Bonus Hayek Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is offered here on the 26th anniversary of F.A. Hayek‘s death.  It’s from page 165 of the 2007 Definitive Edition (Bruce Caldwell, ed.) of Hayek’s classic 1944 volume, The Road to Serfdom:

[M]any liberal socialists are guided in their endeavors by the tragic illusion that by depriving private individuals of the power they possess in an individualist system, and by transferring this power to society, they can thereby extinguish power.  What all those who argue in this manner overlook is that, by concentrating power so that it can be used in the service of a single plan, it is not merely transferred but infinitely heightened; that, by uniting in the hands of some single body power formerly exercised independently by many, an amount of power is created infinitely greater than any that existed before, so much more far-reaching as almost to be different in kind.