Kudos to our congressman, Mike Rogers, for voting the right way on this atrocious assault on the free market. And to Senator Debbie Stabenow, who cast perhaps the first vote that I've agreed with. No doubt she and I opposed the bill for different reason, but I'll take my political allies pretty much any way I can get them.
I need to organize my thoughts before I say much more, or anything that might be taken the wrong way. Went out for a good ride on my road bike this afternoon, cranking up and down some hills, and that cleared my head a little. But I need more of that before I say much else about what's happened to this country and what's becoming of our freedoms.
For now, I think this succinct summary of Hayek's book sums up most of what I'm thinking:
Hayek’s central thesis is that all forms of collectivism lead logically and inevitably to tyranny, and he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of countries which had gone down “the road to serfdom” and reached tyranny. Hayek argued that within a centrally planned economic system, the distribution and allocation of all resources and goods would devolve onto a small group, which would be incapable of processing all the information pertinent to the appropriate distribution of the resources and goods at the central planners’ disposal. Disagreement about the practical implementation of any economic plan combined with the inadequacy of the central planners’ resource management would invariably necessitate coercion in order for anything to be achieved. Hayek further argued that the failure of central planning would be perceived by the public as an absence of sufficient power by the state to implement an otherwise good idea. Such a perception would lead the public to vote more power to the state, and would assist the rise to power of a “strong man” perceived to be capable of “getting the job done”. After these developments Hayek argued that a country would be ineluctably driven into outright totalitarianism. For Hayek “the road to serfdom” inadvertently set upon by central planning, with its dismantling of the free market system, ends in the destruction of all individual economic and personal freedom.
Hayek published this book in 1944. Sounds like it could have been written literally last week.
2 comments:
Friedrich Hayek was a brilliant man. As you doubtlessly know, the spiritual father of the Austrian school of ecnomic thought and one of the great progenitors of modern ecnomic theory. Much of his work seems eriely prescient, but I believe this speaks to the transcendental truthfulness of his words.
I came across your post somewhat-accidentally, but kudos to a fellow free-market faithful, bailout opposing citizen!
I really appreciate your posts--about fiscal policy, about farming, about whatever. Thanks for a great blog
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