Commanding Heights Part 1 – The Battle of Ideas

“A global economy, energized by technological change and unprecedented flows of people and money, collapses in the wake of a terrorist attack …. The year is 1914.

Worldwide war results, exhausting the resources of the great powers and convincing many that the economic system itself is to blame. From the ashes of the catastrophe, an intellectual and political struggle ignites between the powers of government and the forces of the marketplace, each determined to reinvent the world’s economic order.

Two individuals emerge whose ideas, shaped by very different experiences, will inform this debate and carry it forward. One is a brilliant, unconventional Englishman named John Maynard Keynes. The other is an outspoken émigré from ravaged Austria, Friedrich von Hayek.

But a worldwide depression holds the capitalist nations in its grip. In opposition to both Keynes and Hayek stand not only Hitler’s Third Reich but Stalin’s Soviet Union, schooled in the communist ideologies of Marx and Lenin and bent on obliterating the capitalist system altogether.

For more than half a century the battle of ideas will rage. From the totalitarian socialist systems to the fascist states, from the independent nations of the developing world to the mixed economies of Europe and the regulated capitalism of the United States, government planning will gradually take over the commanding heights.

But in the 1970s, with Keynesian theory at its height and communism fully entrenched, economic stagnation sets in on all sides. When a British grocer’s daughter and a former Hollywood actor become heads of state, they join forces around the ideas of Hayek, and new political and economic policies begin to transform the world.”

Conversations – Economic Theory: Robert Ashford and Dr. Edward Wolff

From 2000, well after Bill Clinton declared the end of the Old Left. From the description:

The Guests talk about economic theory in a Paradigm sense. The raise the idea that it ultimatly is the basic source which informs all National & International Political decison making at a policy leval. They (particurly Ashford) strongly question the “Labor Theory of Value” which informs in a fundemental sense virutlaly all Economic Theory from from the far Left to the far Right as outdated in an era when economic production (and the trends therein) is increasingly the result of capital assets which are overwhelmingly owned by a very narrow owership class.

Liberty and Economics – Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises has had a major influence on libertarian ideas and (according to his foundation’s website) is the “uncontested dean of the Austrian School of economists”.

This video, unfortunately, suffers from having been produced by the institute who took his name; as a result, a lot of the narration and interview clips are simplistic and biased. This video does, however, provide a decent overview of von Mises ideas.

Identity and Violence – Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen is a definitive voice on developmental economics and a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998. In this lecture at UC Berkley, he talks about a convergence of a identity and violence.

Milton Friedman on Limited Government

Milton Friedman lays out his case for a limited government in the usual and compelling way in a public television interview from the 50’s. His view that the minimum wage was the worst policy in terms of outcome for blacks is very interesting and seemingly right-on. Too bad the right in America spends even more than those damn ‘tax-and-spenders’.