http://american_almanac.tripod.com/vonhayek.htm
This was written by a group of “christian humanists” back in the early 90’s. Rather hilarious.
Some of the best bits:
"…Von Hayek slandered Friedrich List, Germany’s great American System'' economist, and the Weimar-era German political figure, Walter Rathenau, as part of the same socialist’’ camp as Hitler and Lenin. Von Hayek let his own Anglophiliac sentiments all hang out, as he pilloried List as the principal author of the German thesis'' that free trade was a policy dictated solely by, and appropriate only to, the special interests of England in the nineteenth century.‘’
He slandered Walter Rathenau, the German foreign minister whose assassination in 1923 helped break the resistance to the draconian conditionalities that the Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany, and also proved to be a key step toward the Nazi Party’s rise to power:
``Ideas very similar to these [anti-individualist views] were current in the offices of the German raw-material dictator, Walter Rathenau, who, although he would have shuddered had he realized the consequences of his totalitarian economics, yet deserves a considerable place in any fuller history of the growth of Nazi ideas.‘’
Talk about Nazi ideas! The radical alternatives that von Hayek posed–strict monetarism, near-total deregulation, and Pan-European federalism–were all expressions of the same feudalist outlook that produced Hitler’s National Socialism and the thousands of other varieties of Conservative Revolutionism after World War I.
``We shall not rebuild civilization on the large scale,‘’ he wrote in The Road to Serfdom.
``It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization.'"
…Menger trained a generation of Austrian School economists, including Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich von Hayek. Before his brief New York City venture, von Hayek attended the Boehm-Bawerk seminars at Vienna–along with future Bolshevik leader Nickolai Bukharin. This convergence of radical free market and Bolshevik personalities under the Vienna School tutelage was not as strange as it might seem on first reflection. Boehm’s insistence on the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism due to ``over-production’’ caused by the reinvestment of profit into new infrastructure, research and development, and other capital improvements through the mechanism of credit, was stolen directly from Karl Marx. And Boehm fully subscribed to the superiority of the pre-capitalist feudal guild society over the modern industrial state, a theme Bukharin would elaborate in his own 1914 work, The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class.
“Von Hayek totally rejected the principle that man was created in the image of God. In fact, he traced his own philosophical roots to the early eighteenth century Satanist, Bernard Mandeville. In a lecture he delivered at the British Academy on March 23, 1966, von Hayek lauded Mandeville as a ``master mind,‘’ as the inventor of modern psychology, and as the true intellectual forbearer of David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Carl Savigny and Charles Darwin”
“The sister organization to Mont Pelerin from the very outset was the Pan European Union. Leading Mont Pelerin figures, including von Hapsburg and Walter Lippman, were pivotal figures in the Pan Europe movement. The concept of a Pan-European federation was a cornerstone of von Hayek’s scheme, which demanded the replacement of the nation-state with a ``benign’’ feudalist system”
“Don’t be fooled by cheap Madison Avenue propaganda. There is nothing American'' about Newt Gingrich's new American civilization,‘’ and there is no truth in Dick Armey’s true Hayekian agenda.'' And, as this morning's panel amply demonstrated, there is no free market.‘’ Remove sovereign nation-states from a role in economic development and all you have is the oligarchy’s cartels. The so-called Gingrich Revolution is just the latest effort by the House of Windsor’s agents and useful fools to repackage the same Conservative Revolution that has brought death and destruction to civilization throughout much of the past century”
I love the, what I call, Six Degrees of Separation method that this fellow used in arguing his case. As we know, correlation is not causation, and even then his guilt by association tactic failed utterly to even make a coherent point.