Friedrich Hayek

''This stub was purloined from Conservapedia! let's try and beat them at their game!''

Friedrich August Von Hayek (1899-1992) was a Nobel Prize winning economist and one of the most prominent member of the Austrian School of Economics, a libertarian movement. Hayek emphasized our limited knowledge of the markets (and other subjects), and thus our need for the price mechanism to communicate essential information about supply and demand. His theories are that no centralized planner or government can manage the economy and that the free market is the most efficient known allocator of resources.

Philosophical thought
Hayek, having lived under the Dolfuss regime in his native Austria, militated for freedom from state intervention, particularly as in the economic sphere a dirigiste programme represents an unhealthy trend towards the centralisation of power as (Barry et al, 1984, pp 114-5) in the face of failure of an interventionist policy occurs, Hayek argues, the authorities in charge will not see it as a sign to abandon it, but would rather be spurred on by the vested interests created by interventionist policies to attempt increasing intervention in the area of policy and other areas too (Barry et al, 1984 p 32, p 111). There is no compromise on Hayek’s radical view of liberal democracy, for nobody, not even government officials and central planners have perfect knowledge of what exactly goes on outside the realm of theory (Gray, 1998, p 80). His conviction thus is that the more intervention there is in the economy the sooner or later it will result in a free economy becoming more of a dirigiste regime, ushering later the movement of intervention from the economic sphere into other areas as well (Barry et al, pp 16-8 & p 32). Thus, from Hayek’s non-interventionist stance, it can be argued that elitism and democracy are inimical concepts, and from the premise that government elites cannot be trusted and as such, in a democracy the best outcomes will occur in an arena of "spontaneous order" (Gray, 1998, pp 76-8). Hayek argues that government must be restricted to a role of law enforcement and non-intervention (Gordon, 2005, p 3)

Important ideas

 * Primacy of the marketplace
 * Conservative anarchy
 * Free trade

The Road To Serfdom
His most famous book is The Road To Serfdom (1944). Hayek has been compared to the philosopher David Hume with respect to his insistence that we should be "sensible of our ignorance."