Voices of Liberty

Spreading the ideas of freedom through quotes & original essays 🗽 Follow Voices of Liberty on Substack and YouTube for more!

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists.”

— F. A. Hayek

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

Hayek on why politicians love Keynesian economics:

“Politicians love the argument that if you outspend your income and run a deficit, you’re doing good to the people in general.”

“They don’t want to hear anything more than to be told that irresponsible spending is beneficial.”

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“To make the best available knowledge at any given moment the compulsory standard for all future endeavor may well be the most certain way to prevent new knowledge from emerging.”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“To choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.”

Hayek’s point is that democracy and liberty are not the same thing. Elections decide who governs, but not how much power the government may exercise over the individual.

A government that is democratically elected can still undermine individual freedom if there are no meaningful limits on its power.

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

Hayek on why abolishing inheritance would backfire:

“Men would look for other ways of providing for their children, such as placing them in positions which might bring them the income and the prestige that a fortune would have done.”

“This would cause a waste of resources and an injustice much greater than is caused by the inheritance of property.”

[Milton Friedman Daily @MiltonFriedmanW]

Milton Friedman on what happens when you have a very high inheritance tax:

“What is the effect of a 100% inheritance tax? To encourage people to dissipate their wealth in high living.”

“Where do you get the factories, the machines, the capital investment, the incentive to improve technology, if what you’re doing is to establish a society in which the incentive is for people who, if they by accident accumulate some wealth, to waste it in frivolous entertainment?”

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“We may be free and yet miserable. Liberty does not mean all good things or the absence of all evils. It is true that to be free may mean freedom to starve, to make costly mistakes, or to run mortal risks.”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Students For Liberty @sfliberty]

"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded." — Friedrich Hayek

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“All monopolists are notoriously uneconomical, and the bureaucratic machinery of government even more so.”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“The idea of a political party which embraces all activities of the individual from the cradle to the grave, which claims to guide his views on everything, was first put into practice by the socialists.”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

Government monopoly of money has prevented people from experimenting with alternative forms of money.

The result, Hayek argues, is that money stopped evolving and has become worse over time.

Money, like law and language, emerged spontaneously. But unlike law and language, money was taken out of the evolutionary process and placed under political control.

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“It is of the essence of a free society that a man’s value and remuneration depend not on capacity in the abstract but on success in turning it into concrete service which is useful to others who can reciprocate.”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“Though the pursuit of the selfish aims of the individual will usually lead him to serve the general interest, the collective actions of organized groups are almost invariably contrary to the general interest.”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“The conception that government should be guided by majority opinion makes sense only if that opinion is independent of government.”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“The task of the political philosopher can only be to influence public opinion, not to organize people for action. He will do so effectively only if he is not concerned with what is now politically possible but consistently defends the ‘general principles which are always the same.’”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“The dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival. To follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“What in effect unites the socialists of the Left and the Right is this common hostility to competition and their common desire to replace it by a directed economy.”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Libertarian Party @LPNational]

Remember when Javier Milei gifted Pope Leo a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, during their meeting?

Published in 1988, it’s Hayek’s final book—his most searing and direct critique of socialism. @JMilei https://t.co/sPHYK4o4Pf

[Voices of Liberty @VoLSubstack]

“What is privilege to some is always discrimination to the rest.”

— Friedrich Hayek