Friedrich August von Hayek; Economist Influenced Reagan Policy

Friedrich August von Hayek, 92, the Nobel Prize-winning economist described as the intellectual guru of President Ronald Reagan’s free-market policy-makers. Hayek was a British citizen of Austrian birth. His 1944 book, “The Road to Serfdom,” stated that socialist economics would fail and warned that Western Europe and the United States were on a dangerous road toward excessive government involvement. In November, 1991, President Bush awarded Hayek the Medal of Freedom. Hayek’s son, Laurence, received the award for his ailing father. Hayek was considered the intellectual spirit behind such hard-core free-market types in the Reagan Administration as Martin Anderson, Reagan’s first chief domestic policy adviser, and Paul Craig Roberts, who was assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy. Hayek’s works also influenced Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist who gained prominence in the United States in the 1960s. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics with Gunnar Myrdal of Sweden for pioneering the analysis of interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. In Freiburg, Germany, on Monday.