The Road To Serfdom

Fredrich Von Hayek, the Austrian School of Economics and The Road To Serfdom.

I don't want to get too highbrow on the front page of F2C, but after the savaging of (Centre Right think tank) Policy Exchange's Dr Henry Featherstone, whose paper 'Cough Up'  was criticised by ConservativeHome readers, the blogosphere (including Dick Puddlecote, Taking Liberties, Chris Snowdon, James Delingpole of the Telegraph, Liberal Vision, The Spectator and Mark Wadsworth), intellectual ballast was added by Mark Littlewood of the Institute Of Economic Affairs. He wrote: "Secondly, as Hayek identified, once the state provides and regulates certain things (e.g. the provision of health or labour market contracts) the lovers of state control see external costs and benefits all over the place. There is then literally no limit on the government intervention that can address those costs and benefits and the inevitable result is serfdom."

What I think Littlewood is saying is, that once we allow the state to regulate our behaviour through taxation, laws, or moral judgement, it becomes an unstoppable juggernaut where we all become slaves of the state. Hence Labour are moving on from smoking to drinking, diet, ID Cards, CCTV cameras etc. Four thousand, three hundred new laws have been enacted by Labour in the last 13 years, such as those that outlaw disturbing a pack of eggs when instructed not to do so by an officer, putting on a church concert without first obtaining a licence, causing a nuclear explosion, or entering the hull of the Titanic without permission from a minister. What other nook and cranny of our lifestyles will they want to regulate next?

This is laid out in Fredrich Von Hayek's  book "The Road To Serfdom" published in 1944. We often refer to the health Nazis but one of the chapters specifically deals with "The Socialist Roots of Nazism", in that Nazism was the culmination of socialist ideas that gained ground at the time of the Communist Revolution, post World War 1.  Hayek would no doubt have voiced his disapproval on ConservativeHome too, were he alive today.

Austrian born Hayek died in 1992, two months short of his 93rd birthday, and is rightly considered a giant in economics and leading proponent of the classical liberal free market Austrian School Of Economics. He acquired British citizenship in 1938, living here, America and Germany. In 1975 Hayek met Margaret Thatcher at the Institute Of Economic Affairs and Maggie's intellectual guru, Sir Keith Joseph, was the head of the Centre For Policy Studies, a Hayekian think tank. His influence is quite obviously still with us today.

When we look at the philisophical pigmies of the Labour Party, we are blessed that so many highbrow thinkers agree with us. Mark Littlewood, Dr Patrick Basham and, more than likely, the late and very great Fredrich Von Hayek.