Earlier this week, the Duke Chronicle published a piece warning about the “dangers” of the school’s acceptance of funding from the Charles Koch Foundation for a “Center for History of Political Economy.”
Written by a PhD candidate at Duke, this article irresponsibly makes claims about the works of Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of economic theory somehow “fueling the violent Alt-Right.”
Naturally, there is zero evidence provided, and the absurd accusation itself reveals this PhD student to be completely ignorant of the subject matter.
Duke alum, and occasional Civitas contributor Tyler Bonin, responded in the Chronicle here. A few highlights from Bonin’s response:
It (the original article) furthermore paints a caricature of Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek that is inconsistent with his most famous writings. I expect more from the history department at Duke….
Populist movements which seek to make swift change by building up and utilizing the most extreme of coercive governmental powers leads to a violent expansion of government that curtails individual liberty and the free market principles that Hayek posited. The violence associated with the alt-right is thus incompatible with the points put forward by Hayek and other economists from the Austrian School.
Perhaps what is most appalling about this is the fact that the Chronicle editors decided to run the original piece, full of sloppy innuendo and wild and unsubstantiated claims, in the first place.
