Donald Boudreaux has done us the favor of writing a popularized primer on the foundational thought of the great economist, Friedrich Hayek. His timing is good. For sadly, as Vaclav Klaus, the free-market president of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013, says in the book's foreword: “State interventionism is back and growing.” The once-vivid lessons of the failures and crimes of communist regimes are fading in the group memory, 25 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and its accompanying socialist ideology. Dirigiste government bureaucrats are busy giving orders, arrogantly convinced that they know what is economically best for…
Crisis and Leviathan: IMF Edition
Why do we still have the International Monetary Fund? It began life in 1944 with one rather specific purpose, to make sure that currencies traded at fixed rates of exchange. Since at least 1973, few currency issuers (brave exceptions include China and Panama) have shown the slightest interest in fixed exchange rates. Shouldn’t the IMF have folded a long time ago? What happened was mission creep. For about thirty years, from 1944 to 1973, the IMF did in fact supervise a world generally on fixed exchange rates. These were the “thirty glorious years” in France; the time of the “economic miracle”…
