#fa hayek

[nosferdoc]

[anarchyandacupofcoffee]

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.

F.A. Hayek

[gator-crusador]

It is entirely in keeping with the whole spirit of totalitarianism that it condemns any human activity done for its own sake and without ulterior purpose. Science for science’s sake, art for art’s sake, are equally abhorrent to the Nazis, our socialist intellectuals, and the communists. Every activity must derive its justification from a conscious social purpose. There must be no spontaneous, unguided activity, because it might produce results which cannot be foreseen and for which the plan does not provide. It might produce something new, undreamed of in the philosophy of the planner. The principle extends even to games and amusements. I leave it to the reader to guess whether it was in Germany or in Russia that chess-players were officially exhorted that “we must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’"

FA Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944)

[libbylael]

The most dangerous roads in the world

[nosferdoc]

Defund the Police

What is the rational ground with which we might conclude that defunding the police makes sense?[that’s a broad almost inarticulate sentiment but I will leave the proposition like that in the form of a slogan]

Some assumptions, I think are in order. If we assume that all (or almost all) crime arises from racism, proverty, and the rational need to survive and it can be predicted to occur on a rational or near rational basis then instead of police an ‘army’ of case workers fitted out with programs and government issued vouchers would eliminate or nearly eliminate crime. ‘Policing’ then would be limited to a mere technical administrative procedure when, for instance, someone mistook a display case for a charity offering and accidentally took (or stole) what was left of, for example, a Church’s funds.

Why this sounds like the “whithering of the state” predicted by scientific socialism. The only fly in the ointment for this “workers’ paradise” is Hayek’s Knowledge Problem.

[hiinenkelte]

There is no answer in the available literature to the question why a government monopoly of the provision of money is universally regarded as indispensable. ... It has the defects of all monopolies.

F.A Hayek 

[raglanphd]

“The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources-if "given" is taken to mean give to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.”

FA Hayek~The Use of Knowledge in Society