I'm late in reporting my visit to Sydney last week. Dot let me out on my own to fly to Sydney last Thursday for a day to attend a seminar late afternoon and evening. The Centre for Independent Studies, to which I subscribe, assembled an impressive array of professors to discuss the relevance of the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek to the 21st century.
This might seem rather esoteric and hardly worth the $500 it cost me. In fact, it was intellectually stimulating, and generated, for me, lots of new perspectives. Issues covered included the role of reserve banks, circumstances in which regulation is necessary, appropriate forms of regulation, trade, industry policy and tax-churning. Interestingly, some of the presentations traced the history of Hayek's ideas and his antecedents. I know of his debt to Adam Smith, but was surprised that he probably owed more to the other well-known Scottish moral philosopher, David Hume.
The best presentation was given by Chandran Kukuthas, a professor at the LSE. I know him quite well and he was at university with one of my very good friends, Paul Collits, who I expected to see there. Perhaps I should not have been surprised when he didn't show, since he now lives in Hamilton - about 1500 km from Sydney. Still, I'm off to visit Paul in Hamilton (Vic) at his expense on May 8th. That's not too far away. I'm going there as a visiting guru to enthuse the locals about new approaches to regional development policy!
More about that later after our visit to Canberra for the ANZAC day long weekend. What other nation would set aside a day to celebrate a major military defeat!
AS
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