Friedrich Hayek

Wednesday

Juan P. Villasmil

Meet Maria Corina Machado: could she become Venezuela’s Margaret Thatcher?

In 2006, there was Manuel Rosales. In 2012, there was Henrique Capriles. In 2018, there was Juan Guaidó. All managed to capture the hopes of Venezuela’s opposition, but as hopes slipped away, so did their popularity. Now, there is a new opposition leader in town: Maria Corina Machado, an ideologically driven fighter and a woman who was not afraid to call former president Hugo Chávez a “thief” to his face. As Venezuelans often imprudently say, she “tiene las bolas bien puestas,” meaning that, although female, she “has her testicles in the right place.” That's something that millions of Venezuelans can’t say about the charming yet gutless men who have monopolized the country’s hopes in the past. In July, Dr.

maria corina machado

Thursday

Oliver Wiseman

Why David Mamet went right

How did David Mamet spend the pandemic? The answer, as anyone familiar with the prolific, brilliant playwright and screenwriter would probably have guessed, is that he wrote. “I’ve been writing a lot of essays lately,” Mamet, seventy-four, says when we meet at his Santa Monica home on a cool January evening. “Because, you know, I don’t want to go and sit on a park bench. I’m a writer.” A collection of essays written during the tumultuous plague years is published this month by Broadside, an imprint of HarperCollins. Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch is combative, challenging, witty, and, as the title suggests, its prevailing mood is as dark as the “terrible” period in which it was written.

Mamet

Friday

Harrison Pitt

The West should rediscover Hayek and end the lockdowns

Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is famed as one of the most effective takedowns of the socialist planned economy. Although published in 1944, Hayek’s arguments have never been more relevant as citizens around the world forfeit their freedoms in exchange for security in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hayek’s book, contrary to popular opinion, was addressed to the people of Britain rather than the socialist Soviet Union. Hayek worried the Brits would fall victim to a continued expansion of the strong federal powers enacted by the British government to fight World War Two, and hoped to wean them off their addiction to government control.

libertarians hayek