To get competition among firms with large capital — how is that possible? Only by setting up competitors who have interesting ideas and good projects… - Herman Finer

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To get competition among firms with large capital — how is that possible? Only by setting up competitors who have interesting ideas and good projects and yet may not accumulate the necessary capital before they die. This means that to maintain competition the government planner for free-for-all competition must provide or guarantee credit to would-be competitors. To anybody? If he does not take anybody but chooses his particular people, it would set up a rising howl throughout the land; while if he did not choose among them, there would be a great many failures, and charlatans would run the government into bad debts. If he selected the creditors, by what criterion would he choose? It would have to be a guess that they were good competitive material in some particular line of business. And here Hayek's own planner would have to make distinctions between persons jar particular objects — which he said was against natural law. It is to such absurdity that the insensate attachment to unmitigated bigotry is bound to lead.

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About Herman Finer

Herman Finer (February 24, 1898 – March 4, 1969) was a Jewish Romanian-born British political scientist and Fabian socialist.

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Additional quotes by Herman Finer

I agree neither with Marx nor with Hayek. Even when society has become, as Lenin said, one vast office and factory with everybody governing the processes there in operation, there must still be government, for the economic impetus in man is not productive of spontaneous harmony or the continuance of competition without tears. Nor is man without other, deeper society-shaping needs such as justice, humanity, and equality; these can crash the economy, and these can be subverted or not helped by the economy.

Karl Marx and Hayek have this in common: both believe in systems, not in men; both are fatalists; both are callous; both hold that the state is and should be the product and auxiliary of economic values, and that historically the state was a committee of the economically successful for the mastery of society. Even as Karl Marx believed that when the economic problem was settled the state would wither away, so Hayek believes that the economic problem is now settled and the state ought to vanish except to assist continued competition.

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Government is the instrument for the exchange of one kind of benefit among persons and groups for others; the exchange of some freedoms for others. Government results from the demand for rights by persons and groups; they can be free of government as soon as they reduce their demand for rights and benefits. In the present state of science and technology, and given the tradition of a high standard of living, this cannot happen.

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