Friedrich Hayek on intellectuals and their hostility towards the free market

This reluctance [to integrate themselves into the marketplace] helps further to explain the hostility intellectuals bear towards the market order, and something of their susceptibility to socialism.  Perhaps this hostility and susceptibility would diminish if such persons understood better the role that abstract and spontaneous ordering patterns play in all of life, as they no doubt would do if better informed of evolution, biology, and economics.  But when confronted by information in these fields, they are often reluctant to listen, or even to consider conceding the existence of complex entities of whose working our minds can have only abstract knowledge.

~ Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, Chapter 5: "The Fatal Conceit"

Murray Rothbard on the early career of Henry Kissinger

In 1954, the 31-year-old Kissinger, a Harvard political scientist and admirer of Metternich, was plucked out of his academic obscurity to become lifelong foreign policy advisor to New York Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. Doctor K continued in that august role until he assumed the mastery of foreign policy throughout the Nixon and Ford administrations. In that role, Kissinger played a major part in prolonging and extending the Vietnam War, and in the mass murder of civilians entailed by the terror bombings of Vietnam, the secret bombing of Cambodia, and the invasion of Laos.

Since leaving office in 1977, Dr. Kissinger has continued to play a highly influential role in U.S. politics, in the U.S. media, and in the Rockefeller world empire. It was Kissinger, along with David Rockefeller, who was decisive in the disastrous decision of President Carter to admit the recently toppled Shah of Iran, old friend and ally of the Rockefellers, into the United States, a decision that led directly to the Iranian hostage crisis and to Carter’s downfall.

~ Murray Rothbard, "Why the War? The Kuwait Connection," The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, May 1991

Friedrich Hayek on the dispersion of knowledge, variety and the division of labor

The knowledge that plays probably the chief role in this differentiation [Wilhelm von Humboldt's "human development in its richest form"] - far from being the knowledge of any one human being, let alone that of a directing superbrain - arises in a process of experimental interaction of widely dispersed, different and even conflicting beliefs of millions of communicating individuals.  The increasing intelligence shown by man, accordingly, due not so much to increases in the several knowledge of individuals but to procedures for combining different and scattered information which, in turn, generate order and enhance productivity.

Thus the development of variety is an important part of cultural evolution, and a great part of an individual's value to others is due to his differences from them.  The importance and value of order will grow with the variety of the elements, while greater order in turn enhances the value of variety, and thus the order of human cooperation becomes indefinitely extensible.  If things were otherwise, if for example all men were alike and could not make themselves different from one another, there would be little point in division of labour..., little advantage from coordinating efforts, and little prospect of creating order of any power or magnitude.

~ Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, Chapter 5: "The Fatal Conceit"

Friedrich Hayek on how knowledge is dispersed

To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralising decisions, and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order.  Yet that decentralisation actually leads to more information being taken into account.  This is the main reason for rejecting the requirements of constructivist rationalism [socialism].  For the same reason, only the alterable division of the power of disposal over particular resources among many individuals actually able to decide on their use - a division attained through individual freedom and several property - makes the fullest exploitation of dispersed knowledge possible.

~ Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, p. 76

Jeffrey Tucker on the natural order and liberty

People who can't imagine order over imposition always end up preferring power over liberty.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

Rick Rule on investing, patience, and time arbitrage

The old guys..., those few who have been really, really, really successful, always seem to invest for the 5 to 6 year time frame.  My suspicion is that time arbitrage, that is aligning your preferences with the reality of the investments that you are making, is one of the most important determinants of success.  Some people believe that because they want something to happen in the near term, that their wants are germane.  And they're not.

~ Rick Rule, "The Time for Value Stocks is Here," Stansberry Investor Hour, 30:15 mark, April 16, 2020

Charlie Munger: Great Depression will be prevented by active government

Of course we’re having a recession. The only question is how big it’s going to be and how long it’s going to last. I think we do know that this will pass. But how much damage, and how much recession, and how long it will last, nobody knows.

I don’t think we’ll have a long-lasting Great Depression. I think government will be so active that we won’t have one like that. But we may have a different kind of a mess. All this money-printing may start bothering us.

~ Charlie Munger, "Charlie Munger: The Phone Is Not Ringing Off the Hook'," WSJ, April 17, 2020