The Road to Serfdom

Got the 50th anniversary edition of F. A. Hayek’s classic, The Road to Serfdom. Milton Friedman, in his introduction to this edition, has a footnote on page xi saying,

I use the term liberal, as Hayek does in the book, and also in his Preface to the 1956 Paperback Edition (p. xxxv below), in the original nineteenth-century sense of limited government and free markets, not in the corrupted sense it has acquired in the United States, in which in means almost the opposite.

I cannot agree more. In my previous post about classical liberalism, I complained about the same corruption of the use of this fine term.

The other feature of classical liberalism that I did not explicitly note is the respect for private property. Collectivism refuses to recognize private property rights, because in that ideology the state (read: the elite) owns the means of production and therefore effectively enslaves the general populace. I believe that the Eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal,” presupposes the recognition of private property; for if there is no such recognition, what does it mean to steal?

I think The Road to Serfdom should be required reading for every voter. But that’s only a pipe dream.