Hayek cannot see how, in a planned state, groups can settle their differences over the course to be followed when, the state is to undertake various … - Herman Finer

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Hayek cannot see how, in a planned state, groups can settle their differences over the course to be followed when, the state is to undertake various business projects. He pretends that in this case it is necessary to leave it to "the discretion of the judge or authority in question" to decide what is "fair and reasonable." This again is hypothetical. The solution depends on how the law of the plan is constructed, and the ability and state of mind of the negotiators in parliament, in the courts, and in regulatory bodies such as the Tariff Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are solving problems and building up important experience. But principally it depends on nationwide debate conducted over the course of years, assisted by the sifted results of scientific research and experience. The plan, such as it is, emerges from the majority; and only that emerges from the majority which the majority can thereafter operate. That is the answer to Hayekian obscurantism.

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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

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.

Reaction has been waiting yearningly for this message, for someone to smite democracy hip and thigh. It eases the conscience; approves the feeling that nothing need be done; attacks bureaucracy; says the planner is a scoundrel; and saves taxes! It is no surprise to students of politics, though it is to Hayek, that such a doctrine has been so widely acclaimed.

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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.

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