Now for the bad news

"The worst" always rise to the top of the political heap under a regime of government planning, Hayek explained, for they are the ones with the least qualms about brutalizing their fellow citizens and depriving them of their liberties. All of this can only be sustained by what Hayek called "The End of Truth," or the effects of massive government propaganda that demonizes the civil society, individualism, and the system of peaceful voluntary exchange and private property (capitalism), while glorifying all aspects of the state.

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Now for the bad news:

U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans

Where did anyone ever in a million years get the idea that Obama knew anything about economics???

After Obama became president, he insisted on having "school" every morning which added another hour to the usual one-hour daily briefing that presidents have always received...he wanted to learn about economics and financial stuff. Hmmm...I think I'll stick to my belief that Hayek was correct.

...Was Keynes correct that savings become idle money and depress economic activity? Or was the Hayek view, first articulated by Adam Smith in the "Wealth of Nations" in 1776, correct? (Smith: "What is annually saved is as regularly consumed as what is annually spent, and nearly in the same time too.")

Is all spending equally productive, or should government policies aim to simulate private investment? If the latter, then Mr. Obama is following in FDR's footsteps and impeding recovery. He does so by demonizing business and creating regime uncertainty through new regulations and costly programs. In this he follows neither Hayek nor Keynes, since creating a lack of confidence is considered destructive by both.

Finally, is creating new public debt in a weakened economy the path to recovery? Or is "economy" (austerity in today's debate) and thrift the path to prosperity now, as it has usually been considered before?

Keynes vs. Hayek: The Great Debate Continues

Road to Serfdom (you've always meant to read it)

...but somehow just never got around to it.
But look! Here it is in CARTOONS!!!

Road to Serfdom in Cartoons
http://mises.org/resources/1003

Or, if you prefer, a .pdf of the famous Reader's Digest Condensed Version!

http://hayekcenter.org/?p=682

NO MORE EXCUSES!!!


Section two of Max Eastman's "condensation" of Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom

In order to achieve their ends the planners must create power – power over men wielded by other men – of a magnitude never before known. Their success will depend on the extent to which they achieve such power. Democracy is an obstacle to this suppression of freedom which the centralized direction of economic activity requires. Hence arises the clash between planning and democracy. 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? In every real sense a badly paid unskilled workman in this country has more freedom to shape his life than many an employer in Germany or a much better paid engineer or manager in Russia. If he wants to change his job or the place where he lives, if he wants to profess certain views or spend his leisure in a particular way, he faces no absolute impediments. There are no dangers to bodily security and freedom that confine him by brute force to the task and environment to which a superior has assigned him.

Our generation has forgotten that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. When all the means of production are vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of `society' as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us. In the hands of private individuals, what is called economic power can be an instrument of coercion, but it is never control over the whole life of a person. But when economic power is centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery …

Hurtling Down the Road to Serfdom

by John Stossel:

Government is taking us a long way down the Road to Serfdom. That doesn't just mean that more of us must work for the government. It means that we are changing from independent, self-responsible people into a submissive flock. The welfare state kills the creative spirit.

F.A. Hayek, an Austrian economist living in Britain, wrote "The Road to Serfdom

" in 1944 as a warning that central economic planning would extinguish freedom...The book was a hit. Reader's Digest produced a condensed version that sold 5 million copies.

Hayek meant that governments can't plan economies without planning people's lives. After all, an economy is just individuals engaging in exchanges. The scientific-sounding language of President Obama's economic planning hides the fact that people must shelve their own plans in favor of government's single plan.

At the beginning of "The Road to Serfdom," Hayek acknowledges that mere material wealth is not all that's at stake when the government controls our lives: "The most important change ... is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people."

This shouldn't be controversial. If government relieves us of the responsibility of living by bailing us out, character will atrophy. The welfare state, however good its intentions of creating material equality, can't help but make us dependent. That changes the psychology of society.

I'll explore this tomorrow night on my Fox Business show, 8 p.m. Eastern (rebroadcast Friday at 10 p.m.).

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Most Americans do not understand the chokehold carbon dioxide control would give government over almost everything we do

Giving government the power to allot carbon dioxide gives it essential control over most means of production. This is "The Road to Serfdom" that the great F.A. Hayek warned about.

Clearing the Air on the Clean Air Act and Climate Change