Hayek is quite explicit on this count: if you begin with welfare policies of any sort—directing individuals, taxing for social ends, engineering the outcomes of market relationships—you will end up with Hitler. Not merely with social democratic housing projects or right-wing subsidies for “honest” winegrowers, but Hitler. Thus, rather than run such a risk, democracies should avoid all forms of intervention which distort the properly apolitical mechanisms of a market economy.
