Retreating from Freedom

the generation to which we belong is now learning from experience what happens when men retreat from freedom to a coercive organization of their affairs.  Though they promise themselves a more abundant life, they must in practice renounce it; as the organized direction increases, the variety of ends must give way to uniformity.  That is the nemesis of the planned society and the authoritarian principle in human affairs.

Walter Lippman (1936, The Government of Posterity)

Marxism

Marxism has led to Fascism and National Socialism, because, in all essentials, it is Fascism and National Socialism.

F.A. Voigt (Unto Caesar, 1938)

Socialism

socialism is certain to prove, in the beginning at least, the road NOT to freedom, but to dictatorship and counter-dictatorships, to civil war of the fiercest kind.  Socialism achieved and maintained by democratic means seems definitely to belong to the world of utopias.

W.H. Chamberlin (1937, Collectivism: A False Utopia)

The New Freedom

The subtle change in meaning to which the word "freedom" was subjected in order that this argument should sound plausible is important.  To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached.  The new freedom promised, however, was to be a freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us, although for some very much more than for others.  Before man could be truly free, the "despotism of physical want" had to be broken, the "restrains of the economic system" relaxed.

F.A. Hayek (1944, Road to Serfdom)

Good Intentions

What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.

Johnann Christian Friedreich Holderlin (1957)

Attitude of the liberal

The attitude of the liberal toward society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.  

F.A. Hayek (1944, The Road to Serfdom)