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.

Hayek's analysis of socialism is insightful, prophetic, and chilling. It is a difficult book to read, but very rewarding. It is clear that we take for granted the freedoms we were given by our founding fathers and abdicating them to the socialist planners will lead to dire consequences. We must all wake up before the socialists in our midst lead us to totalitarianism--something that may be difficult to imagine, but most certainly in our future if we continue upon our current path.

Edit: August 2018

My politics has changed somewhat in the couple of years since I wrote the review below. I was somewhat of an anarchist at that time and my position on state control and centralization were pretty much aligned with the book's argument except it came from a socialist perspective. I've changed my position drastically on how centralized or state controlled a socialist state should be but left the review unchanged since it doesn't fundamentally alter my position on the book.

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I've recently started reading economics books by liberal/neo-liberal/libertarian-capitalist writers to better understand their points. But I'm finding them not much superior than the arguments I come across from "anarcho"-capitalists and right wing libertarians on the internet.

For one thing, Hayek lumps the Nazis with socialists and communists because they're all "collectivists." Never mind the fact that fascists speak about "class collaboration" when socialists are interested in the class struggle in society. Never mind the fact that one of fascism's central tenet is nationalism and socialism/communism/anarchism are vehemently anti-nationalist ideologies. Never mind how Hitler arrested 11,000 socialists for "illegal socialist activities" in 1936 or how he had special concentration camps just for leftists. Never mind this from Hitler's book where he very clearly says that his intention was only to crush the Left while appropriating their symbols:

We chose red for our posters after particular and careful deliberation, our intention being to irritate the Left, so as to arouse their attention and tempt them to come to our meetings—if only in order to break them up—so that in this way we got a chance of talking to the people— Hitler, Mein Kempf

Facts and history getting in the way of the narrative wouldn't be great for Mr. Hayek, would it? No, this is the same kind of tactic that was used by Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom and it's the same tactic used by neo-feudalist, free market ideologues today: set up a false dichotomy between the free market and a totalitarian state, knock over state control, and claim you've won the argument against evil socialism. The fact that there are socialists who want the workers controlling the means of production rather than the state is not even glanced at because then it becomes difficult to make simplistic, tired arguments.

I'm also amused by how easily these economists make bombastic claims such that the free market is the only way for individuals to be free, without bothering to go into any of those pesky—and rather philosohical—details about what economic freedom really means. Is it simply the freedom to choose which master one works for today? Or is it the freedom for the worker to have autonomy and engage in voluntary associations with his workers rather than be part of a top down, hierarchical structure that is the capitalist workplace?

Another important theme of the book is Hayek railing against central planning. I couldn't help but wonder whether he was aware that one argument leftists make against capitalist workplaces is that they're simply the state writ small, existing as extremely centralized, hierarchical structures with no democratic control. I'll copy what the Anarchist Library wrote on this because it captures the essence of the argument perfectly:

... private property is the state writ small, with the property owner acting as the “sovereign lord” over their property, and so the absolute king of those who use it. As in any monarchy, the worker is the subject of the capitalist, having to follow their orders, laws and decisions while on their property. This, obviously, is the total denial of liberty (and dignity, we may note, as it is degrading to have to follow orders). And so private property (capitalism) necessarily excludes participation, influence, and control by those who use, but do not own, the means of life.

I don't see much difference between this tyranny and tyranny of the state. The only major difference is that one is free to leave and find himself another job. But for the vast majority of the workers, working for a boss is the fate since the system demands a class of workers. One or two individuals might find a better job and might even become a boss themselves but it's not possible for everyone to become a boss. So what freedom is it if you get to choose which master you serve today? Surely, having the freedom to choose one lord over another wouldn't have been that big of a deal to a feudal peasant.

Philosophically void, should be read only to understand that the ideology of libertarian-capitalism/liberalism stands on but a shaky foundation, supported by pseudo-intellectual nonsense from the modern day preachers of capitalism.

I had high expectations when I started reading the book. In the end, I am left with the feeling that the book is either overrated or outdated or both.

Hayek's main theory is that central planning eventually leads to tyranny. But capitalist countries have sometimes also been authoritarian (South Vietnam, Chili,...), while Scandinavian countries or France can hardly be described as tyrannical.

I am particularly opposed to the idea that we should fight regimes that strive for a higher goal than that of an individual citizen. Hayek thinks about class or race as such a goal. But what about nation? And here we come to the angle of his libertarian belief: according to the author there are no shared values, only needs. No need for borders or restrictions on migration or social security. Central planning involved, remember?

I agree that if possible, entrepreneurship and freedom of speech should be encouraged. But I do not believe in the 'invisible hand' controlling the economy without any human intervention required. Adam Smith did not believe so likewise. And what about environmental planning?

Of course I understand Hayek's purpose of this book to prove that socialism is as authoritarian as national-socialism. During the Cold War, there was a culture war in which Hayek clearly supported the capitalist cause. But from an intellectual point of view, it is not fair to consider communism and national socialism/ fascism as one and the same. Fascism and national socialism were "ni gauche, ni droite", something new, a kind of third position.

One side remark: Hayek uses the word liberalism when he refers to capitalism or libertarianism. During the seventies and eighties, the term has been hijacked by the left and now refers to the most oppressive form of socialism. Sic transit gloria mundi!

Ayn Rand for thinking crazy people. The modern welfare state has been around for about 140 years. It has produced overwhelming success throughout the developed world. But some people hate the idea of community. They believe in a Nietzschean (it’s not a coincidence that Nietzsche’s ideas came about during the birth of the modern welfare state) world where the unshackled individual is supreme. Hayek was one of these people. So was Milton Friedman. They were both nuts. Do you want to walk over the bodies of the homeless while you get to your office and, in a one man lab, personally invent a cure for cancer? That’s the vision of Hayek. Anything less leads to Stalin and Hitler according to him. Marx was a nut, too, and he still has his followers. Why people find extremism, left or right, attractive is a mystery to me. That said, if you want to get an insider look at the paranoia and delusions of the right, this book is as good as any. I should look for the equivalent on the left. too.