Hayek Quotes - page 4
Hayek's blind spot with regard to politics was clear in the early 1980s when the first Thatcher government, in an attempt to reduce inflation and bring the public finances closer to a balanced budget, was raising interest rates and cutting public spending. As he had done during the 1930s, Hayek attacked these policies as not being severe enough. It would be better, he told me in a conversation we had around this time, if Thatcher imposed a more drastic contraction on the economy so that the wage-setting power of the trade unions could be broken. He appeared unfazed by unemployment, which was already higher (more than three million people) than at any time since the 1930s, and would rise much further if his recommendations were accepted.
John N. Gray
At Chicago, Hayek put aside his more technical economic work for the development of a social and political theory that became in time the most ambitious and complete synthesis to emerge from the ranks of the post-war Right. Among its themes - the overriding significance of the rule of law, the need for social inequality, the function of unreflective tradition, the value of a leisured class - were many cultivated by Strauss across the campus. Neither thinker, however, ever referred to the other. Did temperamental antagonism, or intellectual indifference, dictate the silence? Whatever the case, latent tensions of outlook between them were to find expression in due course. Schmitt, on the other hand, was never far from Hayek's mind – standing for the prime example of a skilled jurist whose sophistry helped to destroy the rule of law in Germany, yet a political theorist whose stark definitions of the nature of sovereignty and the logic of party, at any rate, had to be accepted.
Friedrich Hayek
[Estonian Prime Minister] Mart Laar came to my office the other day to recount his country's remarkable transformation. He described a nation of people wh are harder-working, more virtuous - yes, more virtuous, because the market punishes immorality - and more hopeful about the future than they've ever been in their history. I asked Mr. Laar where his government got the idea for these reforms. Do you know what he replied? He said, "We read Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek".
Friedrich Hayek
Though Hayek clearly allows for the possibility of a retreat from socialism, whether of the hot (command planning) or cold (welfare state) variety, and planning, Hayek's critics, apparently taking Hayek at his word, use 'inevitability' to refer to the outcome (a totalitarian polity) that, according to Hayek, is supposedly generated by the cumulative logic inherent to interventionist policy and welfare state practices. Though taking care to note that a change in policy may occur, Hayek apparently considers the logic of intervention as primarily nudging policy in one direction, necessitating ever-further government intervention.
Friedrich Hayek
The [seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s] was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation - Nicky [Kaldor], Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.
Friedrich Hayek
He who states that markets cannot fail, that market failure is always the result of government intervention, is a dogmatist. How the hell would he know? Overall, Hayek was not a dogmatist, although in his writings there can be found traces of such a liberal utopianism. There we encounter the motto: "What is not supposed to be, must not be! And what must not be, is not!" To me, all isms are suspicious anyway. The sceptic in me asks: why should markets be more reasonable than other human institutions? And we can see it every day: markets are also imperfect, prone to error, and in need of repair, like everything else that man has created.
Friedrich Hayek
I was 25 years old and pursuing my doctorate in economics when I was allowed to spend six months of post-graduate studies in Naples, Italy. I read the Western economic textbooks and also the more general work of people like Hayek. By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market. In 1968, I was glad at the political liberalism of the Dubcek Prague Spring, but was very critical of the Third Way they pursued in economics.
Friedrich Hayek
Although he is very probably unaware of this book and of my work in general, I want to express a very belated thanks to Friedrich A. Hayek. His work had much more of an influence on me than I realized during the writing of the First Edition [of The End of Liberalism] I neither began nor ended as a Hayekist but instead found myself confirming, by process of elimination and discovery, many of his fears about the modern liberal state.
Friedrich Hayek
I've always thought, incidentally, that many of us should welcome the fact that...a particular policy idea we hold does have this adverse effect on the opinions of other people. I think this is a very good thing, because it means that those of us who hold our views have to be better to get recognized than people who hold the other views. And in the long run, what matters is the quality of people who propose the ideas and not their number and not their position. It is because it is the quality of these ideas that matters so much that Hayek's ideas have been so wide-spread and have had such an influence, and that you are now seeing the rise in the scientific as well as in the other parts of the world of more people of this particular kind of persuasion....
... I am one of those who has learned a great deal from Hayek. I hope he is as effective as I think he will be in his teaching in Germany, but I also hope that we will see him back here very often indeed.
Friedrich Hayek
In terms of his personal characteristics, Hayek was a very complicated personality. He was by no means a simple person. He was very outgoing in one sense but at the same time very private. He did not like criticism, but he never showed that he didn't like criticism. His attitude under criticism, as I found, was to say: "Well, that's a very interesting thing. At the moment, I'm busy, but I'll write to you about it more later." And then he never would! On the other hand, he wasn't like von Mises. He wasn't intolerant at all. You cannot conceive of Hayek doing the kind of thing that Mises did, when, for example, he wouldn't talk to Machlup for three years because Machlup had come out for floating exchange rates at a Mont Pelerin meeting. Hayek did not do that. That was, I believe, because of the influence of the London School on him. He was very much tempered by the London School.
Friedrich Hayek
Hayek should be taken seriously because he has correctly identified as the most serious problems confronting civilization in the twentieth century the problems of nationalism and totalitarianism. Even with the dereliction of European communism at the end of the twentieth century, the problems which remain or are reemerging in the shape of ethnic conflict, separatist national movements, and regional trading blocs stem from practices and ideas which the liberal tradition has consistently criticized: ideas hostile to individualist, universalist, and egalitarian moral principles. While thinkers like Hannah Arendt have also recognized the threat and moral danger posed by totalitarianism, it is in Hayek's work that we have the most thorough attempt to understand the logic of its institutional alternative.
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.
Friedrich Hayek
Well I mentioned Hayek. There are two ways. One is because of my interest in political economy. The other way is that Hayek was a pioneer in the use of information in economics. One of the papers that Karl and I wrote together that I continue to like was a paper called "The Uses of Money". In that paper we tried to incorporate information and the cost of information to explain why people use money. One of Hayek's most basic ideas is that institutions are a way of reducing uncertainty. Man struggles to find institutional arrangements which on average make life a bit more predictable. Our "Uses of Money" is not so much about money as we conventionally think about it, it's about the idea of a medium of exchange, the function of an institution called the medium of exchange and how the medium of exchange as an institution resolves a part of peoples uncertainty about the future.
Friedrich Hayek
Information costs are reduced by the existence of large numbers of buyers and sellers. Under these conditions, prices embody the same information that would require large search costs by individual buyers and sellers in the absence of an organized market. (footnote 4: The original contributions were those of Hayek (1937 and 1945)).
Friedrich Hayek
Well ... I've always been a voracious reader - I have read the economic views of von Mises and Hayek, and ... Bastiat ... I know about Cobden and Bright in England - and the elimination of the corn laws and so forth, the great burst of economy or prosperity for England that followed.
Friedrich Hayek
![Hayek [...] seemingly would severely limit mankind's ability to design the future through the process of working things out. But Hayek rejects neither reason nor deliberative critique nor constructivism. The exercise of reason in deliberative critique in the service of reconstruction of economy, polity, and society is not only called for but is part and parcel of the Mengerian argument. Constructivism is inherent in the body of social theory developed by Hayek. Constructivism is practiced by Hayek. It is the fundamental logic of his life's work. In a sense, his own practice constitutes the negation of his own argument. (Friedrich Hayek)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/90/friedrich-hayek-ability-argument-1007590.webp)
I first had to discover certain things for myself, and essentially it was the behavior I observed in human subjects in my laboratory study of markets that motivated me eventually to study Hayek seriously. Reading with the eyes of a new mind, I was able to appreciate an enormous depth of understanding in the work of Hayek that would have escaped me if I had not had this personal experience in the laboratory.
Friedrich Hayek
Since Hayek was radically scornful of human reason, he could not, like John Locke or the Scholastics, elaborate a libertarian system of personal and property rights based on the insights of human reason into natural law. Nor could he, like Mises, emphasize man's rational insight into the vital importance of laissez-faire for the flourishing and even survival of the human race, or of foregoing any coercive intervention into the vast and interdependent network of the free market economy.
Instead, Hayek had to fall back on the importance of blindly obeying whatever social rules happened to have "evolved," and his only feeble argument against intervention was that the government was even more irrational and was even more ignorant, than individuals in the market economy.
Friedrich Hayek
