- 28/05/2025
Stephanie Flanders looks at the radical free-market economist Friedrich Hayek's solution to the problems of capitalism - set it virtually totally free from state control.
Categoria
😹
DiversãoTranscrição
00:00We heard that he'd been sinking and then we heard that he died and my husband
00:07said you will have to contact and I was on the phone to the world and people
00:15were saying had I told the American president had I told mrs. Thatcher it
00:22was only then I think that finally it was rammed home to me the enormous
00:26effect that he'd had on the whole world no ringing in the middle of the night
00:31ringing the president of the United States to say that F.A. Hayek had died
00:38Friedrich Hayek was a champion of the market he inspired many of the people
00:44who built the world we live in today Margaret Thatcher would from time to
00:49time pull little bits of paper with quotations on them out of her handbag
00:54and Hayek would be one of them for more than a generation Western leaders claim
00:59to embrace one central economic idea the free market with a financial crisis
01:05that orthodoxies under attack our faith in it it's been shaken like never before
01:09but one great free market visionaries emerged from the meltdown with his
01:14reputation enhanced there might never be a better time to listen to Friedrich
01:19Hayek I see right now this moment in history as a time where Hayek's ideas
01:27deserve a shot of all the big pro-market thinkers
01:32Hayek was by far the most radical he believed the market should be freer than
01:37any government has ever dared to allow it to be in the world according to Hayek
01:42politicians should step back from trying to manage capitalism's ups and downs
01:47they should simply set it free there's no doubt that he's a significant thinker
01:53though there's major controversy about every area of his thought in this series
01:59will reveal the stories of the lives and revolutionary thinking of three
02:03extraordinary men John Maynard Keynes Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek they all
02:10saw their worlds changing as never before becoming ever more complex and
02:14interconnected the fate of entire nations now hung on the power of money
02:19and they had very different ideas about what to do even in the middle of an
02:24economic meltdown Hayek's advice to governments was to step back and do
02:29nothing meddling would only make things worse it's not what anyone has ever
02:34wanted to hear but today we've tried all the usual tricks for fixing the economy
02:39is it time finally to take Hayek's advice instead
02:58around the world we're all still feeling the shockwaves of the financial crash of 2008
03:05you really can feel the fear down here but now has had its worst five days in five years
03:11until that crisis hit western leaders had put their faith in the free market as the best way
03:16to generate wealth but in their version of the market derived from thinkers like Milton Friedman
03:24they still believed if things went wrong they could step in tweak the system get everything
03:29back on track today fans of the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek say it's that arrogant
03:35that distorted picture of a market economy that got us into this mess if we want to try to get
03:40out of it we need to try the real thing to understand how governments not markets might
03:46have caused the crisis we need to wind the clock back to the years leading up to it
03:53america's interest rates have been cut that was expected but the timing has come as a surprise
03:59it's january 2001 and america's central bank the federal reserve
04:04has cut interest rates because it's worried the u.s economy is slowing down
04:10now it cut interest rates for the same reason central banks always do
04:13to make it cheaper for companies and households to borrow and seek out profitable investments
04:19the president was pleased as you might imagine this is the kind of thing presidents expect
04:24central banks to do to avoid economic trouble i think the cut was um was needed it was a
04:33strong statement that measures must be taken to make sure our economy does not go into a tailspin
04:42had Friedrich Hayek been alive he would have taken a very different view
04:46far from avoiding trouble Hayek would have seen the federal reserve's decision to cut interest rates
04:53as sowing the seeds of today's financial crisis
04:58in fact Hayek believed almost any government intervention in the market like propping up
05:02failing businesses setting trade tariffs or manipulating interest rates risk disaster
05:09and the years after 2001 the federal reserve carried on cutting interest rates helping to
05:14fuel a property boom that ultimately couldn't be sustained early in 2007 america's housing
05:22bubble burst and the global financial crisis began just as Hayek might have predicted the
05:29conventional wisdom was that none of these events were foreseeable we couldn't have done anything
05:34about it but of course all of that was false what's playing out before our eyes
05:39is exactly what men like Hayek predicted would happen at first glance the Hayek view of the
05:46crisis looks a bit familiar but don't be fooled you probably think you've heard this argument
05:53before that the federal reserve partly caused the crisis by setting interest rates too low
05:59encouraging everyone to borrow too much but the argument of Hayek and his followers actually runs
06:04deeper than that it's not just that the federal reserve got its sums wrong didn't set the right
06:09interest rate it's that it shouldn't be in the business of setting interest rates at all it's
06:14this radical rejection of the state's role in regulating the market that sets Hayek apart from
06:20other free market thinkers he believed the market would do a lot more harm than good
06:27he believed the market would do a far better job regulating itself
06:31if only governments would just leave it alone free market did not set interest rates at one
06:38percent under greenspan that's the government that is doing that that is price fixing it's
06:43kind of the way the old soviet union used to fix the price of bread or gasoline the u.s government
06:49fixes interest rates the same way we need the market to set interest rates not the government
06:55and if the market set interest rates they would have been much higher and we wouldn't have had
06:59these problems Hayek's belief in the positive power of the unbridled free market stems from
07:06his childhood in Austria he was born in Vienna in 1899 then the city was packed full of intellectuals
07:13like Freud and Wittgenstein many of whom Hayek came to know these family photographs have not
07:22been widely seen growing up he had a keen desire to make sense of the modern world taking shape
07:31around him must have been 13 or 14 when i began pestering all the priests i knew to explain to me
07:40what they meant by the word god none of them could that was the end for me already Hayek grew up in a
07:48family of scientists like many other intellectuals in Vienna at that time
07:53they liked to think they were on a grand quest to unwrap the secrets of the universe
08:01since the 18th century enlightenment science had unlocked many of the puzzles of the universe
08:06including the origins of life itself as Hayek grew up he was drawn to what he saw as the last
08:12frontier the mysterious workings of the economy in all its growing complexity and power in
08:19darwin's theory of evolution he thought he saw what a new science of the economy might look like
08:27physics which allows often for precise predictions in terms of planetary motion and eclipses is not
08:34a good model for understanding how social phenomena work i think that was the basis of his
08:39attraction to evolutionary theory he wanted to establish that you could be a science even if you
08:44don't make precise predictions even if you don't have the sort of control that many of his opponents
08:49said well if we're a science we should be able to engineer society the way an engineer builds a bridge
08:57darwin's theory of evolution also helped forge hayek's vision of capitalism itself
09:02he came to believe the global market had evolved over the course of human history
09:07emerging as a kind of natural wonder driving civilization forward
09:19hayek saw the market as a telecommunications system processing billions of pieces of
09:25information about all our needs and desires and the changing supply of resources to meet them
09:31hayek said it was a marvel the way all this is conveyed to us by prices
09:40that guide our actions as they rise and fall
09:47and to hayek the market does most good when it's most free
09:51it's our desire to control it that most often turns it against us
10:06hayek thought that meddling by government could make it harder for the market to do its job
10:11by distorting the signals it was sending to buyers and sellers
10:15and the meddling involved in the government's control of the supply of money
10:18hayek decided could be most damaging of all
10:27rampant inflation unemployment uncontrollable debt in vienna after the first world war
10:34hayek saw for himself how government abuse of money can wreak havoc
10:41across austria prices had taken off and so had unemployment even the rich were struggling to
10:47feed themselves and no one could quite understand why
10:55the war had left the austrian government with huge bills and low tax revenues so it ordered
11:00the national bank to simply print the money it needed in exchange for bonds or ious
11:09what the people manning the printing presses and their political masters had yet to really grasp
11:15was that they weren't just producing money they were producing inflation
11:20the amount of money in the economy was going up so people had more money to spend but of course
11:26the amount of things they could buy had stayed more or less the same that forced up the price
11:31of everything inflation took off in fact the situation got so bad in austria the inflation
11:37rate hit 10 000 percent the financial wealth was destroyed those that had jobs
11:46continued to have them but they could no longer afford for instance to have
11:52maids and servants with us all of these people all of a sudden ended up being out of work
11:58with their economy going up in smoke austria's central bankers tried to fight fire with fire
12:05by the summer of 1922 prices were doubling every month and the central bank was playing catch-up
12:11printing higher and higher denomination bank notes just to reflect what was going on in the shops
12:17in the end this 500 000 kroner note could maybe buy you a loaf of bread of course by
12:25pumping more and more money into the economy they were only making the problem worse
12:29for austria's politicians it was all a crisis of their own making
12:34they'd been printing money to pay their bills since the start of the first world war
12:39they didn't understand that that could lead to inflation it was a crisis caused by ignorance
12:49having seen austria brought to its knees hayek had an almost visceral fear of inflation all his life
12:56it's a fear that central bankers still share today
13:05what happened next in america led hayek to conclude there can be something worse than
13:09government ignorance hubris he thought that entire period showed the calamity that can come
13:15when governments try to use the power of money to shape the economy in america in the 1920s
13:22the greatest boom the world had ever seen was taking off consumers couldn't get enough of new
13:28products like cars telephones and record players the stock market rose higher and higher as the
13:36roaring 20s wore on the finest economic minds in america came to believe the boom would never end
13:43back in austria in early 1929 hayek was convinced they'd got it all wrong
13:51he'd become the director of the recently founded institute for business cycle research
13:57its job was to understand why economies were always lurching from one boom and bust cycle
14:02to another hayek called it the 19th century pattern that was hardly a thing of the past
14:09the institute was based here at the chamber of commerce where hayek had been developing
14:13a new theory of boom and bust along with new thinking about the market
14:25to many the downs were unpredictable a kind of force of nature that might destroy
14:33to many the downs were unpredictable a kind of force of nature that might destroy an economy
14:39without warning hayek had been working on a new idea that the seeds of busts were sown
14:46during booms because the worlds have become increasingly interconnected
14:50hayek had been studying the american boom to help him forecast what would happen to the
14:55austrian economy he had to produce monthly reports on the state of the european economy
15:00and in 1929 he's credited with making a striking prediction
15:05he thought the american stock market boom was about to end
15:10he was right in october 1929 wall street fell off a cliff and the 20s roared to an anguished end
15:18hayek's prediction came out of what he saw happening at america's new central bank
15:24the federal reserve had been set up in 1913 to stabilize america's notoriously shaky private
15:31banks by offering them a reliable source of credit
15:36hayek's big idea was that it was the cost of borrowing the interest rate set by central banks
15:41like the new york fund and the new york stock exchange
15:45the interest rate set by central banks like the new york federal reserve
15:49that caused unsustainable booms to develop and caused the inevitable busts
15:57in the 1920s the governor of the new york federal reserve had a revolutionary idea benjamin strong
16:04thought he could use the bank's power to set interest rates to influence what was happening
16:09in the economy in many ways that idea of using interest rates marked the start of modern monetary
16:16policy strong began buying government debt on the open market which did have the effect of
16:23raising the amount of money in the economy but unlike austria's hapless central bankers
16:28strong had a strategy the difference with what had happened in austria was that the fed wasn't
16:33buying treasury bonds to help the government pay its bills it was doing it to get money into the
16:38market and keep interest rates low the central bank wanted to encourage everyone individuals and
16:44households and companies to borrow from the banks it worked utilities up motors up radio way up
16:52everything up strong's intervention really paved the way for the financial system we have today
17:00thanks to all that credit he created the stock market rose higher and higher
17:05with loans so cheap many borrowed money to buy shares others invested heavily in property
17:13the federal reserve hoped its intervention would keep the boom going indefinitely
17:17but hayek believes strong's policy was sowing the seeds of an eventual bust according to hayek the
17:23low cost of borrowing was sending the wrong signal to investors in effect that low interest rate was
17:30telling them that america was saving more that there was lots of cash sitting in bank
17:34accounts ready to be lent on and invested it wasn't true don't sell america short why man we've scarcely
17:43started by the time the federal reserve spotted the warning signs it was too late over 14 billion
17:52dollars go with them and so goes the confidence of the nation wall street the crash came when
17:58interest rates rose and investors started to realize the banks didn't have money to back up
18:03all those investments after all the jazz age is over all over to hayek the lesson was clear
18:12by feeding a boom with cheap credit the federal reserve had helped cause the wall street crash
18:17and the great depression fast forward to today's global crisis you could tell a similar story
18:28we certainly saw a lot of cheap credit in the decade before the crash
18:32which did help fuel unsustainable property booms
18:38today central banks have computer models of the economy light years ahead of anything dreamt up
18:43by benjamin strong but even so hayek's followers say the federal reserve had learned nothing from
18:49the mistakes it made in the 1920s in the early 2000s it had kept interest rates too low for too
18:56long but then and now there are plenty who would disagree the job of the fed chairman is to keep
19:03the party going to spike the punch bowl at all costs not to take the punch bowl away which really
19:09should be the job i mean the federal reserve should be independent but it's not it acts in
19:14concert with the government to try to maintain a phony prosperity interest rates are very low
19:22and that was partly promoted by the fact that the surplus countries notably china but others
19:30as well had a lot of money they were perfectly happy with exporting would have been hard to
19:36force american interest rates higher in that environment because there was so much money
19:41flowing in at low interest rates if it was all the fed's fault how come europe had the exact
19:48same experience it's not the fact of of the interest rate policy maybe having been wrong
19:53although i'm not even sure i agree on that but it's the fact that we had these
19:56deregulated wild west financial markets that allowed us to get into the crisis we're in
20:02like our own financial collapse the consequences of the 1929 crash were felt across the world
20:09a string of banking crises followed and a terrible depression in america and much of europe
20:15again hayek said it was all down to interest rates being too low in the boom years
20:19but years later another hugely influential free market thinker came along who argued the exact
20:25opposite milton friedman he said the federal reserve had not pumped too much money into the
20:31system but too little that's the version of history that most politicians and economists still believe
20:38hayek was absolutely wrong to think that in the catastrophic depths of the great depression of
20:45the 1930s that all that was happening was a an unwinding of the malinvestments that had come from
20:53a credit boom clearly there had been a calamitous collapse of the banking sector that had nothing to
20:59do with the earlier so-called malinvestment as the great depression began hayek was in
21:05as the great depression began hayek was invited to give a series of lectures
21:09here at the london school of economics
21:15the lse wanted him as part of their fight back against a new very different strand of economic
21:20thinking from arch rivals cambridge that had been getting a lot of attention
21:25the man driving that new approach was john maynard keynes the grand dispute between
21:32keynes and hayek in the 1930s seems so relevant to us today it's become an internet sensation
21:42lord keynes wow it's it's it's such an honor indeed sir please just go
21:47this surreal reinvention of their battle of ideas has been watched nearly two million times online
21:52hayek no hayek like um high explosives
22:09hayek's opponent keynes was a heavyweight thinker the seemingly unstoppable new force
22:15in economics the clash felt a bit like david and goliath
22:23keynes had two brains it was said of him that he caused more inferiority complexes
22:29with justification than anyone else in his generation hayek was not known he was 16 years
22:35younger than keynes they fell out with each other on first meeting and continued to fight for the
22:42rest of their lives the big economic argument that started here in 1931 is still going on today
22:49if an economy gets into trouble should the government intervene to try to fix it
22:55keynes answer was emphatically yes hayek said no for once it really was that simple
23:02for keynes was a moral problem the fact was there were people unemployed and therefore they should
23:08be put back to work and it didn't really matter how you did it for hayek it was a different thing
23:14hayek concluded that we really didn't know enough about economics and that any attempt by people
23:21like keynes to start fooling around with it with would only end up with unintended consequences
23:27and those unintended consequences according to hayek could be even worse than the problems that
23:33were solved the bitter argument between hayek and keynes embodies a fault line in economics
23:39that exists to this day
23:45it's one of the great academic disputes in the history of intellectual thought it set the tone
23:51really for the difference between left and right today between those who want to intervene in the
23:54economy and those who would prefer to leave the economy alone it was one of the most important
24:03intellectual battles of the 20th century and at the time it was pretty clear who won
24:09keynes in 1933 as the depression showed no sign of ending president roosevelt instigated a massive
24:16public spending program that looked very keynesian under the new deal all kinds of
24:22infrastructure was built across america perhaps most famously hoover dam in arizona
24:31the new deal's gone down in history as the first time a country seriously tried to spend its way
24:35out of recession but even at the time hayek thought it was a mistake he believed what the
24:41economy needed was a period of cleansing to get rid of all the bad investment and weak businesses
24:46from the boom and let the fittest survive hayek saw the new deal as an artificial stimulant
24:54preventing the market naturally healing its damaged ecosystem rather than stepping in
25:01government should step back and let the recession do its job
25:07hayek thought that the recession was the return to normalcy that the boom was caused by bad policy
25:14but once the recession started that was the return of the economy to normalcy it would involve
25:20liquidation of certain projects that had been started that were not sustainable
25:25but in the depths of capitalism's worst ever crisis hayek's tough message
25:30was too much for most politicians to swallow he was ignored
25:44when the financial crisis hit in 2008 policymakers were blindsided
25:49after lehman brothers one of the world's most famous investment banks went down
25:53the american government swiftly turned to canes to try to stop the damage spreading
26:02they started intervening on an epic scale spending hundreds of billions of dollars propping up banks
26:07insurance companies even america's biggest car firms to stop them going bust apparently they
26:14didn't want to see the deep cleansing of the economy that hayek would have recommended
26:19it's not like i'm glad that we need a recession it's unfortunate that we need this recession
26:24had the government not interfered in the economy in ways that i would have been against we never
26:29would have had this phony boom so in other words if we didn't take all these drugs we wouldn't
26:33have to go through the withdrawal in that period in 2008 right across the world people were scared
26:41stiff that this was going to go from a recession into a downright depression and the world is so
26:46global now these things could easily have spread that's why you know people thought
26:51you know different countries we've got to do whatever it takes to stop that
26:56today central banks are pursuing another keynesian idea keeping interest rates low
27:02encouraging borrowing to stimulate economic activity but if you follow the austrian
27:07but if you follow the austrian hayek view it's all worse than pointless
27:12because this intervention in the market is setting the stage for an even greater disaster
27:19what do you think is the relevance of hayek to to what the fed's doing now pouring kerosene
27:25on the fire and trying to put it out they're trying to stop the problem of excessive credit
27:30with more credit but all that it does is it restarts the problems again and you create a
27:36new bubble and the bubble now is in the value of the dollar and the bond market and is unsustainable
27:45hayek's argument with keynes was all about how best to make capitalism work but as the 30s moved
27:52on hayek was drawn into a far greater battle whether capitalism was even the right way to
27:57organize society or if the new ideologies of communism and fascism with their centrally
28:03planned systems held the answer he was convinced both were utterly wrong
28:11hayek said not merely can human beings struggle to understand how to cope with uncertainty
28:18but the world is just too complex for them to cope with understanding all of it
28:23a market system conveys so much information that makes it feasible central planning will
28:29fail under the weight of the impossibility of understanding the complexity of the economy
28:34that was hayek's most important insight and if people had listened to that
28:38they would never have been so worried about the threat from communism as they were because
28:43central planning failed under the weight of its own inconsistency hayek had seen the economic
28:49costs of central planning but world war ii made him focus on the political implications of course
28:55he didn't want the allies to lose the war but seeing how the war effort was changing the economy
29:01made him worry about what would happen if they won he didn't want to defeat the nazis
29:05and then find we'd handed our freedom to an army of bureaucrats instead
29:13when the second world war began the british government took control of the economy
29:18to harness its power for the war effort hayek worried they would never let go
29:26there's a lot of enthusiasm especially among socialists to continue the planning that had
29:30taken place during world war ii after the war was over a government inspector checks
29:35that the measurements are 90 inches long and 60 wide and that the weight is four and a half pounds
29:40as men from the ministry dictated how many blankets each blanket factory produced
29:45hayek began writing a book attacking the government's control of the economy
29:49it would help change the course of the 20th century and start a political battle that runs to this day
30:00and there is a handwritten copy by my father-in-law in an ordinary child's exercise book
30:11of the road to serfdom he has written on it this is about the third or fourth draft
30:19from a longer typescript later destroyed by mistake and so that's that is the draft that
30:28survived of the road to serfdom in the road to serfdom hyatt makes a moral argument that
30:35government attempts to control the economy ultimately enslave its people when we give
30:42more and more power to the state gradually there is an erosion of first economic freedom
30:47and then ultimately political freedom that erosion of political freedom then leads people
30:52to demand a strong man a dictator to sort everything out make the trains run on time
30:57and and everything else and that this leads inexorably down the road to totalitarianism
31:03it says to the socialists of all parties he loved it he was so amused when he thought it up
31:12the road to serfdom was published in britain in 1944 with little fanfare
31:18but across the atlantic things were very different
31:22in april 1945 hayek agreed to give a short lecture tour of american universities
31:29before he arrived his book was given the kind of publicity that money can't buy
31:33an extended extract was published in reader's digest which had more than eight million subscribers
31:40hayek's warning about the dangers of big government struck a chord with many americans
31:45the road to serfdom really fitted in with notions of american individualism and the sense that
31:51anybody can become a millionaire if only they were to work hard enough and an anxiety which
31:57came right from the founding fathers about whether the federal government should take too much
32:02power from the states after the war the size and reach of government did grow across the western
32:10world with the rise of the welfare state reading hayek gave a kind of explanation of why what had
32:20gone wrong was going wrong i gave an alternative vision which seemed to me to be very cogent
32:29what it boiled down to was freedom within the rule of law what he was read to say and actually
32:37himself moved to say by the 1960s was that moving to a social welfare society would eat away at the
32:48health of democracy i think it's one of his failed predictions badly failed even though it remains an
32:56influential part of his thinking now with many followers in the libertarian mode in fact hayek
33:04was in favor of governments providing some kind of safety net but his modern supporters don't like
33:09to dwell on that well we have a lot more socialism now than when he wrote it as socialism creeps in
33:16the economy slowly over time a lot of people don't notice it and eventually you know you're not on
33:21the road to serfdom you're you've arrived at serfdom think about victorian britain that was
33:27certainly a very um free market it was there was a minimum government intervention do we think that
33:34the average citizen of england in in 1870 felt a great deal of personal freedom i think there was
33:42a great deal of servility and class uh deference coming out of the fact that the lives of the poor
33:48were incredibly insecure and only by constantly uh uh flattering their betters could they have
33:56any reasonable assurance of survival so no i think i think there's more more freedom and dignity
34:00in a in a moderately strong welfare state than there is in the hayek and paradise of free markets
34:12despite the success of the road to serfdom in the 1950s and 60s hayek found himself in the political
34:19wilderness governments across the western world were enthusiastically embracing the ideas of
34:24hayek's nemesis from the dark days of the 1930s john maynard keynes it became the new capitalist
34:33orthodoxy that governments could successfully manage their economies the tide of history
34:39had turned against hayek he got very depressed people weren't listening to him and they weren't
34:45reading his books england seemed to be going left wing he'd chosen to be british and he looked
34:54from his views of an economist and he could see everything going the wrong way
35:03then in 1974 eska hayek got a phone call out of the blue it was the man who'd invited hayek to
35:10the lse 40 years earlier to do battle with keynes it was lionel robbins who rang me and said are
35:20you sitting down i said yes and he said uh well uh he's been awarded a nobel prize in economics
35:31and that was like being given the knighthood of the world that's the nobel citation
35:39in stockholm the 10th of december 1974 alpha nobel given to friedrich von hayek
35:53his life started off completely again he'd been depressed he was coming up to retirement and
35:58suddenly everything started it was a new life absolutely everything took off for him
36:10so
36:14while everything began taking off for hayek britain was sinking into economic decline
36:20strikes had become a fact of life the post-war keynesian consensus was crumbling
36:31a few months after hayek won the nobel prize the conservative party
36:35turned to a new leader the rise of margaret thatcher brought hayek into the political
36:40mainstream for the first time margaret thatcher would from time to time pull little bits of paper
36:47with quotations on them out of her handbag and hayek would be one of them hayek had spent most
36:53of the 20th century as a political outsider now he had the ear of the woman who would be
37:00britain's next prime minister i think it would be a great mistake to think of her as
37:05studying hayek like a student would it's more trying to get inspiration from hayek and casting
37:12around ransacking the minds of great men of whom he was one of the most prominent
37:17so that she could somehow get the gold in 1979 margaret thatcher was swept to power determined
37:24to build a new britain it was a bold change of direction that really did create the world we
37:29live in today we did institute a radical change of policy direction which has not really been
37:40reversed it may have been muddied but it hasn't been reversed it um does chime in with hayek
37:48right back in the 1940s saying that the path we're on at the moment is the road to serfdom
37:55and we need to tread a very different path
38:00in the language of the time mrs thatcher began rolling back the state government-owned industries
38:06were privatized public spending and taxes were cut there was a bonfire of state controls on the
38:12market on prices wages dividends and foreign exchange britain was moving hayek's way
38:21we were certainly very much on the same wavelength we were not busy thumbing his
38:27works to find out what we should do it was not a handbook for government but it was the same
38:33general idea nowhere did today's world emerge more clearly than in the conservatives battle
38:41with the british trade unions margaret thatcher wanted to put a stop to what she saw as rampant
38:47union power but she faced a dilemma how do you do that without alienating the entire population
38:54hayek's philosophy helped her formulate her answer
39:00she wanted to frame the argument in terms of liberty she didn't want to say the workers
39:04are all dreadful let's squash them she wanted to say the workers are being squashed by their leaders
39:09this very much fed into hayek and the idea of liberty was you were defending your country here
39:22as well as the state of labor relations hayek and margaret thatcher agreed on a lot but there was
39:29one crucial difference between them whereas hayek thought you freed the market to prevent power from
39:35getting too concentrated in the hands of politicians mrs thatcher thought you could
39:39have free market policies and still keep a lot of power at the center that tension between hayek's
39:46ideas and the controlling instinct of even free market politicians never really went away where
39:53she i think missed out sometimes was understanding the importance of institutions and of countervailing
40:04power in a society hayek for example was quite understanding about the role of local authorities
40:13and local municipalities and local power centers in a way which i don't think margaret ever was
40:24hayek's political influence reached its height in 1986 when mrs thatcher's government swept away
40:31much of the regulation that had constrained the city of london the big bang set the financial
40:36markets free ushering in today's vast interconnected global financial system but it wasn't really the
40:43free market that hayek wanted hayek's followers would say the deregulated financial system that
40:50came out of the 80s and 90s played a big role in the financial crisis because it was only ever
40:55half free it was distorted by an implicit promise to all these financial institutions
41:02that if things went wrong governments would still come to the rescue
41:07in the kind of capitalism we've had in the west since the 1980s the financial institutions that
41:13triggered the recent crash were free to do anything it seems except fail it was the too big to fail
41:22problem that they knew that it was a question of heads i win tails the taxpayer loses and if that
41:32is the bet you take the bet and you take it on a bigger and bigger and a bigger scale so they knew
41:38pretty well that if they got the gamble wrong governments couldn't allow to fail they'd have
41:44to be bailed out that is what is wrong and that is what has to be stopped we certainly have
41:49discovered after the fact that banks are not allowed to fail was that actually a significant
41:54factor in the over lending i don't think there's much evidence of that now the fact that that big
42:00banks clearly will not be allowed to fail and that is distorting our system but i don't think that's
42:06the story of the crisis i think that the crisis was one more about just a general failure to
42:11understand the risks there's no doubt that in the last 30 years politicians of all stripes
42:19have let market forces influence more and more parts of society but they've drawn the
42:24line at hayek's most revolutionary idea of turning money itself over to the market
42:33imagine a world where we didn't have just one legal currency circulating in each country
42:37issued by a central bank but dozens of competing currencies anyone a company a bank a private
42:44individual could set up their own version of the currency and they'd be free to compete
42:49the market would determine how much they were worth hayek knew it was a crazy sounding
42:55suggestion even for him but it would finally stop governments abusing the power of money
43:01in america one man has been trying to do just that
43:09he's taken hayek's most explosive idea and turned it into a reality
43:15and turned it into a reality
43:28bernard von notthouse calls himself a monetary architect
43:32the american authorities call him a domestic terrorist
43:37for some what's happened to von notthouse shows just how seriously governments take
43:42any challenge to their monopoly over money economics is dry and boring but money money
43:50money money money is exciting money sexy you know money's got possessed it's about people
43:56and about dreams about what we do you know money is fantastic and that's what i really
44:01connected with in terms of von hayek because what he said in here was about people taking control
44:09and people issuing their own money von notthouse created his own currency a silver coin called the
44:18liberty dollar which anyone could buy and many have thanks to him coins worth anything up to
44:2450 million dollars have now been sent out into the u.s economy and hayek was a big inspiration
44:31he says the problem is government money it's always been government money because they abuse
44:37their power they make money out of thin air so he says what we should do is to abolish the central bank
44:45the end of the federal reserve that was fantastic
44:49ever since benjamin strong was running the new york federal reserve in the 1920s central banks
44:55have used their control over the supply of money to try to manage the economy's ups and downs
45:01but as we've seen to hayek and his fans central banks are the cause of many of capitalism's
45:07problems not the solution and i don't argue for closing the fed down in one day either i want an
45:13audit of the fed and i want competition ix ideas of competition and money and uh and see who can
45:20who who can win this this argument but for them to claim monopoly powers and prevent us from
45:26practicing uh private market economics is the real problem that we have
45:33a lot of this is this utopian vision the golden age when men were men and currency was free
45:40the united states had a long period of no government monopoly on currency we had that
45:45whole system of unregulated banks issuing competing currencies that system was heavily
45:50prone to financial crises so the idea again that competition is the answer is flying in the face
45:56of history perhaps but the history of government efforts to control the market hasn't been so pretty
46:04either for hayek what was really utopian was the belief that central banks or anyone else for that
46:09matter could ever be a match for the dizzying complexity of our modern economy hayek would say
46:16since since they can't do it they should just stop trying we should stop having well stop having any
46:21intervention in monetary policy or stop having central banks if you go to the stream well that's
46:27dreaming i think von nottaus's own attempt to compete with the federal reserve eventually
46:36drew the attention of the american authorities in 2007 the fbi moved in i think they began to
46:45perceive us as a threat instead of a solution the monetary architect behind the liberty dollar is
46:51talking about the u.s government and why agents raided his evansville world headquarters earlier
46:56this month von nottaus was charged with counterfeiting u.s currency giving evidence
47:04in this courthouse in north carolina in 2011 he talked about hayek well he was relevant to my
47:13defense was because this wasn't some harebrained idea that i had thought up myself that i pointed
47:19out that here was a well-known nobel lawyer who had talked about exactly what i had done
47:31bernard von nottaus was found guilty and now faces up to 25 years in prison
47:37so
47:46i think this was the one he was most proud of companion of honor presented by queen elizabeth
47:54ii buckingham palace 1984 and he was absolutely thrilled when he got that to professor towards
48:04the end of his life hayek was fated by everyone he'd inspired politicians all over the world with
48:11his boundless belief in the power of the free market is catholic university caracas
48:19when it came to their actual policies western leaders in the 1980s usually turned to a free
48:25market thinker whose ideas they found more palatable milton friedman's belief that
48:31governments could steer the economy using their power over the supply of money in circulation
48:36is still a touchstone for governments everywhere in that sense friedman unlike hayek did offer
48:44politicians a way to champion the free market and hold on to the reins of power
48:51hayek's life spanned almost the entire 20th century an era of unprecedented scientific progress
48:57that's one small step for man one giant leap for mankind
49:07but also unprecedented economic disasters living in the shadow of both hayek came to
49:13see the great crises of capitalism as a result of politicians mistaking economics for a science
49:21it was a century for taking on all the big questions and the big question for economists
49:26was how they were going to tame this extraordinary modern economy
49:31canes and hayek both thought that would be incredibly difficult dangerous even but canes
49:36flattered governments with the idea that they could tilt the course of human history their way
49:42it was hayek who said they shouldn't even try we might uncover the laws of the universe
49:47we were never going to master the complexities of human nature
49:52pretense of knowledge he called it pretending they know something that they don't know
49:57well they've been doing it now they we've we've given the the current crop of economists uh
50:02let's see how many years would that be about 70 some years total failure many of the computer
50:09models have been desperately misleading in pretending that we understand how the economy
50:13works we don't we can't forecast the economy but we can try to think about the big questions
50:19but we can try to think about the big questions can we get out of a deep slump and i think by
50:25working with other countries we can gradually find our way out of this so you need the different
50:30insights together but hayek is a is a the moral of hayek is avoid hubris in economic policy
50:38just as we should avoid hubris in thinking that markets left to their own devices
50:43will lead us to nirvana
50:45there's no doubt hayek helped change the course of world history
50:49shifting it decisively away from the state and towards the market
50:57but no government has ever dared to implement hayek's vision of a market
51:01free from state intervention and when capitalism faced its biggest test since the 1930s
51:07politicians rushed to save the market from itself in fact the biggest debate in britain today
51:12is not about whether the government's doing too much to prop up the economy
51:16but whether it's doing enough today hayek's advice seems harder to take than ever
51:22the global economy still struggling with the effects of the financial crisis
51:27hayek would say governments should just step back dismantle most of the machinery they've
51:32constructed for guiding the economy take a deep breath and let go but how many politicians do you
51:39let go but how many politicians do you know who could ever really follow that advice
52:09you
Recomendado
59:41
|
A Seguir
25:07
24:48
25:09
59:28
59:30
1:29:09
1:28:20
1:37:15
1:32:32
55:25
49:45
1:08:58
1:37:01