Quotes About Hayek

Ayn Rand described Hayek's book as "pure poison"; Frank Chodorov "thought the program verged on intellectual cowardice"; libertarian economist Walter Block was probably not alone in thinking him only "a weak and conflicted supporter of the market"; and Hans-Hermann Hoppe referred to "Hayek's social-democratic theory of government".

In the eyes of Hayek and his contemporaries, the European tragedy had thus been brought about by the shortcomings of the Left: first through its inability to achieve its objectives and then thanks to its failure to withstand the challenge from the Right. Each of them, albeit in different ways, arrived at the same conclusion: the best—indeed the only—way to defend liberalism and an open society was to keep the state out of economic life.

It is perhaps worth noting here that even Hayek cannot be held responsible for the ideological simplifications of his acolytes. Like Keynes, he regarded economics as an interpretive science, not amenable to prediction or precision.

Men like Hayek or von Mises seemed doomed to professional and cultural marginality. Only when the welfare states whose failure they had so sedulously predicted began to run into difficulties did they once again find an audience for their views:

Como señalaba Hayek: «Sostener que debemos planificar de forma deliberada la sociedad moderna porque se ha vuelto demasiado compleja es, por tanto, paradójico, y el resultado de un malentendido total [...]. Lo cierto es, más bien, que podemos preservar un orden de semejante complejidad [...] solo de manera indirecta reforzando y mejorando las reglas que conducen a la formación de un orden espontáneo».

Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men.

When I reviewed Hayek's book, The Pure Theory of Capital, it is my sincere conviction that this work contains some of the most penetrating thoughts on the subject that have ever been published.

I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice

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

R. F. Kahn asked, "If I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat, that would increase unemployment?" "Yes," said Hayek, "but … it would take a very long mathematical argument to explain why.

We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately "create the future of mankind." This is the final conclusion of the forty years which I have now devoted to the study of these problems

There was a pretext, albeit slender, that might have prompted Hayek to reach out to Keynes: Keynes had succeeded Edgeworth as editor of the Economic Journal in 1911. But

If an equilibrium was invariably elusive in the real world, Hayek argued, then the a priori assumptions that theoretical economists make about the operation of an economy, or a market, tending toward an equilibrium would always fall short. An equilibrium can be predicted only if the intentions of each of the participants is known, and that is impossible both in theory and in practice.