Very surprised to see F.A Hayek on HN. I would recommend the Road to Serfdom to anyone who is interested in learning more about his viewpoint. Also reading Thomas Sowell wouldn’t hurt either.
What it gave a backround to was dismanteling a lot of the idioitc regulatory structures and inflationary spending of the 1970s.
True, and it was actually a surprise to me since this part of the book have completely disappeared from later policymaking. It's not that uncommon though, most people using Adam Smith as a reference tend to forget the part where he goes full socialist and calls landlords parasites… I even saw a reedition of Wealth of Nations (in French, from an independant libertarian publisher) where the said chapters where simply removed from the book!
> idioitc regulatory structures
Oh yeah, and the 2008 crisis was a good illustration of how good of an idea it was to remove those “idiotic” regulations. Oopsie
Guardrails are so idiotic: people are always bumping into them and getting annoyed. It'd probably be best if we just removed most if not all of them. /s
The thing about regulations is you can always cherry-pick a couple mind-boggling stupid ones. But then there are the ones that look silly, but only if you've never experienced or witnessed the problem they were meant to solve.
Simularly the view that all regulation exist for a good reason is also flat-out false. It flys directly in the face of any serious study of political science and the formation of regulation in the real world.
> ...Sim[i]larly the view that all regulation exist for a good reason is also flat-out false.
You're boggling your own mind, since that's a straw man position. I made it clear I didn't hold it ("the thing about regulations is you can always cherry-pick a couple mind-boggling stupid ones..."), and I don't think "liberals" hold it either.
The position I do hold is that to actually evaluate a particular regulation is difficult and requires a lot of thought; and it's easy to to mislead someone into taking an ignorant, broadly anti-regulation stance by cherry-picking examples of bad ones. I've seen a lot of that, and at one time I even found the cherry-picking persuasive.
Deregulatory zeal has a tendency of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Also, some specific cases of deregulation can merely re-introduce negative externalities that some connected group stands to benefit from (to the determent of the public good).
For those new to Hayek, here is an entertaining overview:
Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc
Also, from what I could gather from Twitter, it appears that recently more and more people are following his unofficial Twitter account. I’ve counted thousand new followers by the day.
His book "Basic Economics" keeps getting updates every 5 years or so, at this stage it's almost an encyclopedia of economic principles.
It's worth noting that the most effective propaganda is the kind that convinces you it's "neutral."