The Road to Serfdom

อ่านยากแบบย้ากยาก เป็น 15 บทสั้นๆ (ไม่เห็นสั้นตรงไหน) ที่ฮาเย็ดอธิบายถึงเรื่องทำไมสังคมนิยมถึงเป็นรากฐานของนาซี
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เคยฟังอจ.พิริยะพูดในสักตอนของ bitcoin talk ทุกวันอังคารเรื่องรัฐสวัสดิการและการวางแผนจากส่วนกลางว่ามันมีปัญหายังไง แต่ตอนนั้นคิดตามไม่ออกว่าทำไมมันถึงจะชิบหาย ปัญหามาจากตรงไหนกัน แต่พออ่านเล่มนี้ (บวกกับเล่ม economics in one lesson) เลยพอจะเข้าใจแล้วว่าการวางแผนจากส่วนกลางและสังคมนิยมมันสร้างความชิบหายได้ยังไง และทำไมมันถึงพัฒนาไปเป็นฟาสซิสได้

นอกจากเรื่องข้างบนแล้ว ก็ยังทำให้พอจะเข้าใจและเปรียบเทียบ pro/cons ของเรื่อง ubi (Universal basic income) ได้ด้วย แน่นอนว่า ubi มันมีข้อดีแหละ แต่ข้อเสียเพียงข้อเดียวของมันก็กลบข้อดีไปเสียหมด เมื่อเรามอบอิสระเสรีที่พึงมีให้ผู้อื่นตัดสินใจ แม้จะเรื่องเล็กน้อยเท่าใด มันก็จะค่อยๆ ขยายใหญ่ขึ้นจนเสรีภาพที่เคยมีกลายเป็นภาพลวงตาว่า เรามีเสรีภาพเหมือนเดิม (แต่เท่าที่เขาพึงจะให้)

ตอนอ่านก็ตีกันในหัว คือฮาเย็กก็อธิบายชัดเจนนะว่ามันเป็นเหตุเป็นผลกันยังไงทำไมสังคมนิยมมันนำไปสู่ฟาสสิซได้ แต่สังคมนิยมบางส่วนก็บอกว่า มันเป็น propaganda หัวจะปวด

I attempted to purge my mind of my previous bias against Hayek; I desperately tried to do justice to this work. But how anyone can read this work and find in it anything of intellectual merit is beyond me. It is a political pamphlet which starts with two axioms which are never rigorously examined, that 'capitalism' and 'socialism' are incompatible; Hayek argues that capitalism (a concept he does not bother to study in depth), leads to freedom and that socialism (again, a concept inadequately studied) leads to Hitler. A work which is largely intended to preach to the converted.

Ah, finished at last. This was a bit of a hate-read for me, but I was surprised that I didn't hate it with quite the intensity I expected.

I was able to appreciate Hayek's arguments against full-scale government planning as predicting a lot of what went wrong with the Soviet Union. Still, I am unmoved by his slippery slope argument that any socialist policies inevitably lead to totalitarian government. Give me a break.

Also, this notion that Nazi Germany came about because of socialist policies adopted before World War I, while ignoring all of the other economic factors - onerous reparations, hyperinflation, depression - that helped pave the way for Hitler's rise... can you be serious?

Overall, I found it very hard to finish this book or concentrate on what the author was saying. Sometimes his focus was too close on the specific perils of a planned economy. Other times his focus was way too broad on gloom and doom warnings of what might happen if this or that happens in a planned economy - predictions that have oftentimes been proven wrong in the last 70 odd years.

The enduring popularity of this work is a bit of a mystery to me.

I have never read a more true or relevant book to the times than this, despite its being written in 1945.
The predictions it made & how things turned out for Russia & others are frighteningly accurate. Whatever one decides at the end, everyone in America needs to read this ASAP.

OK, I'll admit that I finally broke down and read this book because of Glenn Beck. I've heard about this book for so long from conservatives who say that it shows how contemporary liberalism is Hayek's "road to serfdom."

Balderdash. If you read this book, you'll see that Hayek wrote at the end of World War II to warn about the dangers of centralized, planned economies, as opposed to economies based on competition. That's it.

Hayek is not against "big government." In fact, he says a lot about the things governments need to do in order for competition to work! He is in favor of government relief programs. He is in favor of a minimum wage! This guy is a liberal! Yes, there are those who will say Hayek is a "traditional" liberal as opposed to a contemporary one, but the ideological connection is still there--and is still strong, in many ways.

Here's what Glenn Beck says: "We were on the right track, but clearly we've fallen off the wagon. A few years ago I started asking, how'd we get here? How did this happen to us? No one had answers. I started reading history, and it didn't take long for me to realize that we'd completely disconnected ourselves from history, making us incredibly vulnerable to repeating the mistakes of the past. And look at what we're doing! We have a government car company, government banks, we're talking about government oil companies, government is hiring all the workers. We are there, gang! And as Hayek so clearly demonstrated, this road only leads to one destination."

Regardless of what you think about whether there's a "government car company" or the rest of it, Hayek's book is *all* about competitive vs. planned economies. It is not about whether there should be government interventions designed to provide a temporary shield against the inevitable--and sometimes dangerous--wobbles of a competitive economy.

So it's not Hayek that lends credence to what Glenn Beck is after. Maybe it's Ayn Rand? Do I have to read Atlas Shrugged now?

Nhân mùa khai trường năm học mới (2016-2017) thì châm ngôn của cá nhân mình được lấy cảm hứng từ quyển sách này cho những ai cắp sách đến trường, nhất là các bạn mới bắt đầu ôm cặp vào Đại học chữ to, không phải là Dạy thật tốt, học thật tốt, 5 điều Chủ tịch Hồ Chí Minh dạy thiếu niên, nhi đồng, hay lời căn dặn trở thành người công dân tốt, có ích, ngắn gọn là:

Trước khi trang bị cho mình kiến thức, hãy là (một con) NGƯỜI TỰ DO.
Và học hỏi kiến thức để giúp mình được là và mãi là (một con) NGƯỜI TỰ DO.
Cũng như chỉ là (một con) NGƯỜI TỰ DO mới giúp ta lựa chọn kiến thức cho cả cuộc đời về sau.

This is a classic work on socialism. Written during World War 2, Hayek discusses the roots of National Socialism in Germany. He describes its source and demonstrates that the same ideology is pervasive in other western countries. The central premise of the book is that the end of Marxist ideology is always the same: tyranny. Germany, under the Nazis only made the trek from start to tyranny faster than its western counterparts. As western countries abandon classic liberalism for socialistic ideals, they inevitably move towards tyranny.

This is one of the foundation books for my personal philosophy. Along with his other works, the thought of Friedrich von Hayek is basic to my own individualist world view. In this book Hayek contends that liberty is fragile, easily harmed but seldom extinguished in one fell swoop. Instead, over the years “the unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist planning create a state of affairs in which, if the policy is to be pursued, totalitarian forces will get the upper hand.” He asserts that liberty has developed from an a posteriori recognition of humans’ inherent limitations – particularly the restrictions of their knowledge and reasoning. Most importantly, no planner or group of planners, however intelligent and well resourced, can possibly obtain and process the countless bits of localized and tacit information required such that a government plan meets its objectives. Only price signals emitted in an unhampered market enable harmony and efficiency to arise spontaneously from many millions of individuals’ plans. Hence government intervention in the plans of individuals, even if undertaken by men of good will, inevitably leads to loss of liberty, economic stagnation (at best) and war and impoverishment (at worst).

While much of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom focused on correcting erroneous ideas and sloppy thinking that misled (and still mislead) many to support socialistic expansions of government power, that is not all it did. It also reiterated the case for individualism and its economic manifestation—free markets. Since convincing careful thinkers requires such an affirmative case as well as defensive debunking, the book’s diamond 75th anniversary is a propitious time to remember what only individualism provides, so that we will not continue to follow a path of “replacing what works with what sounds good,” as Thomas Sowell described it.

The essential features of…individualism…are the respect for the individual man qua man…the recognition of his own views and tastes as supreme in his own sphere…and the belief that it is desirable that men should develop their own individual gifts and bents.
The attitude of the liberal toward society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.

The holder of coercive power should confine himself in general to creating conditions under which the knowledge and initiative of individuals are given the best scope so that they can plan most successfully. The successful use of competition as the principle of social organization precludes certain types of coercive interference with economic life. Planning and competition can be combined only by planning for competition but not…planning which is to be substituted for competition.
It is the very complexity of the division of labor under modern conditions which makes competition the only method by which such coordination can be adequately brought about.

Nobody can consciously balance all the considerations bearing on the decisions of so many individuals…coordination can clearly be effective only by… arrangements which convey to each agent the information he must possess in order effectively to adjust his decisions to those of others…This is precisely what the price system does under competition and what no other system even promises to accomplish. The economist's plea is for a method which effects such co-ordination without the need for an omniscient dictator. Recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends…that as far as possible his own views ought to govern his actions…forms the essence of the individualist position.

What are called “social ends” are…merely identical ends of many individuals…to the achievement of which individuals are willing to contribute…Common action is thus limited to the fields where people agree on common ends. The clash between planning and democracy arises simply from the fact that the latter is an obstacle to the suppression of freedom which the direction of economic activity requires. The more the state “plans,” the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life…it is the control of the means for all our ends. To believe that the power which is thus conferred on the state is merely transferred to it from others is erroneous. It is a power which is newly created and which in a competitive society nobody possesses. So long as property is divided among many owners, none of them acting independently has exclusive power to determine the income and position of particular people.

Contrast…two types of security: the limited one, which can be achieved for all, and which is therefore no privilege but a legitimate object of desire; and absolute security, which…if it is provided for some, it becomes a privilege at the expense of others. Individualism is thus an attitude of humility…the exact opposite of that intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of the social process.

Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom defended the individual—the only ultimate locus of choice, responsibility and morality—as the appropriate focus of efforts toward human improvement, at a time when failing to keep that focus threatened the entire world. That is a lesson we need to remember now as well, when many do not remember the horrors that can lead to, and so support constantly expanding government powers over its citizens.