The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

by Friedrich A. Hayek

The point is not that whatever economists determine to be efficient is therefore ‘right’, but that economic analysis can elucidate the usefulness of practices heretofore thought to be right – usefulness from the perspective of any philosophy that looks unfavourably on the human suffering and death that would follow the collapse of our civilisation. It is a betrayal of concern for others, then, to theorise about the ‘just society’ without carefully considering the economic consequences of implementing such views. Yet, after seventy years of experience with socialism, it is safe to say that most intellectuals outside the areas — Eastern Europe and the Third World – where socialism has been tried remain content to brush aside what lessons might lie in economics, unwilling to wonder whether there might not be a reason why socialism, as often as it is attempted, never seems to work out as its intellectual leaders intended. The intellectuals’ vain search for a truly socialist community, which results in the idealisation of, and then disillusionment with, a seemingly endless string of ‘utopias’ – the Soviet Union, then Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Nicaragua – should suggest that there might be something about socialism that does not conform to certain facts. But such facts, first explained by economists more than a century ago, remain unexamined by those who pride themselves on their rationalistic rejection of the notion that there could be any facts that transcend...