A Shortcut to Servitude

When The Road to Serfdom by Austrian-British economist Friedrich von Hayek was published by Routledge in March 1944, the initial print run was a modest 2,000 copies. Respectable, but nothing exceptional. Hayek wasn’t an unknown—he was a respected economist and professor at the prestigious London School of Economics. If you haven’t heard of him or his most infamous book, know that his name still brings a tear to the eye of every self-respecting neoliberal.

On the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics, based in Auburn, Alabama, Hayek—disciple of the Austrian school founder von Mises—is still celebrated. Here’s what they write with great excitement:

“What F. A. Hayek saw—and all his contemporaries ignored—was the fact that every step away from the free market toward government planning is a threat to human freedom and a move toward dictatorship. Government planning leads to a society that is less livable, more brutal, and more despotic. Socialism, in all its forms, is incompatible with freedom.”

They even quote Hayek:

“Nazism, by its nature, is no different from communism. Capitalism is the only economic system compatible with human dignity, prosperity, and freedom. To deviate from this system is to empower the worst elements of society to manage what they do not understand.”

So now you know.

I don’t intend—nor do I have the economic expertise—to argue with Hayek’s entire body of work. After all, he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1972, though the Swedish Royal Academy likely had a bit of fun with that decision, since they awarded it jointly to Hayek and his Swedish counterpart Gunnar Myrdal, a leading theorist of the welfare state and social policy. Hayek, reportedly, was none too pleased and grumbled, “They paired me with that damn ideologue.”

The Road to Serfdom is not an economics text but an ideological pamphlet—one that hit Europe at the wrong time. The war experience, memories of the 1930s economic crisis and its consequences, and above all the post-war reconstruction led even conservative European politicians to realize it was better to read Keynes than Hayek. The result was the European welfare state model and the “glorious thirty years” of economic development and the entrenchment of a liberal democratic system based on human rights, rule of law, and pluralism.

Hayek’s book found more attention in the U.S., particularly after an editor at Reader’s Digest condensed its 226 pages into a more digestible 20 for the average American reader. For those who found even that too much, General Motors released a comic-book version in 1950. In 18 panels, it illustrated how seemingly well-meaning intervention in the free market will inevitably lead to facing a firing squad.

The comic’s main villains are “planners”—a euphemism for anyone supporting any form of state economic intervention in the name of public interest. The first two panels explain Europe’s alleged folly to a worried American observer:

“To enable full economic mobilization during wartime, you voluntarily surrender many freedoms. You know regulation was forced upon you by your country’s enemy. But before the war ends, arguments arise that planning should continue in peacetime. Planners who want to stay in power support these ideas.”

Europe largely ignored Hayek for over three decades—until the late 1980s, when the GM comic fell into the hands of newly minted British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The timing was right. The Soviet Union, which had done its best to confirm Hayek’s warnings about planned economies leading to firing squads, was on the verge of collapse. The Iron Lady took the ideas seriously: she crushed the unions, deregulated everything, and sold off state assets. Budgets soared; the efficiency and profits of privatized companies—now free from labor costs and public accountability—grew rapidly. Neoliberalism had found its heroine, who brought Hayek’s comic to life.

Rarely mentioned, however, is the paradox: under Thatcher, the supposedly parasitic British state cost taxpayers just as much as before. In 1978, just before she took office, public spending was 42.5% of GDP. A decade into her neoliberal rule, it had dropped to only 41.7%. Why? Because unemployment costs exploded—she managed to double them. Her famous line that “there is no such thing as society” wasn’t so much an ideological flourish as a description of the wreckage left by her total war on the public, the common, and the solidaristic.

The consequences of her policies—for British society, politics, global standing, and even democracy—are still being chronicled in the daily papers. The profits Thatcher’s neoliberal reforms brought to British capital have since been wiped out by Brexit. Neoliberalism, like every ideological revolution worth its salt, eventually devours its own children.

Over two decades after Thatcher, Republican Governor of Kansas Sam Brownback took things a step further. His 2012 “Kansas experiment” would likely have made even Hayek blush. Brownback’s “march to zero” tax reform drastically cut taxes for the wealthy, slashed or eliminated business taxes, reduced social support, closed schools for low-income children, shuttered four public agencies, and fired 2,000 public workers.

Promising it would inject economic adrenaline, boost investment, and increase employment, the results were disastrous. Within a few years, Brownback turned a billion-dollar budget surplus into a billion-dollar deficit. The expected investment boom and job growth never came. Kansas lagged behind other states. To fill the hole, his administration raided infrastructure funds, halted road repairs, and hiked sales tax—hurting the poorest the most, who ended up paying more in taxes than before.

Many no longer had enough even for “minimum food, shelter, and clothing sufficient to preserve health,” as Hayek had “benevolently” allowed for in The Road to Serfdom as acceptable state support that doesn’t threaten liberty.

Logically, one would think voters would respond by kicking such experimenters—and their ideas—out of office. But experience shows otherwise.

Hayek’s caricatured version of capitalism, generously aided by the auto industry, proved anything but the “only economic system compatible with human dignity, prosperity, and freedom,” as the Mises Institute in Alabama still claims. Quite the opposite. Neoliberalism, far from liberating, produced popular rage—which then fueled far-right populism that now actively and efficiently undermines the very values it claimed to uphold.

The UK is not in good shape. The U.S. is worse. In Alabama, angry and disappointed voters overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016, who later appointed Brownback as “Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.”

Today in the U.S., books are banned, curricula censored, and talk of structural racism and minority rights suppressed. Politically motivated and legally backed attacks on women’s reproductive rights are rampant. Sexual minorities are systematically stigmatized, incited against, and hated.

Let’s go back to the comic.

“Rising confusion in the country leads to protests. In a failed attempt to convince everyone they’re right, the planners create a massive propaganda machine—which will benefit the future dictator. The least educated—inspired by charismatic speakers—form a party. In desperation, the planners elect a new party leader, hoping he’ll impose a solution. They figure they’ll get rid of him later.”

Panel 12 left a strong impression on me:

“The first step of all dictators is to incite the majority against scapegoated minorities. In Germany, this was done with antisemitism.”

But it doesn’t end there:

“In the dictatorship unintentionally created by the planners, there is no room for differing opinions. Posters, radio, press—all spread the same lies!”

The final two panels depict the ultimate consequences of interfering in the free market: “planned” morning calisthenics (eerily reminiscent of Yugoslav military drills) while a uniformed “planner” breaks golf clubs. The final panel shows citizens before a firing squad.

It’s astonishing how precisely this ideological pamphlet describes the reality now playing out in societies that most fervently embraced Hayek’s ideas. In the name of fighting “socialism,” neoliberals are dismantling liberal democracy itself—a system based on “human dignity, prosperity, and freedom.”

From the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama, it’s not far to Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis is “planning” his road to the White House by attacking minorities and progressive ideas. No firing squads—yet—but Americans are busily shooting each other. The analogy isn’t perfect: in Florida, they’re not breaking golf clubs. They’re banning books.

Welcome to servitude. The shortcut version.