Free Republic

“The whole apparatus for spreading knowledge, the schools and the press, wireless and cinema, will be used exclusively to spread those views which, whether true or false, will strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority; and all information that might cause doubt or hesitation will be withheld.”Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944) I just received a remarkable invitation to an upcoming lecture series entitled, “Weeding out Neutrality,” the advertised speakers being “activist librarians” who aim to destroy “old myths about libraries and neutrality” so they can curate collections that are openly and...

In the era whose secret he uncovered, a journalist's office would have looked just like the one where Yang Jisheng works now. The tiled floor, the grimy window panes, the desk piled two feet high with papers, envelopes and books. The Mao-era radiators. The cigarette ash and the dust. Under Mao Zedong, Yang's good fortune was to find a job as a reporter with China's state-run Xinhua news agency. His misfortune had been to see his father die of hunger in 1961, at the height of the famine that killed an estimated 36 million people: "When my dad died, I...

In Barack Obama’s keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, he rebuked “those who are preparing to divide us,” and famously declared, “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” Paradoxically, his unifying speech seven years ago and his divisive rhetoric of today both reveal the president’s governing philosophy, at its very core, is that of a community organizer. The only thing that has changed is the reality of how the economic policies of...

When Glenn Beck urged his listeners, “Please, pick it up. The Road to Serfdom. Make it part of your essential library,” sales of Austrian Economist Frederick von Hayek’s book at Amazon.com pushed it to Number 1 the next day. Prior to the election of President Obama, “The book sold respectably at a clip of about 600 copies a month,” according to Bruce Caldwell, editor at the University of Chicago Press. “But then, in November 2008, sales more than quadrupled, and they haven’t slowed down since.” When John Stossel, host of Fox Business, featured the book on his show on February...

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Progressives can't get past the Knowledge Problem By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds Contributor April 4, 2010 "If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?" -- President Reagan, Jan. 20, 1981. Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew. In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants...

AP IMPACT: Toxic metal in kids' jewelry from China By JUSTIN PRITCHARD, Associated Press Writer Sunday, January 10, 2010 at 11:22 a.m. LOS ANGELES — Barred from using lead in children's jewelry because of its toxicity, some Chinese manufacturers have been substituting the more dangerous heavy metal cadmium in sparkling charm bracelets and shiny pendants being sold throughout the United States, an Associated Press investigation shows. The most contaminated piece analyzed in lab testing performed for the AP contained a startling 91 percent cadmium by weight. The cadmium content of other contaminated trinkets, all purchased at national and regional chains...

In a recent thread I wrote of the systematic assault upon the American institutions, culture, and ideals, by the Obama administration and its myrmidons. Examples were given of attacks upon the financial system, heavy industry, the health care system, the free election process, and the judiciary. One reason given as to *why* this was being done was a reference to a cartoon version of Hayek's classic The Road to Serfdom. In this piece, I look at why the current wave of assaults which are necessary to bring us to the brink of serfdom, and compare the elements of the work...

The Institute of Economic Affairs 2 Lord North Street, Westminster, London SW1P 3LB Tel: 020 7799 8900 Fax: 020 7799 2137 Email: iea@iea.org.uk Internet: iea.org.uk Readers' Digest Condensed Version of the Road to Serfdom(in PDF format) The authors 9 Foreword by Edwin J. Feulner Jr 11 Introduction: Hayek, Fisher and The Road to Serfdom by John Blundell 14 Preface to the Reader’s Digest condensed version of The Road to Serfdom 26 Summary 27 The Road to Serfdom (condensed version) 31 Planning and power 32 Background to danger 34 The liberal way of planning 37 The great utopia 39 Why the...