Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.
It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.
Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.
Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible.
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people.
To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.
Socialism constitutes a threat to the present and future welfare of the human race, in the sense that neither socialism nor any other known substitute for the market order could sustain the current population of the world.
We certainly do not regard it as right that the citizens of a large country should dominate those of a small adjoining country merely because they are more numerous.
Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarianism which horrify us follow of necessity.
If freedom is to flourish the philosophic foundations of a free society must be kept a living intellectual issue and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of the liveliest minds.
The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.
Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.
If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.
Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left.
We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage.
With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.
You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom.