Author: F. A. Hayek
Editor: Bruce Caldwell
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Type: Political Economics
Published Year: 2007
Contemporary events differ from history in that we do not know the results they will produce. —— p.57
If in the long run we are the makers of our own fate, in the short run we are the captive of ideas we have created. —— p.58
It seems almost as if we did not want to understand the development which has produced totalitarianism because such an understanding might destroy some of the dearest illusions to which we are determined to cling. —— p.60
There is an infinite number of good things, which we all agree are highly desirable as well as possible, but of which we cannot hope to achieve more than a few within our lifetime, or which we can hope to achieve only very imperfectly. —— p.98
… it is a superstition to believe that there must be a majority view on everything. —— p.105
It is the price of democracy that the possibilities of conscious control are restricted to the fields where true agreement exists and that in some fields things must be left to chance. But in a society which for its functioning depends on central planning this control cannot be made dependent on a majority’s being able to agree; it will often be necessary that the will of a small minority be imposed upon the people, because this minority will be the largest group able to agree among themselves on the question at issue. —— p. 109
Reading The Road to Serfdom is like a discussion with the author.
Ian (I): What is “planning”?
Hayek (H): According to the modern planners, and for their purposes, it is not sufficient to design the most rational permanent framework within which the various activities would be conducted by different persons according to their individual plans. This liberal plan, according to them, is no plan. What our planners demand is a central direction of all economic activity according to a single plan, laying down how the resources of society should be “consciously directed” to serve particular ends in a definite way. [p.85]
I: Do you agree that free competition, or economic liberalism, is equivalent to “no plan”?
H: The argument for competition is not equivalent to leaving things just as they are. Supporters of free competition do not deny, but even emphasize, that, in order that competition should work beneficially, a carefully thought-out legal framework is required. [p.86]
I: Some people think planning is much more efficient than free competition, do you agree?
H: Nope. Because all the details of the changes constantly affecting the conditions of demand and supply of the different commodities can never be fully known, or quickly enough be collected and disseminated, by any one center, what is required is some apparatus of registration which automatically records all the relevant effects of individual actions and whose indications are at the same time the resultant of, and the guide for, all the individual decisions. This is precisely what the price system does under competition, and which no other system even promises to accomplish. [p.95]