Reply #4: Well, it depends on who he's talking to

[angryfirelord]

It's true that this quote would hold true to someone like a Soviet central planner, who attempted to use statistics to create the ideal economy and ended up failing. However, Hayek in some regards wasn't actually an all hard-out Randian. He still believed, abet limited, that the state should still have some form of a safety net. It may have been as a way to get his ideas out at the time, but I think it shows that even he didn't know all of the answers. A lot of libertarians though still use his other quotes to promote their utopian free market.