The Fatal Conceit, 06/16/2009

Another from Appendix D, Alienation, Dropouts, and the Claims of Parasites:

3. Socialism has taught many people that they possess claims irrespective of performance, irrespective of participation. In the light of the morals that produced the extended order of civilization, socialists in fact incite people to break the law.

Those who claim to have been "alienated" from what most of them apparently never learned, and who prefer to live as parasitic dropouts, draining the products of a process to which they refuse to contribute, are true followers of Rousseau's appeal for a return to nature, representing as the chief evil those institutions that made possible the formation of an order of human coordination.

I do not question any individual's right voluntarily to withdraw from civilization. But what "entitlements" do such persons have? Are we to subsidize their hermitages? There cannot be any entitlement to be exempted from the rules on which civilization rests. We may be able to assist the weak and disabled, the very young and old, but only if the sane and adult submit to impersonal discipline which gives means to do so.

It would be quite wrong to regard such errors as originating with the young. They reflect what they are taught, the pronouncements of their parents -- and of departments of psychology and sociology(,) of education and the characteristic intellectuals whom they produce -- pale reproductions of Rousseau and Marx, Freud and Keynes, transmitted through intellects whose desires have outrun their understanding.
FA Hayek
The Fatal Conceit
University of Chicago Press, 1988 page 153

(Once again I have "Americanized" Hayek's "English English" in spelling and punctuation.)

I would like to think that it is not necessary to point out that by "submitting to an impersonal discipline" Hayek is saying we should all work hard, be prosperous, and play by the rules of the marketplace, as opposed to knuckling under to a command economy.