United Liberty

On this day in 1899, Friedrich August (F.A.) Hayek was born in Vienna, Austria. Over the course of his long life, Hayek, along with others, brought a new way of thinking to economics, challenging statists that sought more debt and spending.

Hayek laid down his economic beliefs in his book, The Road to Serfdom (1944), explaining that the predominant views of the day were essentially fascism. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974 and was awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H.W. Bush in 1991.

He went head-to-head against John Maynard Keynes, whose economic theories were anathema to the free market. And while both economists have been gone for some time, we’re are still waging war over their views today. This battle was the focus of two videos put out by Econstories; the first being “Fear the Boom and Bust”:

And the latter being “Fight of the Century,” which focused on the after-effects and failures of economic stimulus and bailouts:

Hayek is gone, but his ideas remain. Washington would do well to listen to them, instead of dismissing them.