Friedrich August von Hayek Quotes.
Social justice rests on the hate towards those that enjoy a comfortable position, namely, upon envy.
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
[T]hose who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.
We know, in other words, the general conditions in which what we call, somewhat misleadingly, an equilibrium will establish itself: but we never know what the particular prices or wages are which would exist if the market were to bring about such an equilibrium.
It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
The state itself becomes more and more identified with the interests of those who run things than with the interests of the people in general.
I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions.
Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left.
It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world.
There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.
In government, the scum rises to the top.
We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.
The more the state “plans” the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.
Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality – an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.
The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable.
This means that to entrust to science – or to deliberate control according to scientific principles – more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.
[Socialistic] economic planning, regulation, and intervention pave the way to totalitarianism by building a power structure that will inevitably be seized by the most power-hungry and unscrupulous.
We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information.
Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.
A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.
To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.
By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.
Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts.
