On another matter, I simply don’t throw around the word ‘evil’ as easily as you feel comfortable tossing the term around.

Samuelson is not an evil man doing evil things.

I don’t put academics on weird pedestals, as if they are extra-human.

I’ve listened to a top philosopher of science tell me he *never* credits or cites Karl Popper or his work *ever* as an intentional professional blackball of the man.

I raise this example not to say the Samuelson has done *exactly* this thing.

It’s to point out that academics are no different from everyday people in there capacity for all sorts of very human self-interested or “my team vs the other team” behavior falling well below the thresh hold of genuine human evil.

In all sorts of ways folks working in rival scientific paradigms or in rival political ideologies exploit the whole panoply of informal argumentative fallacies and book of insults to signal to others that their rivals are not the ones to be taking seriously, are no the ones who are scientific, are not the ones who are modern, cool, advanced, with the in crowd, what have you.

That is human.

Academics are human beings.

Let’s stop pretending they are not.

Nicholas, Yes the Constitution of Liberty grew out of a series of lectures given in Cairo, I believe at the invitation of the central bank of Egypt (probably under the monarchy that was ousted in a military coup headed by Colonel Nasser) on the development of the political doctrine of the rule of law or something of that nature. It is hard to say exactly what was original and what wasn’t in the Constitution of Liberty because Hayek wrote with such great erudition he traced many of his ideas back to earlier sources, but what he came up with was very much informed by original ideas about the spontaneous orders and the role of rule-following in bringing about such orders and so the final result was, in my view, a work of truly great originality.

Jan, Hayek was certainly very badly mistaken in his assessment of Pinochet. But Pinochet’s crimes don’t necessarily absolve Allende from his role in creating the conditions under which Pinochet could seize power. Sometimes there are very bad choices that people face. Under the circumstances, it was not necessarily wrong to say that Pinochet was the lesser evil, but Hayek went way beyond that, and that was a very stupid and tragic mistake on his part. But Hayek is not the only very smart person who has been duped into making very bad political choices. Sartre defended to Stalin, J.K. Galbraith and many others went to China during the Cultural Revolution and came back gushing about Chairman Mao, and the list of prominent Castro admirers is pretty long as well. For the most part, we don’t go around saying that having given rhetorical support to Stalin, Mao, or Castro is automatic grounds for discrediting a person’s entire life’s work. Martin Heidegger was an active supporter of Hitler and was largely rehabilitated after the war even though it is not at all clear that he really repented of his misdeeds. He is in the estimation of many the most important philosopher of the twentieth century.

Like Friedman, Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom, who would rule as a dictator only for a “transitional period,” only as long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation. “My personal preference,” he told a Chilean interviewer, “leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism.” In a letter to the London Times he defended the junta, reporting that he had “not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.” Of course, the thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet’s regime weren’t talking.

Hayek’s University of Chicago colleague Milton Friedman got the grief, but it was Hayek who served as the true inspiration for Chile’s capitalist crusaders. It was Hayek who depicted Allende’s regime as a way station between Chile’s postwar welfare state and a hypothetical totalitarian future. Accordingly, the Junta justified its terror as needed not only to prevent Chile from turning into a Stalinist gulag but to sweep away fifty years of tariffs, subsidies, capital controls, labor legislation, and social welfare provisions — a “half century of errors,” according to finance minister Sergio De Castro, that was leading Chile down its own road to serfdom.

“To us, it was a revolution,” said government economist Miguel Kast, an Opus Dei member and follower of both Hayek and American Enterprise Institute theologian Michael Novak. The Chicago economists had set out to affect, radically and immediately, a “foundational” conversion of Chilean society, to obliterate its “pseudo-democracy” (prior to 1973, Chile enjoyed one of the most durable constitutional democracies in the Americas).

“as for your reformulation of Hayak’s central thesis that comprehensive central planning could be carried out effectively only by a government exercising unlimited power over individuals that simply is not true.

Stop for a minute. In the Obamacare case it was agreed by all that the States had the power, under their police power, to adopt compulsory insurance laws. Such does not mean that the states have unlimited power over individuals”

Clearly John does not know what ‘comprehensive central planning’ is. (Hint is is not Obamacare whatever its merits otherwise). Indeed Obamacare is an unfortunate example because in the Constitution of Liberty Hayek explicitly gives the OK to making people buy insurance.

“Hayek wouldn’t pass the first day of law school”

Hayek’s degree was in Law, & Economics. It was compulsory to study law to do economics at the university of Vienna.

“I’ll end where I started. Of what use is Hayek to the people seeking freedom in Tahrir Square, today? Are private police the answer? Why are we not seeing blogs and news stories that the solution is private police?”

This is really face-palm time here. That is clearly a chapter of the Constitution of Liberty I forgot to read.

“There is nothing complex, nuanced, or useful about Hayek. I challenge anyone to find anything applicable to Egypt, today, that was not said earlier and better and in a more useful way by someone else, most often one of our Founding Fathers”

As it happens the what would become the Constitution of Liberty began as a series of lectures given in Cairo. And he actually did not claim originality for that book, claiming he tried to reinterpret the Scottish enlightenment liberalism for the twentieth century. But clearly a country in the middle of writing a new constitution should be taking such ideas into account. And I personally would like to see a country implement what Hayek called his “one invention” which was a constitution that completely separates the law making and executive bodies.

Every time you describe what Samuelson says you misinterpret him. He gave Hayek a B-grade for making the personal effort to rise above his environment. That is not the same as saying: Hayek was anti-Semite, but he tried not to be, so I am raising his grade. That’s just an obtuse reading. Samuelson was obviously writing in his usual breezy style, and despite the signature condescending tone (which no doubt really annoys you) he wrote about Hayek in a benevolent spirit comparing him favorably with Keynes and Schumpeter who were unable to rise above their upbringing as Hayek, in Samuelson’s view, did for the most part. The premise that Hayek started as a teenage anti-Semite is yours not Samuelson’s. All he said is that Hayek came from an environment, as Keynes and Schumpeter did, that had a high propensity to produce anti-Semites, and the extent to which his conduct was for the most part free of traces of that environmental conditioning was to his credit. I do agree with you that it was mildly offensive on Samuelson’s part to presume to grade Hayek for effort, but Samuelson was presumptuous and condescending, but not mean-spirited. There was at worst a failure of etiquette on Samuelson’s part in his manner of expression.

As for the rest, I will just let it be. Let’s move on, but if you want to respond, I will let you have the last word (unless I change my mind).:)

Who has time to parse such sentences or distinctions in a blog comments section in this lifetime? Or in Twitter tweets?

I don’t see how I’ve possibly misread Samuelson, and I don’t see that I’ve described him as evil. I’ve described him as a motivated and well as suffering from cross paradigm failures of understanding, failures of understanding that motivation of a different kind could overcome. I don’t describe that motivation as evil, but I do identify it as in part coming out of scientific and ideological rivalry. James Watson describes the same sort of thing on his own part in the DNA discovery adventure. Watson doesn’t describe himself as evil. He describes himself as human.

I’m glad I didn’t offend you, because I feared I had, and I don’t aim to.

I don’t get the unreasonable charge. My reading of Samuelson is not unreasonable. A grade bumped up for effort had to be bumped up from something lower. That is the simple logic of the English language.

All histories I have read say that the post-1848 virulent strain of anti-semitism came into Vienna some time around the turn of the century, and this was a new phenomena. We don’t know that the Hayek family consumed that stuff — I haven’t seen any history that says this stuff was universal, it seems not to have been.

I don’t know the Hayek family’s relation to this other than that his mother played with the Wittgensteins — who were family — at the Wittgenstein house.

Starting with the premise that Hayek was a child or teenage anti-semite is a premise I am not comfortable with.

Perhaps he was. Perhaps he wasn’t.

Did Hayek read the new anti-semitic newspapers as a child? I’m not going to presume that he did.

Did he see anti-semitism? Of course.

How Hayek felt about or how he digested that we can only guess by his actions — creating his own youth organizations which broke existing ethnic barriers.

I’d like to know more about the relation of the Hayek family to all of this, what individual Hayek’s thought of their being joined by marriage to the Wittgenstein family, what the relation of Hayek’s father was to the doctors and academics who were Jewish. And so on.

But I’m not going to credit Samuelson for some sort of competent insight into the matter of “Hayek’s anti-semitism” of to give Samuelson credit for being able to grade the different levels of “Hayek’s anti-semitism” across his life. That is ridiculous, especially when Samuelson does so in the absence of any direct supporting evidence, and in complete ignorance of a good deal of compelling direct counter evidence.

On other matters, I certainly apologize for being unpleasant.

I really am very, very tired of all of the Hayek mythologies and basic failures of comprehension which continue to be propagated in all forums, from peer reviewed work on down — and the endless falsely premised conversations that I believed could be corrected if folks where motivated to care enough to master the material.

The conversation is improving, but incredibly slowly.

I’m sometimes direct and to the point — blunt if you will.

Time is short, and being less blunt takes a whole lot of time.

The short cut to red flagging a mis-cast conversation is simply to say so — “this conversation is miscast”.

It’s hard to say that without coming across as rude — or as ‘rudely’ claiming some sort of interpretive authority.

I don’t know what to do but to offer apologies. When people on on the right track I say say. When in my well considered judgment that are off track I say so.

And I certainly do mean to derail miscast conversations.

So productive ones just possibly might flourish.

Look at the Scott Sumner rat hole of a conversation (rat hole is Leo Laporte’s expression for a detour conversation) on Sheldon Richman.

Do I read you wrong is saying that much of it was not on point and wasn’t productive and didn’t have much to do with Hayekian/Austrian macro, as Scott repeatedly brought them into the conversation?

Scott has done this for years know. Sometimes he’s even acknowledged it — using false presumptions about Hayek’s macro to launch a falsely premised and falsely cast conversation.

And then a thousand tenured professors think Sumner’s false invention IS Hayek.

That is not a problem for you, but that is a problem for anyone who want to pursue work which takes Hayek seriously in academic circles.

Whatever you may think of my understanding of Hayek’s piece on Hicks, it does not constitute an admission of lack of expertise. You can tweet whatever you want to, but your characterization of what I am admitting to involves your putting words in my mouth.

As for Samuelson, he says that Hayek grew up in an environment in which anti-Semitism was widespread and that he largely overcame that influence (not the same as overcoming his anti-semitism). You are the one who is choosing to read into Samuelson’s words a personal attack on Hayek; it’s not there unless you choose to put it there.

And now, on top of ascribing evil motives to Samuelson, you presume to read my mind:

“You are offended because I’ve bluntly raised a red flag at your core failures to get Hayek’s explanatory strategy, how Hayek uses formal constructs, etc.”

I categorically deny that I am offended by your accusations that I have failed to understand Hayek. But I am completely exasperated by the way you distort straightforward English sentences to fit into your view of the world. Don’t you realize how unpleasant and unreasonable you are being?

Exactly. Essentially the force & implication of your earlier remark.

And something I picked up in seeing how you fundamentally misunderstood what Hayek was saying in his piece on Hicks.

In the Tweet I wanted to recommend your remark without misleading people into thinking you were giving the full, on target story.

As for reading Samuelson, whatever.

I don’t take either you or Samuelson as experts on the rise of popular anti-semitism in Vienna at the turn of the century, nor experts on the culture within Hayek’s immediate family. Hayek’s family had intermarried with Jews and his mother played with her Jewish cousins, so the family culture is at least complex.

Samuelson clearly says that Hayek was anti-semitic as a young person.

No evidence for this, as there is in Keynes teen writings.

Counter-evidence in Hayek’s activities and actions.

And then there is the clear statement that Hayek made an effort to try to overcome his anti-semitism.

So he gets a grade change, a bump over Keynes who didn’t try.

A ‘B’ for effort.

My reading skills aren’t so bad. It’s ‘silly’ to debate this.

You are offended because I’ve bluntly raised a red flag at your core failures to get Hayek’s explanatory strategy, how Hayek uses formal constructs, etc.

It’s sometimes impolite to say out loud what must be said.

I’d rather not waist the time in the effort to sugar coat. Mostly because I’m pressed for time.