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Best quotes:
It is the price of democracy that the possibilities of conscious control are restricted to the fields where true agreement exists and that in some fields things must be left to chance.
Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain.
Formal equality before the law is in conflict, and in fact incompatible, with any activity of the government deliberately aiming at material or substantive equality of different people, and that any policy aiming directly at a substantive ideal of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the Rule of Law. To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently. ... It cannot be denied that the Rule of Law produces economic inequality -- all that can be claimed for it is that this inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way.To say that in a planned society the rule of Law cannot hold is ... not to say that the actions of the government will not be legal.... It means only that the use of the government's coercive powers will no longer be limited and determined by pre-established rules. The law can ... legalize what to all intents and purposes remains arbitrary action. If the law says that such a board or authority may do what it pleases, anything that board or authority does is legal - but its actions are certainly not subject to the Rule of Law. By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.
The state can do a great deal to help the spreading of knowledge and information and to assist mobility. But ... the kind of state action which really would increase opportunity is almost precisely the opposite of the "planning" which is now generally advocated and practiced.
The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialists promise us and which can be obtained only by relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and the power of choice; it must be the freedom of our economic activity which, with the right of choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right.
The choice open to us is not between a system in which everybody will get what he deserves according to some absolute and universal standard of right, and one where the individual shares are determined partly by accident or good or ill chance, but between a system where it is the will of a few persons that decides who is to get what, and one where it depends at least partly on the ability and enterprise of the people concerned and partly on unforeseeable circumstances.
Adam Smith - The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council and senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.
The common features of all collective societies ... [is] the deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal. ... The various kinds of collectivism ... difer ... in the nature of the goal toward which they want to direct the efforts of society. But they all differ from liberalism and individualism in wanting to organize the whole of society and all its resources for this unitary end and in refusing to recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of the individual are supreme. ...
It does not need much reflection to see that ... terms [such as "the common good" or "general welfare"] have no sufficiently defiinite meaning to determine a particular course of action. The welfare and the happiness of millions cannot be measured on a single scale of less and more ... only as a hierarchy of ends. .... To direct all our activities according to a single plan ... presupposes ... the existence of a complete ethical code in which all the different human values are allotted their due place. ... No such complete ethical code exists. ...
This view does not ... exclude the recognition of social ends [as] ends to the achievement of which individuals are willing to contribute. ... Common action is thus limited to the fields where people agree on common ends. ... The probability that they will agree on a particular course of action necessarily decreases as the scope of such action extends. ...
It is not difficult to see what must be the consequence when democracy embarks upon a course of planning which ... requires more agreement than in fact exists. ... In a planned system we cannot confine collective action to the tasks on which we can agree but are forced to produce agreement on everything in order that any action can be taken at all... . And to make it quite clear that a socialist government must not allow itself to be too much fettered by democratic procedure, Professor Laski ... raised the question "whether in a period of transition to Socialism, a Labour Government can risk the overthrow of its measures as a result of the next general election" ...
There is no reason why there should be a majority in favor of any one of the different possible courses of positive action if their number is legion. ... Yet agreement that planning is necessary, together with the anbility of democratic assemblies to produce a plan, will evoke stronger and stronger demands that the government or some single individual should be given powers to act on their own responsibility. The belief is [once again?] becoming more and more widespread that, if things are to get done, the responsible authorities must be freed from the fetters of democratic procedure. ... Hitler did not have to destroy democracy; he merely took advantage of the decay of democracy and at the critical moment obtained the support of many to whom, though they detested Hitler, he yet seemed the only man strong enough to get things done. ...
It is far more important to realize that only within [the "capitalist"] system is democracy possible. ... Our points, however, is not that dictatorship must inevitably extirpate freedom but rather that planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible. The clash between democracy and planning arises simply from the fact that the latter is an obstacle to the suppression of freedom which the direction of economic activity requires. ...
While every law restricts individual freedom to some extent by altering the means which people may use in the pursuit of their aims, under the Rule of Law the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action. ... The distinction [is] between ... fixing rules determining the conditions under which the available resources may be used, leaving to the individuals the decision for what ends they are to bused [and] government direct[ing] the use of the means of production to particular ends ... [which] must set up distinctions of merit between the needs of different people.
The formal rules tell people in advance what action the state will take ... defined in general terms ... as a means for people to use in making their own plans. Formal rules are thus merely instrumental ... they are expected to be useful to unknown people [for unknown purposes] and in circumstances which cannot be foreseen. ... They do not involve a choice between particular ends or particular people ....
[Under planning] the state ... becomes a "moral" institution -- where "moral" ... describes an institution which imposes on its members its views on all moral questions, whether these views be moral or highly immoral.
When we have to choose between higher wages for nurses or doctors and more extensive services for the sick, more milk for children and better wages for agricultural workers, or between employment for the unemployed or better wages for those already employed, nothing short of a complete system of values in which every want of every person or group has a definite place is necessary to provide an answer. ... There can be no doubt that planning necessarily involves deliberate discrimination between particular needs of different people, and allowing one man to do what another must be prevented from doing. ...Often the content of the rule is indeed of minor importance, provided the same rule is universally enforced. ... The important thing is that the rule enables us to predict other people's behavior correctly....
The question whether the state should or should not "act" or "interfere" poses an altogether false alternative, and the term "laissez faire" is a highly ambiguous and misleading description of the principles on which a liberal policy is based. Of course, every state must act and every action of the state interferes with something or other. But that is not the point. The important question is whether the individual can foresee the action of the state and make use of that knowledge ... in forming his own plans... The state controlling weights and measures (or preventing fraud and deception in any other way) is certainly acting, while the state permitting the use of violence, for example, by strike pickets, is inactive. Yet it is in the first case that the state observe liberal principles and in the second that it does not. ...
The Rule of Law was consciously evolved not only during the liberal age and is one of its greatest achievements, not only as a safeguard but as the legal embodiment of freedom. As Immanuel Kant put it (and Voltaire...) "Man is free if he needs to obey no person but solely the laws."
[Regarding the plea that planners will only control the "mere" economic motives:] Strictly speaking, there is no "economic motive" but only economic factors conditioning our striving for other ends. ... Because in modern society it is through the limitation of our money incomes that we are made to feel ... our relative poverty ... many have come to hate money as the symbol of these restrictions. But this is to mistake for the cause the medium through which a force makes itself felt. ... Money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man. ... If ... the "pecuniary motive" were largely displaced by "noneconomic incentives" ... if all rewards, instead of being offered in money, were offered in the form of public distinctions or privileges, positions of power over other men, or better housing or better food, opportunities for travel or education, this would merely mean that the recipient would no longer be allowed to choose and that whoever fixed the reward determined not only its size but also the particular form in which it should be enjoyed. ...
So long as we can freely dispose over our income and all our possessions, economic loss will always deprive us only of what we regard as the least importance of the desires we were able to satisfy. ... Economic planning would not affect merely those of our marginal needs that we have in mind when we speak contemptuously about the merely economic. It would, in effect, mean that we as individuals should not longer be allowed to decide what we regard as marginal ... it is the control of the means of all our ends. ... All our ends compete for the same means. ...
That life and health, beauty and virtue, honor and peace of mind, can often be preserved only at considerable material cost, and that somebody must make the choice, is as undeniable as that we all are sometimes not prepared to make the material sacrifices necessary to protect those higher values against all injury.
They advocate planning ... because it will enable us to secure a more just and equitable distribution of wealth. This is, indeed, the only argument for planning which can be seriously pressed. ... But the question remains whether the price we should have to pay for the realization of somebody's ideal of justice is nto bound to be more discontent and more oppression than was ever caused by the much-abused free play of economic forces. ...
Even during the periods of European history when the regimentation of economic life went furthest, it amounted to little more than the creation of a ... framework of rules within which the individual preserved a wide free sphere. The apparatus of control then available would not have been adequate to impose more than very general directions.
Lord Acton -- The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion for equality made vain the hope for freedom.
There is ... a strong case for reducing ... inequality of opportunity as far as congenital differences permit and as it is possible to do so without destroying the impersonal character of the process... . The competitive system is the only one where it depends solely on [the poor farmer] and not on the favors of the mighty, and where nobody can prevent a man from attempting to achieve [greater wealth.] It is only because we have forgotten what unfreedom means that we often overlook the ... fact that ... a badly paid unskilled worker in this country has more freedom to shape his life than many a small entrepreneur in [a planned society]. ...
What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us... . The institution of private property is one of the main things that have given man that limited about of free-and-equalness that Marx hoped to render infinite by abolishing this institution. Strangely enough Marx was the first to see this...
It [is] difficult to stop planning just where we wish ... .
Once it becomes increasingly ... recognized that the position of the individual is determined ... by the deliberate decision of authority, the attitude of the people toward their position in the social order necessarily changes. ... It may be bad to be a cog in an impersonal machine; but it is infinitely worse if we can no longer leave it.
Who plans whom, who directs and dominates whom, who assigns to other people their station in life, and who is to have his due allotted by others? ...
The claim of the workers [used to be for] the "full produce of their labor" .... But there are few socialists today who believe that ... for this would mean that workers in industries using a great deal of capital would have a much larger income than those in industries using little capital, which most socialists would regard as very unjust. ... [If] the planner ... decide[s] how much is to be produced of each good, ... he determines what will be the just price or fair wage to pay. ...
A fixed rule, like that of equality, might be acquiesced in, and so might chance, or an external necessity; but that a handful of human beings should weigh everybody in the balance, and give more to one and less to another at their sole pleasure and judgment, would not be borne unless from persons believed to be more than men, and backed by supernatural powers.
[He closes Chapter 8 with a discussion of how fascists learned the forms for organizations like the Hitlerjugend (HJ) from socialists before them and the conflict between disenfranchised groups, each believing themselves to be trodden down by the others.] The means which the old socialist parties had successfully employed to secure the support of one occupational group -- the raising of their relative economic position -- cannot be used to secure the support of all.
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