The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialists promise us. — Friedrich Hayek

They still believe the economy is a machine with knobs and levers — not a living network mutating beyond their comprehension.

Economics is not a science of material objects or their physical characteristics. It is the logical analysis of human action — of purposeful behavior under conditions of scarcity. Concepts such as “goods,” “commodities,” or “wealth” do not exist independently in nature; they arise from the subjective meanings actors assign to things in the context of their ends and means. All economic categories — value, cost, exchange, profit, loss — are rooted in the structure of action itself, not in empirical observation of physical phenomena. To reduce economics to the study of “goods and services” is to commit a category error. It is not the properties of things that matter, but that these things are chosen, valued, and acted upon by individuals. Economics, properly understood, is praxeology — the systematic study of action based on self-evident axioms, not empirical materialism.

The collectivist seeks to replace the acting man with the abstraction of a collective will. But such a will does not exist; it cannot choose; it cannot value. It is always a mask—worn by the tyrant, the planner, the bureaucrat—who supplants the individual and extinguishes the only genuine source of progress: the spontaneous actions of free men. All collectivist doctrines—whether socialist, fascist, nationalist, or theocratic—demand the subjugation of the individual to a fictitious whole. They are not only morally repugnant; they are irrational. For they seek to annihilate the very mechanism of life: human action itself. So when we say that anything other than liberty—anarchy in a proper sense—is anti-human, we are not making an ideological claim, nor engaging in partisan rhetoric. We are stating a logical truth—one rooted in the nature of man as an acting being. Liberty is not a “value” in the relativist sense. It is a necessary condition for human action. Only a free individual can choose, prefer, and act. Without liberty, there is no actor—only obedience and decay. A system that denies liberty—by decree, coercion, and collectivist abstraction—seeks to extinguish the only agency through which human life is sustained: the individual choosing mind. To abolish liberty is to abolish action. To abolish action is to abolish life. https://mises.org/mises-wire/axiom-action-and-inescapability-liberty

The free market isn’t some naïve ideal. It is the only moral and practical framework for human cooperation. The real myth, the real danger, is your faith in Leviathan.

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Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism. - Ludwig von Mises