The evil Koch brothers

Here's one of them - the mild mannered, 79 year old gentleman, Charles:  

"... My main difference with Hillary is on the vision of what kind of society makes people's lives better - [Hillary's (and all Democrats')] is a vision of society in which people are too evil or stupid to run their own lives but those in power are perfectly capable of running everybody elses' lives because they're so much smarter.  It's what Hayek called "the fatal conceit" or William Easterly called "the tyranny of experts" because that's what it is, tyranny.

... [government] waste and spending are heading us towards a financial cliff ... The reason we tend to support Republicans is they're taking us towards the cliff at only 70 miles an hour and the Democrats are taking us at 100 miles an hour. ..."

KDS (Koch Derangement Syndrome) is HDS on stilts. Even Obama has it.

Friedrich Hayek's interview by James Buchanan

From "The Hayek Interviews", an interview by economist James M. Buchanan: Part I, Part II

On Marxism, a clip from Part II:

Buchanan: How do you explain the revival of Marxist notions in so much of Europe now and to some extent in this country?

Hayek: I don't know ... it's difficult to understand what makes people believe these things ... I can't see that it is intellectually respectable at all.

The origins of the conservative temperament

In an excerpt from his new book, "Enlightment 2.0", Joseph Heath gives two examples illustrating the "hubris of modern rationalism", saying:

... the conservative temperament was born, as a defence of tradition against the tendency of Enlightenment rationalism to take things apart without knowing how to put them back together again, much less improve them. [It occurs to me that another example of modern hyper-rational hubris at work can be found in the scientific claims of climate alarmism.]

Heath's idea's were a constant theme in Friedrich Hayek's writing.  His book should be a good read.

Big Data: Is Hayek Dead?

Proponents of “Big Data” hail it as a “managerial revolution”. What would Friedrich Hayek have said?

Terence Corcoran:

... Many decades ago, The Economist declared "Keynes is dead,"

... As we know, Keynes was resurrected ...

... Given the state of government policy around the world, it's beginning to look like it's time to ask the question: Is Hayek dead?

... Hayek's warning was aimed at the menace of central planning, but it likely also applies to big data corporate planning. Regardless of volume and quality, he said, data and statistics are about the past and are notoriously incapable of predicting even the smallest of changes in economic behaviour. Big data may have uses, but a management revolution based on terabytes of data and YouTube views? Let's hope Hayek isn't dead yet.

This also brings to mind “climate change”. Whether applied to directing an economy or managing “climate change” (which inevitably leads to attempts at directing the global economy) central planning is fatally flawed.  Both climate change and economics have in common: 

Huge complexity   |
Faulty theory       |
Faulty data          |  >> Disastrous policy
Faulty models       |

Hayek is alive and well.

Friedrich Hayek's interview by John O'Sullivan