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 proce… - Herman Finer

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.

Men have no freedom worth mentioning when they have no possibility of exercising their faculties and energy as they feel they must. Freedom in this dynamic sense cannot come to men, in all the abundance potential in our time, unless they collectively manage a large proportion of the social resources and economic equipment. The present economic waste by mismanagement is enormous; it is nothing but lost or unexploited strength; it constitutes a loss of freedom to many.

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.