light the way for those who now claim to carry his flame.

Up next: How the former IEA director general, John Blundell, recruited British students with a flair for free market economics to the US for internships at Koch-funded think tanks.

@Brendanmontague

The Philanthropy Roundtable said of the Earhart Foundation in 2004, "For 75 years, the Earhart Foundation has epitomized achievement in the humanities and social sciences. ... Harry B. Earhart started the foundation in 1929 with the fortune he made with White Star Oil Company. Among his foundation's early beneficiaries was Friedrich von Hayek of the London School of Economics, who wrote The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty."[2]

INCUBATOR: The foundation supports free-market scholars through a network of 50 "Earhart professors" across the United States: "We find promising young men and women that we think would be ideal, not only from an intellectual but also from a character point of view, to be teachers and academic leaders in the future. And when we so identify them, we recommend them to the Earhart Foundation. They provide grants, and we continue to mentor these students as they go through graduate school." [3]

The Kochs have embraced the pure free-market ideology of economist Friedrich von Hayek,who argued that any form of centralized government would lead to totalitarianism and that only complete, unregulated capitalism could ensure freedom. Many “tea party” supporters, such as Fox News host Glenn Beck, have openly embraced von Hayek’s ideals.

wtf: Two years later, Norquist is finally crossing that item off his bucket list.

In a month, he and his wife will set out for Black Rock, Nev.—a barren, 300,000-acre desert that transforms into a hedonic metropolis for one week every August. (For more background, read Wells Tower's excellent story in GQ about his trip to Burning Man).

After Norquist announced Monday his plan to attend the festival, many reacted with disbelief, orsimply declared, "Burning Man is dead." But Norquist insists that the drug-filled utopia in the desert shares some common values with his own group, Americans for Tax Reform.

"Burning Man was founded in '86, the same year as the Pledge, and the first Burning Man had 20 people at it, and our first Center-Right Meeting—the Wednesday Meeting—also had 20 people. So I think there's a real kinship there," Norquist says. "These are very similar operations, except we tend to wear more clothes perhaps at the Wednesday Meetings."

Burning Man relies on a "giving economy" where attendees are encouraged to give goods and services free of charge—a system that Harvey has called "old-fashioned capitalism." And this is hardly the first instance of capitalists like Norquist being drawn to Burning Man. In recent years,Silicon Valley's elite, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt, have flocked to the event.

Norquist says the festival is a good example of the theory of spontaneous order. The theory, which was promoted by Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek, holds that a natural structure will emerge out of a seemingly chaotic environment without need for outside intervention.

"There's no government that organizes this," Norquist said. "That's what happens when nobody tells you what to do. You just figure it out. So Burning Man is a refutation of the argument that the state has a place in nature."