Remembering Friedrich Hayek

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5:38 PM, May 8, 2012 • By GEOFFREY NORMAN

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Remembering Friedrich Hayek, whose birthday is today. He was a philosopher and economist and wrote many wise things, including this:

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.

George Orwell, no fan of capitalism, writing in 1944, made this point in a review of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom:

In the negative part of Professor Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. I cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.