More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
the anti-Semitism of Hitler has driven from his country, or turned into his enemies, many people who in every respect are confirmed totalitarians of the German type.8
“the mass production of opinion is the corollary of the mass production of goods”
“the prejudice which the word propaganda still exerts in many minds today is closely parallel to the prejudice against control of industry and trade”
It remains to discover whether those who brandish this doctrine believe in it or whether they simply want to give the prestige of a scientific appearance to passions of their hearts,
all the characteristic idiosyncrasies of the totalitarian intellectual, a hatred of almost everything which distinguishes Western civilization since the Renaissance, is combined with an approval of the methods of Inquisition.
the scientist is qualified to run a totalitarian society
Freedom, he explains, “is a very troublesome concept for the scientist to discuss, partly because he is not convinced that, in the last analysis, there is such a thing.”
“the freedom to be odd and unlike one’s neighbor is not . . . a scientific value.”
There is serious reason for doubt whether even in those cases where monopoly is inevitable the best way of controlling it is to put it in the hands of the state.
Monopolies are impossible in a truly free market.
Even though some workmen will perhaps be better fed, and all will no doubt be more uniformly dressed in that new order, it is permissible to doubt whether the majority of English workmen will in the end thank the intellectuals among their leaders who have presented them with a socialist doctrine which endangers their personal freedom.
A complex civilization like ours is necessarily based on the individual’s adjusting himself to changes whose cause and nature he cannot understand:
to aim always at the maximum of employment achievable by monetary means is a policy which is certain in the end to defeat its own purposes.
It should never be forgotten that the one decisive factor in the rise of totalitarianism on the Continent, which is yet absent in England and America, is the existence of a large recently dispossessed middle class.
It may sound noble to say, “Damn economics, let us build up a decent world”—but it is, in fact, merely irresponsible.
Quotable.
the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.
he has constantly to reassert and prove the order of his values and to testify to the sincerity of his profession by the sacrifice of those of his values he rates lower to those he puts higher.
noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer,
The Germans know that what they still regard as the British and American traditions and their own new ideals are fundamentally opposed and irreconcilable views of life.
our unwavering faith in those traditions which have made England and America countries of free and upright, tolerant and independent, people is the thing that counts.
It is neither necessary nor desirable that national boundaries should mark sharp differences in standards of living,
we might indeed find that we have defeated National Socialism merely to create a world of many national socialisms,
the problems raised by economic planning of even an area such as western Europe to see that the moral bases for such an undertaking are completely lacking.
make the Norwegian fisherman consent to forgo the prospect of economic improvement in order to help his Portuguese fellow, or the Dutch worker to pay more for his bicycle to help the Coventry mechanic, or the French peasant to pay more taxes to assist the industrialization of Italy?
How many people in England would be prepared to submit to the decision of an international authority,
It is a mistake to regard the brutality and the disregard of all the wishes and ideals of the smaller people shown by the Germans simply as a sign of their special wickedness;
One cannot, for example, create a kind of Tennessee Valley Authority for the Danube Basin without thereby determining beforehand for many years to come the relative rate of progress of the different races inhabiting this area or without subordinating all their individual aspirations and wishes to this task.7
everybody will rightly feel that he is worse off than he might be if some other plan had been adopted and that it is the decision and the might of the dominant powers which have condemned him to a place less favorable than he thinks is due to him.
we cannot hope for order or lasting peace after this war if states, large or small, regain unfettered sovereignty in the economic sphere.
The need is for an international political authority which, without power to direct the different people what they must do, must be able to restrain them from action which will damage others.
The powers which must devolve on an international authority are not the new powers assumed by the states in recent times but that minimum of powers without which it is impossible to preserve peaceful relationships, i.e., essentially the powers of the ultra-liberal “laissez faire” state.
The form of international government under which certain strictly defined powers are transferred to an international authority, while in all other respects the individual countries remain responsible for their internal affairs, is, of course, that of federation.
Multi and bilateral agreements are preferable.
It is worth recalling that the idea of the world at last finding peace through the absorption of the separate states in large federated groups and ultimately perhaps in one single federation, far from being new, was indeed the ideal of almost all the liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century.
its constitution must at the same time be so designed that it prevents the international as well as the national authorities from becoming tyrannical.
An international authority which effectively limits the powers of the state over the individual will be one of the best safeguards of peace.
there will, of course, be an imperative need for some such comprehensive organization, some new League of Nations.
a degree of cooperation could be achieved between, say, the British Empire and the nations of western Europe and probably the United States which would not be possible on a world scale.
the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself.
whatever we do, it can only be the beginning of a new, long, and arduous process in which we all hope we shall gradually create a world very different from that which we knew during the last quarter of a century.
many capitalists are themselves strongly influenced by socialistic ideas, and have not sufficient belief in capitalism to defend it with a clear conscience.
collective action in the interest of all can only be made possible if all can be coerced into accepting as their common interest what those in power take it to be.
The collectivist and anti-individualist character of German National Socialism is not much modified by the fact that it is not a proletarian but a middle class socialism, and that it is, in consequence, inclined to favour the small artisan and shop keeper and to set the limit up to which it recognises private property somewhat higher than does communism.
But if, as seems increasingly probable, the more radical views on economic policy hold the field, it will mean that the scare of Russian communism has driven the German people unawares into something which differs from communism in little but name.
The author is an Austrian refugee,
He writes from a distinctly English point of view, and frequently uses the expression “this country” with that reference.
It does not discuss the problems set by the serious shortcomings of an economic system based on the degree of economic freedom which was regarded as desirable and was allowed, say, around the turn of the century.
Nor should it, lest to address the misconceptions of thed anti-capitalists.
The shibboleths of our times are expressed in a variety of terms: “full employment,” “planning,” “social security,” “freedom from want.” The facts of our times suggest that none of these things can be had when they are made conscious objects of government policy. They are the fool’s-gold words. In Italy they debauched a people and led to death under the burning African suns. In Russia there was the first Five-Year Plan; there was also the liquidation of the three million kulaks.
When “society” and the “good of the whole” and “the greatest good of the greatest number” are made the overmastering touchstones of state action, no individual can plan his own existence.
Hayek is no devotee of laissez faire; he believes in a design for an enterprise system. Design is compatible with minimum-wage standards, health standards, a minimum amount of compulsory social insurance.
(I use the term liberal, as Hayek does— in the original nineteenth-century sense of limited government and free markets, not in the corrupted sense it has acquired in the United States, in which it means almost the opposite),
Love.
The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.
