Friedrich Hayek Quotes

As a result of the efforts of Hayek .. and the many others who share his general outlook, the idea of a centrally planned and centrally administered economy, so popular in the 1930s and early 1940s, has been discredited.

We're supposed to live under capitalism, and capitalism is supposed to be competitive so you would expect that capitalists and entrepreneurs would like competition. Well, it turns out that capitalists do everything they can to avoid competition.

What we call the market is really a democratic process involving millions, and in some markets billions, of people making personal decisions that express their preferences. When you hear someone say that he doesn't trust the market, and wants to replace it with government edicts, he's really calling for a switch from a democratic process to a totalitarian one.

The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.

I do believe in the free market.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

Voluntary association produces the free market - where each person can choose among a multitude of possibilities.

What we want is to establish the rules of a market economy - not to plan its outcome.

Free prices are the price of freedom.

The essential quality of a market system is not that it promotes greed, but that it renders greed harmless.

A market economy is to economics what democracy is to government: a decent, if flawed choice, about many bad alternatives

It doesn't really matter who owns things so long there is enough competition, which means lower pricing, better quality goods, more variety, and an economy where the consumers are the big winners.

With free market and free man, if you remove one of them, it is not called capitalism in my dictionary.

I believe in our free market system.

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.

Market competition is the only form of organization which can afford a large measure of freedom to the individual.

Millions of individuals making their own decisions in the marketplace will always allocate resources better than any centralized government planning process.

Private Property, the Law of Accumulation of Wealth, and the Law of Competition... these are the highest results of human experience, the soil in which society so far has produced the best fruit.

Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.

At the heart of capitalism is the unification of knowledge and power. As Friedrich Hayek, the leader of the Austrian school of economics, put it, "To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind... is to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world." Because knowledge is dispersed, power must be as well.

One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work.

Free markets. What does this system mean? The answer is simple: it is the market economy, it is the system in which the cooperation of individuals in the social division of labor is achieved by the market.

The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms.

The market economy-capitalism-is a social system of consumers' supremacy.

Capitalism is the only society in human history in which neither tradition nor conscious direction supervises the total effort of the community; it is the only society in which the future, the needs for tomorrow, are entirely left to an automatic system.