Fredrick Hayek was an important political/economic thinker and writer of the twentieth century. His classic books The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty, among others, were extremely influential in shaping political thought, and particularly libertarian and conservative thinking. A short, 5-minute movie summarizing the main ideas in The Road to Serfdom can be found here. It is quite chilling.
Despite his beliefs in the power of free-market economies, he was not a Laissez-faire economist, nor was he a conservative, and states his reasons for not being one in his classic essay Why I am not a Conservative.
One of the important ideas that Hayek promoted was the notion that reason alone is insufficient to solve all problems, especially complicated ones like how prices are set in economic systems. Instead, he argued that natural systems, like the free-market economy, must be given sufficient freedom from regulation from well-meaning bureaucrats, so they can operate as a gigantic system of interacting elements. These elements are essentially individual people, pursuing their own individual market interests.
In many of the most important ways, the free-market economy operates very much like an information network. And if we've learned anything about networks, it's that you've got to leave them more or less alone so that they can work out, or compute if you will, the best organization of the system based merely on their own simple interactions. Kevin Kelly does a remarkable job of describing the interactions within networks that make them so powerful and effective.
One would do well to read the above references, and give some consideration to our current political climate and our gradual decent into socialism, the very socialism America's founding fathers warned against. Whatever your political persuasion, you should be concerned about our gradual loss of liberty, and the elimination of freedoms that we once took for granted. It's one thing to disagree with others regarding political questions. It's quite another when those disagreements cannot be discussed for fear of reprisal.
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