"Trabalhar no governo corrompe. Eu tenho observado em alguns de meus melhores amigos, que como resultado da guerra, enredaram-se em trabalho governamental e desde então são políticos, e não mais estudiosos." (Frederick August von Hayek)

Capitalism and the historians

[não achei em .pdf esse parágrafo está na introdução, escrita por Hayek]

"The actual history of the connection between capitalism and the rise of the proletariat is almost the opposite of that which these theories of the expropriation of the masses suggest. The truth is that, for the greater part of history, for most men the possession of the tool for their work was an essential condition for survival or at least for being able to rear a family. The number of those who could maintain themselves by working for others, although they do not possess the necessary equipment, was limited to a small proportion of the population. The amount of arable land and of tools handed down from one generation to the next limited the total number who could survive. To be left without them meant in most instances death by starvation or at least the impossibility of procreation. There was little incentive and little possibility for one generation to accumulate the additional tools which would have made possible the survival of a larger number of the next, so long as the advantage of employing additional hands was limited mainly to the instances where he division of the tasks increased the efficiency of the work of the owner of the tools. It was only when the larger gains form the employment of machinery provided both the means and opportunity for their investment that what in the past had been a recurring surplus of population doomed to early death was in increasing measure given the possibility of survival. Numbers which had been practically stationary for many centuries began to increase rapidly. The proletariat which capitalism can be said to have “created” was thus not a proportion of the population which would have existed without it and which it had degraded to a lower level: it was an additional population which was enabled to grow up by the new opportunities for employment which capitalism provided. In so far as it true that the growth of capital made the appearance of the proletariat possible, it was in the sense that it raised the productivity of labor so that much larger numbers of those who had not been equipped by their parents with the necessary tools were enabled to maintain themselves by their labor alone; but the capital had to be supplied first before those were enabled to survive who afterward claimed as a right a share in its ownership. Although it was certainly not from charitable motives, it still was the first time in history that one group of people found it in their interest to use their earnings on a large scale to provide news instruments of production to be operated by those without them could not have produced their own sustenance."

hayek [em "the constitution of liberty"]

"If we look once more at the elementary contrast between freedom
and slavery, we see clearly that the negative character of
freedom in no way diminishes its value. We have already mentioned
that the sense in which we use the word is its oldest meaning.
It will help to fix this meaning if we glance at the actual difference
that distinguished the position of a free man from that
of a slave. We know much about this so far as the conditions in .
the oldest of free communities - the cities of ancient Greece - are
concerned. The numerous decrees for the freeing of slaves that
have been found give us a clear picture of the essentials. There
were four rights which the attainment of freedom regularly conferred.
The manumission decrees normally gave the former slave,
first, "legal 'status as a protected member of the community";
second, "immunity from arbitrary arrest"; third, the "right to
work at whatever he desires to do"; and,' fourth, "the right to
movement according to his own choice."

This list contains most of what in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries were regarded as the essential conditions of freedom. It
omits the right to own property only because EVEN THE SLAVE COULD DO SO.
With the addition of this right, it contains all the elements
required to protect an individual against coercion"