Comments on: Hillary and Hayek, redux

By: tanstaafl

tanstaafl — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:58:00 +0000

A recent explanation for the subprime crisis offered by the Left was that it was all GWB’s fault (’natch)

His failure this time around (the argument continues) was to adequately regulate the financial industry.

(don’t for a moment consider the possibility that the financial sector might regulate itself, as it had heretofore for much of its history. Those days are done)

In the thinking of the New World Order, this can’t be remedied from within. Only overarching and all inclusive government could possibly regulate and control any and all societal directions or events.

In the inexorable march backwards, just shelve all those Hayek insights and truths.

Central to Hayek’s teaching is the unyielding fact that human ingenuity is limited, that the elasticity of freedom requires the agency of forces beyond our supervision, that, finally, the ambitions of socialism are an expression of rationalistic hubris…“Whoever,” Hayek notes, “has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower—in short, what men should believe and strive for.”

By: renminbi

renminbi — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:46:32 +0000

HRC did not make a killing in the Cattle Futures Market. The trades were allocated to her by her commodities advisor who was legal counsel for Tyson Foods. I know the commodity futures business- I made a living at it.
It looks to me that the trades were given to her as a bribe.In the late 1970s some commodity futures merchants were not sticklers for time stamping the trades-try that nowadays and you might be in trouble for money laundering.The clearing firm, REFCO, was notorious for sloppy record keeping and was, in fact,fined for that.
Victor Niederhoffer had an article on the subject in the Feb.20,1995 National Review which explained things very clearly. As you can guess the MSM were not very curious. A real surprise that,eh?

By: Peter Laverick

Peter Laverick — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:41:04 +0000

Glad to see you quoting the famous line of W.S. Gilbert, which in itself sums up the whole problem with leftist/statist thinking.

By: AR

AR — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:58:10 +0000

Jeez. All this because HRC proposed helping out people who are in jeopardy of losing their homes or may be unable to afford heat in the winter. I’m no economist, but in my reading of The Road to Serdom, Hayek makes it pretty clear that he is not explicitly against government programs that provide a basic level of support to those in unfortunate circumstances or (indeed) government interventions designed to correct unfair market practices. I’m not a fan of HRC, but I don’t see where she says that she wants to set prices or control industry sectors …

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:52:31 +0000

“No 585 people who ever trod upon this earth are smart enough to efficiently and “fairly” direct the economic activity of 300,000,000 million people. It now looks like the Soviet Union will get the last laugh.”

As Hayek points out, nobody CAN be smart enough to know and understand the ever changing, constantly churning ideas, attitudes and opinions of any large body of humans. How do you get the data that exists no where else but inside the skulls of 300 million people? How do you process it in a timely enough fashion to do any good?

It boils down to this, central planning is trading the minds of millions, for the minds of a few, or even one. No one mind knows as much as a million minds. You don’t fix an important problem by putting fewer brains on the job. You put as many brains as you can to find a fix.

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:40:11 +0000

If the opposite of freedom is slavery, then isn’t the opposite of a free market a slave market?

I would like to see Ms. Clinton’s thoughts on this. If you are not for the free market, then you must be talking about some form of enslaved market. Control means taking freedoms away from people, and taking freedoms is a form of enslavement.

Of course, didn’t she make a killing in the commodities market a few years back?

By: Maggie's Farm

Maggie's Farm — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:19:00 +0000

Elections

I am tired of the primaries and the elections. Michelle live-blogged the Dem debate while most people snoozed. However, our friend TigerHawk managed to find some humor in it. Obama calls Bill Clinton a liar. Is that news to us? He is supposedly runni…

By: Maggie's Farm

Maggie's Farm — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:28:19 +0000

Candidate for Best Political Short Essay of the Year: Kimball on Hayek and the Dems

When Roger writes, it’s a safe bet that he is writing what we would write, had we the time, brains, and talent. A quote from Hillary and Hayek, Redux:As Hayek observed, the socialist, the sentimentalist, cannot understand why, if people have been able to

By: LesLein

LesLein — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:08:09 +0000

By coincidence, I just finished Jonah Goldberg’s fine book, Liberal Fascism. In 1933 FDR wrote to his ambassador to Italy, Breckinridge Long, a letter stating that “that admirable Italian gentleman [Mussolini] is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.”

By: Three Sources

Three Sources — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:57:00 +0000

Hillary and Hayek

It pains me to type those names together, but that is the title of a Roger Kimball piece that he has revised and reposted in honor of Senator Clinton’s comments that we noted yesterday. The urgency with which Hayek condemns…