The Road We Should Not Travel

How about we stay off the Road to Serfdom—the Road to Servitude—and remember… “The Road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

EXCERPT: The anniversary this missive would like to bring to your attention — and its prescience for us today — is the 80th anniversary of Friedrich August von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. His incredible economic writing was published in the United States in September 1944 by the University of Chicago Press. I wonder if they would print it today? Some thirty years later, on October 9, 1974, Hayek was announced as a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics. Imagine that. He actually did something to earn his Nobel Prize, unlike Barack Obama. That is really the crux of what Hayek presents: economic empowerment, economic freedom, economic meritocracy and that is why we should all read his work today.

How interesting that in April 1945, Reader’s Digest published a 20-page version of The Road to Serfdom. It was widely read. Sadly today, Americans are not deep readers and thinkers, hence why we find ourselves on said road to serfdom.

Hayek’s premise was that society has mistakenly tried to ensure continuing prosperity by centralized economic planning, which inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Sound familiar?

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