Many of the world’s religious leaders decry the evils of income inequality stemming from a globalized economy. My first post, based on economic reports from such institutions as the World Bank, showed that recent pronouncements by the Pope, the Ecumenical Patriarch, and the Dalai Lama have followed a conventional wisdom that does not capture what has actually gone on in recent economic history: namely, that even as inequality has widened, extreme poverty has simultaneously decreased. I brought in the economic analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his insights about wealth production in modern societies and the wrong assumptions people make about it.
I know this is not the most consequential issue out there, but it is significant at least for those of us who read and write books. When I read an academic book, I want there to be footnotes at the bottom of the page, not endnotes at the end of the book. It is much more difficult to turn to the back of the book than to simply glance at the bottom of the page. This is especially important for law books, because so much of the legal literature is placed in footnotes, including important substantive points. Yet, publishers strongly favor…
The Rev. Timothy Dwight (President of Yale, 1795-1817, leading Congregational and Federalist thinker, enemy of Thomas Jefferson), wrote about the three great good works: piety, benevolence, and self-government. Self-government meant the well ordering of one’s life so he could live as a free and responsible human being. If a person was well self-governed, he would be able to live a pious life and a benevolent life. But self-government was difficult to obtain without piety and the support of free institutions upon which private benevolence also depended. So the three good works were closely intertwined and were supported by the institutions…
Ted McAllister and the Liberty Law Forum at Liberty Fund are to be thanked for resurrecting a vitally important but seemingly forgotten, or, at least, neglected topic. The subject of McAllister’s essay is the American tradition of liberty, which he contrasts with perfect or abstract liberty. He asks two important questions: What is distinctive about…
“The Institutions of American Liberty” is a nicely written and, for the most part, compelling encomium to the tradition of American liberty and the institutions upon which it rests. The author of this piece, as so many following Tocqueville have observed, rightly notes that American history displays “a fervor of institution building by people who…
Lamentably, I find myself in general agreement with the thoughtful commentaries on my essay by the three respondents, C. Bradley Thompson, Steven Grosby, and William Dennis. This is not to say that underneath this broad consensus there aren’t serious and enjoyable differences of philosophy that warrant sustained engagement. Taken as a whole, the body of…
Mark Blaug’s Economic Theory in Retrospect argues that the Keynesian revolution in economics after the publication of The General Theory was a unique event in economic history because of its rapid and almost complete conversion of the economics profession to its central ideas. Frank Knight’s Presidential Address to the American Economic Association in 1951 actually acknowledges this victory of Keynesian ideas within the economics profession but laments that Lord Keynes has successfully dragged economic thinking back to the dark ages. Keynes himself argued forcefully in The General Theory that a revolution in thinking was in order given how difficult it…
Comparing Friedman and Hayek’s Defenses of Liberty
The early 1960s were bleak for champions of the free society. True, we had yet to experience the onslaughts of Johnson’s Great Society, the Nixon Administration, and the Vietnam War. But the Cold War raged and following the Eisenhower administration the welfare state was entrenched and growing.
But from the rubble emerged within just two years of each other two remarkable books—first F. A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty in 1960 and just two years later Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. In these two books rest the roots of an intellectual counter-revolution that would transform not only the United States but the world over coming decades. Both books are simultaneously remarkable feats of scholarly and intellectual force on one hand but also inspiring in their vision for the blessings of a free society on the other. Although authored by two titans of the economics profession—in fact, Friedman received his Nobel Prize in economics two years after Hayek received his—both books were written to reach an audience beyond the ivied walls of the academy.
Yet while the books share many remarkable coincidences beyond their timing and the distinction of their respective authors, they differ in several subtle but important ways in the agenda that they establish for how to conceive of the project of building the free society. In this brief essay I will focus my attention on what I perceive to be an important methodological difference at the heart of the distinction between Capitalism and Freedom (CaF) and The Constitution of Liberty (CoL) and the systems that the two authors establish for preservation of the free society. Following that I will rashly venture to offer my opinion on the bottom line question concerning these two 50 year old books: if forced to choose, which of the two books should one read and use as a guide to understanding the intellectual and institutional foundations of a free society.
Mock-up of a new, libertarian frontier: "sea-steading"
Friedrich Hayek