they were by and large precisely the sort of pedant who insists on reminding you at least once a week that the US is *not* a democracy, but a democratic republic. they also liked to refer to democracy as mob rule or "mobocracy". they were rand and hayek fans, almost to the last one.
to be fair, a number also liked to describe the US as a plutocratic state, but i'm not sure this was seen as distinct from or in any conflict with their otherwise elitist-individualist sentiments.
j
On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 04:29 PM, Shane Taylor wrote:
> I hope Brad doesn't mind this entry from his blog being reposted here,
> but it was quite good:
>
> Notes: Hayek and Democracy
>
> I have long been of the opinion that Friedrich Hayek saw more deeply
> into
> why the market economy is so productive--the use of knowledge in
> society,
> competition as a discovery procedure, et cetera--than neoclassical
> economics, with its Welfare Theorems that under appropriate conditions
> the competitive market equilibrium (a) is Pareto-Optimal or (b)
> maximizes
> a social welfare function that is the sum of individual utilities in
> which each individual's weight is the inverse of their marginal utility
> of income.
>
> <snip>
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