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George Stigler gets Friedrich Hayek's position on state regulation and its 
relation to the threat of arbitrary government flat wrong in his _Memoirs 
of an Unregulated Economist_. He provides with it a claim against Hayek's 
development of the notion of liberty in a liberal society which doesn't get 
beyond a sophomores' strawman, utterly violating the most minimal 
commitment to the principle of charity.  I have also found it striking that 
in the early literature on the role of information and knowledge produced 
after Hayek's seminal essays of 1937 and 1945, Stigler is almost alone in 
failing to credit or even cite Hayek's pathbreaking work in this area, as 
if Stigler's own contribution fell out of the void ready-made, without any 
debt to any prior context or contribution. Until reading McCloskey on 
Stigler, now buttressed by several recent posts on this list, I had thought 
these to be rather sui generis events. Now I'm wondering if instead this is 
part of a wider pattern, explained in part by a particular stand toward 
scholarly ethics, in part by a particular view of the advance of knowledge 
or understanding, and in part by the character of the man. Never having 
known the man it is hard for someone attempting to make a judgment on such 
a matter to come to a very firm conclusion. 
 
Greg Ransom 
Dept. of Philosophy 
UC-Riverside 
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http://members.gnn.com/logosapien/ransom.htm 
 
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