Saturday, October 29, 2022

Once discrimination in the name of social justice is recognised as legitimate, all the safeguards of individual freedom of the liberal tradition are gone

See Bonus Quotation of the Day from Cafe Hayek.

"from page 332 of F.A. Hayek’s October 1973 Wincott Memorial Lecture – titled “Economic Freedom and Representative Government” – as the text of this lecture appears as chapter 24 in the hot-off-the-press Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

Differences in wealth, education, tradition, religion, language or race may today become the cause of differential treatment on the pretext of a pretended principle of social justice or of public necessity. Once such discrimination is recognised as legitimate, all the safeguards of individual freedom of the liberal tradition are gone. If it is assumed that whatever the majority decides is just, even if what it lays down is not a general rule, but aims at affecting particular people, it would be expecting too much to believe that a sense of justice will restrain the caprice of the majority: in any group it is soon believed that what is desired by the group is just."


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