I wasn’t expecting any deep economic enlightenment when I started reading a TIME article about the hit cable television show “Pawn Stars.”
That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to find the following:
And while it’s fun for viewers to guess the value of an antique gun or a vintage Coke machine, the process of buyers’ and sellers’ determining the fair market price of an asset also plays a hugely important role in an economy, whether we’re discussing stocks or a gallon of gasoline. According to the Austrian school of economics, whose anti-Keynesian standard bearer Friedrich von Hayek is a current favorite among conservatives, anything that gets in the way of true price discovery–a central bank that manipulates interest rates, say, or a tax code that incentivizes people to flip houses–will do more harm than good in the long run.
I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising to find Hayek promoted in this manner. After all, Glenn Beck helped push a 66-year-old Hayek tract to the top of the best-seller list, and a pair of rap videos helped his ideas go viral.
