Hayek, Keynesian Economics, And Planning Against Competition: A Caveat?(Essay‪)‬

Abstract: Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom as a warning to intellectuals who were supposedly much taken with the idea of a 'planned' economy. Jeremy Shearmur (1997) makes use of unpublished material drawn from the Hayek archives to suggest that Hayek did not seemingly deem Keynesian full-employment policy to be incompatible with what Hayek would view as a free society. Our reading of the archival material invoked by Shearmur arrives at a rather different conclusion. Hayek's view of the logic supposedly inherent in Keynesian policy is markedly congruent with the general tenor of The Road to Serfdom. We demonstrate that Hayek deemed activist monetary policy incompatible with Hayek's favoured planning for competition. 1 Introduction (1)