Social Planning

The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.

Planned Chaos, p. 29

It is a fact that men disagree in their value judgments. It is insolent to arrogate to oneself the right to overrule the plans of other people and to force them to submit to the plan of the planner.

Planned Chaos, p. 30

At the bottom of all this fanatical advocacy of planning and socialism there is often nothing else than the intimate consciousness of one’s own inferiority and inefficiency.

Bureaucracy, p. 92

All this passionate praise of the supereminence of government action is but a poor disguise for the individual interventionist’s self-deification. The great god State is a great god only because it is expected to do exclusively what the individual advocate of interventionism wants to see achieved.

Human Action, p. 727; pp. 731–32

The writings of the socialists are full of such utopian fancies. Whether they call themselves Marxian or non-Marxian socialists, technocrats, or simply planners, they are all eager to show how foolishly things are arranged in reality and how happily men could live if they were to invest the reformers with dictatorial powers. It is, they say, only the inadequacy of a capitalist mode of production that prevents mankind from enjoying all the amenities which could be produced under the contemporary state of technological knowledge.

Human Action, p. 503; pp. 506–07

The eyes with which we look at the matter must not be those of the dreamer envisioning a lost paradise, who sees the future in a blaze of rose-colored light, and condemns all that goes on around us.

Socialism, p. 92

If a man says socialism, or planning, he always has in view his own brand of socialism, his own plan. Thus planning does not in fact mean preparedness to cooperate peacefully. It means conflict.

Omnipotent Government, p. 243

The “social engineer” is the reformer who is prepared to “liquidate” all those who do not fit into his plan for the arrangement of human affairs.

The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, p. 94