He had a couple of insights: his take on information was a good one. His prediction that the welfare state inevitably leads to tyranny has been falsified.
The OP might as well ask whether libertarianism will die with Ron Paul’s retirement. Again, I say it’s highly unlikely. [hijack] The real question is whether sensible conservatism will gain any traction. The short term odds look poor: dissenters such as Bruce Bartlett, an architect to the Reagan tax cuts, get sent to the cornfield. David Frum risks the same fate. And if sensibility or rigor are anathema, then I doubt whether any given crank or fringe theory will lack an audience. Conservatives deserve better; businessmen deserve better; the nation deserves better. [/hijack]
Now you’re bitching about Glenn Beck? Is he even still on the air?
And would you like to explain to the viewers at home how exactly Ron Paul managed to pervert both markets and public policy? Does he have some sort of magical powers that extend beyond that of all the other United States Congressmen? He’s only been in Congress since 1997.
He’s not even relevant within the Republican Party, why do you such a hard on for him? Are you sure your anger wouldn’t be better directed towards guys like the chairman of the party Reince Priebus. Or maybe Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, or Eric Cantor.
Hayek was alright. Like the other old Austrians, he didn’t know any statistics, and I wouldn’t want him actually in charge of anything, but he was pretty much “the good Austrian”. I’m perfectly okay with lots of little Hayeks in the corner, thinking philosophically about prices as information and free banking. I just wish some of them would learn some god damn math.
It’s the anarchist Rothbard who was completely insane. It’s his followers that are the gold-worshiping morons.
I find it curious how Hayek seems to have replaced Friedman as the iconic free market economist of the 20th century. A few weeks back there was a Planet Money podcast on Keynes and Hayek and of course those Keynes versus Hayek videos have been all the rage.
It’s all the more curious because the new focus on Hayek seems to be centred on business cycle theory where his ideas really haven’t stood the test of time. There was a massive debate between Keynes and Hayek in the 1930’s but Keynes completely won that debate and even Hayek’s supporters like Lionel Robbins basically became Keynesians. There have been no new developments in Austrian business cycle theory since then which would warrant a reversal of opinion.
By contrast Friedman landed some serious blows on Keynesian economics and had a large influence on real-world monetery policy as well. Friedman was a truly great economist who combined theory and empirical work unlike almost no one else. His work has vastly more practical relevance than the entire Chicago/Minnesota school which followed him. Hayek was also a great economist but in a more abstract way operating at the intersection of economics and philosophy. He has almost nothing useful to tell us about macro policy in the current crisis.
Friedman believed that “To spend is to tax,” so he took a dim view of GWBush’s tax cuts. That’s problem #1 for the modern conservative. Friedman also believed in a muscular monetary policy to fight depression. Modern conservatives view this as debauching the currency and leading to hyperinflation, without bothering to compare their beliefs with the historical record. Friedman believed that an insufficiently activist Fed led to the Great Depression, but that New Deal spending was defensible because it was an emergency after all. Strike three.
There is a divide between Keynesians and Austrians. Friedman, however, is on the Keynesian side of that line. So it’s not surprising that his star has dimmed among modern conservatives. By analogy we might compare the serious GOP candidates running for President in 1980 with the current Republican clown car. It’s gotten to the point that when Jon Huntsman says he believes in science, he is treated like an avant guard weirdo. In short, Austrian economics, supply side economics and all manner of wishful thinking have a bright future on the conservative rubber chicken circuit.
I don’t know that their motives are that impure. I put it down more to the tendency of some folks to see the world in black and white. And with Austrian economics, you get a very black-and-white view of the world.
Note that the people who tend to embrace a black-and-white, good-versus-evil worldview in foreign affairs are often the same people who embrace the black-and-white economics of the Austrian school.
If you’re going to define your point into validity, then redistribution of wealth is truly Scottish. At any rate, I don’t think what you see in Europe right now is what Hayek would have called “serfdom.” Or maybe it is. Anybody know? If it is, so much the better for serfdom.
I heard one of those last week, and it actually managed to alter my opinion slightly on the causes of the housing crises. While I always recognized the importance of the alteration of interest rates by the government in creating the housing bubble (even before it burst,) that broadcast convinced me it was as important as the repeal of regulations and fraud by ratings agencies.
However, they overplayed their hand. The introduction said that the bubble and burst were not caused by “too little regulation, but by too much.” It completely failed to make any case that formal regulations – as opposed to actively toying with interest rates – were a cause rather than a solution to the housing crisis.
And the broadcast also took a cavalier attitude toward the depressions America experienced before the Fed took an active role. The financial crises of the 19th century were at least as bad as the ones in the 20th century, so going back to that era of free-wheeling banking would not lead to a more stable economy.
So I now more firmly believe that the Fed had a large role in creating the price bubble in housing due to artifically low interest rates, but it was exacerbated to several times the size it would have been otherwise due to ratings and CDO fraud. After all, no one would have bought the repackaged securities, even though they were forced by the Fed to scrounge for higher yields, if they had been honestly rated.
The postwar West-European social-democracy/welfare-state model has had about 60 years so far, and does not appear to be growing any more tyrannical. (It has other, strictly financial problems, of course, pretty serious right now; but we’ve had those many times in American history and weathered them, and without growing into a tyranny.)
1.) Friedman turned out to be correct and very insightful, but not so correct as to overturn Keynesianism. Neo-Keynesians have plundered and incorporated most of his more useful proposals and explanations for how the market works and made adjustments.
2.) A lot of Friedman’s hypotheses or explanation are downright freaking socialist to economic conservatives of today. A Negative Income Tax? Natural Rate of Unemployment? Permanent Income Hypothesis? Fucking American-hating commie.