Hayek Quotes of the Day
01 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, F.A. Hayek, liberalism Tags: FA Hayek, the road to serfdom
These passages from The Road to Serfdom are my favourite from Hayek because of the allusion to the need to look at institutional solutions to problems and to be flexible about the relative merits of different institutions.
His metaphor of the gardener tending to his plants is great.
Another excellent metaphor of his of the role of public policy is that of a maintenance squad in a factory making sure everything was working well, although the maintenance squad really didn’t care what the factory was producing.
My Hayek exposure was mostly The Use of Knowledge in Society style stuff. I am just now reading The Road to Serfdom for the first time.
While his analysis of why markets work has always been wonderful, from what I can tell his political economy seems to echo that of a distinctly left-of-center economist by modern standards.
Probably nothing has done so much harm to the [libertarian] cause as the wooden insistence of some [libertarians] on certain rough rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire.
We must save capitalism from the unconstrained free-market. Is this Hayek or Robert Reich? Hayek makes repeated reference to the fact that it is only competition as a rough principle that is to be supported. Indeed, he goes on to say
The [proper] attitude of the [libertarian] towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and in order to…
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