Wealth & Money Quote by Friedrich August von Hayek

Hayek’s sentence is a trapdoor: it starts with the moral high ground of “equality” and drops you into the administrative basement where equality has to be processed, sorted, stamped, and enforced. The phrasing “even the striving” signals his core suspicion - that noble intentions don’t just fail in practice, they carry a built-in logic that curdles into its opposite. If you try to level outcomes through a “directed economy,” someone must decide what leveling looks like. In Hayek’s view, that “someone” can’t be a neutral mechanism; it has to be an authority with the power to rank claims, allocate scarcity, and settle disputes. That is where “officially enforced inequality” enters: a new set of privileges emerges, not necessarily in cash but in access, discretion, exemptions, and proximity to the decision-makers.

The sentence works because it reframes the political romance of planning as a bureaucratic necessity. “Authoritarian determination” is doing double duty: it implies coercion, but also the quiet violence of classification. A directed economy doesn’t just redistribute goods; it assigns social meaning by determining “the status of each individual.” Status becomes an output of policy.

Context matters: Hayek is writing in the shadow of interwar and postwar Europe, when state planning was sold as rational modernity and, in the Soviet model, openly fused with political control. The subtext is a warning to social democracies flirting with technocratic management: once the state must engineer equality, it must also engineer people - and that inevitably recreates hierarchy, now with paperwork and police power.