![]() By way of an anecdote, Caldwell recalls how at the height of his stardom, Hayek was asked to speak to a group of businessmen nurtured by the US Republican Party, the sort of group that would want a small government and also government protection of their industries. The reader may profitably read a recent lucid, scholarly, balanced and in-depth account of Hayek’s book and how it came to be written by professor Bruce Caldwell, titled The Road to Serfdom After 75 Years. He does not advocate untrammelled free markets, nor put down every socialist idea. Yet, most people miss the nuanced key message of Hayek. The subsequent fall of the Soviet Union was a vindication of his dire warnings about collectivism. The Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher revolutions were supposed to have been inspired by the ideas of Hayek. Hayek, probably horrified by rampant misreadings and the selective or mischievous quoting of his book, wrote Why I Am Not a Conservative in 1960, as if to distance himself from his ardent admirers. Even George Orwell approved of the book’s main thesis. ![]() Yet, he found himself to be mostly in agreement with Hayek’s liberal ideas. Keynes’s ideas have proven influential to this day. ![]() John Maynard Keynes had published The End of Laissez Faire in sharp contrast to the thinking of classical liberals. ![]()
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