Posted on 01/28/2007 9:29:00 AM PST by Jacquerie
A day or two after the Democrats swept the midterms, I made a promise to finally finish reading an incredible little book called “The Road to Serfdom.” (1944)
The following are direct quotes from the English author, F.A. Hayek. I offer excerpts from the first couple of chapters with the intention of motivating as many Freepers as possible to read it themselves so as to be fully armed when the Democrats and Rinos attempt to further socialize and ultimately destroy a once proud republic.
Foreward
Dedicated “To the Socialists of All Parties”
Fascism and Communism are merely variants of the same totalitarianism which central control of economic activity tends to produce.
I use throughout the term “liberal” in the original, nineteenth century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this.
The most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people. This means, among other things, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.
The inevitable consequence of socialist planning create a state of affairs in which, if the policy is to be pursued, totalitarian forces will get the upper hand.
From the point of view of fundamental human liberties there is little to choose between communism, socialism and national socialism. They all are examples of the collectivist or totalitarian state.
Preface
I am always told by my socialist colleagues that as an economist I should occupy a much more important position in the kind of society to which I am opposed - provided, of course, that I could bring myself to accept their views.
Introduction
The supreme tragedy is still not seen that in Germany it was largely people of good will, men who were admired and held up as models in the democratic countries, who prepared the way for, if they did not actually create, the forces which now stand for everything they detest.
Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.
The Abandoned Road
For at least 25 years before the specter of totalitarianism became a real threat, we had progressively been moving away from the basic ideas on which Western civilization has been built.
We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.
Wherever the barriers to the free exercise of human ingenuity were removed, man became rapidly able to satisfy ever widening ranges of desire.
By the beginning of the 20th century the workingman in the Western world had reached a degree of material comfort, security, and personal independence which a hundred years before had seem scarcely possible.
It might even be said that the very success of liberalism became the cause of its decline. Because of the success already achieved, man became increasingly unwilling to tolerate the evils still with him which now appeared both unbearable and unnecessary.
The change amounts to a complete reversal of the trend we have sketched, an entire abandonment of the individualist tradition which has created Western civilization.
The Great Utopia
What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven. F. Hoelderlin
The French writers who laid the foundations of modern socialism had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by a strong dictatorial government.
While democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
To the great apostles of political freedom the word “freedom” meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the order of a superior to whom he was attached. The new freedom promised, however, was to freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us. Freedom in this sense is, of course merely another name for power or wealth.
Stalinism is worse than fascism, more ruthless, barbarous, unjust, immoral, anti-democratic, unredeemed by any hope or scuple and is better described as superfascist.
Socialism achieved and maintained by democratic means seems definitely to belong to the world of utopias.
Many a university teacher during the 1930’s has seen English and American students return from the Continent uncertain whether they were communists or Nazis and certain only that they hated Western liberal civilization.
ping
What she's saying is that less government control of trade will lead to serfdom at some time in the future. To prevent this we need more government control now. Serfdom now!
It is the work of the 1% that can change the course of history.
One of my favorites. I in particular like his comparison of Nazis and Communists. See the 3rd quote on my FReeper profile page, the 2-paragraph one.
Fortunately that crap is mostly in the soft disciplines - English, anything with "Science" in the title, diversity degrees, and the sort of nonsense that will get your resume throw to the wastebasket for any position beyond barrista or retail clerk.
Engineering, business, finance, accounting, hard sciences, math, etc., are filled with plenty who still believe in American and Western Exceptionalism.
I really don't know but sometime during the history of America. The intro to the version I have by Milton Friedman has a footnote breifly touching on this. There may be more though in there and my memory is just fuzzy.
Thanks, I'd like to explore this further.
We're WELL on our way, look at the difference in the tax burden and hidden taxes in the last 50 years.
Unless you make SERIOUS money, the government pretty much will destroy your dreams.
Thanks. I ordered two copies of The True Believer.
"Please elaborate...I'm not following you."
"What she's saying is that less government control of trade will lead to serfdom at some time in the future. To prevent this we need more government control now. Serfdom now!
LOL! That's what I thought she(he?) was getting at. Maybe I should stay outta this argument.
She doesn't have an argument. She claims to be a conservative but favors higher tariffs and more government control of the economy.
You won't be disappointed, I first read it in 1962, when I was in High School.
If he thinks free trade is the problem, he has a lot to learn.
bttt
Thomas Sowell said the same thing in one of his essays in Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
You ought definitely to read it, there is nothing like it anywhere in political literature.
Hayek once said (paraphrasing here, and although I think referring to another book) that he was not going to write something full of high flown phrases about things like the dignity of man, since leftists could do that too. His intention was to present arguments that would utterly destroy the arguments for socialism. In this book especially, but in all his writings, he succeeds completely in that endeavor.
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