My 2009 Review of The Road to Serfdom
A few days after the 80th anniversary of its publication, and, yes, it's still relevant.
I wanted to post this on September 18 because that day, as an op/ed in the Wall Street Journal reminded us, was the 80th anniversary of the publication of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. But various plans for my September 19 airline travel today got in the way.
In 2009, I persuaded the editors of Regulation to let me do a review of The Road to Serfdom. Nowhere is it written that one should review a book only in the weeks and months after it is published. The fact that Hayek’s book had such a long tail made it game for reviewing.
So that’s what I did. You can find the whole thing here. But here are two excerpts.
Why write a review of a book that was first published in 1944? Because it’s still relevant today. Friedrich Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom during World War II to warn the West that intellectuals and policymakers in traditionally free countries, including Britain and the United States, were repeating the journey that their counterparts in totalitarian countries, especially Germany and Italy, had traveled before the war. That message resonates amidst today’s War on Terror, return to regulation, energy plans, financial sector bailouts, and successive economic “stimulus” packages.
In the United States today, the intellectuals’ and the public’s belief in freedom seems to be in decline and certainly freedom itself is in decline. On the civil liberties side, government agents monitor phone calls, often without a court’s permission; SWAT teams invade people’s homes; and a federal government agency insists that we get its permission before we board commercial flights. In economics, the federal government has become a much bigger decisionmaker in investments, choosing — regardless of investor or customer desires — to give billions of dollars to various firms. And both George W. Bush and Barack Obama embrace the “fatal conceit,” to use one of Hayek’s terms, that government can allocate hundreds of billions of dollars better than the owners of those resources can.
Of course, things are not proceeding the same as they were when Hayek wrote. But as Mark Twain once noted, “History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot.” The dangers in World War II stemmed from an explicit belief in central planning. Although the belief in central planning is less prevalent today, you wouldn’t know it from looking at the government’s policies, which would make sense only if the case for central planning made sense. Hayek’s book is relevant today, not just because it tells the intellectual roots of totalitarian governments, but also because some of the same mistakes in thinking that Hayek criticizes so effectively are apparent in people’s thinking today.
And here’s how I ended:
Of course, many important things today are different from the way they were when Hayek wrote. Included in the list must be the messianic devotion to “environmentalism” and the U.S. government’s willingness to intervene in other people’s disputes around the world and even, as in the case of Iraq, to start such disputes. Is it time for an advocate of freedom to write a new Road to Serfdom?
If I were writing the review today, I would note the extreme belief among many people, disproportionately people on the left, in government censorship of those they disagree with. The recent letter by prominent intellectuals that supports censorship in Brazil is a case in point.
Gargantuan government is an Esher drawing, perpetual motion with the government feeding itself to become even more gargantuan, yet voters still vote for the same dead-end programs and policies. My home state of Illinois currently shows 60,000 FEWER people employed (BLS State-at-a-Glance) that January 2000 and population has fallen for ten consecutive years. No matter: Gov Pritzker was re-elected handily in 2022, despite, by that point, some 20 consecutive "emergency declarations". (The state constitution limits such declarations to 30 days.) In Chicago, my hometown, the reign of Beetlejuice was ended with someone even further left-wing, Brandon Johnson, puppet of the Chicago teachers' union.
There simply is no rational explanation. Fewer jobs, lower population, extreme taxes amidst financial disaster - and the politicians get worse than the state's fisc. Both the state and the city epitomize their roads to serfdom.
Great review. Well worth reading in Regulation magazine here: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2024-09/v32n1-inreview.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#page=8