Top 5 Greatest Liberty-Friendly Economists of All-Time

F. A. Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek was an economist who was a stalwart defender of Classical Liberalism. He received a Nobel Prize in the economic sciences, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George H. W. Bush. Hayek was an economist who wrote many works, one of which was a scholarly article titled The Use of Knowledge in Society. This article was made as a rebuttal to another economist who was a strong proponent of a planned economy, rather than a free economy.

In this work, Hayek talked about the nature of price fluctuations and how they benefit the economy. He argued that this is due to the fact that the economy runs off the actions of many different individuals, and that to have a singular or a few government officials trying to run the economy themselves would be preposterous: the intelligence of many different individuals is much more likely to be larger than the intelligence of a few individuals. Hayek’s article The use of Knowledge in Society was selected as the top 20 all-time articles published at The American Economic Review in 2011.