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If democracy is a means rather than an end, its limits must be determined in the light of the purpose we want it to serve.

Friedrich August von Hayek

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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Differences Moral Today
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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Effort Freedom Individual Mean
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
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Liberty Names People
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Design Liberty Men
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Done Foolish Much Stupid
It would clearly not be an improvement to build all houses exactly alike in order to create a perfect market for houses, and the same is true of most other fields where differences between the individual products prevent competition from ever being perfect.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Differences House Order Perfect
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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Abuse Desirable May Occasionally Purpose
Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Outcomes Reaction Trends
To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to prevent fraud and deception, to break up monopolies- these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Competition Deception Tasks
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.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Government Issues People
And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Powerful Wealth World
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
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Ends Individual Mean
The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Attitude Growth Order
This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Done Economic Planning
Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Doing Good Liberty Opportunity
We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

Justice Umpires Views