“In my conversations with people I meet in life, that fabled 99% doesn’t know about Milton Friedman, and they most likely know nothing about Hayek either.”
Agreed. It’s not just regular folks either. Many engineers and scientists are also clueless and just as likely to go along with Marxist thinking as anyone else.
‘Perhaps that is why we are sliding into tyranny and massive debt, because people in that fabled and important 99% aren’t interested at all (even on this very forum) in LEARNING the lessons of history so we can avoid them.”
True. I’m naturally optimistic. So, like a Jew in Germany in the 1930s, I feel like everything will turn out right. However, when I think about it, there seems to be little reason for optimism.
I remember a conservative commentator saying, “the left always overplays their hand.” However, this country may be so far gone that they can’t overplay their hand.
I could not be more in agreement with the entirety of your post.
These 99% who don’t know about someone like Mises are not uneducated.
They aren’t stupid.
And it spans the political spectrum.
I speak to a lot of people about things like this, and I always ask before I proceed something like “Have you ever heard of a man named Ludwig Von Mises?”
If they say no, I usually continue in my effort to link him to our current conversation by continuing “Ludwig Von Mises was an Austrian economist who fled Nazi Germany in 1940 to come to America...” and go from there.
I don’t judge people who don’t know about Mises, Hayek, Keynes, Friedman, or Sowell. Not a bit. I understand 100% and am not surprised when someone says they don’t know who any of them are.
But I do take exception with people (like some on this thread) who think the lessons those men taught are so worthless that people don’t need to know about them. I view that attitude as ignorant nearly to the point of intentional ignorance.
There are a lot of reasons for ignorance, but there are no good reasons for intentional ignorance.