Sublime

As Friedrich Hayek put it: I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop.

Locke’s political philosophy was, on the whole, adequate and useful until the industrial revolution. Since then, it has been increasingly unable to tackle the important problems. The power of property, as embodied in vast corporations, grew beyond anything imagined by Locke.

Friedrich Hayek’s book The Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism expressed with clarity and authority what I had long felt but was unable to express, namely the unwisdom of powerful intellects, including Albert Einstein, when they believed that a powerful brain can devise a better system and bring about more “social justice” than what historical evolu

Real knowledge of individual buyers and sellers in a market can never be fully known, and because of that no planned allocation can be superior to information conveyed by the prices in a market. A central planner sees two metal bars, each weighing half a pound, and assumes they are the same. You and I might have no better knowledge, but the market

Second, money is a unit of account, the yardstick that is needed to post prices and record debts now and in the future.

the same way that many argue that communism “works in theory but not in practice,” Michels claims that it is democracy that doesn’t work in practice.

Stigler’s mark in economics centered on the economic competency—or rather incompetency—of state power. Once man’s behavior was reduced to utility-maximizing self-interest, economists were able to tear down the edifices of government intervention in the economy; they sought “a large role for explicit or implicit prices in the solution of many social

But the idea that government had the definite responsibility—a “social duty”—to use the resources of the state to prevent distress and to promote the general welfare was first suggested at that time.