I have heard a lot of people that think that these two men have all the answers to our situation we are experiencing in the US today………
This was a tweet I found the other day and felt I had to pass it along…….this is a bit troubling…at least for me……
“Hayek admired Pinochet’s Chile so much that he decided to hold a meeting of his Mont Pelerin Society in Viña del Mar, the seaside resort where the coup against Allende was planned. In 1978 he wrote to the London Timesthat 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.”For instance, Hayek—writing to The Times in 1978 and explicitly invoking Pinochet by name—noted that under certain “historical circumstances,” an authoritarian government may prove especially conducive to the long-run preservation of liberty: There are “many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies.”As Hayek notes, “democracy needs ‘a good cleaning’ by strong governments.”The Pinochet junta “enacted a new constitution in September 1980. . . . The constitution was not only named after Hayek’s book The Constitution of Liberty, but also incorporated significant elements of Hayek’s thinking.””I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking in liberalism. “Interestingly enough, Hayek had sent Salazar a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (1960) in 1962 and Hayek’s accompanying note to Salazar is particularly revealing: Hayek hopes 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.”Dictatorship, as he put it in his El Mercurio interview, was “a means of establishing a stable democracy and liberty, clean of impurities.”
What say you now?
“an authoritarian government may prove especially conducive to the long-run preservation of liberty … abuses of democracy” blah, blah, blah.
Wealthy, well-connected conservatives attach themselves to such notions because the liberty they are referring to is that which benefits them primarily and any abuses of democracy are actually actions by government that tend to favor the general welfare of all of its citizens, not just the plutocracy.
Milton Friedman and other Chicago School free-marketers saw Hayak as their intellectual mentor
Libertarians attch themselves to the names…..but do they really know?
Had to translate a BBC documentary on Hayek last year. Seems some politicians in Britain were giving him a serious second look.
Yeah and here also….scary thought when you realize what they really think…
Well, I’m sure we can think of political lefties who have also associated themselves, regrettably, with some of the evil committed by Communist states in the mid 20th century. Those are important, yes, but they’re not as important, since these men are social scientists, and not politicians, as their work in social theory. Heidegger couldn’t shake Nazism and Arendt never really condemned Heidegger for it – are you to write a post criticizing them if there is some Heideggerian or Arendtian (more likely) upswing? What matters more is there work in their fields, not some of the more disappointing aspects of their associations.
I find Hayek more interesting than Mises, mainly due to the works of how spontaneous orders do, and do not, arise in the world.
As for smart and engaging analysis from the Hayekian worldview today, I give you a political theorist, Jacob Levy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ORKWkb_1hQ and economist Mark Pennington: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXavnggAvsc. Again, you may disagree, and that’s important. But let’s take these ideas seriously if you want to either defend or shoot them down.
Thanks!
I would like to thank you for your input……personally I think that a benevolent dictator, which cannot think of one off hand, is a good idea in some cases…Iraq and Syria com to mind readily…..the thing about economics is that it is mostly theory…seldom does it work the way it is envisioned……thanx again for your visit…please stop by often…chuq