Here's a fact that those of us who have little time for Hayek and Mises recognize, but which the followers of those two do not. The largest, most sustained, and most widely distributed improvement in living conditions for poor and working people occurred in the least free-market period of Western capitalism's history. During the return to a more free market style of capitalism during the last 15-20 years, poverty and other social ills related to it have grown significantly. The proportion of the population living in poverty has risen, and the real income of those at the bottom has fallen, over the past 15 to 20 years in the USA, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Chile, Mexico, Argentina and other places where social planning and regulation has been displaced by efforts to allow 'spontaneous order'. In several countries of Asia with the most impressive historical records of reducing poverty and raising living standards for large numbers of people (Japan, the 4 'tigers' and China), the methods followed have not been those of Mises or Hayek, but rather have involved a good deal of conscious, public (though not democratic) control of the economy. This is part of the reason why restatements of the views of Hayek and Mises as being based on honest commitment to the facts strike me as completely unconvincing. Their views are in fact decidedly a priori, and the worsening of conditions for the working and unemployed poor in recent years owes a good deal to those views being deemed correct on a priori grounds by significant numbers of policymakers. Peter
