The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion for equality made vain the hope for freedom. — Lord Acton Formal equality before the law is in conflict, and in fact incompatible, with any activity of the government deliberately aiming at material or substantive equality of different people, and any policy aiming directly at a substantive ideal of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the Rule of Law. To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently. To give different people the same objective opportunities is not to give them the same subjective chance. It cannot be denied that the Rule of Law produces economic inequality — all that can be claimed for it is that this inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way. It is very significant and characteristic that socialists… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Friedrich Hayek
The Management of the Life of the People
Even in [1931] the Macmillan Report could already speak of “the change of outlook of the government of [England] in recent times, its growing preoccupation, irrespective of party, with the management of the life of the people” and add that “Parliament finds itself increasingly engaged in legislation which has for its conscious aim the regulation of the day-to-day affairs of the community and now intervenes in matters formerly thought to be entirely outside its scope.” — F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom Read more →
Utterly Different From What We Expected
We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected. — Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom Read more →