From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.
Tag: Friedrich August von Hayek
(1899–1992) Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
The free market limits oppression
[T]he power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work? And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?
Humility before wisdom
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
Socialist ‘economics’
If socialists understood economics they wouldn’t be socialists.
Fiat currencies allow government theft
With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.
Time-binding
It is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual’s use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone.
Progressive fascism
The rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.
What economists do
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Unintended consequences
Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?
The mirage of social justice
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.