The Road to Serfdom (Link to the Readers' Digest Condensed Version in PDF!)

Here is this guy, writing this book back in the 1940’s, talking about what the lessons of socialism are and how people continually forget those lessons of history, and...here we are again 65 years later, and every single word he writes is applicable TODAY with absolutely no transposition or word substitution (although I admit, I have to continually transpose “conservative” for “liberal”...)

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language. The worst sufferer in this respect is the word ‘liberty’. It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said that wherever liberty as we know it has been destroyed, this has been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have planners who promise us a ‘collective freedom’, which is as misleading as anything said by totalitarian politicians. ‘Collective freedom’ is not the freedom of the members of society, but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society that which he pleases. This is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1394906/posts?page=23#23

At the start of the Twentieth Century the term "liberal" meant the same in America as it still does in the rest of the world - essentially, what is called "conservatism" in American Newspeak. Of course we "American Conservatives" are not the ones who oppose development and liberty, so in that sense we are not conservative at all. We actually are liberals.
But in America, "liberalism" was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary). The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us. And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation just as surely as marketers love to boldly proclaim that the product which they are flogging is NEW!

I have my own Newspeak-English dictionary:

objective :
reliably promoting the interests of Big Journalism. (usage: always applied to journalists who are members in good standing; never applied to anyone but a journalist)

liberal :
see "objective," except that the usage is reversed: (usage: never applied to any working journalist)
progressive :
see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
moderate:
see "liberal." (usage: same as for "liberal").
centrist :
see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").

conservative :
rejecting the idea that journalism is a higher calling than providing food, shelter, clothing, fuel, and security; adhering to the dictum of Theodore Roosevelt that: "It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena (usage: applies to people who - unlike those labeled liberal/progressive/moderate/centrist, cannot become "objective" by getting a job as a journalist, and probably cannot even get a job as a journalist.)(antonym:"objective")

right-wing :
see, "conservative."

conservative :
opposed to radical change of the sort which promote the idea that assigns authority to "liberals" while leaving the responsibility with those who work to a bottom line and therefore are subject to second guessing.

Readers' Digest Condensed Version of the Road to Serfdom (in PDF format)

The purpose of this reply is to be a target to which I intend to link people from other threads. It seems necessary to create this target because the original link is now broken.

CONTENTS

The authors 9 Foreword by Edwin J. Feulner Jr 11

Introduction: Hayek, Fisher and The Road to Serfdom by John Blundell 14 Preface to the Reader’s Digest condensed version of The Road to Serfdom 26 Summary 27 The Road to Serfdom (condensed version) 31

Planning and power 32 Background to danger 34

The liberal way of planning 37 The great utopia 39

Why the worst get on top 43 Planning vs. the Rule of Law 49

Is planning ‘inevitable’? 51 Can planning free us from care? 53

Two kinds of security 58 Towards a better world 62

The Road to Serfdom in cartoons 63 About the IEA 82

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