It was my hero, Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), economist of the “Austrian School,” and historian of ideas, who wrote the book titled Road to Serfdom. It appeared in the spring of 1944, in England, not the most convenient moment given the paper shortages of wartime, and the continuing distractions from the life of the mind offered by Herr Hitler. Nor could it have been calculated to please Keynesians and other supporters of the prevailing economic wisdom—which was that the success of centralized war production, and Roosevelt’s New Deal in America, had permanently validated “central planning” in every national economy.
More than that, the ideologues of the Left, having had to withdraw their pacifist approach to Hitler after the disintegration of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, were now arguing that the Nazi Party of Germany was “capitalism’s answer to the socialism of Mother Russia,” and laying down the rhetorical notion that “capitalism equals fascism,” as a way to tarnish the people who had actually risked their lives in fighting the Nazis tooth, nail and soul.
While the idea that Hitler’s program of “National Socialism” worked on free market principles was utterly absurd, not only on its face but on every possible level of analysis, we must remember that then as now the batty ideas of the Left enjoyed a tremendous cachet in fashionable society, among people who do not so much think as preen themselves. Moreover, those were the days of “Uncle Joe” Stalin, when the western world was too busy fighting a war in which he had become an ally to remember that the socialist system in Russia was an obscene and murderous tyranny.
Friedrich Hayek’s book was an attempt to write, for the broadest possible intelligent audience, a warning of what central planning entails. While it might be necessary under conditions of total war, in which a nation is struggling for survival alone, and the freedom of the individual is a matter of no consequence, it cannot exist in peacetime except with the effect of crushing that freedom.
Moreover, all systems of central planning, with their massive, unproductive, Kafkaesque bureaucracies and their Byzantine regulatory systems, are by nature economically inefficient. They turn an entire nation into a vast top-heavy war machine when there is no war; finally collapsing (as in Soviet Russia and elsewhere) under their own weight and leaving the society underneath them in ruins.
Yet the idea that anonymous geniuses in a central planning office will be able to organize all human activity more efficiently and fairly than it can organize itself persists as a waking dream. George Orwell was among the reviewers who praised Hayek’s book when it appeared, and I think it helped him develop the concept of “Big Brother,” expounded in his prophetic novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
It is now nearly 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down, and for a moment we could indulge the alternative waking dream that socialism was over, and the prestige of central planning systems was at an end.
Hayek himself lived long enough to become an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, and to witness that marvellous moment when the chains were removed from the peoples of central and eastern Europe. And yet to the end of his life he knew the battle against the commissars had hardly been won: that new ideologies would arise in the void left by Communism, and that the struggle against tyranny in this world is never over.
Writing in the National Post this week, Peter Foster invoked Hayek’s book again with an article titled “The New Road to Serfdom,” and variations on the phrase appear frequently elsewhere. Never having been appropriated by the Left, the phrase continues to be useful, as intellectual shorthand, to remind us that all of the political experience of the last 60-something years has tended to vindicate Hayek, and to show consistently the disastrous consequences of bureaucratic solutions to human problems.
But Mr. Foster reviews the process by which the ideals of Communism, expressed in that Berlin Wall, are being resurrected under the new ideological banner of Environmentalism. From the UN’s Brundtland Commission of 1987, which launched the phrase “sustainable development,” to the follow-up Rio Conference of 1992, organized by the Canadian socialist Maurice Strong, to the radical Kyoto accord of 1997, which proposed a scheme for centrally planning the economy of the entire planet, Environmentalism has provided the new home for the old Left.
As I wrote above, the plausibility of “democratic” central planning on a gargantuan scale emerged, in the West, from the circumstances of a world war. After that war, the idea of the “mixed economy” replaced it, as a kind of compromise. Free enterprise became our engine of wealth, while state bureaucracies expanded alongside, their parasitical “sustainable growth” depending upon ever higher levels of taxation. The “new Western man” is half-free, with approximately half our earnings retained and half surrendered to the Moloch, which tells us how to live with ever-growing self-confidence.
But to get beyond this half-measure, the central planners need a war. The “climate change” and “global warming” scares are intended to provide this war, and justify the Moloch in seizing the rest of our earnings, property and freedom.
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