Recent Obama Administration policies and assaults on the private sector have spawned a renewed interest by many American citizens into our nation’s founding principles of liberty, personal property rights and free markets.  One of the most definitive works in defense of free markets is F.A. Hayek’s seminal piece, The Road to Serfdom. 

Hayek’s book gave rise to one of the most preeminent group of free-market economists in America at the University of Chicago’s Business and Economics School, ironically the precise city from which President Obama and many of the other socialists who surround him originate.   As a young professor at the London Economic School, Hayek intended his piece as an argument against the scheme of central planning that was prominently pedaled during the interwar period (between WWI and WWII) by England’s Leftists and Fabian Socialists who expressed great admiration for Hitler’s Fascist Germany, Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and Lenin and Stalin’s Communist Russia.  Though history has since proven Hayek prescient and his main arguments correct, an abating appetite for socialism since the 1980’s seems to have recently reversed into a renewed global push toward socialism, particularly within the United States. 

After meeting near permanent demise in the 1980s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialists have become creative in their methods of deceiving American citizens through a more incremental approach to implementing their schemes and by adopting free market terms to sell those socialist ploys under false pretenses.  Although Hayek’s arguments placed more emphasis on the wholesale adoption of a central planning economic system, his writings addressed the alternative of an incremental approach to implementing socialism.  In a forward to his 1956 paperback version released in America, Hayek contended, “That hodgepodge of ill-assembled and often inconsistent ideals which under the name of the Welfare State has largely replaced socialism as the goal of reformers needs very careful sorting out if its results are not to be very similar to those of full-fledged socialism.”  He went on to state regarding such piecemeal change that, “…a full understanding of the process through which certain kinds of measures can destroy the bases of an economy based on the market and would gradually smother the creative powers of a free civilization seems now of the greatest importance.”   Hayek recognized that extensive government control produces a psychological change, an alteration of the character of the people, a fact readily apparent in the entitlement mentality typified by individual or corporate welfare recipients, in the reluctance of the unemployed to seek employment when their benefits are extended and in the manner in which the American people have acquiesced to a congress and federal government far exceeding their constitutional limits and enumerated powers.

Hayek opens his original book with a quote by David Hume, a Scottish philosopher from whom America’s founding fathers adopted much of their views on liberty and natural rights, “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.”, a quote which exemplifies the policies of the Obama Administration.  Though many see threats to liberty in the form of external powers that seek to all at once conquer a free nation and impose despotic rule, today’s socialists operate as the enemy within and are a more insidious threat to liberty with their incremental advance toward socialism. 

To survive as a prosperous nation, Americans must adhere to our founding principles and heed the lessons of history.  Since man could walk upright, commerce spread throughout the world and took firm root wherever there was no despotic political power to stifle it.  Wherever barriers to the free exercise of human ingenuity were removed, man became rapidly able to satisfy ever-widening ranges of desire.  A critical question to be constantly posed, if one had to develop a society from the ground up, “which would be preferable, a thriving system of commerce or a central government?”  Commerce is the most fundamental activity of society and as our founders believed governments were to be instituted among men for the sole purpose of protecting the liberty and property of its people,

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  Declaration of Independence

As our founders believed, the fruit of one’s labor in the form of personal property was an essential aspect of liberty and therefore Government should be instituted primarily to protect personal property, and certainly not steal it and redistribute it to those who did not sweat and toil for it.  James Madison, one of the authors of our constitution repeatedly emphasized this point,

 “The personal right to acquire property, which is a natural right, gives to property, when acquired, a right to protection, as a social right. “  James Madison

“The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted. “  James Madison

History has also been witness to the demise of freedom that accompanies the rise of socialism, and the subsequent collapse of those nations implementing such schemes.  The collapse of Fascist Italy, Germany and Communist Russia are all recent historical examples of regimes admired by socialists for their redistributive and central planning schemes, but which all eventually increased their despotism and then collapsed.  After promises of utopia, these regimes were required to become increasingly ruthless, barbarous, unjust, immoral and anti-democratic in order to impose their plans upon their citizens.   Aside from his arguments on the impossibility of conducting such planning, Hayek points out that central plans must be carried out by central planners, and those very men most anxious to plan society are the most dangerous if they are allowed to do so—and the most intolerant of the planning of others,  “From the saintly and single-mild idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.”  The recent U.S. Healthcare debate was a prime example of such tactics, where our president made promises that the plan would be low cost (under $1 trillion), incur no tax increase for those under $250,000, and provide the ability for every citizen to keep their existing private insurance plans, all promises we now know were blatant lies.  Yet the President and the socialist wing of our Congress rammed the unconstitutional bill through with unprecedented vigor and by unconstitutional means against the will of the American people—single minded idealists taking but one step into fanaticism. 

As Elie Halevy pointed out, “The socialists believe in two things that are absolutely different and perhaps even contradictory; freedom and organization.”  Hayek describes how the free market is an extremely unorganized but extraordinarily efficient system, comparing it to the science of biological evolution in his separate work, The Fatal Conceit, the Errors of Socialism.  There is no way to organize an economy with strong government interference that would permit the free market to retain its efficiencies through the price mechanism.  Any interruption of the price mechanism creates inefficiencies in the allocation of resources throughout the entire economic system.  However the socialists in congress believe in numerous schemes that include interfering with the price mechanism, such as adjusting wage prices, providing mortgages to those unable to repay them, Nationalized Healthcare as well as recent efforts to control energy prices with a risky cap and trade scheme, etc., all in the name of social planning and all of which eventually induce inefficiencies into the market that destroy economic growth and prosperity.  Most of the world has recently fell victim to American socialists through the devastation their risky mortgage scheme wreaked upon the entire world economy.  Obamacare will have devastating effects on the economy as well if not rescinded, and if socialist Cap and Trade legislation is ever signed into law, further damage will be done to our nation’s economic growth and prosperity.  All this coupled with Obama’s additional $4 Trillion in debt that he has foisted upon America just in the past year and a half, will doom United States citizens yet to be born to economic serfdom.   

Hayek explains in chapter 6 that one of the most troubling aspects of socialism is the absence of a consistent Rule of Law.  He states a government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand and the discretion left to the executive organs wielding coercive power should be reduced as much as possible.  Under the rule of law the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action.  In a free market system, the individual is free to pursue his personal ends and desires within those rules and predetermined limits with confidence the rules will remain unchanged into the future.  Hayek explains that laws in a government such as a democratic republic are intended for such long periods that it is impossible to know whether they will assist particular people more than others, precisely why in the United States lady justice wears a blindfold.  Socialism and the heavy hand of a central government causes the exact opposite of this where the Rules of Law change depending inevitably on the circumstances of the moment, for example who is in charge and what their current priority happens to be, as has been chillingly and repeatedly demonstrated by President Obama.  For example, during the auto industry bailout, Obama intervened with the bankruptcy judge to overturn two hundred years of legal precedent in bankruptcy and reorganization laws to steal from the legitimate investors in General Motors and redistribute a major stake in the company to Labor Unions according to his personal preference of who the winners and losers should be.  Additionally, despite President Obama’s culpability in the Gulf Oil Spill in approving dangerous workarounds to established procedures for one of his major campaign contributors that resulted in the oil rig explosion, and his incompetence in handling the aftermath of the spill, refusing to waive the Jones Act and accept the assistance of over 13 countries offering oil skimmers, Obama bypassed the rule of law and before any investigation was conducted forced BP Corporation to set aside $20 Billion in a restitution fund.  These funds will partly pay for the oil jobs Obama himself destroyed by prematurely and reflexively ceasing all drilling operations in the Gulf.  A government that manipulates and bypasses the established Rule of Law discourages economic activity and investment, since it makes would be participants in economic activity nervous and unsure of the rules of the game, making planning more difficult for those individuals.  Hayek explains that in the end somebody’s views will have to decide whose interests are more important, making government a “moral” institution, where “moral” is not used in contrast to immoral but describes an institution which imposes on its members its views on all moral questions, where these views may be moral or highly immoral as demonstrated by Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin et al.  Such behavior on the part of socialists causes an increasing arbitrariness and uncertainty of and a consequent disrespect for, the law and judicature, which have essentially become an instrument of policy.  Manipulating the Rule of Law for present policy priorities creates significant economic insecurity for long-term investment decisions. 

Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom, is a must read for every American and should be a part of our nation’s high school curricula.