Quote

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.

Friedrich August von Hayek

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Friedrich August von Hayek
Age: 92 †
Born: 1899
Born: May 8
Died: 1992
Died: March 23
Economist
Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
University Teacher
Vienna
Austria
Friedrich August von Hayek
Friedrich von Hayek
Friedrich A. von Hayek
Friedrich A. Von Hayek
F. A. von Hayek
Friedrich August Von Hayek
Hayek
F. A. Hayek
Liberty
Standard
History
Issue
Money
Period
Defraud
Power
Historical
Plunder
Used
Standards
Practically
Government
Periods
Exclusive
People
Gold
Governments
Issues
Exception

More quotes by Friedrich August von Hayek

Image
It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
Without the rich - without those who accumulated capital - those poor who could exist at all would be very much poorer indeed, scratching a livelihood from marginal lands on which every drought would kill most of the children they would be trying to raise.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
Socialism constitutes a threat to the present and future welfare of the human race, in the sense that neither socialism nor any other known substitute for the market order could sustain the current population of the world.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
The mischievous idea that all public needs should be satisfied by compulsory organization and that all the means that individuals are willing to devote to pubic purposes should be under the control of government, is wholly alien to the basic principles of a free society.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
The effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
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.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
If freedom is to flourish the philosophic foundations of a free society must be kept a living intellectual issue and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of the liveliest minds.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
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?
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
Least of all shall we preserve democracy or foster its growth if all the power and most of the important decisions rest with an organization far too big for the common man to survey or comprehend.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
The problems raised by a conscious direction of economic affairs on a national scale inevitably assume even greater dimensions when the same is attempted internationally. The conflict between planning and freedom cannot but become more serious as the similarity of standards and values among those submitted to a unitary plan diminishes.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Image
Unlike proportionality, progression provides no principle which tells us what the relative burden of different persons ought to be the argument based on the presumed justice of progression provides no limitation, as has often been admitted by its supporters, before all incomes above a certain figure are confiscated, and those below left untaxed.
Friedrich August von Hayek