Friedrich Hayek Quotes

The fully planned economy, so far from being unpopular, is warmly regarded by those who know it best.

The free market is the most efficient for utilizing resources and responding to needs, but there are many human needs which find no place on the market.

The one thing about markets is that they do not give any advance notice. If they did, they would be arbitraged away.

In its own way, market reasoning also empties public life of moral argument. Part of the appeal of markets is that they don’t pass judgment on the preferences they satisfy.

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.

Indeed, if communist central planners could have organized the economy with as much detail, precision, and flexibility as a modern-day Toyota or Wal-Mart, communism would probably still exist.

Economic activity is carried out by individuals in organisations that require a high degree of social co-operation

The only reason free markets have a ghost of a chance is that they are so much more efficient than any other form of organization.

Markets are the best way to allocate resources.

Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or Communism.

Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It's how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.

Capitalism does millions of things better than the alternatives. It balances supply and demand in an elegant way that central planning has never come close to.

Within a market, organizations have interests distinct from and often antagonistic to the market processes that produced and sustain them.

The market is not an invention of capitalism …. It is an invention of civilization.

Free enterprise and the market economy mean war; socialism and planned economy mean peace. We must plan civilization or we must perish.

Socialism can also practice market economy.

Markets can do certain things, but markets cannot do other things

Whoever claims that economic competition represents "survival of the fittest" in the sense of the law of the jungle, provides the clearest possible evidence of his lack of knowledge of economics…. The truth is that economic competition is the very opposite of competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition in the grabbing off of scarce nature-given supplies, as it is in the animal kingdom. Rather, it is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth.

This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.

Under communism (socialism), there is no incentive to supply people with anything they need or want, including safety.

Without calculation, economic activity is impossible. Since under Socialism economic calculation is impossible, under Socialism there can be no economic activity in our sense of the word All economic change, therefore, would involve operations the value of which could neither be predicted beforehand nor ascertained after they had taken place. Everything would be a leap in the dark. Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.

Perhaps the most widespread misunderstanding of economics is that it applies solely to financial transactions. Frequently this leads to statements that "there are noneconomic values" to consider. There are, of course, noneconomic values. Indeed, there are only noneconomic values. Economics is not a value itself but merely a method of trading off one value against another.

If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure. He helped us to understand why capitalism won by a knockout. It was Hayek who elaborated the basic argument demonstrating that central planning was nothing else but an impoverishing fantasy.

The Reichswirtschaftsministerium ('Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs') tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages. It decrees to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. Market exchange is merely a sham.

Capitalism works better than it sounds, while socialism sounds better than it works.