Free Republic

“The whole apparatus for spreading knowledge, the schools and the press, wireless and cinema, will be used exclusively to spread those views which, whether true or false, will strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority; and all information that might cause doubt or hesitation will be withheld.”Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944) I just received a remarkable invitation to an upcoming lecture series entitled, “Weeding out Neutrality,” the advertised speakers being “activist librarians” who aim to destroy “old myths about libraries and neutrality” so they can curate collections that are openly and...

Recently the books 1984 and Animal Farm have had a rebirth of relevance. Orwell’s books coined words and phrases that have become descriptive of what is happening now -- doublethink, Ministry of Truth, Big Brother, thought criminal, Newspeak, and, of course, Orwellian.Another book with a similar theme was written in 1944 by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek -- The Road to Serfdom. Hayek was born in Austria in 1898 and spent most of his life in England and America. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.Orwell’s 1984 and Animal...

Not long after the end of World War II, author and economist Friedrich A. Hayek wrote in “The Road to Serfdom” that fascism and communism were really two sides of the same coin.For this, he was sharply criticized and even mocked. We just teamed up with the communists to beat the fascists, the argument went. True, Stalin (grudgingly) fought alongside the Allies to defeat Hitler. But Hayek warned that this was an anomaly; both ideologies exalted top-down state control and were ultimately antithetical to individual freedom.It’s time to revisit Hayek’s warnings.Arguments about fascism are all the rage at the moment....

It is time to admit it; modern conservatism is almost a complete and utter failure. Today’s conservative movement seems to employ a lot of folks in pretty cushy jobs, prints some magazines, hosts some websites, publishes various books, and puts on conferences until the cows come home – for those who don’t know, conferences and seminars can be big time money makers. Sadly, its primary purpose seems to have become a self-propagating jobs program for those lucky, skilled, or connected enough to rise to the top.

Donald Trump was giving it his all during a final rally in New York Monday, but in the midst of his speech he made a flub. In a video obtained by CNN, the GOP candidate accidentally refers to 9/11 as the convenience store 7-Eleven, probably best known for its Slurpees. "I wrote this out, and it's very close to my heart because I was down there and I watched our police and our firemen down at 7/11, down at the World Trade Center right after it came down," he said. "And I saw the greatest people I've ever seen in...

Baltimore is burning and the book most relevant to the tragedy, and to that of Ferguson, MO, Detroit, MI, and many other cities in the US is Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. The media will pimp the idea that racism caused the rioting, looting, and burning, but racists live in every city in the US that is not on fire. Baltimore and Ferguson have more in common with the Arab “Spring” and the frequent rioting in Paris and London than with the civil rights marches of the 1960s. Cairo and Tunis erupted a few years ago because they had armies...

Paul Krugman, a few years ago, wrote at length to extol the magnum opus of science fiction grandmaster, Isaac Asimov, theFoundation Trilogy. Prof. Krugman’s reflections thereon are of keen interest. I met Asimov once, 40+ years ago, at a world science fiction convention. I even got him to autograph my Science Fiction Book Club copy of “The Foundation Trilogy.” This compilation of three novels is an SF classic. I, then and since, found it too dull to read in full. (Asimov’s I, Robot then was much more engaging to this long-ago SF geek. But nothing Asimov wrote really rivaled Heinlein’s...

The case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends. If there were omniscient men, if we could know not only all that affects the attainment of our pres­ent wishes but also our future wants and desires, there would be little case for liberty. It is because every individual knows so little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to...

The GOP just keeps getting weirder.

I just started reading The Road to Serfdom - just started the second chapter after slugging through the various introductions and prefaces. About halfway through the first chapter, I started wondering – not for the first time – that whenever there is a discussion on socialism, some things – to me – always seem to be missing. One, how come no one ever does a compare/contrast with socialism and our Declaration of Independence and Constitution? Two, how come no one really defines socialism? How did it start? What is the difference between communism, Marxism, socialism, fascism, Nazism? I have heard...

THE ROAD FROM SERFDOM By Bill Steigerwald FrontPageMagazine.com | August 30, 2005 More than 60 years ago, when the world was at war and government planning of economies was held in the highest esteem by the Western democracies, the great libertarian economist F.A. Hayek wrote “The Road to Serfdom,” a provocative work that quickly became one of the century’s most important manifestoes for economic, political and personal freedom. Hayek warned that giving governments more and more control over the economies of free societies was not going to lead to socialist utopias but to totalitarian hellholes like Nazi Germany. “The Road...

The executive branch isn’t the only arena in which the Obama affirmative action crusade will be felt over the next four years. The legislative branch, too, offers manifold opportunities for mischief. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-148), or “Obamacare,” for example, offers a generous supply of tripwire. Section 5301, which defines criteria for federal aid to medical schools, contains a subsection, “Priorities in Making Awards.” It states: “The Secretary [of Health and Human Services] shall give priority to qualified applicants that…have a record of training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups.” Section 5303,...

Election day is a week away. For an economist, this has been one of the worst campaigns I can remember, measured by the rhetoric of the candidates. Unemployment is still near 8% three years into the recovery. The Federal government is consistently spending a trillion dollars more than it takes in. We're in the aftermath of an economy-wide disaster but there has been remarkably little discussion of how we got here. Wall Street has been living off the rest of us and what are we to do about it?Virtually none of these issues have gotten any real attention. And...

As Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney take the stage in Tampa next week, the ghost of an Austrian economist will be hovering above them with an uneasy smile on his face. Ryan has repeatedly suggested that many of his economic ideas were inspired by the work of Friedrich von Hayek, an awkwardly shy (and largely ignored) economist and philosopher who died in 1992. A few years ago, it was probably possible to fit every living Hayekian in a conference room. Regardless of what happens in November, that will no longer be the case. Hayek’s ideas aren’t completely new to American...

It was an error for the Republicans to bring in New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as the key speaker at their convention. While all of the excitement and adventure in politics in the last three years has been among conservatives, Christie is the great, faithless bet against conservatives’ future and a futile attempt to institutionalize the past. At CPAC events these last three years, up to 40 percent of young conservatives yearned for Ron Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano; STATES’ RIGHTS, SOUND MONEY AND CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT. The other 60 percent — the National Review crowd, the neocons, the Bush apparatus,...

When I was reading F.A. Hayek "The Road to Serfdom," I remember being astonished that Hayek reported that in Britain during the 1930's, workers were consigned to their jobs by the British government, and failure to comply would result in prison time.I no longer have book and I would like to find sources to confirm this history.I did a search for "Socialist Britain" and found no mention of this.Any help would be appreciated

I’m sensing some panic in the air. Certain people seem mighty concerned that other people are...discovering Hayek. As a W. S. Gilbert character might say, Oh horror! Economics and business reporter David Warsh is getting much attention for suggesting that F. A. Hayek, far from being one of the two most prominent economists of the 1930s—the other being Keynes—is rather more like the woman who was thought to have won the Boston marathon in 1980 when in fact she had joined the race, mostly unnoticed, a half-mile from the finish line. Hayek’s fans “have jumped a caricature out of the...

In this exclusive video, Nobel-laureate F. A. Hayek discusses the evolution of morality and social norms, arguing that they result from unplanned, emergent processes. He contrasts this conclusion with other philosophical accounts of law and morality.

Such was the title of a debate held at the Asia Society, sponsored by Thomson Reuters, which I attended several weeks ago. Coming at a time of agonizing societal fissures arising from debates over austerity, stimulus, and the wisdom of government intervention into the economy, this event pitting the backers of a Hayekian view of economics against those who espoused a Keynesian model seemed incredibly timely. After explaining to the audience the general structure of the debate and how it would be judged-spectators were given gadgets similar to those distributed at IQ2 debates, which they were to use to vote...

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES and Friedrich Hayek. The names conjure opposing poles of thought about making economic policy: Keynes is often held up as the flag bearer of vigorous government intervention in the markets, while Hayek is regarded as the champion of laissez-faire capitalism. What these men actually thought — about the economy and each other — is more complicated, as Nicholas Wapshott demonstrates in “Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics” (W. W. Norton, $28.95). This lively book explores one of the most pressing economic questions of our time: To what extent should government intervene in markets? And in...