'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.
If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialist.
Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.
[Socialistic] economic planning, regulation, and intervention pave the way to totalitarianism by building a power structure that will inevitably be seized by the most power-hungry and unscrupulous.
In government, the scum rises to the top.
What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.
The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
The advantage of a free market is that it allows millions of decision-makers to respond individually to freely determined prices, allocating resources - labor, capital and human ingenuity - in a manner that can't be mimicked by a central plan, however brilliant the central planner.
Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts.
[T]hose who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about.
Inflation is probably the most important single factor in that vicious circle wherein one kind of government action makes more and more government control necessary. For this reason all those who wish to stop the drift toward increasing government control should concentrate their effort on monetary policy.
Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left.
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.
The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable.
Social justice rests on the hate towards those that enjoy a comfortable position, namely, upon envy.
No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.
A society that does not recognise that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.
When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.
It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.
Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rates higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for.
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.
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