“It is the rule of law, in the sense of the rule of formal law, the absence of legal privileges of particular people designated by authority, which safeguards that equality before the law which is the opposite of arbitrary government.

A necessary, and only apparently paradoxical, result of this is that formal equality before the law is in conflict, and in fact incompatible, with any activity of the government deliberately aiming at material or substantive equality of different people, and that any policy aiming directly at a substantive ideal of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the rule of law. To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently….it cannot be denied that the rule of law produces economic inequality - all that can be claimed for it is that this inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way…

…it may even be said that for the rule of law to be effective it is more important that there should be a rule applied always without exceptions than what this rule is.... It does not matter whether we all drive on the left- or on the right-hand side of the road so long as we all do the same. The important thing is that the rule enables us to predict other people’s behavior correctly, and this requires that it should apply to all cases - even if in a particular instance we feel it to be unjust.”

Page 79, The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich a. Hayek, The University of Chicago Press, 1944