The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek

Chapter 15 cautions that the campaign to create an international planning body would simply impose a magnified form of collectivism on the entire world. Modern socialists, as described in Chapter 14, persist in advocating for an idealized moral standard that would instead wipe out ethics altogether. Chapter 13 shows that many of the same principles espoused by the Nazis are being promoted by respected thinkers in democratic nations. In Chapter 12, Hayek presents evidence that Nazism is a form of socialism and not capitalism, as presumed by the West. They, in turn, would encourage the populace to believe propaganda that furthers their plans, which would damage discourse and the search for truth.

Instead of the best people achieving office, planning attracts the worst among us: those who crave arbitrary power. A guaranteed income would be possible only at the cost of freedom to choose one’s vocation.Ĭhapters 10 and 11 look at how central planning distorts political incentives. Fair wages would be reserved for groups favored by the planners. Rather than achieving greater autonomy and respect, workers would be treated as cogs in the government machine, their freedoms curtailed. In Chapters 7 through 9, Hayek examines the pitfalls of planning. Planning cannot realize a unified purpose because humans don’t share one single goal further, planning will cause the breakdown of the Rule of Law, without which governments quickly descend into despotism.

It’s not inevitable, says Hayek, that the modern world must move toward collectivism, or that socialism is better than markets at allocating resources. Germany, Russia, and Italy adopted central planning and became dictatorships, but the West assumed that planning and tyranny were unrelated, and, heedless, moved toward implementing parts of socialism.Ĭhapters 4 through 6 deconstruct false beliefs about collectivism. Democracies that were economically free had become so successful that people began to take their prosperity for granted, and chafed at the uneven distribution of wealth. The first three chapters discuss the revolt against freedom in Europe and the move toward centralized management of society. It has been re-issued several times the 2007 Definitive Edition contains six introductory essays that include useful background information about the book’s history. The Road to Serfdom was successful from the start and remains controversial to this day.

The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek