"John Stuart Mill was the saint of rationalism for a good reason. Mill's ideas are the roots of the self-destructive character of a rationalist or constructivistic view of how civilization could be organized. Since Mill, this muddle about facts has guided policy and most of the strivings of people of good will, who were inspired by a false picture, based on a worldwide division of labor, of how a society worked. It was from Mill's muddle (and the similar deceptions of Marx) and from the confusion of those pretended defenders of liberty who proclaimed a new moral postulate which required a complete suppression of individual freedom that the whole muddle of the middle derived. The ideal of freedom was increasingly relegated to second place by the idea of social justice. However, the two are incompatible. If one accepts the principle of social justice, one cannot preserve the market economy which provides that which social justice would like to distribute. The two principles are antagonistic and irreconcilable. There can be no halfway house between them. As the promise of social justice cannot be generally satisfied and also cannot be refused to all others once it has been conceded to some, there can be no question about where one's choice must be if one really wants to help the poor."
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Academics from England19th-century philosophersPhilosophers from EnglandEconomists from EnglandClassical economists
Original Language: English
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Sources
Friedrich Hayek, "The Muddle of the Middle", in S. Pejovich (ed.) Philosophical and Economic Foundations of Capitalism (1983)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill
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John Stuart Mill
1806 – 1873
englischer Philosoph
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