Friedrich Hayek

"Hayek doesn’t seem to grasp that human beings can exist both as individuals and as members of a society, without necessarily subordinating them to the needs of an imposed social plan (although he acknowledges that the state can legitimately serve social needs, he contradictorily views collective benefits as incompatible with individual freedom). He rejects the very concept of social justice, for much the same reasons that he rejects the arbitrary valuation of labor: in Hayek’s view there is no way to put an objective value on a grievance or to weigh it against other claims. And because he locates all responsibility and agency only at the level of the individual, he sees no way in which any claim can be generalized to society. Hayek’s political philosophy recognizes only negative rights. Positive fulfillment beyond the most basic needs is a matter of individual striving."

"All economic activity is carried out through time. Every individual economic process occupies a certain time, and all linkages between economic processes necessarily involve longer or shorter periods of time."

"Questions about the influence of socialism are increasingly more difficult to answer as the word socialism has so many meanings. The idea that the inequalities of incomes can be greatly reduced has come to be recognized as largely impractical. Practically all endeavours at just distribution express more or less arbitrary conceptions of what is just and the central idea of Marxian socialism of a rationalisation of the means of production has been largely abandoned as technically impracticable. I believe that in general the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind."

"I am now profoundly convinced of what I had only hinted at before, namely, that the struggle between the advocates of a free society and the advocates of the socialist system is not a moral but an intellectual conflict. Thus socialists have been led by a very peculiar development to revive certain primitive instincts and feelings which in the course of hundreds of years had been practically suppressed by commercial or mercantile morals, which by the middle of the last century had come to govern the world economy."

"Altruism is an instinct we've inherited from the small society where we knew for whom we work, whom we serve. When you pass from this, as I like to call it, 'concrete society', where we are guided by what we see, to the abstract society which far transcends our range of vision, it becomes necessary that we are guided not by the knowledge of the effect of what we do, but by some abstract symbols. Now, the only symbol which tells us where we can make the best contribution is profit. And in fact by pursuing profit, we are as altruistic as we can possibly be, because we extend our concern to people who are beyond our range of personal conception. This is a condition which makes it possible to produce what I call an extended order, an order which is not determined by our aim, by our knowing what are the most urgent needs, but by an impersonal mechanism which by a system of communication puts a label on certain things which is fully impersonal."

"I mean, it became particularly acute because Keynes, against his intentions, had stimulated the development of macroeconomics. And I was convinced that not only his particular conclusions, but the whole foundation of macroeconomics was wrong. So I wanted to demonstrate that we had to return to microeconomics, that this whole prejudice supported by the natural scientists that could deduce anything from measurable magnitudes, the effects of aggregates and averages, came to fascinate me much more. I felt in a way, that the thing which I am now prepared to do, I don’t know as there’s anybody else who can do this particular task. And I rather hoped that what I had done in capital theory would be continued by others. This was a new opening which was much more fascinating. The other would have meant working for a result which I already knew, but had to prove it. Which was very dull. The other thing was an open problem: How does economics really look like when you recognize it as the prototype of a new kind of science of complex phenomena which could not employ the simple model of mechanics or physics, but had to deal with what then I described as mere pattern predictions, certain limited prediction. That was so much more fascinating as an intellectual problem."

"Our basic problem is that we have three levels, I would say, of moral beliefs. We have the first instance, our intuitive moral feelings which are adapted to the small, person-to-person society where we act for people whom we know and are served by people whom we know. Then, we have a society governed by moral traditions which, unlike what modern rationalists believe, are not intellectual discoveries of men who designed them, but as a result of a persons, which I now prefer to describe as term of 'group selection.' Those groups who had accidentally developed such as the tradition of private property and the family who did succeed, but never understood this. So we owe our present extended order of human cooperation very largely to a moral tradition which the intellectual does not approve of, because it has never been intellectually designed and it has to compete with a third level of moral beliefs, those which the morals which the intellectuals designed in the hope that they can better satisfy man's instincts than the traditional morals to do. And we live in a world where three moral traditions are in constant conflict, the innate ones, the traditional ones, and the intellectually designed ones, and ultimately, all our political conflicts of this time can be reduced as affected by a conflict between free moral tradition of a different nature, not only of different content."

"The socialist argument continues despite its many defeats―on the impossibility of economic calculation under collectivism, the fallacious claims for the use of markets under socialism, the incompatibility of liberty and state direction of the economy, and many others. The argument is being won by the new liberals of the late 20th century. But many people still do not understand it. And most on the Left continue to resist it."

"Those who suffer from this monopoly should form a libertarian anti-labour union movement of workers directed against what has long become a deceptive farce favouring an elite that has gained dominance in a party wrongly claiming to represent the interest of all workers. Once it is recognized that the unions prevent people from getting jobs, such a movement may readily spread."

"I don't believe that we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, and since we can't take them violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something they can't stop."

"I don't like criticizing Milton Friedman not only because he is an old friend but because, outside of monetary theory, we are in complete agreement. Our general views on what is desired and what is not are almost identical until we get on to money. But if I told him what I said before, that I very much doubt whether monetary policy has ever done anything good, he would disagree. He personally is convinced that a good monetary policy is a foundation for everything."

"It seems to me that my original plan is right, but I am afraid that I’ve come to the conclusion that politically, it is completely Utopian. Governments will never allow monetary competition, and even bankers do not understand the idea because they have all grown up in the system which is so completely dependent on central banks. So I think we need a roundabout way. After all, in the modern world, currency is no longer the most important money. Credit and credit cards are substitutes. While governments can stop people from issuing money, they can hardly stop them from opening accounts in something unless they introduce a complete system of exchange control. I do not expect that any bank will understand this idea. But I hope that one of the big dealers in raw materials will be prepared to open accounts which will be redeemable in so much of current moneys as are necessary to buy this list of raw materials. Through these accounts he can make his unit—call it the “solid”—the standard unit without it ever being used in circulation. People very soon will begin to keep their accounts in “solids”—the only thing which is trustworthy. Although it’s a thing where many people can compete, most of them will probably choose the same list of raw materials. If one major firm will start this, others will imitate it. So I think we can forget about existing money and existing banks, and gradually open a system of accounts which will displace the government money."

"And since any inflation, however modest at first, can help employment only so long as it accelerates, adopted as a means of reducing unemployment, it will do so for any length of time only while it accelerates. "Mild" steady inflation cannot help—it can lead only to outright inflation. That inflation at a constant rate soon ceases to have any stimulating effect, and in the end merely leaves us with a backlog of delayed adaptations, is the conclusive argument against the "mild" inflation represented as beneficial even in standard economics textbooks."

"It is no exaggeration to say that the central aim of socialism is to discredit those traditional morals which keep us alive."

"All the paradigms of culturally evolved institutions, morals, exchange, and money refer to such practices whose benefits transcend the individuals who practice them in the particular instances. The result is that whole groups may be helped by them to expand into what I shall call extended orders, through the effects of practices of which the individuals are not aware. Such practices can lead to the formation of orderly structures far exceeding the perception of those whose actions produce them. They make possible the adaptation of such actions to unknown circumstances and lead to the formation of an indefinitely expansible order which can develop only through group selection, that is, a selection of groups for common attributes possessed by them."

"The human groups have been selected for the effects of their habitual practices, effects of which the individuals were not and could not be aware. Customs are mostly group properties, beneficial only if they are common properties of its individual members but referring to reciprocal action. Morals have not only been designed by man, but man also usually does not understand their reason."

"I don't know what monetarism is. If monetarism just means a good old-fashioned quantity theory, of course it has not failed. If it means the particular version of Milton Friedman, I think it has because he imagines that he can achieve — ascertain — a clear quantity relationship between a measurable quantity of money and the price level. I don't think that is possible. In fact, just about 40 years ago in the opening sentences of my book, Prices and Production, I wrote that it would be a great misfortune if people ever cease to believe in the quantity theory of money. It would be even worse ever to believe it literally. And that's exactly what Milton Friedman does."

"Our whole modern society, based on a far-ranging division of labour, is, however, essentially dependent on two factors that conflict with our natural instincts. The first is the assumption, implicit but not understood, that we can do more good to unknown people if we follow the impersonal signals of the market, which enable us to serve the needs of people whom we do not know and to make use of opportunities and facilities with which we have no direct acquaintance. The second is that for this purpose we can follow our own individual aims with freely chosen associates and are not bound to serve the concrete ends of the group into which we were born."

"In a sense, we all are socialists. We are still governed by feelings that are based on what was necessary in the small group of known people among whom each had to aim at fulfilling the needs of persons he knew; where he had to collaborate with a definite group of fellows, who were given to him and whom he could not choose, to pursue common purposes. Our instincts still tell us to strive to serve the known needs of known people and that our pleasure in life is derived from the consciousness that we follow a set of common purposes with people whom we know and who share our environment."

"I believe you will be shocked by my stating this so bluntly because we are still guided instinctively by those inherited "natural" emotions. But I think we must recognize that we have become a worldwide, peaceful, and prosperous society by having learned to disregard those natural instincts and to follow instead certain abstract rules of honesty—rules establishing private property and ultimately codified in the form of private law. It is the rules of property and contract on which the growth of a worldwide, peaceful, and prosperous society was based. All these are traditional rules that evolved by a process of selection, which made those groups who followed the new rules more prosperous than other groups, and which thus came gradually to govern the civilised part of the world. Those communities who adopted the new rules and, in doing so, infringed upon deeply embedded natural feelings became the successful ones, the ones who multiplied because they were more prosperous and were able to attract people from other groups."

"Our morality itself is the result of a process of cultural selection. Those things survive which enable the species to multiply."

"We do not owe our morals to our intelligence: we owe them to the fact that some groups uncomprehendingly accepted certain rules of conduct — the rules of private property, of honesty, and of the family — that enabled the groups practising them to prosper, multiply, and gradually to displace the others."

"We have found a method of creating an order of human co–operation which far exceeds the limits of our knowledge. We are led to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware. We do not know the needs which we satisfy, nor do we know the sources of the things which we get. We stand in an enormous framework into which we fit ourselves by obeying certain rules of conduct that we have never made and never understood, but which have their reason."

"The social product which is now maintaining a human population of this world four or five hundred times as large as that which man could achieve in the natural hunting and gathering stage is owed only to the division of labor, skills, and knowledge. This division could never have been designed or planned, but it arose through and is now maintained by the guiding service of competitive market prices and wages that tell each person where its efforts can make the largest contribution to the total. These self-generating signals, which inform the individuals about the combined efforts of thousands of events of which they can have no direct information, bring about an adaptation of the individual efforts to the unknown. No central direction could achieve this adaptation because the knowledge of all the facts of which the market takes account is spread among thousands and cannot be known to any central authority. It is, of course, impossible to improve signals when one does not know what determines them. Wealth, which social justice would like to distribute as a reward for merit and need, is, therefore, due to the circumstance that the direction of individual efforts is guided by a choice between returns which depends largely on accidental circumstances of time and place and is effected but not conclusively determined by what the individual can know or do. Thus, the wealth which the advocates of social justice want to redistribute would not exist if social justice reigned. Social justice is a fraud, a promise to distribute what one would not have if one followed its bidding. Wealth just would not be there or would rapidly disappear if the ordering by the principles of the market that now guide its production were replaced by some others which would give to each that to which he imagines himself to be entitled."

"[Milton Friedman] believes in an oversimplified quantitative relationship between a measurable quantity of money and the price level. You must leave it to the discretion of the central bank to so adjust the supply of ultimate cash reserves as to keep the price level stable."

"My life has been dominated by my differences with John Maynard Keynes. That turns almost wholly on the - I believe, false - conviction that there is a simple relationship between aggregate demand for consumer goods and the volume of employment. Keynes was one of the most intelligent people I knew but he understood very little economics. He must not be blamed for his disciples. He knew the danger of inflation."

"On the scale on which [tax cutting] is being tried, I'm a little apprehensive. I'm all for reduction of government expenditures but to anticipate it by reducing the rate of taxation before you have reduced expenditure is a very risky thing to do."

"These morals, or better this moral tradition, is the result of an evolution which occurred parallel to, and yet distinct from both biological evolution on the one hand, and the evolution of our intellect on the other hand."

"A reconsideration of the discussion in which I took an active part more than 40 years ago has left me with a rather depressing view of the somewhat shameful state of what has become an established part of economic science, the subject of 'economic systems'. It appears to me that in this subject political attractiveness has been preserved by the flimsiest of arguments. The kindest thing one can say is that some well-meaning people have allowed themselves to be deceived by the vague and thoughtless language commonly used by specialists in the theory of these issues."

"There mere idea that the planning authority could ever possess a complete inventory of the amounts and qualities of all the different materials and instruments of production of which the manager of a particular plant will know or be able to find out makes the whole proposal a somewhat comic fiction. Once this is recognised it becomes obvious that what prices ought to be can never be determined without relying on competitive markets."

"What the planning authority would have to know would not be the mere totals but the distinct, peculiar conditions prevailing in each enterprise which affect the information about values transmitted through market prices but would be completely lost in any statistical information about quantities that might reach the authority from time to time."

"The illiterate expression ‘given data’ constantly recurs in Lange. It appears to have an irresistable attraction to mathematical economists because it doubly assures them that they know what they do not know. It seems to bewitch them into making assertions about the real world for which they have no empirical justification whatever."

"I cannot help but protest in the strongest possible terms against the cartoon on page 3 of your publication of the 30th of December equating the present governments of Poland and Chile. It can only be explained by complete ignorance of the facts or by the systematically promoted socialist calumnies of the present situation in Chile, which I had not expected the F.A.Z. to fall for. I believe that all the participants in the Mont Pelerin Society conference held a few weeks ago in Chile would agree with me that you owe the Chilean government a humble apology for such twisting of the facts. Any Pole lucky enough to escape to Chile could consider himself fortunate."

"Well, I would say that, as long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression — and this is valid for South America — is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government. And during this transition it may be necessary to maintain certain dictatorial powers, not as something permanent, but as a temporary arrangement."

"It should surprise no one that the lost generation of British economists who had succumbed to the teachings of Lord Keynes should form a panicky mob when a reversal of the policies they had inspired reveals the damage they have done. ... Following their advice has induced a structure of employment that can be maintained only by accelerating inflation but will collapse only when it becomes a gallop and destroys any possibility of a rational use of resources. Nobody has ever claimed that so long as it is necessary to reduce inflation to get out of this vicious circle the effect can be anything but to destroy the particular employments created by past inflation. Only after inflation has been brought to a full stop can the market be expected to guide workers to jobs which can be maintained without accelerating inflation. All those who plead for “mild” inflation and oppose “too much” inflation are merely preparing the ground for a later depression."

"There is no salvation for Britain unless the special privileges granted to the trade unions in 1906 are revoked. The average level of real wages of British workers would undoubtedly be higher, and their chances of finding employment better, if the wages of different occupations were again determined by the market and all limitations on the work an individual is allowed to do were removed."

"When I look at the world, I sometimes feel that here in Germany one may still be in some sort of lifeboat that can hope to keep afloat when the rest of the world goes bust. German and Switzerland and perhaps Austria and Belgium have the few relatively stable currencies in the world."

"The advice I would give is: If you have the courage to do so, don't feel patriotic in monetary matters. Choose the money which helps you best."

"If a big country like the United States did return to the gold standard, it would start a great deflation. Most likely the government couldn't stick to it for long. They'd switch the policy to some halfway measure like a gold exchange standard."

"If the world as a whole returned to the gold standard there would be such fluctuations in the value of gold that it would very soon prove impractical. Today an international gold standard could only mean that a few countries would maintain a real gold standard. The other countries would hang on to the system through a gold exchange standard — where the currency isn't really redeemable in gold but the government attempts to keep a fixed rate between its currency and gold."

"I don’t believe we’re in for a crash now. It's much more likely that government will just conceal the continuation of inflation by price controls. But if anything is worse than an open inflation, it’s a repressed inflation. What you’re likely to get is not a violent deflation but increasing stagnation of productivity."

"I did say in print, in February, 1929 that there was no hope for economic recovery in Europe before American interest rates came down. That wouldn’t be until the American boom collapsed — which was likely to happen within the next few months.And this did, in fact, happen in October 1929. What made me expect this, of course, was one of my main theoretical beliefs — that an inflationary boom cannot be maintained indefinitely. I was sure that a very unstable situation was created by the artificial prolongation of the boom in 1927, when the Federal Reserve tried to stave off a collapse by credit expansion."

"Both altruism and solidarity are very strong instincts which guided man in the small group. We were serving known other persons when his efforts were directed to the needs of familiar people. Now we have grown as rich as we are because we have replaced this by a system where we no longer work for the known needs of known other people, and no longer use the known assistance of other people, but where our effort is completely guided by price signals, which for the individual means that I must use my resources for the maximum success of what resources is sacrificed for the purpose, but the justification is not my benefit but in this way I benefit my fellow man most. So it does happen that so far as commercial activities economic activities are concerned we will benefit our fellow man most if we are guided solely by the striving for gain. We are then completely free how to use what we have earned and there of course the desire for being altruistic come in very strongly, but not in the ordering principle of our society."

"The knowledge of facts is widely dispersed. We want to make use of knowledge possessed by millions of individual people, which they can only use if they are fed signals about the general situation. You can't reverse it you can't possibly concentrate this knowledge. The whole order of international cooperation has been built on such a signalling system, where signals tell you about facts which nobody knows concrete in their totality, and I may add such signals you cannot correct - you can not correct signals which inform you about circumstances you don't know."

"The newfangled word monetarism means of course no more than the good old “quantity theory of money”, as it was formulated in modern times by the late Professor Irving Fisher and reformulated by Professor Milton Friedman. Of this I said nearly 50 years ago in the first lecture I delivered in this country that “from a practical point of view, it would be one of the worst things which could befall us if the general public should ever again cease to believe in the elementary propositions of the quantity theory”. This was, however, unfortunately brought about by the seductive theories of Lord Keynes. I then said that it was in many respects a crude over-simplification, but the irrefutable chief content is still that inflation is always and everywhere the effect of an excessive supply of money and that it can be cured only by a restriction of its supply."

"It seems to me that the future of peaceful international relations and the safety of persons in foreign countries would have been much better served if, after the Iranian Government placed itself outside the community of nations by approving the holding captive of the personnel of the United States embassy, the United States Government had at once sent an ultimatum saying that, unless every single member of the embassy staff were within 48 hours handed over unharmed to representatives of the United States Government at some place outside Iran, bombs would be falling at an increasing rate at the seat of the Iranian Government."

"There is no doubt, and in this I agree with Milton Friedman, that once the Crash had occurred, the Federal Reserve System pursued a silly deflationary policy. I am not only against inflation but I am also against deflation! So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression! So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression. One consequence of this policy was, of course, the fact that confidence was destroyed."

"I think the basic misconception is to speak of the so-called “best” allocation of resources. What is the best? In common economics it is defined as what would be if we knew everything. Economists operate with the fictitious assumption that all the relevant data is known, but this is totally unrealistic. Nobody knows all the data. What we have is widely dispersed knowledge, which cannot be concentrated in one mind. To call the situation—which would use all the knowledge available—“optimal” is nonsense because it is by definition a non-achievable solution. Our problem is not the full utilization of all knowledge but the best use we can achieve with any known institutional structure. In that sense, some oligopolistic (and even monopolistic situations), represent the best possible utilization of knowledge that we can achieve. Even the action of a monopolist can be extremely beneficial."

"My whole concept of economics is based on the idea that we have to explain how prices operate as signals, telling people what they ought to do in particular circumstances. The approach to this problem has been blocked by a cost or labor theory of value, which assumes that prices are determined by the technical conditions of production only. The important question is to explain how the interaction of a great number of people, each possessing only limited knowledge, will bring about an order that could only be achieved by deliberate direction taken by somebody who has the combined knowledge of all these individuals. However, central planning cannot take direct account of particular circumstances of time and place. Additionally, every individual has important bits of information which cannot possibly be conveyed to a central authority in statistical form. In a system in which the knowledge of relevant data is dispersed among millions of agents, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different individuals. Given this context, it is intellectually not satisfactory to attempt to establish causal relations between aggregates or averages in the manner in which the discipline of macroeconomics has attempted to do. Individuals do not make decisions on the basis of partial knowledge of magnitudes such as the total amount of production, or the total quantity of money. Aggregative theorizing leads nowhere."

"The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally. There is no reason why a man who has made a distinctive contribution to economic science should be omnicompetent on all problems of society — as the press tends to treat him till in the end he may himself be persuaded to believe."