6 Friedrich Hayek Quotes on Economy

Friedrich Hayek quotes on economy

25. If the resources of different nations are treated as exclusive properties of these nations as wholes, if international economic relations, instead of being relations between individuals, become increasingly relations between whole nations organized as trading bodies, they inevitably become the source of friction and envy between whole nations. It is one of the most fatal illusions that, by substituting negotiations between states or organized groups for competition for markets or for raw materials, international friction would be reduced. This would merely put a contest of force in the place of what can only metaphorically be called the 'struggle' of competition and would transfer to powerful and armed states, subject to no superior law, the rivalries which between individuals had to be decided without recourse to force. Economic transactions between national bodies who are at the same time the supreme judges of their own behavior, who bow to no superior law, and whose representatives cannot be bound by any considerations but the immediate interest of their respective nations, must end in clashes of power.

64. Inflation is probably the most important single factor in that vicious circle wherein one kind of government action makes more and more government control necessary. For this reason all those who wish to stop the drift toward increasing government control should concentrate their effort on monetary policy.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

138. Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

142. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

150. Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

160. There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.