Friedrich Hayek

When Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom, he mentioned in the preface that he had often been told by his socialist colleagues that he would hold an important position in a future planned society, if only he would come around to agree with them.

Fifty years ago, in 1968, Austrian (and Austrian school) economist Friedrich A. Hayek published a monograph called The Confusion of Language in Political Thought.

The prevailing political discourse seems to be consumed with the bromides of social justice, carefully tended by political and intellectual classes claiming special knowledge of its demands.

For early progressives the state was the true embodiment of the social will, the thinking, acting entity of which individual people are only one part.

Last week, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Janet Yellen was awarded the Radcliffe Medal at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. At a lunch in Yellen’s honor, Lizabeth Cohen, dean of the institute, praised the Fed chair’s “steadfast commitment to robust growth” and the way the she “steers our economy,” guided by the philosophy of her Yale mentor, Keynesian economist James Tobin.