The book 'Road to Serfdom' is one of his most important books.
This book was published in 1944 at the height of Fascism and Nazism.
The core message of the book is that socialist policies such as central planning and big government lead to Fascism and Nazism.
"There are few signs yet that we have the intellectual courage to admit to ourselves that we may have been wrong. Few are ready to recognise 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."
Perhaps the author intends this to be a warning to all.
"many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realisation would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny."
Socialist policies lead to totalitarianism
As socialist policies fail, totalitarianism follows to hide the failures.
"The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road towards a totalitarian, purely negative, non-economic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following.
Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Stalinist Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany."
Author explains the reason why this is so.
"The 'social goal', or 'common purpose', for which society is to be organised, is usually vaguely described as the 'common good', or the 'general welfare', or the 'general interest'. It does not need much reflection to see that these terms have no sufficiently definite meaning to determine a particular course of action.
The welfare and the happiness of millions cannot be measured on a single scale of less and more.
The welfare of a people, like the happiness of a man, depends on a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations. It cannot be adequately expressed as a single end, but only as a hierarchy of ends, a comprehensive scale of values in which every need of every person is given its place.
To direct all our activities according to a single plan presupposes that every one of our needs is given its rank in an order of values which must be complete enough to make it possible to decide between all the different courses between which the planner has to choose. It presupposes, in short, the existence of a complete ethical code in which all the different human values are allotted their due place."
"The essential point for us is that no such complete ethical code exists.
The attempt to direct all economic activity according to a single plan would raise innumerable questions to which the answer could be provided only by a moral rule, but to which existing morals have no answer and where there exists no agreed view on what ought to be done."
"Not only do we not possess such an all-inclusive scale of values: it would be impossible for any mind to comprehend the infinite variety of different needs of different people which compete for the available resources and to attach a definite weight to each."
Central planning is bad
"Most planners who have seriously considered the practical aspects of their task have little doubt that a directed economy must be run on more or less dictatorial lines. "
Central Planners impose top down dictatorial directives. It reduces freedom and prosperity. As their planning fails, the become more dictatorial. Peoples freedoms are curtailed, and prosperity diminishes. Tyranny, fascism, and Nazism is the end result. This is the Road to Serfdom.
Federalism over central control and planning
"Of all checks on democracy, federation has been the most efficacious and the most congenial.
The federal system limits and restrains the sovereign power by dividing it and by assigning to Government only certain defined rights. It is the only method of curbing not only the majority but the power of the whole people." - Lord Acton.
"We shall not rebuild civilisation on the large scale. It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralisation."
Individualism for freedom and prosperity
"This is the fundamental fact on which the whole philosophy of individualism is based. It does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish, or ought to be. It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since, strictly speaking, scales of value can exist only in individual minds, nothing but partial scales of values exist, scales which are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other. "
* * *
"The guiding principle, that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy, remains as true to-day as it was in the nineteenth century."
ISBN: 979-8301510427
Published: November 27, 2024
Pages: 187
Available on: amazon
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