What has made men good is neither nature nor reason but tradition. - F.A. Hayek

The fundamental absurdity of a majority taxing itself in order to maintain a propaganda organization aimed at persuading the same majority to go further than it is yet willing should be obvious. [...] The propriety of such agencies in a democracy spending public funds on publicity in favor of extending their activities must remain questionable.

It is much more difficult to see how it will ever be possible to abandon a system of provision for the aged under which each generation, by paying for the needs of the preceding one, acquires a similar claim to support by the next. It would almost seem as if such a system, once introduced, would have to be continued in perpetuity or allowed to collapse entirely. The introduction of such a system therefore puts a strait jacket on evolution and places on society a steadily growing burden from which it will in all probability again and again attempt to extricate itself by inflation.

There is no justification for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary; the contrast suggested by this statement is altogether false: it is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.