Friedrich Hayek quotes - page 3
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.
Friedrich Hayek
The misconception that costs determined prices prevented economists for a long time from recognizing that it was prices which operated as the indispensable signals telling producers what costs it was worth expending on the production of the various commodities and services, and not the other way around. It was the costs which they had expended which determined the prices of things produced.It was this crucial insight which finally broke through and established itself about a hundred years ago through the so-called marginal revolution in economics.The chief insight gained by modern economists is that the market is essentially an ordering mechanism, growing up without anybody wholly understanding it, that enables us to utilize widely dispersed information about the significance of circumstances of which we are mostly ignorant. However, the various planners (and not only the planners in the socialist camp) and dirigists have still not yet grasped this.
Friedrich Hayek
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.
Friedrich Hayek
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.
Friedrich Hayek
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.
Friedrich Hayek
The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.
Friedrich Hayek
I suggested before that the whole of economic history could be rewritten in terms of this gradual suppression of the primitive instincts by what we very mistakenly call "artificial” rules. Of course, they are not in the strict sense artificial. Nobody ever invented them. They were not the result of design. The new manners of conduct were not adopted because anybody thought they were better. They were adopted because somebody who acted on them profited from it and his group gained from it, and so these rules, without anybody under standing them-that is very important for the later part of my argument-without anybody understanding in what way they benefited their community, gradually came to be generally accepted.
Friedrich Hayek
