Professor Hayek's history is not history. Especially before the nineteenth century, but quite plentifully since the sixteenth century, legislation ha… - Herman Finer

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Professor Hayek's history is not history. Especially before the nineteenth century, but quite plentifully since the sixteenth century, legislation has more and more replaced the growth of custom as the regulator of morals in society in every sphere. Let Professor Hayek read the history of the English Poor Law, for example, from 1535 onwards. Hayek should remember that even the status of the Churches was and is in both the United States and Great Britain regulated by statute or constitution. In every field of individual and social life legislation embodies morals : marriage, divorce, duty to family, religion, property, theft, libel, slander, contract, business — the list is never-ending. This legislation does not come out of the blue, produced without careful reflection and weighing of choices. Hayek must know that.

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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

Hitler was not a socialist. He was a nationalist and a racialist; and in Mein Kampf himself tells how he designed to use social services and equality for the purpose of the Reich for conquest of the world. The purposes of socialism — equality, prosperity, charity, and international peace — were not the aims of Hitler. He detested all of them. It is irrelevant altogether to quote to us, as Hayek does, a number of obscure economic professors who may have impressed him when he was a student, men who said they were socialists but who characteristically derided Great Britain because she was a nation of merchants, while Germany was a nation of heroes! The writings he refers to were written in the course of World War I and were war polemics.

On grounds of history; on grounds of logic; on grounds of the misuse of terms; of the abuse of authorities; of the neglect of verified information; of the use of the most infantile fallacy known to logic, viz. post hoc, ergo propter hoc — Hayek's attempt to identify socialism and planning and dictatorship and totalitarianism is not only a failure, it is a snare.

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Most human beings like enjoyment without employment. Most human beings like the services of government while they clamor for local government and self-government. This is the paradox of human nature: to want the fruits of centralization while keeping local and personal and state rights that militate against the benefits of large-scale organization.

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