The Illustrated Road to Serfdom (Short Cartoon Describing Planned Economies)

Mises.org ^ | 1944 | Friedrich Hayek

[GOPJ]

I believe Road To Serfdom must get into the hands of more people. An easy way to understand the road Hussein is taking us down.

I agree.

[combat_boots]

Great post.

Boots

[Recovering_Democrat]

tks. please ping all your FR friends to this thread; we need to get the message out.

[sweetiepiezer]

ping

[combat_boots]

ping

[swatbuznik]

Ping!

[Canedawg]

Thank you for that link.

[aruanan]

The Road is a terrific book. Over sixty years after initial publication it is a prescient road map to our eventual life under socialist tyranny. My ten year old copy is dog-eared, highlighted and falling apart. I think a new Amazon soft copy is less than $8.

As I read The Road to Serfdom, I am continually amazed at how well Hayek understood the nature of the statist beast.

[MeekOneGOP]

You bet. My pleasure.

Thank YOU for posting this!! :)

[haroldeveryman]

“it can be a hard read”

I think I know what you mean. I would characterize it as a “slow read”. His writing is extremely lean and economical (no pun intended), with lots of content concentrated into each paragraph. And it’s easy to get lost in his long sentences.

But what I liked about his style was that he stayed away from technical jargon and stuck to plain words.

[montesquieu]

Ping for later!!

[Bon mots]

If you like that, go and see Milton Friedman’s videos over at:
http://www.IdeaChannel.tv

Great stuff!

[Polarik]

Excellent! But, unfortunately, the people who need to read and understand the parallels are so blind, close-minded and stupid, that won’t get the parallels even if it was hard-wired into their brains.

[Recovering_Democrat]

not all of the people are lame brained. i know a guy who was a big hussein supporter...he is beginning to doubt and in fact told me to my face he thought the stimulus was a mistake. he even said this before the stimulus passed.

some people who just voted obama as a way to smack back the republicans are having voter’s remorse. we need to capitalize on that fact.

[GOPJ]

As Immanuel Kant put it, ‘Man is free if he needs obey no person but solely the laws.’

This needs to be a stand alone post.

[Recovering_Democrat]

BTW,thanks for the Readers Digest version of Road To Serfdom.

Amazing...96 pages to ‘condense’ it. :)

Perhaps if the truth Hayek tells in this book gets out, we will have a chance to continue true liberty in our time.

Another thing I’d like to see is for people to watch
Milton Friedman’s “Free To Choose”; I’ve started a couple threads on that. The video is available on the internet.

Also: “The Commanding Heights” another good book/video. Though it is more of a history and not a strict polemic about the virtues of free markets.

[Recovering_Democrat]

I see you’ve sent someone to MF’s Free To Choose site already. :)

[GOPJ]

Many socialists have the tragic illusion that by depriving private individuals of the power they possess in an individualist system, and transferring this power to society, they thereby extinguish power. What they overlook is that by concentrating power so that it can be used in the service of a single plan, it is not merely transformed, but infinitely heightened. By uniting in the hands of some single body power formerly exercised independently by many, an amount of power is created infinitely greater than any that existed before, so much more far-reaching as almost to be different in kind.

It is entirely fallacious to argue that the great power exercised by a central planning board would be ‘no greater than the power collectively exercised by private boards of directors’. There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would posses. To decentralize power is to reduce the absolute amount of power, and the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize the power exercised by man over man. Who can seriously doubt that the power which a millionaire, who may be my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest bureaucrat possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends how I am allowed to live and work?

Ping

[FormerACLUmember]

The democrat controlled mainstream media matches Hayek’s anaysis perfectly!

[Bon mots]

I see you’ve sent someone to Milton Friedman’s "Free To Choose" site already.

:)Hehe, yeah. We need to spread the word. :)
I've been sending people there for years!

Ever since I've read "Free to Choose" I have been buying copies I find in used book stores and passing them out like chocolates to acquaintances... especially left-wingers and Peace Corps types.

I'm one of the old farts who read it when it first came out in 1980!