If the world as a whole returned to the gold standard there would be such fluctuations in the value of gold that it would very soon prove impractical… - Friedrich Hayek

The misconception that costs determined prices prevented economists for a long time from recognizing that it was prices which operated as the indispensable signals telling producers what costs it was worth expending on the production of the various commodities and services, and not the other way around. It was the costs which they had expended which determined the prices of things produced. It was this crucial insight which finally broke through and established itself about a hundred years ago through the so-called marginal revolution in economics. The chief insight gained by modern economists is that the market is essentially an ordering mechanism, growing up without anybody wholly understanding it, that enables us to utilize widely dispersed information about the significance of circumstances of which we are mostly ignorant. However, the various planners (and not only the planners in the socialist camp) and dirigists have still not yet grasped this.

It seems to me that the future of peaceful international relations and the safety of persons in foreign countries would have been much better served if, after the Iranian Government placed itself outside the community of nations by approving the holding captive of the personnel of the United States embassy, the United States Government had at once sent an ultimatum saying that, unless every single member of the embassy staff were within 48 hours handed over unharmed to representatives of the United States Government at some place outside Iran, bombs would be falling at an increasing rate at the seat of the Iranian Government.

I believe you will be shocked by my stating this so bluntly because we are still guided instinctively by those inherited "natural" emotions. But I think we must recognize that we have become a worldwide, peaceful, and prosperous society by having learned to disregard those natural instincts and to follow instead certain abstract rules of honesty—rules establishing private property and ultimately codified in the form of private law. It is the rules of property and contract on which the growth of a worldwide, peaceful, and prosperous society was based. All these are traditional rules that evolved by a process of selection, which made those groups who followed the new rules more prosperous than other groups, and which thus came gradually to govern the civilised part of the world. Those communities who adopted the new rules and, in doing so, infringed upon deeply embedded natural feelings became the successful ones, the ones who multiplied because they were more prosperous and were able to attract people from other groups.