Science & Tech Quote by Friedrich August von Hayek

Hayek is doing what he often does best: turning an opponent's self-description into a trap. On its face, he's accusing “socialists today” not of being wrong on the merits, but of switching the venue of argument. If the dispute is framed as technical and empirical, economists have to show their work: predictions, incentives, institutional frictions, unintended consequences. If it’s reframed as “entirely moral questions,” the socialist can keep the prestige of the economics department while declining the discipline’s most uncomfortable obligation: being testable.

The subtext is a shot at academic insulation. Hayek implies that socialism survives in the seminar room by immunizing itself against refutation - a kind of intellectual diplomatic status. Call it ethics, and suddenly the normal adjudicators of economic debate (evidence, comparative performance, measurable tradeoffs) are treated as category errors. That’s also a critique of professional incentives: moral posture can function as a career strategy, a way to appear humane and sophisticated while dodging accountability for results.

Context matters. Hayek is a Cold War liberal, forged in the fights over central planning and the “socialist calculation” debate, where he argued that dispersed knowledge can’t be aggregated by planners without mangling prices and feedback. Read through that lens, the line isn’t just partisan sniping; it’s a defense of economics as a science of constraints. He’s warning that once politics is smuggled in as morality-only, policy becomes a contest of virtue signals, and the ledger of consequences goes missing.