On Planning

In a small community common views on the relative importance of the main tasks, agreed standards of value, will exist on a great many subjects.  But their number will become less and less the wider we throw the net; and, as there is less community of views, the necessity to rely on force and coercion increases.

 F.A. Hayek (1944, Road to Serfdom)

Planners 3

The hopes [planners] place in planning, however, are the result not of a comprehensive view of society but rather of a very limited view and often the result of a great exaggeration of the importance of the ends they place foremost.

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

Planners 2

...while planning is in the main still an ambition, it unites almost all the single-minded idealists, all the men and women who have devoted their lives to a single task.

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

Planners

...it is worth inquiring why so large a proportion of the technical experts should be found in the front rank of planners. The explanation of this phenomenon is closely connected with an important fact which the critics of the planners should always keep in mind: that there is little question that almost every one of the technical ideals of our experts could be realized within a comparatively short time if to achieve them were made the sole aim of humanity.

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

Freedom and Organization

The socialists believe in two things which are absolutely different and perhaps even contradictory: freedom and organization.

Élie Halévy (1938, The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on Socialism and War)

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)