 |
| Image credit |
This is my comment on a post introducing Hayek:
You write: “Like it or not, modern capitalist economies are all mixed economies with interventionist states.”
Excellent point. I refused to see it that way for a long time, and only oversight of this fundamental truth could make me an admirer of Hayek’s. Not much of substance remains of Hayek once one understands his neoliberal dogmatism which is based on the purported dichotomy of a pure market economy and socialism or a tendency toward socialism of immediate destructiveness. (You are either doing what the pure market economy demands or you are on the fast track to socialism, an attitude very pronounced in The Road to Serfdom.)
The best part of his work concerns the role of handling knowledge in an economy.
http://quaesivi.blogspot.com/2018/03/if-equilibrium-economics-is-wrong-why.html
His monetary theory is deficient in that he does not understand that any “free market in currencies” including the Gold Standard requires massive political intervention—and will not, as Hayek believes, deliver us of the need to engage in politics; his political theory tends toward the anti-democratic, while in my analysis of freedom democracy is one of the indispensable core features of liberty ( for which reason I consider him not a voice of liberty as much as he writes about her). His legal theory is also hollow insinuating the existence of quasi-Platonic constants of a rule of law that ensures perfect markets; unsurprisingly one never gets to grasp these miraculous super-rules when reading his “Law, Legislation and Liberty”; they remain an unsubstantiated promise. He does not understand that markets are fundamentally political because they require the constant working out of legal and other rules; and this working out is a thoroughly political process. Instead he expects the application of certain legal rules to depoliticised society and turn it into a purportedly unpolitical, mysteriously market-driven event.
Lastly, Hayek, the great theoretician of spontaneous order is hindered by his liberal dogmatism to extend the concept of a spontaneous order to the state, politics and society at large. Such extension would have made him understand that a free society is one of indeterminate outcomes and does not terminate in any specific preconceived vision of it, such as proposed by classical liberalism.
I have documented my criticism of Hayek in a series of posts, starting with this one: http://quaesivi.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-paradox-of-freedom-1-austrian.html
