I continue to be bemused/repulsed by the reaction of so many of those who voted for Hillary. Their over the board lunacy will fade in time but it will not disappear because hypocrisy is part of their DNA and will surface again when something, they cannot tolerate, offends their sensibilities, like the opinion of others who disagree with them.
Then there are the paid rioters whose fascistic acts are even more disgusting but also more dangerous because they extend themselves, for pay, for the sole purpose of creating discord and bringing down civil societies. Their behaviour mocks that which they protest.
Eventually, they too fade from memory as the money runs out along with their 'trumped up'cause(s) but, they too, will resurface when they over-react when a black person is killed by a policemen, when Trump says something offensive or when they purposefully choose to misinterpret etc.
One day more rational liberals will wake up and realize a lot of senseless acts are being perpetrated while they chose to remain silent fearing a backlash from their own fringe. They may be disgusted with those on campuses who are engaged in smashing the protections granted by our Constitution, they may find rioting and destruction offensive yet, they remained silent. Eventually, they will learn they too are at risk of being devoured and then it might dawn on them how feckless their own silence but it will be too late.
Neither can they justify their silence by defending and projecting their own lies and baseless charges against Donald but they have to justify their behaviour and that of their ilk and can only do so comfortably by 'proceeding in silence.'
I would not want to serve with them because I would never be comfortable trusting my life to them. They have no spine. They are a pathetic example of intolerance. They might claim to be educated, they may mouth about their care for the "little man" the "underdog" but I do not trust them because I refuse to ignore their hypocrisy and self-righteousness.
Their inferiority does not make me feel superior, just sad. Their lies do not sell me. I judge them by their actions and less by their words but when the words and actions unite that is all the evidence I need to reach my conclusion about their intolerance. (See 1 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Obama's many lies will eventually begin to trickle out and those who reveal them will, no doubt, be accused of being racially motivated, politically biased and un-PC. Light of day exposure, like Clorox, is cleansing. It is just a matter of time. Stay tuned. (See 2 below.)
===
Is the Democrat Party being taken over by Bernie Sander's Socialists? If so, this should help insure their defeat far into the future unless Americans want to follow "the sick men" of Europe and decline at a swifter pace than already.
If you believe I am out of my mind and/or irrational I urge you read: "The Road To Serfdom" by Friedrich von Hayek.
Hayek lost his intellectual battle with Keynes, who was embraced by Liberals as their darling. The rest is history, deficit spending and inflation and the root of America's fiscal problems. (See 3 and 3a below.)
===
The entire staff of The Weakly/Sickly Standard opposed Trump and now, like The NYT's, is going through their own self-examination and mea culpa in order to retain their readership. They just lost my re-subscription.
The magazine has a cadre of excellent writers who were so busy defending the Republican elites they lost their intellectual way and panicked over the prospect and consequences of a Trump election. (See 4 below.)
===
Dick
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1)Jewish Groups at Texas U Cancel Lecture by Author Caroline Glick for Fear of ‘Alienating’ Anti-Zionists on Campus
by Lea Speyer and Rachel Frommer
A program slated for Monday, featuring a lecture by renowned American-Israeli writer Caroline Glick — author, most recently, of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East — has lost the sponsorship of Jewish and pro-Israel student groups at the University of Texas at Austin fearful about how her message might anger anti-Zionists on campus,The Algemeiner has learned.
“Some people are concerned Glick may not be the best representative for what we are trying to accomplish — that is, promoting our message and advocating for Israel,” Eliav Turk, who sits on the board of both Texans for Israel and AIPAC on Campus, told The Algemeiner. “There are fears she may alienate student groups and minorities we are trying to attract, which have traditionally taken a non pro-Israel stance.”
The organizations that have withdrawn their support for the program — funded by CEO of Davidsohn Global Technologies, Joseph Davidsohn — include Hillel, Texans for Israel and AIPAC on Campus.
Davidsohn called the push-back against Glick disgraceful. “She is being vilified because student groups believe she promotes a one-state solution — which means they clearly haven’t read her book,” he told The Algemeiner. “It is important that students hear her speak and learn an alternative narrative about Israel, not just the one put out by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine or Black Lives Matter.”
Rabbi Moshe Trepp, a Jewish life educator at UT Austin’s Hillel and one of the main campus organizers of the event, told The Algemeiner that the student government was informed by Hillel that its official sponsorship has been revoked, and that the reservation for the room in which Glick’s lecture was to take place was cancelled. Organizers are now attempting to find an alternative venue, either on or off campus, for her talk.
According to Trepp, the move came after student leaders “did their own research into Glick and saw that she was listed by liberal organizations as associated with a hate group — which is a false accusation, Glick is not full of hate, but she does say things about Israel that makes others uncomfortable.”
He said that the students’ attempt to keep her out of UT Austin is “creating an atmosphere on campus where left-wing haters who say terrible things about Israel and the Jews are never protested, and we can never bring in a person who forces people out of their comfort zone.”
The Algemeiner also learned that a Christian student was allegedly intimidated for promoting the event. She reported being told that by advertising the lecture, she is making a bad name for herself at the university — and could even cause riots.
Margo Sack, the director of Jewish student life at UT Austin’s Hillel chapter, denied ideology played a part in the cancellation. “An outside donor suggested hosting Caroline Glick on our campus, but our student leaders determined there was not enough student interest at this time,” she told The Algemeiner. “The proposed program was never placed on the calendar, because students were not interested in hosting her.”
She protested: “Texas Hillel does not shy away from diverse voices participating in discussion about Israel on our campus. We respect our student leadership and will continue to make programming decisions based on student interest.”
Glick told The Algemeiner that she found it “very disconcerting that we’ve come to a point where American Jews, and reportedly pro-Israel Jews, no longer feel comfortable supporting Israel, and believe they somehow have to apologize for it. This is a travesty and a tragedy. I feel sorry for these students, who have been raised so poorly that they are being denied the basic knowledge about who they are as Jews and what the Jewish state stands for.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thursday's cordial meeting between President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama was a reassuring ritual of democracy. But Obama was far from convincing when he told Trump "we are now going to do everything we can to help you succeed." There are some highly disparate ideas here about what constitutes success, both foreign and domestic. There are also big areas in which one might reasonably wonder if Obama and his team are in a quandary over the prospect of a Trump administration inheriting the internal records of the most "transparent" administration ever.
Take, for instance, the Iran nuclear deal, Obama's signature foreign policy legacy, the chief accomplishment of his second term. The Obama administration's Iran file has been a realm of murk, crammed with dangerous concessions and secret side deals for terror-sponsoring Tehran -- to a degree that has left some critics wondering if Obama's real aim was to empower Iran as the hegemon of the Middle East (equipped with ballistic missiles to complement its "exclusively peaceful" nuclear program).
The cherry on top -- officially separate from the nuclear deal, but highly coincident -- was the Obama administration's secret conveyance to Iran early this year of cash totaling $1.7 billion for the settlement of an old claim against the United States.
Like Obama's other legacy achievement, the unaffordable Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, these Iran dealings were so intricate, extensive and opaque that we are still discovering just how duplicitous the official narratives were. Obama never submitted the Iran nuclear deal as a treaty for ratification by the Senate. Instead, he rushed the deal to the United Nations Security Council for approval less than a week after the final text was announced, and left Congress wrestling through the ensuing weeks, during the summer of 2015, to try to extract vital details from the elusive Obama and his team, subject to a legislative bargain so convoluted that the process, and the deal, never came to a vote.
For simplicity's sake, let's focus on the $1.7 billion "settlement" paid to Iran, which Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, apparently with no prior notice to Congress, announced this past January. Obama and Kerry did not mention at the time that the administration was shelling out the funds in cash, to be airlifted into Iran -- a form of payment especially handy for Iran's illicit ventures, such as terrorism and procurement for its ballistic missile program (the usual role of ballistic missiles -- which Iran has continued testing -- being to carry nuclear weapons, which Obama has assured us Iran under his deal is not developing).
Obama and his team also neglected to mention that $1.3 billion of his administration's cash bonanza for Tehran had come from the pockets of American taxpayers, via an obscure channel at Treasury called the Judgment Fund. It took months before such specifics came to light, which they did thanks not to the administration, but to the efforts of the press, and a number of persistent questioners in Congress -- to whom the administration sent tardy and evasive replies.
Questions continue to swirl around this cash-for-Iran arrangement. Was it a ransom for American prisoners released by Iran on the same day the Obama administration announced the $1.7 billion settlement? (The Obama administration has repeatedly asked the public to swallow the logical fallacy that because it is not U.S. policy to pay ransom, this was not a ransom).
Why did the administration -- until outed in August and September in a series of stories by the press -- make a secret of the cash, the conduits and the dates of delivery? What were -- what are -- the full terms of this confidential arrangement? Which, according to a Sept. 29 report in The Wall Street Journal, included, as part of a package of three secret documents signed in Geneva, U.S. backing for the lifting of UN sanctions on two Iranian state banks blacklisted for financing Iran's ballistic missile program.
Why have the relevant texts of all this wheeling and dealing been kept secret? Why has the administration repeatedly stonewalled questions from Congress? What were the machinations behind Obama's claim, after The Wall Street Journal on August 3 broke the story of the first tranche of $400 million in cash for Iran, that the U.S. government had no choice but to pay Iran with a mountain of hard-currency banknotes? Based on what internal calculus did the administration refuse to provide public confirmation for another few weeks -- until after the news broke in the press -- that the additional $1.3 billion in taxpayers funds had also been paid in cash? On the basis of what information, precisely, did Attorney General Loretta Lynch certify that Treasury paying out those tax dollars to Iran was in the interest of the United States?
The government of terror-sponsoring Iran knows the answers to many of these questions. The American public does not. But we can reasonably speculate that as this cash-for-Iran saga unfolded, it left a trail of records within the Obama administration. Classified, quite likely -- but surely there are some illuminating documents that someone with the proper clearances might wish to read.
Once upon a time, we would have called this a paper trail; these days it would more likely be digital. But at the very least, there ought to be the secret texts, the related justifications, requisitions and all the to-and-fro that would presumably be involved in the State Department, the Pentagon and Treasury (at the behest of the Justice Department, on behalf of State, with the blessing of President Obama), secretly organizing cash shipments totaling $1.7 billion for Iran -- and then, for months, despite persistent questions from Congress and the press, covering it up. Add to that the overlap -- or was it, as appears more likely, the coordination? -- of all that clandestinely conveyed cash with the return of American hostages. Then amplify this scene dramatically, to include the manufacturing of the mothership Iran nuclear deal itself, and the related handling of sanctions (which, as the 2014-2015 Iran talks stretched out from the initially planned six months to 17, appeared, despite administration protests to the contrary, to be ever more casually enforced).
Which brings us back to America's presidential election a mere three days ago, in which it sure looks like Obama and his team were blind-sided by Trump's defeat of Hillary Clinton. Misled by their own narratives, by their echo chamber in the press, by erroneous polls, by the same arrogance that begat the presidential rule of pen-and-phone and Ben-Rhodes-narratives, Obama and his team were expecting a handover to Hillary. She might not agree with them on everything, but as a former insider herself, as a candidate who was running to continue Obama's trajectory and cement his legacies, she wasn't someone whose access to the Iran file was likely to cause anyone currently in the White House to lose sleep (provided she'd really ditched her non-secure home-server proclivities).
And then Hillary lost.
Instead, here comes Trump. It's a good bet that until Tuesday night, the Obama White House never expected any such imminent intrusion by the Trump team into its closets. Trump has called the Iran nuclear deal "disastrous," and has said, variously, that he'll dismantle the Iran nuclear deal, or renegotiate it. On Thursday, one of Trump's foreign policy advisers, Walid Phares, told CNN that Trump will demand changes in the deal.
Whatever Trump does with the Iran deal, once he takes office he's entitled to have access to what's actually in it -- preserved in full, including any secret documents, understandings, promises or related bargains. This should include information that holds the answers to a great many lingering questions, among them the full rationale and terms of Obama's prolific concessions to Iran -- not least, the $1.7 billion cash payola to the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism.
Even with such access, assuming the records are in good-faith preserved and turned over in full, disentangling the truth from the Obama narrative could be complicated. Andy McCarthy, on PJMedia, warns the Trump transition team against trusting Obama's politicized intelligence on ISIS and al-Qaeda. It would be folly to rule out similar bias on Iran.
But if Obama has any desire to see his signature Iran deal sustained, presumably he, or his team, will have to divulge to his successor whatever his end of this bargain actually and fully entails, beneath the narrative and behind the official gloss. Otherwise, with no particular help from Trump, the deal may implode anyway. For Obama, during this transition period, it is, one might suppose, an unexpected and not entirely comfortable choice.
Ms. Rosett is Foreign Policy Fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum, and a foreign affairs columnist for Forbes.com.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3) BERNIE SANDERS SUPPORTERS POISED to TAKEOVER the DNC
According to the OccupyDemocrats.com, the Democratic Party is major need of rebranding and is expected to go through a complete overhaul since they have lost both branches of government. The plan is to get rid of leaders at the state level parties. Sanders supporters, according to Occupy, are aggressively trying to seize these position in a big a power grab from Arizona to Maine
However, it is not just Sanders’ supporters who are trying for this kind coop de’ gras type strategy. Politico reports Sanders himself is planning to “leverage his community organizer outreachprogram with 6,700 Americans who’d like to run for office to reshape the Democratic Party from the ground up.”
This is the political revolution we need, as reported on OccupyDemocrat.com.
The goal is to replace party officials in states where Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton during the acrimonious Democratic primary with more progressive leadership. But the challenges also represent a reckoning for state party leaders who, in many cases, tacitly supported Clinton’s bid.
“I think the Bernie people feel very strongly that they were abused, somehow neglected during the primary process and the conventions,” said Severin Beliveau, a former Maine Democratic Party chairman who supported Sanders in the primary. “In Maine, for instance, where Bernie got 70 percent of the caucus vote, they are emboldened and in effect want to try to replace [Maine Democratic Party chairman] Phil Bartlett, who supported Clinton.”In Wisconsin, Democrats are quietly predicting that the party chair will face a challenger who will hold incumbent chairwoman Martha Laning to account for why Clinton lost the state. Laning cast her vote as a superdelegate for Clinton — in a state where Sanders won the primary by a wide margin.
Ever since Bernie Sanders has become a family name, he has created a movement which seeks to re-de-define and re-create what it means to be democratic and have a democratic agenda. Occupy explains how this moment will be the most progressive democratic platform that has ever been proposed.
As Occupy continued, the aftermath of this election marks a change in power in democratic party. The Clinton/Obama way of doing things has “failed miserably” and is “putting everything the Obama administration has achieved at risk.”
“Equating possession of money with political results is a logical fallacy,” Occupy explains. You can have all the money in the world, but if they people don’t believe in your ideas, you will always fail.
3a) Friedrich A. Hayek, who died on March 23, 1992, at the age of 92, was probably the most prodigious classical liberal scholar of the 20th century. Though his 1974 Nobel Prize was in Economic Science, his scholarly endeavors extended well beyond economics. He published 130 articles and 25 books on topics ranging from technical economics to theoretical psychology, from political philosophy to legal anthropology, and from the philosophy of science to the history of ideas. Hayek was no mere dabbler; he was an accomplished scholar in each of these fields of inquiry. He made major contributions to our understanding in at least three different areas—government intervention, economic calculation under socialism, and development of the social structure. It is unlikely that we will see the likes of such a wide-ranging scholar of the human sciences again.
Hayek was born into a family of intellectuals in Vienna on May 8, 1899. He earned doctorates from the University of Vienna (1921 and 1923). During the early years of the 20th century the theories of the Austrian School of Economics, sparked by Menger’s Principles of Economics (1871), were gradually being formulated and refined by Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, his brother-in-law, Friedrich Wieser, and Ludwig von Mises. When Hayek attended the University of Vienna, he sat in on one of Mises’ classes, but found Mises’ anti-socialist position too strong for his liking. Wieser was a Fabian socialist whose approach was more attractive to Hayek at the time, and Hayek became his pupil. Yet, ironically it was Mises, through his devastating critique of socialism published in 1922, who turned Hayek away from Fabian socialism.
The best way to understand Hayek’s vast contributions to economics and classical liberalism is to view them in light of the program for the study of social cooperation laid out by Mises. Mises, the great system builder, provided Hayek with the research program. Hayek became the great dissecter and analyzer. His life’s work can best be appreciated as an attempt to make explicit what Mises had left implicit, to refine what Mises had outlined, and to answer questions Mises had left unanswered. Of Mises, Hayek stated: “There is no single man to whom I owe more intellectually.” The Misesian connection is most evident in Hayek’s work on the problems with socialism. But the insights derived from the analysis of socialism permeate the entire corpus of his work, from business cycles to the origin of social cooperation.
Hayek did not meet Mises when he was attending the University of Vienna. He was introduced to Mises after he graduated through a letter from his teacher, Wieser. The Hayek-Mises collaboration then began. For five years, Hayek worked under Mises in a government office. In 1927, he became the director of the Institute for Business Cycle Research which he and Mises had set up together. The institute was devoted to theoretical and empirical examinations of business cycles.
Building on Mises’ The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), Hayek refined both the technical understanding of capital coordination and the institutional details of credit policy. Seminal studies in monetary theory and the trade cycle followed. Hayek’s first book, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1929), analyzed the effects of credit expansion on the capital structure of an economy.
Publication of that book prompted an invitation from Lionel Robbins for Hayek to lecture at the London School of Economics. His lectures there were published in a second book on the “Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle,” Prices and Production (1931), which was cited by the Nobel Prize Committee in 1974.
Hayek’s 1930-1931 lectures at the London School were received with such great acclaim that he was called back to the prestigious University of London and appointed Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics. At age 32, Hayek had reached the pinnacle of the economics profession.
The Mises-Hayek theory of the trade cycle explained the “cluster of errors” that characterizes the cycle. Credit expansion, made possible by the artificial lowering of interest rates, misleads businessmen; they are led to engage in ventures that would not otherwise have appeared profitable. The false signal generated by credit expansion leads to malcoordination of the production and consumption plans of economic actors. This malcoordination first manifests itself in a “boom,” and then, later, in the “bust” as the time pattern of production adjusts to the real pattern of savings and consumption in the economy.
Hayek versus Keynes
Soon after Hayek’s arrival in London he crossed swords with John Maynard Keynes. Keynes, a prominent member of the British civil service then serving on the governmental Committee on Finance and Industry, was credited by the academic community as the author of serious books on economics. The Hayek-Keynes debate was perhaps the most fundamental debate in monetary economics in the 20th century. Beginning with his essay, “The End of Laissez Faire” (1926), Keynes presented his interventionist pleas in the language of pragmatic classical liberalism. As a result, Keynes was heralded as the “savior of capitalism,” rather than being recognized as the advocate of inflation and government intervention that he was.
Hayek pinpointed the fundamental problem with Keynes’s economics—his failure to understand the role that interest rates and capital structure play in a market economy. Because of Keynes’s unfortunate habit of using aggregate (collective) concepts, he failed to address these issues adequately in A Treatise on Money (1930). Hayek pointed out that Keynes’s aggregation tended to redirect the analytical focus of the economist away from examining how the industrial structure of the economy emerged from the economic choices of individuals.
Keynes did not take kindly to Hayek’s criticism. He responded at first by attacking Hayek’s Prices and Production. Then Keynes claimed that he no longer believed what he had written in A Treatise on Money, and turned his attention to writing another book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), which in time became the most influential book on economic policy in the 20th century.
Rather than attempting to criticize directly what Keynes presented in his General Theory, Hayek turned his considerable talents to refining capital theory. Hayek was convinced that the essential point to convey to Keynes and the rest of the economics profession concerning monetary policy lay in capital theory. Thus Hayek proceeded to set forth his thesis in The Pure Theory of Capital (1941). However correct his assessment may have been, this book, Hayek’s most technical, was his least influential. By the end of the 1930s, Keynes’s brand of economics was on the rise. In the eyes of the public Keynes had defeated Hayek. Hayek lost standing in the profession and with students.
During this time, Hayek was also involved in another grand debate in economic policy—the socialist calculation debate, triggered by a 1920 article by Mises which stated that socialism was technically impossible because it would lack market prices. Mises had refined this argument in 1922 in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, the book which had profoundly impressed the young Hayek when it appeared. Hayek developed Mises’ argument further in several articles during the 1930s. In 1935, he collected and edited a series of essays on the problems of socialist economic organization: Collectivist Economic Planning. Additional Hayek essays on the problems of socialism, and specifically the model of “market socialism” developed by Oskar Lange and Abba Lerner in their attempt to answer Mises and Hayek, were later collected in Individualism and Economic Order (1948).
Again, the economics profession and the intellectual community in general did not appreciate Hayek’s criticism. Had not modern science given man the ability to control and design society according to moral rules of his own choosing? The planned society envisioned under socialism was supposed to be not only as efficient as capitalism (especially in view of the chaos capitalism was said to generate with its business cycles and monopoly power), but socialism, with its promise of social justice, was expected to be fairer. Moreover, it was considered the wave of the future. Only a reactionary, it was argued, could resist the inevitable tide of history. Not only had Hayek appeared to lose the technical economic debate with Keynes and the Keynesians concerning the causes of business cycles but, in view of the rising tide of socialism throughout the world, his general philosophical perspective was increasingly labeled as a primitive version of liberalism.
The Road to Serfdom
Hayek, however, kept on refining the argument for the liberal society. The problems of socialism that he had observed in Nazi Germany and that he saw beginning in Britain led him to write The Road to Serfdom (1944). This book forced advocates of socialism to confront an additional problem, over and beyond the technical economic one. If socialism required the replacement of the market with a central plan, then, Hayek pointed out, an institution must be established that would be responsible for formulating this plan. Hayek called this institution the Central Planning Bureau. To implement the plan and to control the flow of resources, the bureau would have to exercise broad discretionary power in economic affairs. Yet the Central Planning Bureau in a socialist society would have no market prices to serve as guides. It would have no means of knowing which production possibilities were economically feasible. The absence of a pricing system, Hayek said, would prove to be socialism’s fatal flaw.
In The Road to Serfdom Hayek also argued that there was good reason to suspect that those who would rise to the top in a socialistic regime would be those who had a comparative advantage in exercising discretionary power and were willing to make unpleasant decisions. And it was inevitable that these powerful men would run the system to their own personal advantage.
Hayek was right on both counts, of course—on the economic as well as the political problem of socialism. The 20th century is replete with the blood of the innocent victims of socialist experiments. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and a host of lesser tyrants have committed heinous crimes against humanity in the name of one or another variant of socialism. Totalitarianism is not a historical accident that emerges solely because of a poor choice of leaders under a socialist regime. Totalitarianism, Hayek shows, is the logical outcome of the institutional order of socialist planning.
After the defeat in the public forum of his critique of Keynes and the controversy that arose over the debate on economic calculation under socialism, Hayek turned his attention away from technical economics and concentrated on restating the principles of classical liberalism. Hayek had pointed out the need for market prices as conveyors of dispersed economic information. He showed that attempts to replace or control the market lead to a knowledge problem. Hayek also described the totalitarian problem associated with placing discretionary power in the hands of a few. This led him to examine the intellectual prejudices which blind men from seeing the problems of government economic planning.
During the 1940s, Hayek published a series of essays in professional journals examining the dominant philosophical trends that prejudiced intellectuals in a way that did not allow them to recognize the systemic problems that economic planners would confront. These essays were later collected and published as The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952). The Counter-Revolution, perhaps Hayek’s best book, provides a detailed intellectual history of “rational constructivism” and the problems of “scientism” in the social sciences. It is in this work that Hayek articulates his version of the Scottish Enlightenment project of David Hume and Adam Smith of using reason to whittle down the claims of reason. Modern civilization was not threatened by irrational zealots hell-bent on destroying the world, but rather it was the abuse of reason by rational constructivists trying to consciously design the modern world that had placed mankind in chains of his own making.
In 1950, Hayek moved to the University of Chicago, where he taught until 1962 in the Committee on Social Thought. While there, he wrote The Constitution of Liberty (1960). This work represented Hayek’s first systemic treatise on classical liberal political economy.
In 1962, Hayek moved to Germany, where he had obtained a position at the University of Freiburg. He then increasingly centered his efforts on examining and elaborating the “spontaneous” ordering of economic and social activity. Hayek set about to reconstruct liberal social theory and to provide a vision of social cooperation among free individuals.
With his three-volume study, Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973-1979) and The Fatal Conceit (1988), Hayek extended his analysis of society to an examination of the “spontaneous” emergence of legal and moral rules. His political and legal theory emphasized that the rule of law was the necessary foundation for peaceful co-existence. He contrasted the tradition of the common law with that of statute law, i.e., legislative decrees. He showed how the common law emerges, case by case, as judges apply to particular cases general rules which are themselves products of cultural evolution. Thus, he explained that embedded within the common law is knowledge gained through a long history of trial and error. This insight led Hayek to the conclusion that law, like the market, is a “spontaneous” order—the result of human action, but not of human design.
Hayek’s work in technical economics, political and legal philosophy, and methodology of the social sciences has attracted great interest among scholars of at least two generations, and interest in his work is growing. His contributions to economic and classical liberalism are vast and will live on in the progressive research program he has bequeathed to future generations of scholars.
Friedrich Hayek lived a long and fruitful life. He had to endure the curse of achieving fame at a young age and then having that fame turn to ridicule as the Keynesians and socialists gained popularity and the intellectual and political world moved away from his ideas. Fortunately he lived long enough to see his towering intellect recognized again. Both Keynesians and socialists were eventually defeated soundly by the tide of events and the truth of his teachings. Classical liberalism is once again a vibrant body of thought. Austrian economics has re-emerged as a major school of economic thought, and younger scholars in law, history, economics, politics, and philosophy are pursuing Hayekian themes. We may mourn the loss of this great champion of liberalism, but at the same time we can rejoice that F. A. Hayek left us such a brilliant gift
A great scholar is defined not so much by the answers he provides as by the questions he asks. Successive generations of scholars, intellectuals, and political activists throughout the world will long be pursuing questions that Hayek has posed.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
by Fred Barnes Donald Trump has done what Ronald Reagan did. He beat back a hostile press, smears by his opponent, outrage by foreign leaders, vast campaign spending by Wall Street and the wealthy one percent, and vows by actors and rock stars to leave the country if he was elected president.
Trump falls short of Reagan in many ways. He's unlikely to be as consequential a president. But he has an opportunity in his first 100 days in the White House to put Washington on a new and entirely unexpected course. And harness an out-of- control federal bureaucracy-the so-called administrative state.
He has promised to repeal ObamaCare, nullify all of President Obama's executive orders and memoranda, begin a wall along the border with Mexico and begin deporting illegal immigrants convicted of crimes, cut individual and corporate tax rates, kill the Iran nuclear deal, deregulate energy production, and start negotiations to rewrite trade treaties.
Trump's victory has many dimensions. Not the least of them is his election was part of a broad Republican triumph. Republicans kept control of the Senate, a feat that once had seemed impossible since they had 24 seats at stake and Democrats only ten. Trump didn't split the party. He strengthened it.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment