[BLANK AUDIO] Friedrich Hayek was born in Vienna, a son of a physician and related to. In the first World War, he fought on the Italian front before returning to Vienna to get doctorate's in both law and political science. His interest soon shifted towards economics. From 1931 to 1950, he taught at the LSE in London. From there, he moved to Chicago where he was instrumental in bolstering the so called Chicago School before ending his career at the University of Freiburg. Although initially sympathetic towards democratic socialism, his doubts led him to increasingly demand and emphasize the rights of the individual as a defenses against the excesses of communism and the encroachment of welfare's post war planning. In 1944 he published his book, The Road to Serfdom which rapidly became a best seller. Remember, he'd witnessed the excesses of Stalinist Russia, and totalitarian militarism of Natzi Germany. He now argued that after the war, Western democracies were becoming so fixated with economic prosperity and were willing to take any necessary measures to promote it. If there wasn't to be an equal recognition of individual economic and political rights he argued, this would lead to a drift towards totalitarianism. He regarded the umbrella of international organizations being created, the UN, the IMF, and the International Trade Organization, in exactly the same way. All planning, regardless of intention, was coercive, and therefore inferior to the market as an allocative mechanism between individuals. The task of government should be limited to what markets could not do by themselves. Health and safety regulation, avoiding environmental damage, preventing fraud and other criminal activities and interestingly, the provision of a minimum level of social security. In his later work, the Constitution of Liberty, published in 1960, he argued that economic freedom should take precedence over political freedom. Since political freedom could still lead to the election of a democratic government that could still erode the individual liberty in the economic sphere. Now there are grounds for disagreeing with this views. State intervention doesn't necessarily have to lead to totalitarianism. And the untrammeled working of the market could itself lead to the breakdown of society and prompt the emergence of totalitarian regimes. Others, even further to the right of the political spectrum, resented even the limited state intervention that Hayek was willing to concede. Nevertheless, Hayek has remained extremely politically influential, if only as a means for legitimizing policy choices. Let me illustrate this with one anecdote. In 1975 at a conservative party policy meeting, the future British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher interrupted a speaker by slamming a copy of The Road to Surf on the table and proclaiming, this is what we believe. The American president Ronald Reagan was also a fan of his and invited him as a special guest to the White House. And in Eastern Europe, where the contrast between his ideas and the reality of the crumbling central planning system was even starker, his influence was also strongly felt. In 1974, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, but ironically for his work on trade cycles.