The road not taken: Hayek's slippery slope to serfdom.
The National Interest › Nbr. 1998, December 1998
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Summary
Economist and author Friedrich Hayek
Theoretical economist Friedrich Hayek stirred controversy with his book 'The Road to Serfdom.' According to Hayek, central planning is not the solution to economic problems because it is incompatible with political and cultural freedoms that are the hallmarks of democracy. He claimed that central planning led to the emergence of serfdom. Hayek's theories earned bitter criticisms from his colleagues at the time of the book's publication, even though the book itself sold millions of copies.See the full content of this document
Extract
The road not taken: Hayek's slippery slope to serfdom.
This is another story about a book, a curious book that went from bestseller to oblivion and back several times over. The millions of copies it sold in a score of languages "completely discredited" its author, exactly as he foresaw it would. Although he was regarded as one of the leading theoretical economists of the century, the economists of the University of Chicago (whose university press had published the offending book) refused to have him on their faculty. No matter, by living to be over ninety he buried not only them but also the very notion of a planned economy, which had been the target of his essay. The book in question is Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Looking back to its publication fifty-four years ago one can easily see the reasons both for its enduring fame and for the discredit it brought on its author.
Published in the United States and Britain while the war against Nazi Germany was still raging, the book said that the democracies risked going the same way as Germany because their politicians and their intellectuals had fallen for the idea that an economy could be centrally planned, and they would soon be putting that idea into practice under the name of postwar reconstruction. In fact, Hayek said, central planning led, via cumulative attempts to mend its inevitable failures, to "a servile state" (he recalled Hilaire Belloc's 1913 book of that name). It led to serfdom, to a condition "scarcely distinguishable from slavery." Moreover, any attempt at getting a little bit pregnant in this domain, by toying with moderate planning and a "middle way" between capitalism and socialism, would set the democracies on a slippery slope that would end, more slowly but just as surely, in that same serfdom. The free market was not only more efficient economically but indispensable for political and cultural freedom. Its enemies were intellectuals, meddling politicians - and unbridled democracy, which is to say, oppression and spoilation by demagogues invoking the unrestricted will of the majority. Hayek began by saying, "This is a political book." That is what economists say when they want to disarm criticism, and to be judged by looser standards. In fact, it was not a political book but a quite...See the full content of this document
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