Sublime

The economic truth is that you can’t have success without failure, you can’t have accountability without consequences. Governments are eliminating these crucial factors to give short-term relief, at the expense of killing long-term growth and innovation.

Patterns of government funding for research make it virtually certain that “Caesar will hear only what is pleasing to Caesar.”

there are four basic Government Traps — popular misconceptions about the nature of government: 1. The belief that governments perform socially useful functions that deserve your support. 2. The belief that you have a duty to obey laws. 3. The belief that the government can be counted upon to carry out a social reform you favor. 4. The fear that the

Among the most powerful institutions for supporting good incentives are property rights, political stability, honest government, a dependable legal system, and competitive and open markets.

Though Hayek’s readings of Smith may have been opportunistic, they were not inaccurate.24 He was careful to distance his interpretation of Smith from those he found to be reductive or dogmatic. His interest in Smith’s works and their prominence stemmed, above all, from his impulse to lay the epistemic foundations for a social theory of markets and

All social inequality, in the long run, is inequality of income. That is part of the argument for democracy: that the attempt to have a “proportionate justice” based on any merit other than wealth is sure to break down. Defenders of oligarchy pretend that income is proportional to virtue; the prophet said he had never seen a righteous man begging

John Stuart Mill, arch advocate of free people and free markets, once said that if widespread scarcity was a hallmark of capitalism, he would become a communist.)[26]

Hayek gives us the intuition of prices conveying only what market participants deem to be the most important information and actually destroying the rest, and Holland shows how this can be represented with the formalism of complex systems.