If a big country like the United States did return to the gold standard, it would start a great deflation. Most likely the government couldn't stick … - Friedrich Hayek

There mere idea that the planning authority could ever possess a complete inventory of the amounts and qualities of all the different materials and instruments of production of which the manager of a particular plant will know or be able to find out makes the whole proposal a somewhat comic fiction. Once this is recognised it becomes obvious that what prices ought to be can never be determined without relying on competitive markets.

I suggested before that the whole of economic history could be rewritten in terms of this gradual suppression of the primitive in­stincts by what we very mistakenly call “artificial” rules. Of course, they are not in the strict sense artificial. Nobody ever invented them. They were not the result of design. The new manners of conduct were not adopted because anybody thought they were better. They were adopted because somebody who acted on them profited from it and his group gained from it, and so these rules, without anybody under­ standing them—that is very important for the later part of my argu­ment—without anybody understanding in what way they benefited their community, gradually came to be generally accepted.

May one who has devoted a large part of his life to the study of the history and the principles of liberalism point out that a party that keeps a socialist government in power clearly has lost all title to the name “Liberal”. Certainly no liberal can in future vote “Liberal”.