Hayek interview

— Alexa, the Amazon/Google service that tracks your web surfing and builds a soft web of suggestions, decided I would like this Reason magazine — F.A. Hayek Interview. She was right. From the 1920s until the ’40s, Hayek and his countryman Ludwig von Mises argued that socialism was bound to fail as an economic system … Continue reading “Hayek interview”

Alexa, the Amazon/Google service that tracks your web surfing and builds a soft web of suggestions, decided I would like this Reason magazine — F.A. Hayek Interview. She was right.

From the 1920s until the ’40s, Hayek and his countryman Ludwig von Mises argued that socialism was bound to fail as an economic system because only free markets–powered by individuals wheeling and dealing in their own interest–could generate the information necessary to intelligently coordinate social behavior. In other words, freedom is a necessary input into a prosperous economy. But even as Hayek’s elegant essay extolling market prices as the signals of a rational economy was hailed as a seminal contribution upon its publication in the American Economic Review in 1945, shrewd socialist theorists proved to the satisfaction of their peers that central planning could be streamlined so as to solve, with really big computers, the very information problem that F. A. Hagek had so courteously exposed.

She must have figured this out from reading the comments on Silicon Valley Politics.