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buermann 's review for:
The Road to Serfdom
by Friedrich A. Hayek, Bruce Caldwell
There's a surprising amount of mythology built up around this book considering how little time and effort it takes to read it. At the behest of a conservative friend I did read it, and couldn't understand what he liked so much about it, or what it was supposed to change among my various pinko sympathies.
On page 87 we find Fred supporting public infrastructure and regulations to account for environmental externalities because of market failures: "Thus niether the provision of signposts on the roads nor, in most circumstances, that of the roads themselves can be paid for by every individual user. Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism."
On page 148 we find Fred supporting single payer insurance: "Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance - where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks - the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong."
Even more unexpected is the final chapter, in which he demands a federated world government over which "the supernational authority must be very powerful": "The great opportunity we shall have at the end of this war is that the great victorious powers, by themselves first submitting to a system of rules which they have the power to enforce, may at the same time acquire the moral right to impose them on others". Such high hopes. Such dark comedy.
The rest of the book consists of repetitive restatements of his arguments against centralized economic planning, none of which seems terribly original any more than it is disagreeable to anybody: even the commies abandoned it, to the extent that they ever embraced it. As Chuang Tzu wrote in 300 BCE, "When Sages appeared, tripping up people over charity and fettering them with duty to their neighbor, doubt found its way into the word."
On page 87 we find Fred supporting public infrastructure and regulations to account for environmental externalities because of market failures: "Thus niether the provision of signposts on the roads nor, in most circumstances, that of the roads themselves can be paid for by every individual user. Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism."
On page 148 we find Fred supporting single payer insurance: "Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance - where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks - the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong."
Even more unexpected is the final chapter, in which he demands a federated world government over which "the supernational authority must be very powerful": "The great opportunity we shall have at the end of this war is that the great victorious powers, by themselves first submitting to a system of rules which they have the power to enforce, may at the same time acquire the moral right to impose them on others". Such high hopes. Such dark comedy.
The rest of the book consists of repetitive restatements of his arguments against centralized economic planning, none of which seems terribly original any more than it is disagreeable to anybody: even the commies abandoned it, to the extent that they ever embraced it. As Chuang Tzu wrote in 300 BCE, "When Sages appeared, tripping up people over charity and fettering them with duty to their neighbor, doubt found its way into the word."