"An essential difference between Hayek and Friedman here was that Hayek was in many ways a dark thinker. If you read Hayek in the 1930s and 1940s, the thinks the world is coming apart. Certainly Hayek's response to the Great Depression was not one that imbued with a great deal of optimism. He thought that to a certain extent you just have to wait things out; if you try to intervene to solve the problem you'll only exacerbate it. Whereas Friedman was this tremendous optimist. Friedman was always emphasizing--he said that what Hayek and Robbins got wrong when they were responding to the Great Depression was precisely that: that they said you shouldn't do anything. He thought that part of what he was doing in monetary theory was to try to come up with a way to say that there was a solution, something that could be done that would prevent this kind of problem. A kind of counternarrative to Keynes. And he always emphasized--instead of dwelling on the catastrophic situation that the world was in, he always emphasized the ways in which those catastrophes could be solved by the market. And so when you reach this moment of deep pessimism that I think a lot of people associated with organizations like the Tea Party felt, Hayek in many ways feels more consonant with that set of views."
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Philosophers from AustriaAcademics from the United KingdomAcademics from AustriaFriedrich HayekEconomists from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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Angus Burgin, "Burgin on Hayek, Friedman, and the Great Persuasion" (March 18, 2013)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek
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Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich August von Hayek CH (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian, later British, economist and philosopher best known for his defense of [[w:classical liberalism|classical
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