“If craftsmen and blacksmiths were feared for transforming material substance, if traders were feared for transforming such intangible qualities as value, how much more will the banker be feared for the transformations he effects with the most abstract and immaterial of all economic institutions? Thus we reach the climax of the progressive replacement of the perceivable and concrete by abstract concepts shaping rules guiding activity: money and its institutions seem to be beyond the boundary of laudable and understandable physical efforts of creation, in a realm where the comprehension of the concrete ceases and incomprehensible abstractions rule.”

— Friedrich Hayek

Source: 1980s and later, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), p.102

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Friedrich Hayek 79

Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economic… 1899–1992

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