Hayek Warns of "Omnipotent Elected Assembly"

Friedrich A. Hayek, Nobel laureate in economics and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991, responds to a question posed by a student at Stanford University in the 1970s. The question pertains to the prospect of free markets in a democracy if reform measures are seen as unpopular.

His answer seems relevant today given the crisis in the United States and particularly in regards to the proposal submitted to Congress by Treasury Secretary Paulson.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Hayek
• Democracy
• Inflation
• Unemployment
• Reform
• Congress
• Money
• Crisis

[Rundstedt1]

Polanyi’s famous rebuke to Hayek was proven in Chile, “[The] lassiez-faire economy was the product of deliberate State action...lassiez-faire was planned.”. In order to plan for the free market, they had to overthrow democracy, which had definitively moved against the free-market in that era. What occurred in Chile was an authentic 'counter-revolution' and like all revolutions it requires violence - "Perspectivos" 2/05/10

[objectivistathlete]

@Rundstedt1 Is democracy sacred, even when 51% of the population can vote away 49% of the population's rights?

[BullToTheShit]

Sorry, but I need subtitles to understand 100% of what he's saying.

[objectivistathlete]

@Rundstedt1 You cannot definitively say that Hayek "supported" Pinochet's regime. Furthermore, Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" didn't predict an INEVITABLE march to socialism. As we have seen, most of the developed world has taken a step back from socialism by liberalizing their economies in the past few decades. However, after the financial crisis these countries have further moved toward socialism via bailouts, fiscal stimuli, and monetary printing.

[Rundstedt1]

@Malthus0

His rebuke to everything Hayekain (And Misesian) still stands. And Hayek's treatese has been proven wrong again and again, he believed that the Labor gov't in the UK would lead to totalitarianism and that the more social orientated states in Western Euprope were on a 'Road to Serfdom', and yet it was HE who supported and courted dictatorships like the murderous Pinochet regime.

[Malthus0]

@Rundstedt1 Polanyi did not aim the Great Transformation at Hayek, he aimed it against Mises. Polanyi's book does not address the The Road to Serfdom in fact the 2 books main points are compatible. Both Polanyi & Hayek can be right. As Hayek never attacked the kind of planning state or private that creates or maintains a spontaneously ordered society. The example he gave was a gardener, & gardeners have to be pretty drastic with weeds sometimes in order to allow the garden to flourish

[SoccerShadow]

Is there a transcript of this somewhere?

[FrankiePoker]

That was awesome. Hayek is brilliant.

[Worldslargestipod]

@Rundstedt1 - Which is why democracy needs to go

Elections are not contracts, they mean nothing, they specify nothing, they represent the will of nothing. They are little more than a symbolic gesture that codifies the relinquishing of absolute power to the hands of a few and are thus not qualitatively different from an oligarchy or dictatorship or monarchy.

it is not a say in the direction of the country, it is a suggestion box for slaves.