Tyler Durden quotes Hayek at Zerohedge, 1/28/12, F.A. Hayek On “The Great Utopia”
To allay these suspicions and to harness to its cart the strongest of all political motives—the craving for freedom — socialists began increasingly to make use of the promise of a “new freedom.” Socialism was to bring “economic freedom,” without which political freedom was “not worth having.”
To make this argument sound plausible, the word “freedom” was subjected to a subtle change in meaning. The word had formerly meant freedom from coercion, from the arbitrary power of other men. Now it was made to mean freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth. The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for a redistribution of wealth.
The claim that a planned economy would produce a substantially larger output than the competitive system is being progressively abandoned by most students of the problem. Yet it is this false hope as much as anything which drives us along the road to planning.
HKO comment:
Hayek believed a planned economy inevitably led to tyranny. His critics claimed that bureaucrats in Britain could not be compared to their counterparts in Germany, that there were other factors involved. Yet while planning may not lead directly to the kind of tyranny that Hayek saw rise in Germany, it does often come at the expense of political freedom to some great degree and it is economically and philosophically grossly inefficient. There are just too many choices in a modern economy to be effectively made by a handful of elites. Rather than face their own responsibility as poor planners they are likely to resort to the force of government.
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