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About this quote

What does it mean?
Controlling the means of production means controlling the ends and values of society.
In plain terms
Whoever controls resources decides what people value and do.
What can you take from it?
Control of means dictates ends.

Where it applies

  • economic systems
  • political theory
  • societal goals

Putting it to work

  • critiquing central planning
  • studying value systems

Questions to consider

  • Who should decide societal values?
  • Can means be separated from ends?

Another view

People might agree on ends even if means are controlled.

More from Friedrich Hayek

  1. The effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit th…

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  2. The first need is to free ourselves of that worst form of contemporary obscurantism which tries to persuade us that what we have done in the recent past was al…

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  3. That democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly diff…

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