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[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.

Friedrich August von Hayek

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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
Power
Intervention
Way
Inevitably
Regulation
Planning
Socialistic
Hungry
Pave
Structure
Unscrupulous
Building
Seized
Economic
Totalitarianism

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We can either have a free Parliament or a free people. Personal freedom requires that all authority is restrained by long-run principles which the opinion of the people approves.
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The [classical] liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people -- he is not an egalitarian -- but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are.
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The chief point we must remember is that the great and rapid advance of the physical sciences took place in fields where it proved that explanation and prediction could be based on laws which accounted for the observed phenomena as functions of comparatively few variables - either particular facts or relative frequencies of events.
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The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.
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I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.
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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.
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Many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism, and sincerely hate all manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.
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Through the inevitable mismanagement of resources and goods at the disposal of the state, all forms of collectivism lead eventually to tyranny.
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[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
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The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the wrong beliefs.
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'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
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There may be few instances in which the superstition that only measurable magnitudes can be important has done positive harm in the economic field: but the present inflation and employment problems are a very serious one.
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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.
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The chief difference [between totalitarian and free countries] is that only the totalitarians appear clearly to know how they want to achieve that result, while the free world has only its past achievements to show, being by its very nature unable to offer any detailed plan for further growth.
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Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement.
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It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress... 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.
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The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.
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The more I learn about the evolution of ideas, the more I have become aware that I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig-with the stress on the old.
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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.
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Without a theory the facts are silent.
Friedrich August von Hayek