• F.A. Hayek: The Road to Serfdom; The University of Chicago Press; 1944-994, 266pp.
The John Locke Foundation is celebrating the 60th anniversary of F.A. Hayek’s revolutionary work combating the economics of socialism, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek was a free market, “Austrian school” economist and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974. He died in 1992 at 92.
Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom in 1944, unaware of the impact it would have in economic and political thought. The book was published in several dozen languages, read, and heralded by Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, George Orwell, and Margaret Thatcher, and selected by the New York Public Library as one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century.
The Road to Serfdom was meant to highlight and condemn an insidious socialistic tendency on the rise in England. In the book Hayek paints a picture of the tragedy of socialism’s planned economy. Hayek vouchsafes to the readers of today the dangers of a planned economy’s ability to remold the human psyche, a metamorphosis during Hayek’s time that resulted in the destructive force of German nationalism during World War II. In the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the book, published in 1994, Hayek’s close friend and fellow Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman says Hayek “persuasively demonstrates” the necessity for an “individualistic society” in order to uphold the “widespread demand for freedom to ‘do one’s own thing’.”
Recalling the tragedies of WWII we would be hard-pressed to discover, in totality, why such travesties occurred. Hayek digs to the underlying foundation of Germany’s form of socialism, i.e. nazism, and argues that the massive deaths and violations to human freedom did not come from the German people specifically, but were a product of misdirected values embedded in socialism itself. The essential question for every society structuring a government and economy is how should we plan our lives effectively and more importantly, who should do the planning? One answer is socialism. In seeking sanctuary in a state-planned economy we no longer “make use of the spontaneous forces found in a free society.” Instead, Hayek says, in socialism, we “replace the impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market by the collective and ‘conscious’ direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals.”
Hayek contends that relegating the economic power of the people to the state only acts to degrade the society as a whole. Hayek asks the question, should power be given to the people so “they can plan most successfully; or whether a rational utilization of our resources requires central direction” by an economic blueprint?
Under socialism the central planner rules as king. He controls the means of production, the things produced, and all capital investment. The planner’s goal is social equality. But there is no way for a single planner or group of planners to possibly control a whole nation’s economy with equality in mind. Inevitably there would surface partiality. Somehow those who believe in central planning cling to the hope that a single person or planning board can better predict the interactions of an economic system than can the individual planners endowed with the freedom to plan their own lives. “Yet it is this false hope as much as anything,” as Hayek says, “which drives us along the road to planning.”
When we buy into this “false hope,” we disconnect ourselves from our own identities. We no longer hold our own values: Our values are now the state’s values.
If we are to be directed by our own individual conscience, we cannot be governed by the economic central planning offered by socialism. To relinquish our economic freedoms would be to relinquish a tidal wave of other freedoms. The freedom to plan our economic lives is the freedom to plan our lives. There is no distinction. Our initial desire to weed out uncertainties by embracing socialism leads to the conclusion that “every activity must derive its justification from a conscious social purpose. There must be no spontaneous, unguided activity, because it might produce results that cannot be foreseen and for which the plan does not provide.” But, it is the spontaneity of the unhindered will that allows us to be free. The more freedom we have, the more choice will be made available to handle those very vicissitudes that scare some men but invigorate others.