We recently attended Richard Epstein’s lecture at George Mason Universityon“The Continuing Relevance of Hayek’sThe Constitution of Liberty.” (Disclosure: we are big fans of Epstein’s book “Simple Rules for a Complex World.”) In his lecture, Epstein delivered several devastating blows against Hayek’s body of work. Among other things, Epstein spotted an internal inconsistency in Hayek’s thinking. Let’s start with Hayek’s greatest contribution to the field of political economy: his counter-intuitive notion of “spontaneous order.” In his famous paper on “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” for example, Hayek explains why decentralized markets produce greater levels of peace and prosperity than centralized “command-and-control” systems do. Simply put, when people are free to decide for themselves what things to buy and sell, their choices spontaneously generate high levels of social coordination without any intentional design or central planning. In Hayek’sown words: “The continuous flow of goods and services is…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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