Hayek

"Hayek was almost religious when it came to describing what the market could do when left to its own devices. He believed that the market was more important, and more beneficial, than the institution of democracy itself. A market was able to mediate all the wishes of everyone on earth. When people entered a market, their demands instantly put a price on the thing they wanted. The market also put a price on the things that they had to offer (like their labor). These prices were not dictated or set by a king. Instead, they were derived from the push and pull of supply and demand. The prices in a free market were the most honest assessment of reality that humans could ever hope to achieve. Government, on the other hand, was never really able to mediate between all the competing needs of its people. It was impossible for everyone in a large society to come to some sort of consensus that the government could then enforce through law. Laws and regulations were unworthy tools to use to deal with problems of the natural world, because the natural world was always changing. Laws were static; the world was fluid. Only the market could respond to the ways the world rapidly changed, Hayek believed. And if markets were Hayek’s religion, then entrepreneurs were his saints. He saw entrepreneurs as the lifeblood of adaptation and efficiency. They were the ones who spotted new ways of doing things. They were the ones who created new products, created new technology, established new orders when it was time for the old orders to decay."

"As senators fought against the findings of their own committee, Koch put another piece of its plan into place. The biggest threat wasn’t emanating from the Senate but from the courts and the US Attorney’s office, two institutions that could not be influenced by campaign donations or lobbyists. In response, Koch initiated a long-term plan to reshape America’s judiciary system. Ron Howell founded an obscure nonprofit group called Oklahomans for Judicial Excellence. It did something unheard of: it started grading local judges based on their fealty to free-market economic theory. The group created scorecards for state judges, measuring how well their verdicts conformed with the teachings of Hayek and von Mises. The group publicized these rankings with public opinion articles published in places like the Daily Oklahoman. The grading system created a way to embarrass judges in the local press by publicizing their low scores. Koch Industries also offered them a way to escape this embarrassment: the company sponsored a series of free seminars that judges could attend if they received poor grades from Koch’s rating system. The seminars were not held in stuffy classrooms. Koch Industries paid for judges to travel to a ski resort in Utah or a beachfront condominium, among other locations, relaxing places where the judges might be more open to Koch’s message. The company held lectures that emphasized the importance of market forces in society, and warned against the consideration of things like “junk science” that plaintiffs often used to prove corporate malfeasance. The seminars were well attended, sometimes by more than sixty judges at a time. A Kansas state district court judge named Michael Corrigan attended a Koch-sponsored seminar at the Sundial Beach Resort in Sanibel, Florida, and another at the University of Kansas; in between these seminars he handled two cases involving Koch Industries without disclosing the potential conflict of interest, according to an account later published in the Wall Street Journal. The junkets that it organized might have been disclosed or even regulated if they were enjoyed by other public officials, such as members of Congress. But there were no such restraints on treating judges to all-paid vacations, perhaps because no one had thought to organize such events on such a large scale before. Koch’s efforts to sway judges evolved over many years. By 2016, it had transformed into a new program that offered free seminars to judges called the Law & Economics Center, which was housed at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, along with Koch’s free-market think tank, the Mercatus Center. The Law & Economics Center claimed to have hosted more than four thousand state and federal judges from all fifty states at its seminars."

"In Hayek’s view, even well-intentioned state actions ended up causing far more human suffering than the market-based ills that they were meant to correct. His most famous example of this was the policy of rent control, which was big in Hayek’s hometown of Vienna. Politicians put a cap on rent prices to help people who rented homes and apartments. But Hayek described a long list of unintended consequences. The controls made it unprofitable for landlords to reinvest their cash in money-losing apartments, for example, so those apartments devolved into squalor. Because there was no incentive to build new apartment buildings, housing shortages became perpetual. Big families were stuck in small apartments because they couldn’t afford to move out of their rent-controlled dwellings. Hayek said this proved a simple point: cutting one thread in the tapestry of a free market—even with the goal of helping people—only unraveled other parts of the tapestry."

"As senators fought against the findings of their own committee, Koch put another piece of its plan into place. The biggest threat wasn’t emanating from the Senate but from the courts and the US Attorney’s office, two institutions that could not be influenced by campaign donations or lobbyists. In response, Koch initiated a long-term plan to reshape America’s judiciary system. Ron Howell founded an obscure nonprofit group called Oklahomans for Judicial Excellence. It did something unheard of: it started grading local judges based on their fealty to free-market economic theory. The group created scorecards for state judges, measuring how well their verdicts conformed with the teachings of Hayek and von Mises. The group publicized these rankings with public opinion articles published in places like the Daily Oklahoman. The grading system created a way to embarrass judges in the local press by publicizing their low scores. Koch Industries also offered them a way to escape this embarrassment: the company sponsored a series of free seminars that judges could attend if they received poor grades from Koch’s rating system. The seminars were not held in stuffy classrooms. Koch Industries paid for judges to travel to a ski resort in Utah or a beachfront condominium, among other locations, relaxing places where the judges might be more open to Koch’s message. The company held lectures that emphasized the importance of market forces in society, and warned against the consideration of things like “junk science” that plaintiffs often used to prove corporate malfeasance. The seminars were well attended, sometimes by more than sixty judges at a time. A Kansas state district court judge named Michael Corrigan attended a Koch-sponsored seminar at the Sundial Beach Resort in Sanibel, Florida, and another at the University of Kansas; in between these seminars he handled two cases involving Koch Industries without disclosing the potential conflict of interest, according to an account later published in the Wall Street Journal. The junkets that it organized might have been disclosed or even regulated if they were enjoyed by other public officials, such as members of Congress. But there were no such restraints on treating judges to all-paid vacations, perhaps because no one had thought to organize such events on such a large scale before. Koch’s efforts to sway judges evolved over many years. By 2016, it had transformed into a new program that offered free seminars to judges called the Law & Economics Center, which was housed at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, along with Koch’s free-market think tank, the Mercatus Center. The Law & Economics Center claimed to have hosted more than four thousand state and federal judges from all fifty states at its seminars."

"In Hayek’s view, even well-intentioned state actions ended up causing far more human suffering than the market-based ills that they were meant to correct. His most famous example of this was the policy of rent control, which was big in Hayek’s hometown of Vienna. Politicians put a cap on rent prices to help people who rented homes and apartments. But Hayek described a long list of unintended consequences. The controls made it unprofitable for landlords to reinvest their cash in money-losing apartments, for example, so those apartments devolved into squalor. Because there was no incentive to build new apartment buildings, housing shortages became perpetual. Big families were stuck in small apartments because they couldn’t afford to move out of their rent-controlled dwellings. Hayek said this proved a simple point: cutting one thread in the tapestry of a free market—even with the goal of helping people—only unraveled other parts of the tapestry."

"Hayek was almost religious when it came to describing what the market could do when left to its own devices. He believed that the market was more important, and more beneficial, than the institution of democracy itself. A market was able to mediate all the wishes of everyone on earth. When people entered a market, their demands instantly put a price on the thing they wanted. The market also put a price on the things that they had to offer (like their labor). These prices were not dictated or set by a king. Instead, they were derived from the push and pull of supply and demand. The prices in a free market were the most honest assessment of reality that humans could ever hope to achieve. Government, on the other hand, was never really able to mediate between all the competing needs of its people. It was impossible for everyone in a large society to come to some sort of consensus that the government could then enforce through law. Laws and regulations were unworthy tools to use to deal with problems of the natural world, because the natural world was always changing. Laws were static; the world was fluid. Only the market could respond to the ways the world rapidly changed, Hayek believed. And if markets were Hayek’s religion, then entrepreneurs were his saints. He saw entrepreneurs as the lifeblood of adaptation and efficiency. They were the ones who spotted new ways of doing things. They were the ones who created new products, created new technology, established new orders when it was time for the old orders to decay."

"By contrast, Hayek argued, the market is the only known method of providing, through the signal of prices, the kind of information that individuals need to judge the comparative advantages of different uses of resources, simply because that knowledge is so dispersed. The market integrates all this dispersed knowledge in a natural process similar to evolution. Neither process could be designed by man. It takes a certain intellectual humility to accept that the order generated without design can far outstrip the plans humans consciously contrive. Socialism doesn’t have that humility and cannot possibly achieve what it promises."

"Hayek explains that this is because human instincts evolved over the millions of years man spent in small family groups as a hunter-gatherer. In that setting he’d developed powerful instincts of sharing, altruism and cooperation. The market, which has developed rapidly over only the past few thousand years and which enabled explosive population growth far beyond small family groups, has utterly transformed everyday life for most humans. Now, through the market, they enjoy goods and services from people they’ve never seen and about whom they know nothing. Success depends on abstract rules and traditions that don’t necessarily marry with inherited instincts. The evolution of our instincts couldn’t keep pace with the rapid development of civilisation."