While in graduate school I encountered the writings of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, which shook me out of my then socialist beliefs. There was Hayek's book of essays, Individualism and Economic Order, and Mises's wide-ranging and unsettling Socialism, which showed me I had not thought through any details — economic, social or cultural — of how socialism would work. One of their arguments in particular, about the impossibility of rational economic calculation under socialism, dumbfounded me. Whether or not the argument was ultimately judged to be correct, it was amazing, something I never would have thought of in a million years.
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Robert Nozick, as quoted in "Robert Nozick" in The Harvard Guide to Influential Books : 113 Distinguished Harvard Professors Discuss the Books That Have Helped to Shape Their Thinking (1986), p. 187Friedrich Hayek
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The most important player on Ronald Reagan's economic team is Ronald Reagan. The person most responsible for creating the economic program that came to be known as Reaganomics is Reagan himself. For over twenty years he observed the American economy, read and studied the writings of some of the best economists in the world, including the giants of the free market economy — Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman — and he spoke and wrote on the economy, going through the rigorous mental discipline of explaining his thoughts to others. Over the years he made all the key decisions on the economic strategies he finally embraced. He always felt comfortable with his knowledge of the field and he was in command all the way.
Friedrich Hayek
The path away from economic freedom is, as Hayek long ago demonstrated, the road to serfdom. The road may be a long one: the pace may be swift or slow: but the destination cannot be changed. State ownership, state monopolies, state regulation and state planning, through the centralisation of economic power, inevitably lead to economic failure. They inevitably increase both the temptation and the scope for abuses of political power until freedom itself is threatened. The planned economies, the controlled societies which socialism requires, pervert what are truly economic decisions for the market into political decisions for the politician or the bureaucrat. The fruits of centralised economics are corruption, poverty and servility—and in the socialist society the only medicine which may be prescribed is heavier doses of the same socialist poison.
Norman Tebbit
One of the most original and most important ideas advanced by Hayek is the role of the "division of knowledge" in economic society … [But if] I had to single out the area in which Hayek's contributions were the most fundamental and pathbreaking, I would cast my vote for the theory of capital. As I said before, when I reviewed Hayek's book on The Pure Theory of Capital, it is "my sincere conviction that this work contains some of the most penetrating thoughts on the subject that have ever been published." If two achievements may be named, I would add Hayek's contributions to the the theory of economic planning. Most of what has been written on systems analysis, computerized data processing, simulation of market processes, and other techniques of decision-making without the aid of competitive markets, appears shallow and superficial in the light of Hayek's analysis of the 'division of knowledge', its dispersion among masses of people. Information in the minds of millions of people is not available to any central body or any group of decision-makers who have to determine prices, employment, production, and investment but do not have the signals provided by a competitive market mechanism. Most plans for economic reform in the socialist countries seem to be coming closer to the realization that increasing decentralization of decision-making is needed to solve the problems of rational economic planning.
Friedrich Hayek
If, of course, one builds into the concept of an 'individual' all that Professor Hayek does in his Road To Serfdom, Individualism and Economic Order and many other works, which is, to put it briefly, the whole of laisser-faire economic theory, then plainly man as such a programmed predator has very little interest in being fraternal, or very little chance.
Bernard Crick
Well … I've always been a voracious reader — I have read the economic views of von Mises and Hayek, and … Bastiat … I know about Cobden and Bright in England — and the elimination of the corn laws and so forth, the great burst of economy or prosperity for England that followed.
Friedrich Hayek
Hayek, Friedrich
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