“The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy.” — Milton Friedman

“Becoming rich in the private sector comes from serving others, while in the government it is the result of serving oneself at others’ expense.” — Javier Milei

“The Marxians’ love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.” — Ludwig von Mises

“If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists.” — F. A. Hayek

Hayek on why politicians love Keynesian economics: “Politicians love the argument that if you outspend your income and run a deficit, you’re doing good to the people in general.” “They don’t want to hear anything more than to be told that irresponsible spending is beneficial.”

“To choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.” Hayek’s point is that democracy and liberty are not the same thing. Elections decide who governs, but not how much power the government may exercise over the individual. A government that is democratically elected can still undermine individual freedom if there are no meaningful limits on its power.

“All monopolists are notoriously uneconomical, and the bureaucratic machinery of government even more so.” — Friedrich Hayek

Government monopoly of money has prevented people from experimenting with alternative forms of money. The result, Hayek argues, is that money stopped evolving and has become worse over time. Money, like law and language, emerged spontaneously. But unlike law and language, money was taken out of the evolutionary process and placed under political control.

“It is of the essence of a free society that a man’s value and remuneration depend not on capacity in the abstract but on success in turning it into concrete service which is useful to others who can reciprocate.” — Friedrich Hayek

“The task of the political philosopher can only be to influence public opinion, not to organize people for action. He will do so effectively only if he is not concerned with what is now politically possible but consistently defends the ‘general principles which are always the same.’” — Friedrich Hayek

“The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.” — Friedrich Hayek

“The dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival. To follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.” — Friedrich Hayek

“What in effect unites the socialists of the Left and the Right is this common hostility to competition and their common desire to replace it by a directed economy.” — Friedrich Hayek

“What is privilege to some is always discrimination to the rest.” — Friedrich Hayek

“The preservation of a free system is so difficult precisely because it requires a constant rejection of measures which appear to be required to secure particular results.” — Friedrich Hayek

“The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.” — Friedrich Hayek

Hayek and Mises at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in West Berlin, September 1956. (First and third from right, second row)

“It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.” — Friedrich Hayek

Two sides of the same coin

Hayek on Keynes’s posthumous “sainthood”: “Keynes was disputed so long as he was alive—very much so. After his death, he was raised to sainthood.”

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales on Hayek

“Collectivism has no room for the wide humanitarianism of liberalism but only for the narrow particularism of the totalitarian.” — Friedrich Hayek

“A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.” — Friedrich Hayek

Hayek: “Both altruism and solidarity are very strong instincts which guided man in the small group where we were serving known other persons.” “Now we have grown as rich as we are because we have replaced this by a system where ... our effort is completely guided by price signals.” “So far as economic activities are concerned, we’ll benefit our fellow men most if we are guided solely by the striving for gain.”

Hayek on why he didn’t critique Keynes’s General Theory when it was first published: “I spent a lot of time criticizing his Treatise on Money, which came out before the General Theory, in two long journal articles. But when I published the second one, Keynes told me, ‘Oh, never mind, I no longer believe that.’ So when he came out with his General Theory, I thought I was not going to waste my time criticizing. But that book was the one which became so frightfully important. I regretted for the rest of my life that I did not return to the charge then.”

When a system increasingly requires coercive methods to function, it attracts and favors the most ruthless, power-hungry people. Hayek examines this phenomenon in Chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom, “Why the Worst Get on Top.”

“But that wasn’t real socialism.”

“The unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.” — Friedrich Hayek

Why do intellectuals gravitate toward socialism and collectivism in general? Many intellectuals, Hayek argues, vastly overestimate their ability to direct society, treating people as if they were pieces to be moved on a chessboard.

A fascinating clip of Margaret Thatcher discussing & quoting Hayek during a 1996 speech in New York: “I remember very well when I was just in university reading for a science degree and Hayek, brilliant and perceptive as he was, published to an astonished world, The Road to Serfdom. He’d done the analysis. He knew where it would lead. And he turned out to be right.” “Hayek wrote: ‘How sharp a break with the whole evolution of Western civilisation the modern trend toward socialism means becomes clear if we consider it not merely against the background of the 19th century but in a longer historical perspective. We are rapidly abandoning not the views merely of Cobden and Bright, of Adam Smith and Hume, or even Locke and Milton, but one of the salient characteristics of Western civilisation as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and the Romans. Not merely 19th- and 18th-century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides, is progressively relinquished.’”

Hayek called this belief “the fatal conceit”

“Often in science what is most crucial is a proper formulation of the question.” — Friedrich Hayek

Hayek on what true scientists understand that most intellectuals don’t: “The man who has learned a little science lacks the humility the real scientist gladly acquires. The typical intellectual believes everything must be explainable, but a scientist knows that a great many things are not. A good scientist is essentially a humble person.”

“There can be no freedom if the government is not limited to particular kinds of action but can use its powers in any ways which serve particular ends.” — Friedrich Hayek

“Much pretended altruism consists in a desire to make others serve the ends which the ‘altruist’ regards as important.” — Friedrich Hayek

Jordan Peterson explains Hayek’s “knowledge problem” argument against socialism: “The proposition that central planning will work is the proposition that you can substitute one expert mind for a million distributed expert minds.” “That’s obviously not the case, because each person is going to have knowledge that pertains to their locality that isn’t accessible to everyone. So it’s much better to let everyone make the decisions and sum them.”

Beware of such “emergencies”

Hayek on socialists’ desire to direct society from above rather than leave individuals free to choose: “The common features of all collectivist systems may be described, in a phrase ever dear to socialists of all schools, as the deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal. That our present society lacks such ‘conscious’ direction toward a single aim, that its activities are guided by the whims and fancies of irresponsible individuals, has always been one of the main complaints of its socialist critics.”

“It is better to have a choice between several unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one.” — Friedrich Hayek

Roger Scruton on Hayek’s rejection of “social justice”: “Hayek expressly dismissed the expression as a piece of deceptive Newspeak, used to advance large-scale injustice in the name of its opposite.”

“Totalitarianism is the new word we have adopted to describe the unexpected but nevertheless inseparable manifestations of what in theory we call socialism.” — Friedrich Hayek

Markets create wealth by using the dispersed knowledge of millions of individuals. Prices act as signals that coordinate their decisions.