Friedrich August Hayek
NEW DARLINGS OF THE RIGHT
Friedrich August Hayek CH (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992), born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek, was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought. He is considered to be one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century, winning the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974. Along with his mentor Ludwig von Mises, he was an important contributor to the Austrian school of economic thought.[1] Hayek's account of how changing prices communicate information which enables individuals to coordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics.[2] Hayek also produced significant work in the fields of systems thinking, jurisprudence, neuroscience and the history of ideas.
Hayek served in World War I, and said that his experience in the war and his desire to help avoid the mistakes that had led to the war (see below) led him to his career.
In 1974 Hayek shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal for his "pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and [his] penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena."[3]
Austrian School Economist
Hayek Finds New Fans
by Tamara Keith
November 15, 2011
Second in a three-part series
These days it can feel like the country is unsteady — politically, economically. In a search for the way forward, scholars and politicians often turn to their fundamental beliefs. NPR is taking a look at some of the most influential philosophers whose ideas molded the present and could shape the future. You might not know all their names, but you're certainly familiar with their ideas. They are woven into the fabric of our society.
The Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek's arguments for free-market capitalism and against socialism and central planning made him a popular figure in 1940s America — and again today.
The Road to Serfdom
Main article: The Road to SerfdomHayek was concerned about the general view in Britain's academia that fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism and The Road to Serfdom arose from those concerns. It was written between 1940 and 1943. The title was inspired by the French classical liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on the "road to servitude".[23] It was first published in Britain by Routledge in March 1944 and was quite popular, leading Hayek to call it "that unobtainable book," also due in part to wartime paper rationing.[24] When it was published in the United States by the University of Chicago in September of that year, it achieved greater popularity than in Britain.[citation needed] At the arrangement of editor Max Eastman, the American magazine Reader's Digest also published an abridged version in April 1945, enabling The Road to Serfdom to reach a far wider audience than academics.
The libertarian economist Walter Block has observed critically that while The Road to Serfdom is "a war cry against central planning," it offers lukewarm support for a free market system and laissez-faire capitalism,[25] with Hayek even going so far as to say that "probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all of the principle of laissez-faire capitalism".[26] In the book, Hayek writes that the government has a role to play in the economy through the monetary system, work-hours regulation, and institutions for the flow of proper information. These are contentions associated with the point of view of ordoliberalism. Through analysis of this and many other of Hayek's works, Block asserts that: "in making the case against socialism, Hayek was led into making all sort of compromises with what otherwise appeared to be his own philosophical perspective—so much so, that if a system was erected on the basis of them, it would not differ too sharply from what this author explicitly opposed."[25]
AMERICAN POLITICAL REALITY
Charles A. Reich
Charles A. Reich in Opposing the System (1995) brings the past into the present. As I have written in previous posts, his book although published in 1995, reads like it was published in 2011, proving the more things change the more they stay the same, and if you don’t know your history, you are bound to relive it. Taking up from my previous post on Managerial Decisions that has brought serfdom on American labor, I will fall back on the knowledge of Professor Reich.
Charles A. Reich states that a second major decision that affects the lives of ordinary Americans is how we will spend our money—on toys for children or schools for children, on entertainment or public libraries, on expensive automobiles or preserving natural beauty. In a free economy, this is a choice that is supposed to be made by the people.
When [we know as the Occupy Movement does], we find ourselves asking, as we now do, “What has happened to the money”—we are revealing that we have lost this soverign power of choice. If we had conciously made a decision not to spend our resources on such goods as education, there would be no mystery, even if we had made an unwise choice. The mystery arises when we cannot find the money for the goods we say we want.
THE FALACY OF THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY
Reich pays omage to John Kenneth Galbraith by stating that in his classic work The Affluent Society (1958), John Kenneth Galbraith made the important observation that our economy showed an increasing pattern of affluence in the private sector combined with impoverishment of the public sector.
Galbraith described the “public poverty” of urban decay, school overcrawding, insufficient public transportation, air and water pollution, shortages of parks and playgrounds, and a commmercially blighted countryside. He pointed out that privately produced wealth was in startling contrast to the impoverishment of publicly rendered goods and services, and that “our wealth in privately produced goods is, to a marked degree, the cause of crisis in the supply of public services.”
Galbraith observations have proven to be dire prophsies: In the the ensuing decades, we have seen more and more “public poverty,” which has caused ever deeper cutbacks in spending for all the public needs of society except for police [until 2010 when the Republicans decided Obama would be a one term President], prisons, and the military—the instrumentalisties of repression.
PRIVATIZATION OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR
Reich insists that this public impoverishment is caused by giving an almost absolute priority to “private” economic growth. Galbraith points out, for example, that advertising operates exclusively on behalf of privately produced goods. “The engines of mass communication, in their higest state of development, assail the eyes and ears of the community on behalf of more beer but not more schools. Even in the conventional wisdom it will scarcely be contended that this leads to an equal choice between the two.” And Galbraith offers several other substantial reasons why public goods are at a severe disadvantage in competing with private growth. Today’s “mystery” of no money for public services turns out to be no mystery at all. The missing money is to be found in the “private sector.”
Reich writes that what Galbraith could not imagine in 1958 was how far the process of neglecting public services would go, and the zeal with which “deficit reduction” (i.e., still further cuts in public expenditures) would be pursued by leaders of both political parties. Nor could he have anticiapated the national denial that public services are in may cases essential to the health of society, whereas the goods and services of the private sector may be unnecessary luxuries.
FEMINIST OPPOSING THE SYSTEM
Reich quotes that late Linda Davidoff whole obituary appeared in The Villager in 2004. Linda Stone Davidoff, executive director of the Citizens Union and a leader in parks advocacy and progressive political causes for four decades, died Dec. 31 in Tucson, Ariz., at the age of 62. As executive director of The Parks Council from 1988 to 1995, Davidoff developed the Civic Alternative site plan for Donald Trump’s Riverside South riverfront residential project between 59th and 72nd Sts. The plan, adopted by Trump, provides for reduced building density and for the 21-acre Riverside South Park currently under construction. http://www.thevillager.com/villager_37/lindadavidoff.html
Reich quotes Davidoff from her New York Times article:New York City seems determined to squeeze its Parks Department dry. In 1986 the department had 4,951 full-time employees—merger by the standards of other cities—to seed, mow, clean, prune, paint and repair 26,000 acres of ballfields, paths, woodlands, beaches, meadows, and flower gardens. By 1995, if Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s budget is adopted, the full-time staff will have fallen to 2,563. . . . (58)
House To Debate Balanced Budget Amendment
by David Welna
November 15, 2011
The House of Representatives is set to debate this week a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget each year. It's part of the same mandate of this summer's debt ceiling law that more famously requires Congress to slash $1.2 trillion from the deficit or face automatic, across-the-board cuts.
THINGS OF HISTORY NEVER CHANGE
Thus, across the nation, parks, both urban and wilderness, are suffereing a comparable tragic neglect [and closure]. And this neglect lessens everyone’s enjoyment and leads more and more people to feel a sense of clustrophobia that there is no longer beauty, or wilderness, or santuary to be found.
Reich concludes the two great decisions that make the most difference to ordinary Americans were not made by “big government” or by the voters but by unelected managers who are well isolated against the effects of their own decisions. Why do we passively accept this situation when we find the results so painful and unsatisfactory? The answer is that we have been led to believe that these decisions are being made not by mangers but by “the free market.” Despite overwhelming evidence that the freemarket is a myth, it is universally spoken of as if it were the central truth about our economy. It is not.
Did U.S. Tax Policies Increase Economic Inequality?
November 16, 2011
The Occupy Wall Street movement continues to protest policies that have made the top 1 percent of income earners richer, while about 14 million Americans are out of work.
Grover Norquist and Rick Perry
LOOKING FOR GOD--OH OR THE SECOND COMING OF FDR
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Gadot is a metaphor for the American Left and Progressives. Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's premiere. It was voted "the most significant English language play of the 20th century".[1]Waiting for Godot is Beckett's translation of his own original French version, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled (in English only) "a tragicomedy in two acts".[2]
The American Left, like Gogo and DeDi, is always waiting for a deliverer. This deliverer was embodied in the last incarnation as FDR. The Left never seems to see that it is the corruption of the US Congress which has left them dissapointed like Beckett’s characters in Godot.
In the early 1990s, I attended the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) Convention in St Louis. There I went to a lecture by its keynote speaker whose first name was Mary (if anyone out there in cyber space knows her last name please comment), who was a Beckett scholar and critic, especially on his Waiting for Godot.
As usual at these events, I had a comment and a question for the literary expert. I bagan my comment by naming the play. Then I was quickly corrected by “expert” Mary, a very wonderful and knowledgeble woman of letters. She corrected me. She said, “The English translation of the title is and Irish joke on Beckett’s part. The name Godot is God-‘O in the Irish tradition of naming. This familiarization or vulgarization of the diety is in the naming tradition of the Catholic Irish such as “Jock-O-me-boy.”
This taking God’s name in vain is part of the Irish Catholic comic nihlism which Beckett included in most of his work. In Waiting for Godot/God-O, he takes it this vulgorism to its ultimate, which Frank McCort wrote about in Angela’s Ashes and his brother Malichi wrote about in Tis.
The Left and Progressives in general complain about Obama as though they were the Isrealites wailing in the Wilderness against Jahovah who has delivered them out of the house of bondage to a hard task master in Egypt. Pretty soon they will be responsible for installing a Republican golden calf in the White House and allowing the corrupt 112th Congerss to remain seated in comfort.
The eight Republican presidential candidates sitting at the table listen as a video of former President Ronald Reagan is played during a debate at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., on Oct. 11.
IF YOU HOLD OUT CHANGE WILL COME
The United States is a failing democracy, not a theocracy.If Obama thought he had the strong backing from the Left and the Progressives that FDR had, instead of going against the 112 Congress (the most corrupt body since Reconstruction), then victory would be US! Obama is nothing but a man out on a political battle field alone. However some prefer to wait continue to wait for Man-Godot.
DIANE REHM TO MY POINT
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-11-14/katrina-vanden-heuvel-change-i-believe
"The Change I Believe In"
Guest Host:
Sigrid Estrada
The editor and publisher of the Nation addresses the challenges limiting political debate and why she's fighting for progress in the Age of Obama.
When President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, progressives cheered what they saw as a chance for real change in the country. One of those was Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the Nation. Still she cautioned, we progressives need to be as clear-eyed, tough and pragmatic about Obama as he is about us. Three years later vanden Heuvel takes stock of the president’s accomplishments and winces at the disappointment she and other supporters feel over compromises he’s made with republicans on critical social and economic issues. In a new collection of her columns, she addresses the challenges limiting political debate and why she's fighting for progress in the age of Obama.
Guests
editor and publisher of The Nation, writes a weekly column for The Washington Post.
Program Highlights
As a proud progressive, Katrina vanden Heuvel cheered the election of President Barack Obama. In the years since, she has expressed a less enthusiastic response to Obama's accomplishments in office, and to the state of American politics today. Vanden Heuvel talks about what she sees as Obama's biggest challenges now and what she thinks the Democrats need to do ahead of the 2012 elections.
High Hopes in 2008
Vanden Heuvel had a message for Obama when he was elected, and it included things she wanted to see him do during his term. To her, one of the most important tasks Obama had before him was to put demands on the banks, which she says he has failed to do. Obama also made a mistake in what vanden Heuvel calls "demobilizing" many of the people who helped get him elected. "In the system we live in, you need countervailing power," she said. "You need wind at your back, and the wind at your back to take on establishment power and corporate money in your system would be people."
Disappointments on Health Care, Financial Reform
Vanden Heuvel knows that compromise is an essential part of politics, but she saw Obama as retreating from his ideals during the long debate over health care reform. She said he had run on audacity, but what he demonstrated was conciliation. In her view, Obama allowed lobbyists to gut both the health care and financial reform bills, rendering them ineffective.
Obama's Accomplishments
Obama's supporters are irritated when left-leaning writers and commentators like vanden Heuvel come out with such strong criticisms of the president. But vanden Heuvel doesn't want people to look at her writing and her book as a denigration of the president. "It's trying to take a measure of not just the presidency, but the interconnection of movement, of leadership, of conditions in this country," she said. Passing two major pieces of legislation, appointing two strong women to the Supreme Court, and repealing the global gag rule are all accomplishments she acknowledges.
What Would an Obama 2012 Win Mean?
A listener asked vanden Heuvel if she would be optimistic if president Obama is re-elected in 2012. In her book, vanden Heuvel wrote that she thinks we need to be as pragmatic and clear-eyed about Obama as he is about us. Right now, she said it's important for movements to keep working with the president, and pushing him when needed - criticizing, engaging, and supporting when called for.
You can read the full transcript here.
Author Extra: Katrina vanden Heuvel Answers Audience Questions
Q: Why do the democrats never come out and support the president when the Republicans mislead the electorate? I think there would be a benefit to more widely supporting the stimulus or "failed stimulus" as they like to call it, as well as the health care bill and some of the tax reform the president has been talking about. There never really seems ot be much fact checking on the part or the liberals. - From Patrick via email
A: But many Democratss do come out and support the President when GOP misinforms, misleads the public. But it also demands a White House and a President willing to frame and fight hard to support and promote their policies – for example, the stimulus, which this White House didn’t do enough to “sell.”
Q: The left is missing the bullhorn that Fox News provides for the right.The Nation is a passionate, smart, critical voice that needs to be heard. What does Katrina plan to do to make the Nation more visible, more relevant and more part of the daily conversation ... currently it is dismissed as a liberal almost fanciful weekly. - From John via email
A: The independent/progressive media infrastructure is stronger now than it was 20 years ago. But it does need to get stronger. MSNBC has become a platform for some strong progressive voices; the Nation now has 1.5 million viewers on its website, thenation.com and has its reporters out on all platforms, radio and TV and more….We are also working with media across the country to make our voice more relevant and connected to real lived experiences of workers and others fighting the Right in places like Ohio and Wisconsin.
Q: Progressives are too reluctant to publicly embrace the fact that Obama and most other Democrats depend on Wall Street financing as much as the Republicans do and that their policy decisions reflect that dependence. If we get policies that favor the top 1% from both major parties, wouldn't it make sense to start supporting alternatives like the Green Party as one way to work toward more humane policies? - From Josh via email
A: I believe our first goal must be to get corporate money out of our political system and create a small donor network so a new generation of gutsy reformers can have a stronger voice in our politics. Then, as I lay out in THE CHANGE I BELIEVE IN, we must fight for political reforms — I have a passel of ‘em in the book — that would give third parties a real chance, not just Ross Perot third parties, which are top down and run by corporate money, but real alternative voices. But we would also be wise to support and grow the small “d” democratic wing of the Democratic party and find through public financing and new media an end to corporate money in our system...
Read an Excerpt
Excerpted with permission from the introduction of "The Change I Believe In: Fighting For Progress in the Age of Obama" by Katrina vanden Heuvel. Available from Nation Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2011.
BBC WORLD SERVICE
http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/?q=OCCUPY%20MOVEMENT
… said it would begin legal proceedings at the High Court to seek their eviction. The Occupy movement said its protest aimed to highlight the issues…
A spokesman for the Occupy Wall Street movement has been explaining what protesters are still doing in Zuccotti Park.
… contrasting views as the Occupy Wall Street movement faces a change in circumstances. I stand with Occupy Wall Street and have been down at Zuccotti…
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