Competition means decentralized planning by many separate persons.
Money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man. It is money which in existing society opens an astounding range of choice to the poor man, a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy.
Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.
Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.
I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano’s Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. Once you see that you lose all hope.
It is when it is contended that “in a democracy right is what the majority makes it to be” that democracy degenerates into demagoguery.
I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.
The mind cannot foresee its own advance.
It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality – an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.
Social justice rests on the hate towards those that enjoy a comfortable position, namely, upon envy.
Capitalism created the possibility of employment.
Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.
A policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy.
We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in.
It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization.
Through the inevitable mismanagement of resources and goods at the disposal of the state, all forms of collectivism lead eventually to tyranny.
Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists.