What all this amounts to, then, is that the Rule of Law requires that administrative discretion in coercive action (i.e., in interfering with the per… - Friedrich Hayek

Both altruism and solidarity are very strong instincts which guided man in the small group. We were serving known other persons when his efforts were directed to the needs of familiar people. Now we have grown as rich as we are because we have replaced this by a system where we no longer work for the known needs of known other people, and no longer use the known assistance of other people, but where our effort is completely guided by price signals, which for the individual means that I must use my resources for the maximum success of what resources is sacrificed for the purpose, but the justification is not my benefit but in this way I benefit my fellow man most. So it does happen that so far as commercial activities economic activities are concerned we will benefit our fellow man most if we are guided solely by the striving for gain. We are then completely free how to use what we have earned and there of course the desire for being altruistic come in very strongly, but not in the ordering principle of our society.

Our whole modern society, based on a far-ranging division of labour, is, however, essentially dependent on two factors that conflict with our natural instincts. The first is the assumption, implicit but not understood, that we can do more good to unknown people if we follow the impersonal signals of the market, which enable us to serve the needs of people whom we do not know and to make use of opportunities and facilities with which we have no direct acquaintance. The second is that for this purpose we can follow our own individual aims with freely chosen associates and are not bound to serve the concrete ends of the group into which we were born.

What I expect is that inflation will drive the Western countries into a planned economy via price controls. Nobody will dare to stop inflation because to discontinue inflation will inevitably cause extensive unemployment. So assuming inflation stops it will quickly be resumed. People will find they can't live with constantly rising prices and will try to control it by price controls and that of course is the end of the market system and the end of the free political order. So I think it will be via the attempt to regress the effects of a continued inflation that the free market and free institutions will disappear. It may still take ten years, but it doesn't matter much for me because in ten years I hope I shall be dead.