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Archive of posts published in the tag: Friedrick von Hayek

Gray Swans

Small firewalls that contained corrections were being dismantled, leading to larger, far more damaging crashes.  Part of this was the result of greater connections from travel and communications, but a great part is the result of central powers believing they can control macro markets when they cannot. There is just too much dispersed and unarticulated knowledge for anyone or any administrative bureaucracy to accomplish this.

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Why Individual Rights are Important

“It is because we normally do not know who knows best that we leave the decision to a process which we do not control. But it is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.”

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The Limits of Democracy

“Though democracy is probably the best form of limited government, it becomes an absurdity if it turns into unlimited government. Those who profess that democracy is all-competent and support all that the majority wants at any given moment are working for its fall. “

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The Danger of the Administrative State

“If anything has been demonstrated by modern experience in these matters, it is that, once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies. If the latter do not themselves determine the means to be employed, the decisions of their agents will be more or less arbitrary.”

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Nationalizing Bad Outcomes

Imagine the compromises when 100 Senators and 435 Representatives bargain to get their piece of the health care allocation in an atmosphere where bitter partisanship rules every issue.  In other words what seems to work in Europe is not easily transferable to a radically different political and economic environment.   And the complete comparative picture is not as clear as we are led to believe.  Maybe we spend more on health care because we want to.

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Facing the Limits of the Administrative State

This leads to a rethinking of the Administrative State in line with lessons learned and new thinking on how such organizations function.  Regulators are OK for executing clear laws, but terrible at designing systems and regulations  to advance unproven political theories.

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Three Core Defects of Socialism

“The third problem is that socialism, following Marx’s dialectical theory of history, lends itself to a theory of inevitability or preordination that leaves no room for dissent, and that leads in consequence to the elevation of a political class that responds to failure by searching for wreckers and dissenters to punish. “

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The Clipboard Tyrant

“Humans make hierarchies of status and privilege for themselves whenever the opportunity avails itself. This is why all socialist systems that do not work within the constraints of a liberal democratic framework of the rule of law inevitably descend into tyrannies. Give the state unbridled power, and the denizens of the state will use that power toward their own ends.”

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The Resistance is the Establishment

The belief in a ‘general will’ or the ‘people’s will’ is a myth. It is the calling card of the progressives as well as the socialists and Mussolini’s brand of fascism. We are a collection of interests and factions and the constitution is a system to balance those interests, not to ignore them or oppress them.

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A Checklist of Priorities

Pragmatism is considered the antithesis of ideology but fails to recognize that it has become an ideology.  Ideological is not the same as dogmatic.  Ideology according to Goldberg is checklist of priorities. 

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The Human Chessboard

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations with its often misunderstood ‘invisible hand’ was preceded by The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a work many consider more important and should be considered an integral part of Wealth of Nations. This Quotation of the

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The Unluckiest Political Movement

from Kevin Williams at National Review, Camino de Servidumbre But men do not like being told that they cannot do that which they wish to do, and this is particularly true of men who have a keen interest in political power.

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Hayek Predicts Venezuela

Kevin Williamson makes an interesting distinction between the welfare state and socialism. from National Review, Camino de Servidumbre There are two ways of thinking about economics: Many progressives (and many right-wing populists) believe that economics is less of a science

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The Party of Hate

A gem from Kevin Williamson at National Review, Fake Hate Crimes: There are many strands of conservatism and many kinds of conservatives. There are those such as myself whose views are shaped by the epistemic critique of central planning associated with

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Invoking the Tribal Instinct

From Robert Zubrin at Richochet, America Needs a Liberal Party: In his classic 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, then living in exile in England, shocked readers with his diagnosis of Nazism. National socialism, he argued, was not

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Distinguishing Welfare from Socialism

Political terms evolve and Kevin Williamson makes an rare but important distinction. Providing for the poor from the public sector is not not synonymous with socialism.  Socialism is more about government control of the economy than mere redistribution. from Venezuela

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Political Trade Schools

Henry Oliner 2106 01 19 Richard Hofstadter’s Anti- Intellectualism in America is often used by liberals to explain why conservatives vote as they do.  Hofstadter was motivated to expand on the subject by the rejection of Adlai Stevenson to the

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Required Ruthlessness

“What I have argued in this book, and what the British experience convinces me even more to be true, is that the unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist planning create a state of affairs in which, if the policy is

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A New Kind of Servitude

“Is it too pessimistic to fear that a generation grown up under these conditions is unlikely to throw off the fetters to which it has grown used? Or does this description not rather fully bear out Tocqueville’s prediction of the

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The Gradual Encroachment of Ideas

“It was perhaps John Maynard Keynes who said it best, in the closing chapter of The General Theory: the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than commonly

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