A Hayekian Worldview

In June 2010, Nobel Prize winner in Economics Friedrich August von Hayek’s book “The Road to Serfdom” became the bestselling book in Amazon.com thus making it the fastest selling book in the world at the time. In his famous book, first published in March 1944, Hayek warned the world about the economic policies being pursued and how they would inevitably lead to economic crises, political turmoil, and eventually “Serfdom” or a kind of slavery to gigantic government bureaucracies. Hayek predicted the global economic crisis we currently find ourselves in and the world is just beginning to catch up to his ideas; ideas which are currently fueling an intellectual revolution which is hopefully about to explode into the mainstream and transform society. Although Hayek might best be known for his classic book and being a famous economist, he was much more than that, perhaps no other human being has pieced together as coherent an understanding of the world as he has, thus making him one of the greatest intellectuals mankind has yet to produce. If mankind is to overcome its socioeconomic problems and reach a state of peace and increasing prosperity it must stumble upon Hayek and like-minded thinkers just as surely as mankind had to stumble upon an understanding of bacteria in order to cure disease. The central theme of this book can be summarized by the following words Hayek wrote: “We understand now that all enduring structures above the level of the simplest atoms, and up to the brain and society, are the results of, and can be explained only in terms of, processes of selective evolution…” This book is about the single law of nature that creates everything around us, both the biological as well as the socioeconomic worlds, that law being Natural Selection. Whether we know much about natural selection or not, most of us associate it with people like Charles Darwin and the biological world of animals and living things, but natural selection also evolved the socioeconomic order and things like religions, laws, customs, language, and especially for our purposes, the many socioeconomic institutions that make up our modern economies like money, the banking and lending industries, stock markets, interest rates and more. In other words, at a fundamental level natural selection creates both the biological as well as the socioeconomic orders. ... Although most of this book can be seen as an introduction to economics, I also wanted to briefly discuss a cultural phenomenon that plays a significant role in society and does not get much critical attention: the rise and dominance of the African American dominated Hip-Hop culture and its effects on American society and the world.