Via an old Sotheby’s catalogue (not an inappropriate destination when googling Hayek):
There is a famous anecdote that during a Conservative Party policy meeting, Thatcher removed her copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty from her handbag, slammed it down on the table and declared, “This is what we believe.”
The impact that Hayek’s writing had on Thatcher, her advisors, and her policies is undeniable. Thatcher herself wrote: “the most powerful critique of socialist planning and the socialist state which I read at this time and to which I have returned so often since [is] F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.”
Somehow, I don’t think Thatcher would have said the same of “common-good capitalism” and its variants, ideas that, under different labels, would have been all too familiar to her by the time she was speaking, as would their generally dismal consequences.
And while we’re on this topic, the related notion of “conservative” ESG is yet another expression of collectivism, a way of dressing up an attack on the property rights of shareholders in (to some) more attractive clothing. It is not a route down which the Right should be going.
Russ Greene, tweeting today:
ESG is only ~20 years old and now some on the right can’t imagine a world where ESG not hegemonic. Conservatives must again be able to see a horizon beyond progressivism.
Back to Sotheby’s:
Throughout her career Thatcher constantly returned to her favourite economist. A decade after Hayek’s death, she was awarded the Internationaler Preis der Friedrich-August-von-Hayek-Stiftung prize. Her acceptance speech concluded “Hayek is, therefore, the prophet not of doom and disaster, but of peace and plenty. His is a voice of wisdom for our time, and for all time.”
It should be stressed that Thatcher was operating in the world of practical politics; she was, to use a nonsense term, no “free-market fundamentalist.” For her, Hayek was a guide to the direction of travel, the road away from serfdom, so to speak.