/lit/ - Literature

I really like it but it would be far more impactful when it was written, hindsight kind of dulls it a bit. He's got much better writtings for the modern man.

With Hayek besides Road to Serfdom his writting style is largely a playing with ideas with the reader and much less aggressive and stubborn than a Mises or Rothbard in his prose, so that leads a lot of people to think of him as a weak thinker.

His more obscure (or not really obscure but less popular more academic) works have all of his gold nuggets in them; Use of Knowledge in Society, Denationalisation of Money.

I personally prefer The Constitution of Liberty and especially The Fatal Conceit. It's amazing what a few decades does to an authors ideas.

Bonus: Pic related interview. Some important shit people tend to skim over

>>11815980
> There's no getting around the fact that hypercapitalism is categorically unjust. Jeff Bezos doesn't do a trillion times more work or produce a trillion times more value than half the earth's population combined. I'd draw the line at a sixth or an eighth.
It's really weird that people look at someone getting a little bit from a lot of people and then say they got too much.

Something really stuck with in an interview I was watching with F.A Hayek you guys might find interesting too. (pic related)

The guy next to him is talking about "Social Justice" and you know how people debate philosophy all the time about right/wrong, what's moral and so on, the prevailing thought from what I can see is that morality comes from human actions.

Now the guy next to him says something to the effect of "they think that quantificiation that is the assigning of numbers will tell us about justice and in fact it will not"

The profound thing about that statement is that people like yourself say "Bezos has X number of $$$s and this person somewhere else in the country is starving and this worker is barely able to pay their mortgage, therefore this is unjust" and that is exactly, looking at numbers for your indication of right/wrong rather than of the actual human actions that contain moral content to decide whether an outcome is right/wrong.

Now what Hayek's ultimate point is, is that the market is a sort of game, in that you have millions of interactions between individuals which are all voluntary (therefore they are not immoral) but nobody actually knows what the outcome of all these interactions will be, that it's not determined by somebody and therefore determined beforehand to have an unjust outcome, but rather a game of chance (more to it than that obviously) but you can't have 1 million moral interactions and then decide that the overall outcome is immoral. There's a gap that doesn't follow in the logic there.

That's not to say as Hayek also points out that we don't have an imperative to help people that don't genuinely make it in life but there has to be an aspect of responsibility because outcomes will never be completely equal, but they can be less bad.

That's why your Classical Liberals, Libertarians, Conservatives etc harp on so much about alternative forms of welfare, that are brought about by more moral and voluntary methods. Whereas I guess the marxist would say it's impossible to look after the poor when "the rich horde wealth" and personally I think that's a misunderstanding of what rich people do with wealth but that's another matter.

Thoughts?

Hayek's interview talking about social justice had a lot of penny drop moments for me intellectually in trying to understand the world and search for the truth.

My favourite one is the fellow next to him saying something along the lines of "they think the assignment of numbers, that is quantification can tell us something about justice and in fact it will not", either before or after Hayek says "I can be just or injust towards my fellow man", I wish everyone understood this and how important it is not to ignore or get this wrong when building their world view intellectually.