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

If the champions of an economic and political delusion were its only victims, we could with a little charity leave them to their rude awakening. But in democratic countries delusions may become public policies, supported by power, and hungry for domination even at the cost of subverting democracy.

Hayek's assumption is that political power is neither limited in scope, restricted in authority, responsible in operation, nor co-operative and decentralized in execution. This assumption is stupid.

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.