Hayek

For those who have an interest in politics, who also wish to have some knowledge of this subject, I can recommend a book published in 1944. It is by Friedrich Hayek, and is dedicated “To the socialists of all parties.” The title is, “The Road to Serfdom.”

It is extraordinarily well-written, for an academic whose native language wasn’t English, in less than two hundred exhilarating pages. The book predicts, correctly, that while they will lose the War, German ideological notions that began to prevail before the War in e.g. Germany, Russia, Italy, and throughout the West, would continue to do so, in Britain and America. They were plausible and were thought to have been proved in wartime. In the coming peacetime, all the intellectuals would be on board.

Yet they were wrong, and had always been wrong. The professor, Hayek, shows why neither a little nor a lot of socialism will ever work; why it invariably makes everyone poorer, except for an ideological elite; and why it traps whole societies in the condition of serfdom. Oddly enough, almost no one wants to be a serf, but some wish to have power over serfs. Hence the popularity of socialism among the power-hungry.

Too, ambiguous and poorly understood political terms fool people. (My father explained this as the Triple-B principle: “Bullshit Baffles Brains.”)

The idle reader should still be captivated by this book, which hasn’t dated, even slightly. Re-reading it, as I have been doing since high school, I find the arguments irresistible and compelling. Other members of the “Austrian School” out of which Hayek sprang (it was originally a Catholic movement, incidentally) are also informative, but none are so articulate.

The “Chicago School,” of Milton Friedman et alia, was the nearest American equivalent. But that was based on numbers, more than upon the ironical ideas, which old Austro-Hungaria had the leisure to mull.

For we should realize that political principles are not mysterious and mathematically complex. Within the realm of human understanding, the universal truths of supply and demand are like the truths of everyday physics: simple and constant through time. Gravity doesn’t turn off and on; the sun doesn’t rise in the west, ever.

Thanks perhaps to his English disciple Margaret Thatcher, this Austrian candidate was once knighted by our Queen. While waiting backstage for the presentation, he was approached informally by Her Majesty herself, who had one question. It was a time when the Irish Republican Army was much in the news, and London was perhaps over-informed about its demands. Things were blowing up daily.

“How is your name pronounced?” the Queen whispered. It looked like it might be, HAY-eck, but you can never be sure with these foreign persons.

“HIGH-eck, ma’am,” the learned professor replied. … “As in, HAYEK-splosive.”