Quotes About Hayek

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek.

We know, in other words, the general conditions in which what we call, somewhat misleadingly, an equilibrium will establish itself: but we never know what the particular prices or wages are which would exist if the market were to bring about such an equilibrium.

Hayek was never a popular author to the extent that everyone was reading him at the corner newsstand. But the Austrian refugee showed how the roots of Hitler's tyranny and the bases of Marxist collectivism were one and the same. His work had a profound influence on a generation of freedom loving young conservatives. Even

But Hayek is also one of the handful of social scientists who (along with his teacher Ludwig von Mises) demonstrated more than sixty years ago why the socialist system could not work and, thus, why it would eventually collapse, as it did in 1989.

To modern man,' Hayek argues, 'the belief that all law governing human action is the product of legislation appears so obvious that the contention that law is older than law-making has almost the character of a paradox. Yet there can be no doubt that law existed for ages before it occurred to man that he could make or alter it.

the market is the benign mechanism that Hayek and others describe only when it is constrained by an impartial rule of law, and only when all participants bear the costs of their actions as well as reaping the benefits.

No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.

Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.

One of the most original and most important ideas advanced by Hayek is the role of the 'division of knowledge' in economic society.

We must look at the price system as . . . a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function," Hayek

Nadie, ni siquiera Von Mises, ha reseñado mejor que Hayek los beneficios en todos los órdenes que trajo al ser humano aquel sistema de intercambios que nadie inventó, que fue naciendo y perfeccionándose a resultas del azar y, sobre todo, de la irrupción de ese accidente en la historia humana que es la libertad.

Selon Hayek, tout socialisme, lorsqu'il active la planification économique et met fin à la concurrence et à la propriété privée, établit automatiquement un mécanisme qui, à plus ou moins brève échéance, liquide le pluralisme politique et les libertés, que les planificateurs le veuillent ou non.

hasta alcanzar, en nuestros días, la civilización, palabra que en boca de Hayek quiere decir libertad, legalidad, individualismo, propiedad privada, mercado libre, derechos humanos, convivencia y paz.

Tied up with his dismissal of natural law is Hayek's continuous, and all-pervasive, attack on reason. Reason is his bete noire, and time and time again, from numerous and even contradictory standpoints, he opposes it.

Hayek, more than anyone else, illuminated the knowledge problem. Simply put: No one person can ever know enough. Planners who think they can process all of the data from disparate sources across vast expanses of geography and culture are, quite simply, educated fools.

Half the time I read Hayek's The Sensory Order with amazement at the extent of his reading and comprehension. He is right most of the time.

Friedrich Hayek advanced the view that the common law contributed to greater economic welfare because it was less interventionist, less under the tutelage of the state, and was better able to respond to change than civil legal systems; indeed, it was for him a legal system that led, like the market, to a spontaneous order.

Friedrich Hayek's, with his prescient warning in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that socialism and fascism were not really opposites, but had 'fundamental similarity of methods and ideas', that economic planning and state control were at the top of an illiberal slope that led to tyranny, oppression and serfdom, and that the individualism of free markets was the true road to liberation. Ignoring

They had stumbled on what Friedrich Hayek called the catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by a growing division of labour.

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.

Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friederich von Hayek who, in the decades after World War II, was their leading interpreter and defender. His defense did not rest primarily upon the supposed optimum attained by them but rather upon the limits of the inner environment—the computational limits of human beings:31

Hayek later decided that what really separated him from his friend Keynes was that the latter always believed that certain advanced thinkers (Keynes among them, of course) could skillfully and accurately manipulate the social order to their own ends, without ill effects.