I am taking vacation gone fishing, which is my code for sitting at home doing with my time that which I wish to do. So what am I doing right now? I am listening to a fascinating lecture by Friedrich A. Hayek from 1977 in which he presents an argument in defense of the Free Market Economy. It warns of the dangers associated with the pretense of knowledge when attempting to enforce economic policies on an otherwise free market. If youd be interested in hearing this lecture, Ive provided a link below. I have also provided a quote I took note of from the lecture which I find particularly eloquent and intriguing: “As a framework of human interaction, all people are guided by certain basic moral principles, among which such things as a respect for another person’s property, the duty of keeping contracts, and in fact in short, what the traditional private and criminal law provide and have put into legal forms are the basic moral rules on which our society rests, on which our productivity depends, and on which if we didn’t recognize it, would destroy that wealth for which you have to take in order to improve the position of those people who are well off.” “Many so-called good people want to impose on public life other morals which are clearly incompatible with a working market society and which are in a way inherited or derived for a much earlier primitive society of small groups in which people were working not for serving “unknown people somewhere”, but when it was thought that the only good you could do was to serve the known needs of your known fellow man. These good people who never understood how a market economy works, had the conception that to be socially beneficial, you had to serve known particular needs of particular other people, and everything that was not thus guided was immoral and antisocial, thus branding as immoral and antisocial the foundation on which our whole wealth, our riches and in fact increasing population to the numbers which is in 30 years espaced. An attempt to enforce on modern society this believe that if you want to be socially beneficial, you have only to do the sorts of things where you see that you are benefiting known other people, and you must NEVER be guided merely by the things of the market which tell you how you can produce something cheaply and find buyers will recompense you for them, would be a destruction of that order of society on which we all rely which produces the wealth on which we live.” youtube/watch?v=0Y0JhEesxOw
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 18:32:46 +0000
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