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

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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.
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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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Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.
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There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.
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Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success
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I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano's Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. That seems to be hopeless once you see that you lose all hope.
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Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement.
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If we can reduce the risk of friction likely to lead to war, this is probably all we can reasonably hope to achieve.
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Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.
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Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances, but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad ... Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.
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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.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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Perhaps even more than elsewhere current notions of what is desirable and practicable are here still of a kind which may well produce the opposite of what they promise.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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This is the constitutional limitation of man's knowledge and interests, the fact that he cannot know more than a tiny part of the whole of society and that therefore all that can enter into his motives are the immediate effects which his actions will have in the sphere he knows.
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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
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It is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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Competition means decentralized planning by many separate persons.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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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.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.
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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.
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Independence of mind or strength of character is rarely found among those who cannot be confident that they will make their way by their own effort.... Indeed, when security is understood in too absolute a sense, the general striving for it, far from increasing the chances of freedom, becomes the greatest threat to it.
Friedrich August von Hayek