ABSTRACT
In a small intervention first published in the Daily Telegraph in 1976
Friedrich Hayek hailed Adam Smith as a forerunner, and even an
originator, of economic libertarianism. According to Hayek, Smith’s
greatest achievement had been the invisible hand approach to market
processes, and from this he had made a definite proposal regarding
distributive justice: ‘[t]he recognition that a man’s effort will benefit more
people, and on the whole satisfy greater needs, when he lets himself be
guided by the abstract signals of prices rather than by perceived needs’.
From this, Hayek, as we know, would draw quite radical policy conclusions:
‘The demand for social justice for an assignment of the shares in the
material wealth to the different people and groups according to their needs
or merits, on which the whole of socialism is based, is thus an atavism.’1
