The Road to Serfdom

Last week I finished reading The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek. I enjoyed the book and how it explained its ideas.

Throughout the book Hayek makes the case why people should have the freedom to make their own choices in economic matters and the problems that arise when a government makes too many choices for its citizens. Hayek uses many examples when presenting his points. Since the book was published in 1944, the Nazi regime is used in many examples.

Hayek explains how a nation that starts planning its economy and directing who will produce what will slide into a totalitarian state. He wrote the book as a cautionary tale to nations. Hayek explains Germany followed a path of ideas that lead them to the Nazi regime. Any nation that follows a similar path of collectivism will arrive at a totalitarian outcome.

The biggest thing I took out of the book was the danger of the slippery slope. People with the best of intentions and goals will concentrate power in the government to use it for everyone's benefit. However, these noble people will eventually be supplanted by a political party that will use the machinery of government to crush people and impose their narrow ideology.

On the negative features of the book, the writing is verbose and has many unnecessary words. This could be a symptom of the book being more academic than most. There were too many qualifiers and adverbs. I wanted to pull out a red pen to cross out superfluous words and rephrase sentences into more understandable and flowing prose. However, the book is divided into chapters so by the time I got tired of reading a chapter would end. Finishing one chapter a day and summarizing what I read make it more understandable.

For the past week I have been trying to write a short summary of The Road to Serfdom I am happy with. My failure is part of the reason for the scarcity of posts lately. Luckily, the internet has come to my rescue. I found a pdf of a book compiled by the Institute of Economic Affairs. Starting on page 63 it summarizes the book in cartoons originally published in Look magazine. I suggest you check it out as it is more interesting than the rest of my post.

If you want more words, page 27 from the same link has some points Hayek wrote for the jacket of the first edition. I quoted a few of them below. I should mention socialism as used in Hayek's time was understood as government ownership of all industry.

• Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that in our endeavour consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?


• Totalitarianism is the new word we have adopted to describe the unexpected but nevertheless inseparable manifestations of what in theory we call socialism.


• In a planned system we cannot confine collective action to the tasks on which we agree, but are forced to produce agreement on everything in order that any action can be taken at all.


• The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialists promise us and which can be obtained only by relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and of the power of choice: it must be the freedom of economic activity which, with the right of choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right.


• What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.


• We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.

When I finished the book I wanted to pick up another one in the same political and economic genre. However, I wanted it to be something I disagreed with. More on that in a few day.

If you want a political and economic book I recommend The Road to Serfdom.