William Buckley Interviews F.A. Hayek on Causes and Solutions for Mass Unemployment

William Buckley interviews Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek on the causes and solutions of mass unemployment. Also present is Hillsdale College President George Roach.

Hayek points out that the government can only temporarily “solve” the problem of unemployment by inducing more and accelerating inflation, which misdirects labor into unsustainable (viz., dead weight) occupations. The implication is that politicians need to allow the economy to adjust to dislocations, such as Calvin Coolidge did following the short depression of 1919.

Of course, both politicians and central planners want to be seen as “doing something” during times of economic adjustment, a bias of electoral politics in our present culture. A virulent influence on this conditioned public disposition is the mass media, which tend to uphold state-centric solutions to all economic problems.