The mischievous idea that all public needs should be satisfied by compulsory organization and that all the means that individuals are willing to devote to pubic purposes should be under the control of government, is wholly alien to the basic principles of a free society.

I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.

The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.

If we were to make no better use of victory than to countenance existing trends in this direction, only too visible before 1939, we might indeed find that we have defeated National Socialism merely to create a world of many national socialisms, differing in detail, but all equally totalitarian, nationalistic, and in recurrent conflict with each other.

The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.

It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.