Some unnecessary misconceptions about Friedrich Hayek and "the Hayekian world view" also require clarification. Hayek rejected Conservatism not because he had a problem with "other social institutions", but because he was optimistic about the spontaneous forces of human interaction and because he welcomed the yet unknown, as a glance at the last chapter of his Constitution of Liberty suffices to reveal. Hayek and the Hayekians indeed treasure tradition, i.e. social "rules of just conduct" that evolve over time and are passed on between generations, without people understanding their origin, meaning or effect. The point is that this social fabric of values, rules and habits evolves through our unconscious action; it is not "from design". Just as tradition encapsulates valuable experience, artificially narrowing the path to the future can only impede our flourishing. "Political prudence" is about just that.

The charge that Hayekians misread history, taking markets for the result of evolution and the state for the product of design, is as incorrect as it is beside the point. Opposing the market and the state (system) is anyhow a stale exercise. Human beings interact. This interaction may lead to economic exchange or to agreement on policy and rules. Wherever humans interact, a market ipso facto constitutes itself: a market for goods, for policies, for ideas. Interaction is spontaneous — and while it can take many different forms, it cannot fail. Failure is a meaningless term here. Yet when we turn our attention from the phenomenon of interaction toward the system, it is trivial to note that the rules governing the interaction on any of these platforms are a mixture of both heritage and design. Rules are set and rules go on to evolve. And as they are set, they had better be prudently conceived. How ideologically constrained must one be to reject the lessons learned from the financial crisis? 

What is crucially different between economic (market) transactions and collective (political) choice is the effect on the individual. A transaction in a market for goods is a priori voluntary. In the political sphere, however, policies and rules always apply even to those who disagree with them. Unless unanimity is guaranteed, collective decision-making invariably implies coercion. That is the core of the problem and the predicament of unlimited democracy. Take Lord Skidelsky's supermarket example: while Hayekians would invite enemies of the supermarkets simply to purchase their groceries at smaller stores, paternalists would sooner seek to ban supermarkets altogether so that nobody could shop cheaply any more. There is no way around it: this is an attack on liberty and a dangerous step towards totalitarianism. Hayek's notorious line on the slippery slope has been crossed.