Sublime

Starting in the wake of the last Great Depression, when many wealthy people woke up to the fact that their wealth did not protect them against bombs tossed through windows, most industrial nations have done the same thing by ratcheting up working class incomes, providing benefits such as old age pensions and providing plenty of free entertainment i

But, to anachronistically borrow our function metaphor once more, Hayek points out that the projection from the n-dimensions of information to the one dimension of price destroys an enormous amount of information.

The Philosophical Approach Keynes said “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Meaning, if you don’t know what intellectual software you’re running, you’re probably running it unconsciously.

“If you said to a dean that you wanted to fund conservative constitutional law, he would reject the idea out of hand. But if you said you wanted to support Law and Economics, he would be much more open to the idea,” he confided. “Law and Economics is neutral, but it has a philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government.

It’s claimed that “society needs them” and the free market won’t, or can’t, provide them. But who is “society” if not the same people who are already expressing their needs and preferences in the marketplace? If they aren’t willing to pay for the service in the free market (the General Market apart from the government), who can say they’re eager to

We could hold an ad hoc election, what H. L. Mencken described, with less exaggeration than he might have thought, as “an advanced auction of stolen goods.” And to make the example more realistic, we would agree to share some of the money we collected from you with these anonymous bystanders in exchange for their support. That is the role the moder

a proposal for a guaranteed income would today almost certainly be attacked as a liberal mechanism for attempting to bring about “equal outcomes.” Hayek himself explicitly rejected this, however, writing that “it is unfortunate that the endeavor to secure a uniform minimum for all who cannot provide for themselves has become connected with the whol

Government repudiates all responsibility for seeing that he gets bread. But it anxiously accepts all responsibility for seeing that he does not get beer. It passes an Insurance Act to force him to provide himself with medicine; but it is avowedly indifferent to whether he is able to provide himself with meals.