Friedrich Hayek

"That a systematically pursued incomes policy means the suspension of the price mechanism and. before long the replacement of the market by a centrally-directed economy seems to me beyond doubt."

"...The reason is that it is now generally taken for granted that in a democracy the powers of the majority must be unlimited, and that a government with unlimited powers will be forced, to secure the continued support of a majority, to use its unlimited powers in the service of special interests - such groups as particular traders, 'the inhabitants of particular regions, etc."

"They will do so not because the majority is interventionist, but because the ruling party would not retain a majority if it did not buy the support of particular groups by the promise of special advantages. This means in practice that even a statesman wholly devoted to the common interest of all the citizens will be under the constant necessity of satisfying special interests, because only thus will he be able to retain the support of a majority which he needs to achieve what is really important to him.

The root of the evil is thus the unlimited power of the legislature in modern democracies, a power which the majority will be constantly forced to use in a manner that most of its members may not desire"

"This, however, was by no means the view of the classical theorists of representative government. John Locke made it very clear that in a free state even the power of the legislative body should be limited in a definite manner, namely to the passing of laws in the specific sense of general rules of just conduct equally applicable to all citizens."

"For Locke, and for the later theorists of Whiggism and the separation of powers, it was not so much the source from which the laws originated as their character of general rules of just conduct equally applicable to all which justified their coercive application."

"This older liberal conception of the necessary limitation of all power by requiring the legislature to commit itself to general rules has, in the course of the last century, been replaced gradually and almost imperceptibly by the altogether different though not incompatible conception that it was the approval of the majority
which was the only and sufficient restraint on legislation."

"Even the concept of the arbitrariness which democratic government was supposed to prevent changed its content: its opposite was no longer the general rules equally applicable to all but the approval of a command by the majority - as if a majority might not treat a minority arbitrarily."

"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."

"The device to which the theorists of liberal constitutionalism had looked to guarantee individual liberty and the prevention of arbitrariness was the separation of powers. If the legislature laid down only general rules equally applicable to all and the executive could use coercion only to enforce obedience to these general rules, personal liberty would indeed be secure. This presupposes, however, that the legislature is confined to laying down such general rules. But, instead of confining parliament to making laws in this sense, we have given it unlimited power simply by calling 'law' everything which it proclaims: a legislature is now not a body that makes laws; a law is whatever is resolved by a legislature."

"We should want an assembly not concerned with the particular needs of particular groups but rather with the general permanent principles on which the activities of the community were to be ordered."