Friedrich August von Hayek
Friedrich August von Hayek
Friedrich Hayek CH, born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek and frequently referred to as F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian and British economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for his "pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and ... penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena."...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth8 May 1899
CountryAustria
Friedrich August von Hayek quotes about
Unlike proportionality, progression provides no principle which tells us what the relative burden of different persons ought to be the argument based on the presumed justice of progression provides no limitation, as has often been admitted by its supporters, before all incomes above a certain figure are confiscated, and those below left untaxed.
[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
To discover the meaning of what is called "social justice" has been one of my chief preoccupations for more than 10 years. I have failed in this endeavour or rather, have reached the conclusion that, with reference to society of free men, the phrase has no meaning whatever.
Social justice rests on the hate towards those that enjoy a comfortable position, namely, upon envy.
I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be that I could make the speakers and writers among them thoroughly ashamed ever again to employ the term "social justice.
We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.
Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men.
I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal
It is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.
Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand.
It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world.
The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.
It may be that a free society... carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends.