.. the desire to organize social life according to a unitary plan itself springs largely from a desire for power. .. in order to achieve their end, collectivists must create power of a magnitude never before known, and … their success will depend on the extent to which they achieve such power.
This remains true even though many liberal socialists are guided in their endeavors by the tragic illusion that by depriving individuals of the power they possess in an individualist system, and by transferring this power to society, they can thereby extinguish power. …by uniting in the hands of some single body power formally exercised independently by many, an amount of power is created infinitely greater than any that existed before, so much more far-reaching as almost to be different in kind. There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess, and if nobody can consciously use the power, it is just an abuse of words to assert that it rests with all the capitalists put together.
from The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek
HKO comment:
While it is misleading to defer to the ‘power of capitalists’ as if it came from a single coordinated entity, this is not true of the power of government which often literally does descend from a single government bureaucracy. This is why power shifted from the private sector to the government sector is power increased, and power much harder to control and correct.
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