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Comment by bjcy | Hacker News Reader

I'm not terribly familiar with free market Austrian-school economics, could you expound on what you mean?

I would ignore the inflammatory language and just educate yourself.

The wikipedia page is informative, if a little heavy going for the non-economist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School

As I posted above, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt is a simple, easy to read book that encapsulates most of the arguments put forth by the Austrian school.

It's a type of junk-economics which has been forced into public consciousness over the last 30-40 years, and which originated in the '30s with philosophers such as von Mises and von Hayek.

Read David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harv...) for a stunning exposition of the social and economic crises that have developed around the world as a result of governments attempting to apply this philosophy.

The book seems interesting. But Neoliberal economists, even though they talk a lot about free markets, have a very different world view than that of Austrian economists. One example: Neoliberals promote treaties like NAFTA that allow the free flow of goods and capital between countries, but don't allow the free flow of people between countries.On the other hand, Austrian economists would insist on the importance of also letting people choose were they want to live and work. Furthermore, despite its name, NAFTA is not really about free trade. NAFTA is a huge set of regulations.

Neoliberalism is Austrian-school thinking put into practice; it's the best that governments can do given the economic and social realities of the day. People like Milton Friedman and other Chicago school economists drew heavily on the Austrians, and those Chicago school economists were directly advising developing nations from the '70s onward.

Responses like yours only reinforce my thesis: your philosophy can never be practiced successfully. Where it fails, the problem is only ever due to some sort of impurity or oversight in implementation. The market can never be "free enough".

If people actually saw what went on "free enough" would have been put to bed years ago. The Chicago boys were given free reign in Chile under Pinochet and nearly destroyed the country. They had to back off of their "free enough" goals to start the trend upwards again to be able to write their "The Chilean Miracle" propaganda piece [1].

[1] http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionC11 (sorry for a link that originates from the Anarchist FAQ but this is the best aggregated source on the subject I've found).

If you're equating the Chicago school and the Austrian school, you don't know the first thing about either and you're not qualified to start the moronic, off-topic flame war about the subject you've gotten everyone into.

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