Hayek

Thursday

Kate Andrews

Impeccable history of the free market – and from the BBC too

The launch of Radio 4’s Invisible Hands series has been both blessed and cursed by timing. It tells the story of Britain’s ‘free market revolution’, just as President Donald Trump overhauls the free trade consensus of the past 40 years and world leaders grapple with how to respond. The problem is the hypotheticals posed at the start of the first episode – that free market capitalism ‘might be in crisis’; that ‘the global free market might be under threat’ – are already out of date. It’s settled. Free trade is out, tariffs are in. Welcome to the trade wars. The world could do worse than look to the ‘Invisible Hands’

Monday

Steerpike

LSE campaign demands Hayek Society abolition

Another day, another student fiasco. This time the scene of the crime is the London School of Economics and a new campaign called LSE Class War, launched earlier this month with its own radical manifesto. Among the (fairly standard) demands for this groups are call for a ‘private school free’ LSE – a policy which would necessitate the removal of many of its international students – and calls to ‘decolonise LSE’ with ethnic minority quotas for the hiring of academics. More unusual is the demand to ‘install a David Graeber lecture series to celebrate the life of the revered professor’ – a reference to the left-wing academic who died last year. This