Sublime

At the Freedom School, Charles became particularly enamored of the work of two laissez-faire economists, the Austrian theorist Ludwig von Mises and his star pupil, Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian exile, who visited the Freedom School. Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom had become an improbable best seller in 1944, after Reader’s Digest published a

Hayek: “Planning leads to dictatorship.” The purpose of government is to secure individual rights, little else. One sip of social welfare and free government dies.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, has stated that the idea for establishing Wikipedia came to him after he read this paper by Hayek and his explanation of knowledge.

I ended up with a picture in my head of a market economy as a far-from-equilibrium communications network that uses prices to transmit information about wants and scarcities to people who make production and consumption decisions, exactly as Friedrich von Hayek4 explained almost 90 years ago.