The ultimate ends of the activities of reasonable beings are never economic. Money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man. - F.A. Hayek

The fact that we are constantly choosing between different values without a social code prescribing how we ought to choose does not surprise us and does not suggest to us that our moral code is incomplete. In our society there is neither occasion nor reason why people should develop common views about what should be done in such situations. But where all the means to be used are the property of society and are to be used in the name of society according to a unitary plan, a “social” view about what ought to be done must guide all decisions. In such a world we should soon find that our moral code is full of gaps.

But scarcely less surprising to me was the enthusiastic welcome accorded to the book by many whom I never expected to read a volume of this type — and from many more of whom I still doubt whether in fact they ever read it.

What Tocqueville did not consider was how long such a government would remain in the hands of benevolent despots when it would be so much more easy for any group of ruffians to keep itself indefinitely in power by disregarding all the traditional decencies of political life.