박근혜 탄핵의 진짜 이유는 "일본식 의원내각제" 였고 탄핵 당시 이미 여야가 여기에 대해서 합의한 상태라는 말이 많았다 박근혜는 의원내각제 반대 했음 주동자는 김무성과 유승민 1월 14일 박근혜 대법원 형 확정 설 1포인트 박근혜 사면 4월 7일 보궐선거때 의원내각제에 대한 국민 투표 붙임 역대 대통령들이 감옥에 가는 비극을 막자라며 여론 선동 및 문재인에게 면죄부를 줄 가능성이 높다 의원내각제 통과는 박근혜 탄핵의 완성을 의미한다 / 일베 --->의원내각제 밀약설은 지난 부정선거를 국힘당이 눈감아 주는 이유도 설명할 수 있게 된다. 또 내각제를 통해 여야의 탄핵파들이 권력을 잡으면, 박 대통령은 사면된다 해도 영원히 권력에서 배제된다는 것을 뜻한다. 그럼으로써 그들은 불법 탄핵과 부정선거 모두 법망을 피할 수 있게 된다. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 한국경제 "대학 등록금도 못 내던 사촌형, LH 입사하더니 재산 20억" --->관료들의 부패가 조선말의 상황과 비슷하다. 이걸 개혁하지 못하면 망국을 면할 수 없다. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ LH 직원 “與의원들 투기는 놔두고, 왜 우리한테만 지X” “더불어민주당 소속 정치인들이 우리(LH) 쪽에 정보를 요구해서 투기하는 것을 봤다” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 오스트리아 학파 경제학자 안탈 페테케 1932년 헝가리 부다페스트에서 태어난 안탈 페테케Antal Endre Fekete는 수학자이자 경제학자이다. 페테케는 통화의 중요성을 간파한 소수의 유럽인 중의 한사람으로, 통화에는 긍정적으로는 분업의 수단으로 작용하지만, 부정적으로는 정치적 개입의 희생양이 되거나 개입의 촉진제가 된다는 것이다. 그가 멩거의 시장성Absatzfähigkeit (marketability)의 개념을 정의하고 발전시킨 것은 통화 이론에 큰 공헌이었다. 그가 마지막으로 필기한 내용은 내 등골을 서늘하게 했다. 짧은 문장 속에 그는 다가오는 부채로 인한 파탄의 결과가 어떠할지 묘사했다. 그는 2020년 10월 14일 사망했다. Antal Fekete, Gold, and Central Banks Rahim Taghizadegan On the fourteenth of October 2020, Antal E. Fekete, the Hungarian-Canadian economist who saw himself as a monetary theorist following the tradition of Carl Menger, died in Budapest. Behind him was an eventful and fruitful life which was quite typical of the crazy last century. His experiences eventually filled Fekete with dark forebodings for the current century. We can only hope that this crazy year won’t become characteristic of an entire era, as his year of birth did. Antal Endre Fekete was born on the eighth of December 1932 in Budapest. Mass unemployment was rife in the midst of a deep global economic crisis. Hungary was heading towards National Socialism on the back of a severe banking crisis. The totalitarian, anti-Semite Gyula Gömbös had taken over the government shortly before Fekete’s birth. All around, belief in the omnipotence of politics was leading to a spiral of interventionism and polarization which would ultimately lead to the old Europe being destroyed by totalitarianism and war. Monetary policy played a role in this that is underestimated to this day. Fekete was one of the few old Europeans to recognize the central role of money, on the positive side as a means of amicable division of labor, on the negative side as a casualty and lever of political intervention spirals. This led the mathematician to monetary theory, in which he sought to expand and update the old Austrian school of economics. As with all original contributions, it is too soon to definitively assess whether he introduced new errors and what these errors were. Yet his prominence as a sharp thinker who combined theory with profound historical knowledge is undervalued. This is partly due to his quarrelsome personality, which came between him and almost all of his comrades in arms and companions. But it is also partly because economics touches on questions of existence which hardly allow for objective sobriety. Even the representatives of the Austrian school of economics have to show their colors again and again in the madness of time, and the discourse is influenced by ideology, fears, and wishful thinking. History provided Fekete with drastic and life-threatening lessons. In 1932, Hungary was still using the gold standard, a pengö was defined as just over a quarter of a gram of gold (around fifteen euros today). When the forint was introduced in 1946, it replaced 400 octillion (twenty-nine zeros!) pengös, after the worst hyperinflation in history. Prices had been tripling every day. Today a forint is worth just over quarter of a euro cent. In light of this development, it is astonishing that Hungary has not produced more great monetary theorists. This is probably because the intellectual consequences of such socioeconomic disruption are always dramatic. Among the consequences are a declining aptitude for learning and a growth in escapism, whereby, paradoxically, the perception of the damage dwindles as the damage increases. This is why monetary policy is so popular, so formidable, and so underestimated. The misfortune that drove Antal Fekete from his homeland until his later return turned out to be lucky for economics. This was also the case for other representatives of the old Austrian school. This tradition would not have survived in Europe. The legacy of Menger and Mises was mainly preserved in North America. Fekete emigrated along with almost all of the other Hungarian fans of freedom in 1956, when a people’s uprising was bloodily crushed by the Soviet army. He first went to Vienna, just on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and then quickly on to Canada. There he began his academic career as a university professor in mathematics. He wrote a textbook on linear algebra and a handful of specialist articles. He considered his greatest contribution to be his proposal for a numbering system which expresses numerical values, however high, with the least digits possible—i.e., as economically as possible. The system of “stepnumbers” received no recognition and is typical of Fekete’s idiosyncratic approach, which also limited his impact in the field of economic sciences. His real interest and prominence lay in the field of economics. Just like his stepnumbers system, his economic approaches are potentially highly significant, but sketchy and characterized by peculiarities. In spite of these peculiarities, Fekete never adorned himself with borrowed plumes; he preferred to mention the authors of good ideas or wise thoughts by name too often rather than too little. He also always encouraged his comrades in arms to check arguments and make any necessary improvements or corrections. Unfortunately Fekete did not succeed in completing his life’s work. But the wealth of different insights and schemata proves to be a gold mine for any economist who struggles with the most difficult questions surrounding the theory of money, interest, and capital, and is sensitive to the devastating social consequences of heading down the wrong economic track. Fekete’s motivation to show the inhuman consequences of the history of money permeates his work in economics. It was his empathy for the casualties of war and inflation that formed the basis of his work. His mathematical training revealed itself in stringent logic, which, however, always remained humble before the unpredictability of human uniqueness. Fekete first came to prominence as an economist when he was invited to share his knowledge of monetary history at Paul Volcker’s seminar in 1974. Volcker was soon to become chairman of the Federal Reserve System. Ten years later, Fekete was invited to the American Institute for Economic Research as a visiting researcher. Finally, in 1985, he received his calling to politics—Congressman William E. Dannemeyer brought Fekete on board as a consultant for money reform. Fekete developed a solution for public financing after a debt crisis—the gold bond. Fekete’s attention was always focused on alternatives for financing a modern economy without creating unlimited amounts of money. A reduction in relation to physical gold seemed insufficient to him—if banks didn’t create money, bonds and especially bills of exchange would once again have a major role to play. Fekete received his first European recognition in 1996 when he received an award from the Swiss bank Lips for an essay on the role of gold in a monetary system (“Whither Gold?”). Even back then, he strongly criticized the monetary policy, and many aspects of his critique proved to be prophetic. His detailed definition and further development of Menger’s concept of Absatzfähigkeit (marketability) can be considered one of his greatest contributions to monetary theory. The essay has lost none of its topicality and reveals Fekete’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history of currency and ideas. After his retirement, Fekete worked—as Ludwig von Mises once did—at the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, and taught at the Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala and the Romanian Sapientia University. He advised the Mexican entrepreneur and philanthropist Hugo Salinas Price on his reform plans to monetize a silver coin as a more stable savings alternative. Salinas Price provided an important assessment of some of the contradictions between Fekete and Mises, whom he admired: “I knew Mises personally and have no doubt that he would have generously accepted the refreshing ideas of Antal E. Fekete.” Since 2002, Antal Fekete had been teaching a growing number of interested people via the internet and in regular seminars, especially in Hungary and Spain, where he attracted a competent economist, Juan Ramón Rallo, as his comrade in arms. He appeared on various occasions under the imprimatur of the Gold Standard Institute, Gold Standard University, and most recently the “new Austrian school of economics.” Unfortunately, setting up institutions always proved unsustainable because of personal disagreements. Fortunately, Fekete distributed his writings largely freely over the internet. So, little by little his influence grew. Fekete’s sharp intellect allows us to overlook his sometimes overly sharp manner. He noted that intellectual development was lacking in the modern Austrian school in contrast to its old Austrian predecessor. Admittedly, remedying this shortcoming is too broad a task for one person’s shoulders to bear, even if this person is standing on the shoulders of giants. Fekete saw the huge contradiction in his advocacy of Adam Smith’s so-called real bills doctrine, which views gold-backed bills as a legitimate form of monetary expansion as they are in line with the market and self-adjusting. Those who interpret the theory of money more strictly, such as Mises’s most prominent American student, Murray N. Rothbard, saw here a gateway to the arbitrary creation of money. Can these exchange banks be trusted? Would they in turn engage in political lobbying with any seigniorage profits and thus gradually—as a protected cartel—push through the increasingly generous creation of money? Can only the strictest money supply restrictions, which do not allow lending beyond the sum of deposits, avoid these incentives for the creeping dispossession of the population? Neither Fekete nor Rothbard can conclusively answer this type of question. But we should be grateful to thinkers of this caliber that they did not shy away from clarity of speech, did not seek false harmony, but arguably stood up for the pursuit of the true and good. In personal contact, Antal E. Fekete was a touchingly charming and generous person whose spirit was unusually sharp right up to a very old age. The spirit of old Europe radiated from his whole personality. Towards the end of his life, he became darker and darker, just as Carl Menger once did. The last handwritten note of his that I saw sent icy shivers down my spine. In a few words, he outlined the consequences of the looming debt collapse. It is better to keep quiet about them so as not to set a self-fulfilling prophecy in motion. He experienced the craziness of the last century at first hand, which shrouded his being with a characteristic melancholy. I hope it is just the Hungarian in him, that echo of the cruel and paradoxical history of the most melancholic nation in Europe. But perhaps Fekete was a sensitive person like Roland Baader. At least it is encouraging that Fekete was looking for solutions, for alternatives for new institutions for when the existing ones fall apart amid great disappointment. Author: Rahim Taghizadegan (info@scholarium.at) is director of the academic research institute Scholarium in Vienna, Austria, lecturer at several universities and faculty member at the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein. Salon: Prof. Antal Fekete & Rahim Taghizadegan https://youtu.be/BW4YT0fvB5U / 유투브에 올라온 인터뷰 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 하이에크 인터뷰/ 말년에 인터뷰한 내용. 이런 거장의 말은 금싸라기 모으듯이 읽어야 한다. In December the Cato Institute launched its Distinguished Lecturer Series with an address by F.A. Hayek, 1974 Nobel laureate in economics and author of numerous books, including The Road to Serfdom; The Constitution of Liberty; Prices and Production; Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle; and Law, Legislation, and Liberty. Professor Hayek is now working on a book entitled The Fatal Conceit, which will deal with socialism and central planning in all its forms. Before his lecture, Professor Hayek granted the following exclusive interview to Policy Report. Policy Report: What role can a public policy institute, like the Cato Institute, play to limit the size of government and increase individual freedom? Hayek: Well, I can’t speak about particular institutes, but the one institution of that sort which I have watched from the beginning and for the existence of which I am in some sense responsible, is the Institute of Economic Affairs of London, which was created by Antony Fisher. He thought you could sway mass opinion. What I insisted and what was strictly followed by the Institute was not to appeal to the large numbers, but to the intellectuals. My conviction is that, in the long run, political opinion is determined by the intellectuals, by which I mean, as I once defined it, the secondhand dealers in ideas—the journalists, schoolmasters, and so on. In fact, socialism is very largely an affair of the intellectuals and not the working class. So the Institute began publishing little brochures or pamphlets dealing with a few political issues on a level intelligible to the intelligent, but not technically educated, person. They are not writing for the economist, nor for the general public, but for the educated man, represented by schoolmasters and journalists and so on. It has taken a long time to prove its success. And for a time I did wonder whether or not I was thinking correctly. I now think it has become the most powerful maker of opinion in England. By now, book shops usually have a special rack of Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlets. Even people on the left feel compelled to keep informed of the Institute’s publications. And I think that if you are looking for a program here in the United States, you can do no better than to study the Institute’s publications catalogue. PR: Do you think monetarism has failed? And what would be wrong with enforcing a monetary rule that limited the growth of high‐​powered money? Hayek: I don’t know what monetarism is. If monetarism just means a good old‐​fashioned quantity theory, of course it has not failed. If it means the particular version of Milton Friedman, I think it has because he imagines that he can achieve—ascertain—a clear quantity relationship between a measurable quantity of money and the price level. I don’t think that is possible. In fact, just about 40 years ago in the opening sentences of my book, Prices and Production, I wrote that it would be a great misfortune if people ever cease to believe in the quantity theory of money. It would be even worse ever to believe it literally. And that’s exactly what Milton Friedman does. He imagines that it is possible to prescribe to the monetary authorities a definite rate at which “the ” quantity of money must be allowed to increase. I must say that I don’t know what “the” quantity of money in a measurable sense is. It has become so complex. There is a distinction between Ml, M2, and so on. I don’t think there is such a simple relationship. When you mean by monetarism that you can instruct the monetary authorities—the Federal Reserve System—to adjust the quantity of money to keep the price level stable, I believe that is correct. But they have to find out by experimentation what they have to do to keep the price level stable. If you understand correctly what Milton Friedman believes, that you can tell them to increase some particular observable quantity by 3% a year, I think it is nonsense. I say this although Friedman is a great friend of mine, and I admire most of his views, but his quantitative approach to economics seems to me to involve a gross oversimplification of what things really are like. PR: What steps would you recommend to return the United States to stable economic growth and prosperity? Hayek: What I can say about the United States is exactly the same that I’ve been preaching in England since Mrs. Thatcher has been in power. It is politically possible to cause, by braking inflation, 20% unemployment for six months. It is not politically possible to create 10% unemployment for three years. If you do it quickly even a very high rate of unemployment can be tolerated. If you try to do it slowly and gently, you are bound to fail, because people in the long run will not put up with it. But they will accept it if it comes quickly. I think every termination of inflation, which is without doubt the most important thing to do, has to be done much more quickly than it has been done in England. It wasn’t Mrs. Thatcher’s fault; she knew she couldn’t get her cabinet to follow her view. She admits as much. In fact, I heard her say, “My one mistake was to go on much too slowly. I ought to have done it much more quickly.” I think the same thing is in a measure true of the United States. You have done much better. You have, since Reagan came into power, reduced inflation very considerably. But one thing I might add is that reducing inflation is of little use unless you bring it down to zero inflation. Anybody who argues that a little inflation is all right, is completely wrong because inflation stimulates things only as it accelerates. If you rely on a little inflation, you are bound to increase it. You are driven into increasing inflation. So the aim must be not to reduce inflation, but as rapidly as possible to get back to a stable price level. PR: One thing that some of the Reagan advisors have talked about is applying a cost/​benefit test to regulations. Is it possible to measure costs and benefits and is cost/​benefit analysis a sufficient program for deregulation? Hayek: If you take “measure” literally, certainly not. But so far as you can estimate them roughly, they must be your guide. I think what you soon arrive at is that for practically all regulations the costs are greater than the benefits. It is simpler to argue against regulations as such than to pretend that you can single out those where clearly the costs are greater than the benefits. There is good sense behind the cost/​benefit argument, but I don’t think it’s of great practical value. PR: What reforms would you propose in our monetary system? Hayek: Well, I have despaired of ever again finding a way of restraining government abuse of any money which it issues. My proposal to denationalize money was always in a sense Utopian because governments will never freely allow competition in this business. I believe there are ways around this, and my present view—which I hope before long to state in detail—is that there is probably a possibility of not issuing currency but starting with credit accounts under some other name—say, call the unit a “stable” and promise to redeem it with enough of whatever current monies are required to buy a certain list of raw materials. So it doesn’t involve issuing any circulating money, but it enables the holder to keep a stable unit in the form of a credit. Once you’ve succeeded in this, the next step would be issuing credit cards on these accounts. And then you have circumvented the whole monopoly of government. Since it is politically impractical to deprive the government of its monopoly, you have to circumvent it. PR: Other than monetary reform, what sort of limits or constraints do you think it is feasible to put on government in a Western democratic society? Hayek: I think it requires a change in the constitutional arrangement. We have really to redo in a different manner what the world tried to do in the 18th century when they hoped that the principle of the separation of pwers was intended as a restriction on democracy. It hasn’t done so. I think we have to invent a new way. PR: Professor Hayek, when did you realize the important incentive and information functions played by market prices? Hayek: Well, it’s a very curious story, in a way, that I was led to put the emphasis on prices as a signal of what to do. It was an essay I wrote in 1936 called “Economics and Knowledge.” That was originally written to persuade my great friend and master, Ludwig von Mises, why I couldn’t accept all of his teaching. The main topic of the essay was to show that while it was perfectly true that what I called the logic of choice—analysis of individual action—was, like all logic, an a priori subject, Mises’ contention that all the analysis of the market was an a priori thing was wrong, because it de‐​pended on empirical knowledge. It depends on the problem of knowledge being conveyed from one person to another. Now, curiously, Mises, who was so very resentful generally of critiques by his pupils, even praised my article, but he never seemed to recognize to what extent it meant a diversion from his own fundamental conception. And I never got him to admit what I really imagined to be the case, that I refuted his contention that the analysis of the market economy was an a priorifunction, that it was a fully empirical matter. What was a priori was a logic behind it—a logic of individual action—that when you pass from the action of one individual, there occurs a causal process of one person acting upon another and learning. And this could never be a priori. This must be empirical. And pursuing this thought is how it started. This led me to investigate how important the prices forming on the market were as guides to individual action. And it is since that date, since what originally was a criticism of my master, Mises, that I have developed this idea of the guide function of prices which 1 regard as more and more important, which I have applied in its effect on price fixing, on rent restriction, on capital investment. All through, what it comes to is that we can achieve a condition of correspondence of separate effort only if we rely on prices as guides which tell people what to do. I am personally convinced that the reason which led the intellectuals, particularly of the English‐​speaking world, to socialism was a man who is regarded as a great hero of classical liberalism, John Stuart Mill. In his famous textbook, Principles of Political Economy, which came out in 1848 and for some decades was a widely read text on the subject, he makes the following statement as he passes from the theory of production to the theory of distribution: “Once the product is there, mankind—socially or individually—can do with it whatever it pleases.” Now, if that were true I would admit that it is a clear moral obligation to see that it is justly distributed. But it isn’t true, because if we did do with that product whatever we pleased, it would never be there again. Because if you ever did it once, people would never produce those things again. PR: Professor Hayek, we’re hearing much today about the threat to world trade through new rounds of protectionism. What advice would you have to political leaders and also to the people of Western countries who might be concerned about new protectionist measures? Hayek: Perhaps I am over-optimistic—but one thing has been understood, at least by the more responsible people, that nothing did more to intensify the depression of the 1930s than the return to protectionism. I have not yet found anybody who, once he was reminded of this fact, would still continue to believe that it might be necessary to reintroduce protection. PR: In your recent interview with the New York Times you said, “Keynes was one of the most intelligent people I knew, but he understood very little economics.” How do you account for his great influence in policy‐​making circles as well as in the academic community? Hayek: Well, that is a very profound problem. He was in complete agreement with the philosophical movement which had invaded that generation, what I’d call intellectualist or constructivist ideas derived from many decades of French philosophers. These ideas taught: Don’t believe anything which you cannot rationally justify. This was at first applied to science, but then was equally applied to morals. “Do not regard as binding upon you any morals which you cannot intellectually justify.” Now that meant in the person of Keynes two things which he himself stated. He admitted publicly that he had always been an amoralist. And that involved the famous statement—in the long run we are all dead. Now the great merit of traditional morals is that they have evolved and developed by long‐​run effects which people never foresaw and understood. And the merits of the institution of private property and of saving are that in the long run those groups that adhered to them prospered. Similarly, the function of the market system, the benefits of it, are effects beyond our vision—beyond our comprehension. Now, any philosopher who says, “I should admit only what I can rationally justify,” must exclude effects which are not foreseeable, must refuse to acknowledge a moral code which has been evolved because of its de facto effect. The utilitarian theorists believed, and Mises strongly believed, that man had chosen his morals with an intelligent understanding of the good effects. But that is wrong. Most of the effects of the moral we can’t foresee. They are beyond our vision. The effect is that on the market especially we can serve people whom we do not know. We can profit from the services of people we do not know. In short, we can form an order of activities far exceeding our comprehension. The same is true in our action for the future. Our morals teach that saving is a good thing, because it will help future generations, but that is not a thing we know from experience. All we do know is that those social groups in which saving was a virtue have prospered, and they gradually displaced the others. We simply must realize that our traditional morals are not to be approved because we can show how they are beneficial to us, but only because they have been proved in a process of selection. By selection I sometimes speak of the natural selection of religions: those religions which preached the right morals survived and enabled the group to multiply. It is not the intelligence of our ancestors that has left us with more efficient morals, but—as I like to express it to shock people—our ancestors were really the guinea pigs who experimented and chose the right ways which have been transmitted to us. It was not necessarily their superior intelligence. Rather, they happened to be right, so their successes multiplied, and they displaced the others who believed in the different morals. So the difference between Keynes and me is really based on different beliefs about the foundation of ethics. Keynes believed—asserted—“I am only prepared to believed in such rules the effects of which I can see.” But, in fact, civilization has formed by man learning to conform to rules of action, the effects of which were far beyond his vision. I’ve just come up with a new formulation which I rather like, that the invention or the development of the market amounts to the invention of a new sense organ in effect, similar to the evolution of sight in addition to the sense of touch. The sense of touch gives information only about the immediate environment as far as we can feel. The formation of the sense of sight in the evolution of animals enables us to take account of a much wider environment, but one still visible to our senses. Now, the market has become a sort of, as the biologists call it, extra‐​somatic or external sense organ, which informs us of things of which we are not aware physically. We cannot see the benefits of our action. We cannot see where our benefit come from, but we have developed a mechanism that serves as an organ of information operating very similarly to the sense organs, but enabling us to adjust our action to events which are beyond our sensory perception. PR: What flaws do you see in current free‐​market economic thinking? Hayek: I have two defaults in my activities which I frequently regret. The one is that when Keynes, after I had devoted so much time to criticism of his Treatise on Money, thought out his general theory and told me no one believed in what I spent so much time to criticize, I did not return to the charge and never systematically attacked the General Theory. And the second thing which I regret is that when Milton Friedman, who was a close colleague and friend, preached positivist economics, I did not attack his positivist economics. Positivist economics is really based on the same idea that we can form appropriate policy on the assumption of complete knowledge of all the relevant facts. In fact, the achievement of the market system is that we can do much better than we would do if we relied only on what we positively know. We can make use of this signaling system, as I call the market, which informs us of things which we cannot directly perceive or which are only transmitted to us—and that applies both spatially and temporally. We learn to adjust ourselves to the events which are beyond our vision spatially, which happen on other continents, and we learn to adjust ourselves to things which will happen in the distant future which we cannot see. The mathematical economists in particular talk of the “given” knowledge, the “given” data. Note how the use is placed to cause reduplication: “Given data” means “given” “givens.” If they suspect that things are not really given to them, they reassure themselves by calling them “given data”; in fact the data are hypothetical assumptions. Nobody knows all of the data. They only become operative and enable us to form an appropriate order by this transmission system of the market, where through many relays and changes what happened somewhere in New Zealand still affects my action by affecting wool prices or land prices and guiding me in what to do. So it’s all a guide, as I put it before, an information system, something, which, incidentally, Adam Smith said over 200 years. In many respects I find more wisdom in Adam Smith than in most of the later classical economics (not to speak of the famous mathematical economics) which is very beautiful and very true if you assume all of the data are known, but becomes nonsense when you remember that these data are not known to anybody. PR: Do you think that positivism as a methodology, as a way of thinking, tends to incline economists toward believing that they can fine‐​tune and intervene in the economy to achieve predictable results? Hayek: Yes, very much. I started as a positivist myself, in the Ernst Mach group in Vienna. I gradually changed—and in spite of Mises’ argument against positivism, I would say that even Mises was still at heart a positivist who had not completely freed himself from its assumptions, which in a way really go back to Rene Decartes. The whole basic idea of positivism—that our knowledge is based on given observations of the external world—goes back to Decartes. PR: Professor Hayek, just one last question. What should be the role of the economist as a policy advisor? Hayek: You can either be an economist or a policy advisor? Hayek: You can either be an economist or a policy advisor. Now, just let me in conclusion tell you another story of which I have only become recently aware. You know I have moved about a great deal from country to country, but certainly it drew my attention that in each case I’ve cleared out as soon as I was threatened to be used for government purposes. In Austria, at the end of the ‘20s or beginning of the ‘30s, I was just for the first time called to sit on a government committee. Within six months I was out of the country. In England I took a little longer. At the age of 19 years I had been for the first time used on a mission of the colonial office and six months later had left the country. In the United States, where I was for 12 years in Chicago, it never got quite as far because by the time I was asked to sit on a government committee I had already committed myself to leave the country. By moving around the world I have avoided that corruption which government service regularly involves. And more sadly, I have seen in some of my closest friends and sympathizers—I won’t mention any names—who completely agreed with me, how a few years in government corrupted them intellectually and made them unable to think straight. I suppose you all know the famous story of the one‐​handed economist. An American chief of one of the big corporations advertised for a one‐​handed economist. His associates were very puzzled as to what he meant. He replied, “Oh, I want a person who doesn’t say, ‘on the one hand and on the other.’ ” And I’m afraid that all the people who have been in government service have become two‐​handed economists who think in terms of one hand and the other. If one has kept out of government service, one remains a one‐​handed economist who believes there is a clear way in which we ought to proceed, but one maintains this conviction only so long as one stays out of government. All my friends who have gone into it and stayed for any length of time have, in my sense, been corrupted. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------