If you haven't heard of it, The Road to Serfdom is an essay by economist Friedrich A. Hayek and it was first published in 1944. It is Hayek's warning against the potential of centrally planned economies to be easily taken over by dictators and oligarchies. Hayek felt that the free market could do a much better job in shaping society for the best than any government. He is often thought of as a sort of nemesis of the economist John Maynard Keynes, whose theories were based in using government to influence and direct the economy. It's been a long road for me to understanding how this essay has been used by the Right as propaganda to influence public opinion about the Obama administration's handling of the economic crisis of recent years.
A couple years ago, I heard an irate
teenager in the diner of the conservative bible belt town where I
live “educating” a few elderly women about what was being
perpetrated by the Obama administration. I listened in with
astonishment as the boy told these women, who had been alive since
before WWII, about how the world worked. He said that Obama was a
socialist and that socialism was one step away from dictatorship.
The elderly women listened politely, but though they were probably
conservative too, seemed to look with knowing pity on the kid. They
probably weren't as politically minded as he was, but a lifetime of
experience had made them wise enough to be skeptical. I didn't
understand where the kid's logic was coming from, but he sounded like
someone who had just been made aware of some great “truth” by an
idol, and by the ignorance of the kid's claims, I figured it had to
have been a conservative pundit, likely someone like Glenn Beck.
Months later I was listening to a
Planet Money podcast where Hayek was compared to Keynes in
light of the battle going on in Washington about how to best go about
solving the country's economic problems. They mentioned The Road
to Serfdom, so wanting to better understand the views of Hayek, I
looked up the essay and read it. What I was immediately struck by
was how dated it was. It was obviously written at the height of the
Nazi regime and would have served well as anti-Nazi propaganda, but
was likely meant to be something different. Democratic countries
with leanings towards socialist policies,in other words, countries
that had government control of certain sectors of the economy, were
compared and likened to the Nazi regime. He predicted that these
governments were only steps away from authoritarian regimes like the
Nazis. The reason the essay seems dated to me is that history has
shown his predictions to be wrong.
