Over six decades ago, free market, Austrian economist and Nobel Laureate, Friedrich A. Hayek, warned about the kinds of misguided economic policies that can lead a country down a road to serfdom of government control and domination over the citizenry.
With the rapidly expanding power of government under the cover of the current economic crisis, I discuss in a new piece, “America’s Return to a Road to Serfdom?” the particular dangers our country faces in heading down a road the end of which leads to the loss of individual liberty and the diversity of human choice that is a hallmark of a free society, and the strangling of free enterprise and the competitive pricing system through a growing spider’s web of government controls, regulations and restrictions.
The expanding control of government over more and more areas of the economy means, as Hayek pointed out, means that each and everyone of us most increasingly conform to the hierarchy of values imposed by those in political authority. The State reduces us to a homogeneous mass to be easily manipulated and molded to fit the design the social engineers wish to make us in to.
And matching this, the growing network of economic controls means that the market pricing system is undermined through the edicts of “pay czars” and production regulations resulting in what Ludwig von Mises long ago called the socialist reality of “planned chaos.”
Each of us who cares about liberty must do all in our power to persuade our fellow Americans that this is a road down which there is nothing but a new brand of serfdom and economic decay.
