Keynes vs Hayek

Hayek is the best of the two. Keynes is promoting the muddy mess of what the US is doing nowadays. Hayek promotes Free Market economy. He is yet another great son of Austria-Hungary.

Some selected quotes:

"Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be persuaded to adopt it as their program."

"There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal."

"The misconception that costs determined prices prevented economists for a long time from recognizing that it was prices which operated as the indispensable signals telling producers what costs it was worth expending on the production of the various commodities and services, and not the other way around."

"There is no salvation for Britain unless the special privileges granted to the trade unions in 1906 are revoked. the average level of real wages of British workers would undoubtedly be higher, and their chances of finding employment better, if the wages of different occupations were again determined by the market and all limitations on the work an individual is allowed to do were removed."


"Well, I would say that, as long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism." (By the way, he means liberal in the same way Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt Leddihn does, not in the modern American understanding)


"To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them. "

"The main point of my argument is, then, that the conflict between, on one hand, advocates of the spontaneous extended human order created by a competitive market, and on the other hand those who demand a deliberate arrangement of human interaction by central authority based on collective command over available resources is due to a factual error by the latter about how knowledge of these resources is and can be generated and utilised."

"Constitutional monarchy offers us … that neutral power so indispensable for all regular liberty. In a free country the king is a being apart, superior to differences of opinion, having no other interest than the maintenance of order and liberty. He can never return to the common condition, and is consequently inaccessible to all the passions that such a condition generates, and to all those that the perspective of finding oneself once again within it, necessarily creates in those agents who are invested with temporary power."

"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish."

All in all, he is very good in economics, and pretty good in politics, though not as good as Oliviera or Kuehnelt-Leddihn.

Yeah, you are right. However, I would say that the market should be left alone as much as possible.

Although, shouldn't the guilds be regulating such things, not the government?