Book Thoughts: Road to Serfdom

Note: I decided recently to comment on things I've noted in books over the years. I'm calling these Book Thoughts. This is the third post.

One book that had a profound effect on my economic thinking was FA Hayek's Road to Serfdom. It is old but very new. (I think I first heard of it from a college economics professor. He was from some Central American country and I could barely understand what he was saying, but what he said made a whole lot more sense than dozens of other instructors I've had.) Here are a few quotes from Road to Serfdom along with my comments:

The delegation of particular technical tasks to separate bodies, while a regular feature, is yet only the first step in the process whereby a democracy which embarks on planning progressively relinquishes its powers.

The preceeding quote makes me think of how the U.S. Congress - in particular - hands off rule-making to unelected governmental agencies which promulgate "regulations," which are, by another name, "laws." It angers me that laws should be made by unelected individuals and I think all regulations should have to be ratified by Congress once a year, and while they could be passed in a single batch, I think any representative or senator should be able to demand that specific regulations be pulled out and dealt with separately.

The Rule of Law could clearly not be preserved in a democracy that undertook to decide every conflict of interests not according to rules previously laid down but "on its merits."

I've heard this before! What "on its merits" seems to mean is that a judgement should not be made on the basis of what the law says, but on the basis of the personal feelings and prejudices and whims of the judge or bureaucrat.

Security tends to become stronger than the love of freedom. The reason for this is that with every grant of complete security to one group the insecurity of the rest necessarily increases. If you guarantee to some a fixed part of a variable cake, the share left to the rest is bound to fluctuate proportianally more than the size of the whole.

I think it is talking mostly of financial security here. An astute and sad observation.

I understand the book is receiving renewed interest. If so, it is well deserved.