Status Updates From Camino de servidumbre

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I also find myself with little differentiated views to speak of. Most of my views are just the product of my society, the people I associate with, or rehashes of other thinkers.

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obvious that most stupid people are conservative'. Mill does NOT say that most conservatives are stupid, he says that it is obvious that most stupid people are conservative. ii) Do the students and academics of our higher institutions have differentiated views today? It seems that they are overwhelmingly left-wing, progressive and anti-capitalist. iii) It obviously reminded me of Trump's base.

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regions with lower moral and intellectual standards.

Important caveat by Hayek, however: this does NOT mean that most people have low standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values and beliefs are similar are the people with low standards.

Definitely an interesting idea, and I've been reflecting on it all day. 3 points: i) It reminded me of how Mill asserted that 'it is ...

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on top. Firstly, it is 'probably true in general' that more intelligent and educated people have more differentiated views. This is clear: stupid and uneducated people cannot think for themselves, their beliefs are dictated by primitive and common tastes and instincts. I would add first-order thinking to that mix.

So, to find a high degree of similarity and uniformity in outlook, we must descend to the...

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I have reached Chapter 10: Why the worst get on top - probably the most one-sided chapter, where Hayek finally says what he's been itching to say for the whole book: that totalitarianism is inevitable if we allow a select few to run our society. I find this sort of extreme thinking bizarre but I look forward to unpacking the arguments.

What caught my eye was an interesting idea behind why the worst get...

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famous Franklin quote (which Hayek peruses) of 'Those who sacrifice liberty in exchange for security deserve neither' is equally philosophically meaningless.

I'm sure an individual with a predilection for security could equally use reason to argue why security dominates liberty.

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ideologue on neither liberty nor security). Pure reason cannot PROVE why a certain end, even liberty, is the ULTIMATE end: each individual has their own preference for either liberty or security based on their passions. This is why I find Hayek to be constantly shouting 'Liberty liberty liberty!' but never telling me, why liberty? He can't!

Sentimentalist moral philosophy is the same reason why the ...

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It seems to me that this is the classic conundrum of sentimentalist moral philosophy at play. Reason can only inform us HOW to reach our ends (in Hayek's case, his reason informed him that security will eventually subsume liberty - the end that he wants), but never WHICH ends to reach for. I find myself bound in a world where only the passions can inform us which ends I want (in my personal case, I'm an ...

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I've finished reading Chapter 9: Security and Freedom, and the main takeaway was that Hayek, of course, argues very well why trading off a bit of liberty for some security is a slippery slope that will eventually demand from us all our liberty, BUT, Hayek never (and I would argue, can never) proves/ argues WHY liberty should be the supreme good, or at least, why it is a better good than security.

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Since your income is not tied to equity risk, a salaried worker shouldn't expect to be compensated more than a business owner - but it seems that, according to Hayek, many well-trained, highly educated white-collar workers envy the blue-collar business owner who makes more than them.

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- that back then, they didn't have opportunities, and our generation is the entitled generation, etc etc etc. Horseshit.

A key idea that Hayek plants in my mind, though, is that you should expect to not be compensated for the lower risk that you're taking. He comments that socialist mindset against the profit motive led many of the professional class to become salaried workers.

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It is interesting that Hayek touches on the elite overproduction hypothesis (he doesn't use this term of course), and identifies this group as the root of much of socialist support - people with higher education and training who think that they deserve more than their jobs pay them. I find this interesting because I take this as evidence of the lies that our parents and grandparents like to feed us ...

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Have we not seen enough empirical studies that show systemic discrimination against certain groups in the free market? I am all for liberty, but I do not once believe that I could be a professional actor or football player if I just took a paycut and then put in the effort.

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themselves up by the bootstraps.

Hayek also seems to live in a fantasy world in other domains. He says that under the free market, no one is truly excluded from their dreams - the plain girl who dreams to be a saleswoman can do so were she to take a paycut and then put in the effort over time, etc; whereas under a central planner, everyone would be directed to occupations that they are deemed suited for.

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greatest device of liberty in human history, under free markets, a poor man could lift himself out of poverty by earning more money.

...

Huh?
So ... solve homelessness by buying a house? Solve world hunger by ... feeding people? Solve poverty by ... earning money?

This is ridiculous. Obviously, Hayek's naive claim rests on the assumption that sufficient economic mobility exists for people to pull ...

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I get what Hayek is saying. Firstly, I broadly agree with Friedman's famous maxim that economic freedom is a necessary condition for political freedom. Thus, to surrender our economic freedom to a central planner would be to surrender our political freedom as well.

That being said, I must say that I think some of Hayek's views concerning the liberty of money to be naive. Hayek says that money is the ...

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My point is that Hayek himself has views on the nature of the good life (which probably aligns with mine), but knows that a planned society to achieve any one person's opinion of 'the good life' is economically impossible and politically illiberal.

Note 7/n:
to a liberal market economy - the point of a classical liberal society is to 'lower the sights of politics', to not aim at a good life as defined by any religion or doctrine, but just to aim to preserve LIFE ITSELF, to let people decide for themselves what the good life is.