Javier Milei on the end of collectivism

We are facing an end of a cycle.  Collectivism and the moral posturing of the UOC Agenda have collided with reality and no longer have credible solutions to offer for the real problems of the world.  In fact, they never did.  If the 2030 Agenda has failed, as its own promoters acknowledge, the response should be to ask ourselves if it was not a poorly conceived program from the start, accept reality and change course.  One cannot insist on persisting in error, doubling down on an agenda that has always failed.

The same happens with ideas that come from the Left.  They design a model according to what they believe humans should do and when individuals freely act otherwise, they have no better solution than to restrict, repress and curtail their freedom.  We in Argentina have already seen with our own eyes what lies at the end of this path of envy and passions: poverty, ignorance, anarchy and the fatal absence of freedom.

~ Javier Milei, speech before United Nations General Assembly, September 25, 2024

Ludwig von Mises on how private property and the free market allows non-conformists to exist

In the political sphere, there is no means for an individual or a small group of individuals to disobey the will of the majority. But in the intellectual field private property makes rebellion possible. The rebel has to pay a price for his independence; there are in this universe no prizes that can be won without sacrifices. But if a man is willing to pay the price, he is free to deviate from the ruling orthodoxy or neo-orthodoxy.

What would conditions have been in the socialist commonwealth for heretics like Kierkegaard, Schopenauer, Veblen, or Freud? For Monet, Courbet, Walt Whitman, Rilke, or Kafka? In all ages, pioneers of new ways of thinking and acting could work only because private property made contempt of the majority's ways possible. Only a few of these separatists were themselves economically independent enough to defy the government into the opinions of the majority. But they found in the climate of the free economy among the public people prepared to aid and support them. What would Marx have done without his patron, the manufacturer Friedrich Engels?

~ Ludwig von Mises, "The Rise of Capitalism," Liberty & Property

Murray Rothbard on scientism

The key to scientism is its denial of the existence of individual consciousness and will.  This takes two main forms: applying mechanical analogies from the physical sciences to individual men, and applying organismic analogies to such fictional collective wholes as “society.”  The latter course attributes consciousness and will, not to individuals, but to some collective organic whole of which the individual is merely a determined cell.  Both methods are aspects of the rejection of individual consciousness.

~ Murray Rothbard, "What is the Proper Way to Study Man?," Mises.org, December 28, 2016

[Originally appeared as a chapter in Scientism and Values, Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1960). Excerpted from Economic Controversies.]

Friedrich Hayek individualism, morals and collectivism

The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.

~ Friedrich Hayek