Friedrich Hayek - Planning Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

View all Friedrich Hayek Quotes
The effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go; with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.

Friedrich Hayek
The problems raised by a conscious direction of economic affairs on a national scale inevitably assume even greater dimensions when the same is attempted internationally. The conflict between planning and freedom cannot but become more serious as the similarity of standards and values among those submitted to a unitary plan diminishes.

Friedrich Hayek
Planning and competition can be combined only by planning for competition, but not by planning against competition.

Friedrich Hayek
Is it really likely that a National Planning Officer would have a better judgement of 'the number of cars, the number of generators, and the quantities of frozen foods we are likely to require in, say, five years,' than Ford or General Motors etc., and, even more important, would it even be desirable that various companies in an industry all act on the same guess?

Friedrich Hayek
There mere idea that the planning authority could ever possess a complete inventory of the amounts and qualities of all the different materials and instruments of production of which the manager of a particular plant will know or be able to find out makes the whole proposal a somewhat comic fiction. Once this is recognised it becomes obvious that what prices ought to be can never be determined without relying on competitive markets.

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

Friedrich Hayek
What the planning authority would have to know would not be the mere totals but the distinct, peculiar conditions prevailing in each enterprise which affect the information about values transmitted through market prices but would be completely lost in any statistical information about quantities that might reach the authority from time to time.

Friedrich Hayek
Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible.

Friedrich Hayek
There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.

Friedrich Hayek