Rating: 
Summary: Relevant and potent sixty years on
Review: The Road to Serfdom - Hayek Scribing about the Road To Serfdom is a humbling experience. This is, after all, a book that would launch a thousand other similar philosophies, perceiving humanity at its glorious apex, when it is, both economically and politically, liberated from the framework of the interfering state. Pertinently avowed within Hayek's writing is that germ of alarm and concern at the world he has left behind. This is no ordinary academic, swallowed up from an early age in the same old, same old study, but a man who had out of a horrible necessity fled from Nazi Germany to save himself. The book gives an urgent, unhindering tone to what might well have been an otherwise stale political treatise. Hayek, we must remember, is not writing about politics from a third person perspective ; he is writing from the vantage point of someone supremely concerned that curtailment of our economic freedom in this country, through ostensible socialism, will eventually lead to solid totalitarianism. It goes like this. First, the wages are controlled, then the housing supply is controlled, then your neighbours disappear, then we build a Gulag. It is an easy idea, one that we can see in our everyday experiences - if you give a child a piece of chocolate, he will demand more and more. If you allow free reign to governments to have some economic control over my life- and yours- they will, and believe me on everyone of these words, will want the whole cake in the end. They won't just eat it, but snatch it, smash it, and fashion it in their own image. Mocking is an easy habit, and it is something that liberals have often felt it necessary to do at the sincere, well-meaning writings of right-wing libertarians. It is a reaction to be pitied. But, the last twenty odd years have shown that heeding Hayekian politics results, ultimately, in the best of all possible economic results. Thatcherism's arching pillar was Hayekian. It is one that has been adopted, and hardly touched by the current Labour Government. The 90s, with their unparalleled growth and prosperity throughout the West, could only have happened because the leaders of the eighties took on board Hayek's fundamentals. We ought to pray that today's politicians reaffirm this vision.
Rating:
Summary: An important book
Review: The book is simply great, on whatever side of the political spectrum you may reside. Hayek ably shows that the chosen road will not lead to the desired endstage described by Marx but to a authoritarian nightmare in which no one is free except a few of "the ruling class". Do not expect to find a treatise on libertarianism vs. socialism as some of the reviewers think, since the author himself stated that he doesn't want to attack Marxism. For that there are other books.
Rating: 
Summary: Reviewer Drew G. Price did not read this book
Review: One of the reviewers, Drew G. Price from Lake Saint Louis, Missouri United States, stated that F.A. Hayek was FOR socialism, government control, etc. He quite obviously did NOT read this book. F.A. Hayek argues strongly in defense of the free market, arguing in fact that abandoning the free market results, eventually, in totalitarianism. Please disregard his review. This is an excellent book. One of the foundational books in support of the moral basis of capitalism and freedom.
Rating: 
Summary: Huge blind spots
Review: Partly right. This book is a mixture of: * 1. Truths (he was largely right about the efficiency of the market, and the inefficiency of government price-setting. Post-WW2 Britain even had inspector ensuring haircuts were the regulated price, which most of us would consider absurd. So Hayek did have valid concerns at the time of writing); * 2. Blatant untruths (he claims compromising the market leads inevitably to totalitarianism - disproved in many countries around the world, for over 100 years); and * 3. Enormous blind spots (Hayek completely ignores externalities, the free rider problem, and inequalities in opportunity due to differences in health care, education and inherited wealth or poverty). Lack of rigour and balance aren't unique to Hayek of course, but it's worth reading someone who is genuinely insightful and rigourous and isn't stuck in one viewpoint. I'm very impressed with Amartya Sen's "Development and Freedom". Intelligent, rigourous and balanced. Importantly, it balances a philosophical analysis of freedom with a very empirical examination of outcomes. Why have market reforms succeeded in some countries and failed in others? Read what he has to say about education, health care and land reform; about institutions; about capability. I'm having to read it very slowly, but it's got 10 times more substance than "The Road to Serfdom". I can see why Sen won a Nobel Prize. Give Hayek a miss, and read something more balanced and intelligent.
Rating: 
Summary: Mr. Hayek's recomendations are crap!
Review: He was right about the nazis and there control of their country and industry etc. but he gives recomendations for America to be more controlled by the federal government in the way of economics and industry!.....Wrong! Why do you think a lot of the corporations have left our country for little or no taxation, no OSHA, EPA, capital gains tax and on and on?..Even China has a much better attitude towards business than America!Mr.Hayek doesn't believe that income and a good lifestyle isn't that important compared to other concerns of life!...What an idiot!...Just ask anyone if they want to get paid less and work more hours?..That's just what his "caring" socialistic attitude encompasses when he talks of equality in income for all people!
He thinks the government can run utilities, and other industries better than corporations!....Is he in a dream world?..Everybody knows that the federal government and other governments do a terrible job being efficient!...Just go to your post office to mail a package on time!...That's why we've got UPS and Federal Express!..... Mr. Hayek better pull his head out, he's still in the Feudal state in his English limey mind! Basically boys and girls, he believes in the elite on top and you and me the serfs!....heavens we're not smart enough as a whole American people to run our own country according to his "Majesty"!..He's still in the feudal age of Kings and Queens where you're property was their property if they wanted it!You we're a Nothing!.....Classic attitude of the crown heads of Europe! He also believes in the U.N which was to later come about. He also makes mention of having a workable world government, a superstate!....WEll, hello to the socialists and communists long dream of a "World Utopia"...the elite are still working on it!
Hey, did Soviet Russia do great after all those 70 years?....
NOPE!...It didn't work then and it won't work in the future! Self employment,a free market(or at least as possible without traitors)a pro-business government, and great incentives for family making and industry is the only way to go!....Not a former british intelligence officer's view of the future like George Orwell....1984! It's amazing that he was given co-winner of the Nobel prize for economics!..WE should of kicked his lousy communist/socialist butt back to England!....It's a crock Mr. Spock!
Rating:
Summary: Change Your World View In One Easy Lesson
Review: This book occupies the top rank of those books that fundamentally change how you look at the world. Hayek's argument is complex, but it all hinges on one radical statement: economic choices are moral choices. Once you grasp that, the entire book makes sense. Economic choices are moral choices. It sounds perverse, doesn't it? We're accustomed to thinking of economics as being about business, and therefore fundamentaly amoral. But consider: every time you decide what to do with your money--e.g., whether to buy a book or put the money in the bank--you are making a value judgment. At root, these judgments cannot be purely based on logic (logic has to have something to start with); they're based on your subjective priorities, framed by your morals. Individual taste, such as preferring chocolate over vanilla, obviously comes into it; but some people make a moral choice to override taste. Religious ascetics deliberately avoid foods that taste too good, or clothes that look too nice, because they consider worldly pleasures to be a distraction. As a more quotidian example, I prefer pizza to grilled chicken, but I have decided that it would be wrong to go on eating pizza: given my family history of heart disease, I have to cut back on fat, because I need to make sure I live long enough to raise my children. Economic choices are moral choices. When I read this book for the first time, I had to step back and digest that one for a while. It really changed my worldview: instead of seeing money as a trivial goal that moral people shouldn't worry about, I now see money as a tool for helping people to exercise their moral sense more freely.
Rating:
Summary: good refutation of socialism
Review: The Road to Serfdom is a somewhat dated little book about capitalism vs. socialism. The greatest achievement of this book is that it, moderately convincingly, establishes a link between state-run capital and fascism. For instance, Hayek asserts that the Nazi regime had more fundamentally in common with Marxist ideology than free market capitalism. It is up to the reader to decide.
This is a good book and quite important, but it could have been shorter. If you are an economist, you might find that the non-technical language of this book is a bit profuse, and that Hayek's ideas could have been presented more concisely. However I think it is clear that Hayek is writing more to the reasonably literate masses than to economists.
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Summary: Very actual in context of EU's highly politicised economies.
Review: A truly great book by one of the leaders, along with Ludwig von Mises, of the Austrian School of Economics, and still very a propos in the context of EU's nations highly politicised economies. Have you ever considered why large and over-sized animals like elephants and whales have no natural predators? Such large animals have reached an evolutionary stage (a Darwinian term for lack of a better word, although I do not believe in the evolutionary theory in its present state) where they devote the best of their strength in the daily struggle of their own bodily survival, without having to compete with other species. In the end of the scale, the extremely large animals are seeing to feed on the extremely small, just like the whole world of animal life feeds on water and oxgen... Compare this to such gigantic conglomerates and companies as General Electric, Walmart, Intel, IBM and Microsoft. They have virtually no real competitors left in their own respective field, and their own growth stimulates a broad-band growth in all of their related respective industrial fields as well as in the Economy as a whole. These companies literally own, and are owned by the respective sectors in which they strive. Competition has been abolished and the reins of power have been democratically handed over to such gigantic and entrenched Stalwart-winners. Now if such industrial Behemoths are in the loom of failing, they are likely to tear down whole facades of the economy. Such a feat cannot be left to happen, i.e. there should be a cushion or a safety net, as the damage occurred in the respective company are likely to be propagated to the whole economy. This has early enough been universally recognized. Just remember that JP Morgan saved the Steel Industry and the Stock Market by bailing it out with his own personal funds, a move which proved to be very rational and beneficiary not only to the economy as a whole but also to himself and his own vested interests. Remember that highly rich individuals and personal funds were urged by the Fed to bail out LTCM at the wake of its collapse, and to do this they readily agreed, as they recognized that it was not only in the interest of the economy and the stock market as a whole to prevent the total financial collapse of ailing LTCM Mammoth, but it was also very much in their own private interest. These are highly illustrative examples were free-market features typically deemed as market-failures have been hampered by the free-market itself, without any government agency regulation and/or State intervention. Why then could not such free-market self-regulatory features be adopted in other parts of the world, such as in France (Renault, Credit Lyonnais, and now Alston?)?... Simply because France sometimes looks like it's possessed by one of the world's biggest nationalistic ego? Simply because when the ideology of egalite-fraternite does not spontaneously materialize itself on an individual level, as it actually seldom does, the paternalistic Etat Francais sees it as its own responsibility to use an expeditive predicament as the ultimate arbitrary short term economic solution, for lack of a better one? That may well be some of the reasons, although it can be said en passant that other European nations such as Switzerland are neither immune from such self-complacent attitudes (witness the attempted but failed political rescue/bailout of Swissair/Swiss), but Switzerland, although not a member of the EU, is at least more firmly grounded in the principles of a free-regulated market economy, a fact which prevents it from intervening strongly in local domestic economic issues, at least as strongly as France has been seen to be doing in the past. Some political and/or economical animals are sooner or later deemed to extinction, like it was the case with the dinosaurs. That is the natural outcome of striving and struggling economies, and a fact with which it should not be hampered with. If it is generally agreed that the survival of private enterprises close to extinction on the economic evolutionary scale should not be made at the expense of the tax-payers money (i.e. oxygen and water in the world of animal life), it is at least certain that the mistakes and misdemeanors and mismanagements of high tax-bracket executives of so-called private companies should not be bailed out by the average tax-payers held hostages under various political agendas. In that context, globalisation, although it is now a social issue that has been very badly politicised in latter times, seems to be once more the healthiest solution, offering the most sensible safeguards against human management failure and unjustified corporate greed. The risk of seeing France again floating adrift such illusionary (illusionary because State-subsidized) dreams of national grandeur (witness the Concorde, the TGV, and so forth), while it cannot be argued that France definitively possesses a high degree of engineering expertise and vision, is today only tampered by its binding adhesion to the EU and its implied adhesion to principles of free-market economics. Let's just hope that the EU's Competition Commission will stand up to its mandate and tamper the delusive French wishes of once more dangerously amalgamating economics and politics in a rather hazardous form of hegemonic mixes. More than fifty years after publication, it seems that the concepts depicted in this book are still in an urgent need to be preached, especially among European nations.
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Summary: Understanding this is the road to revcovery for the U.S.
Review: One of the things this book makes clear is the murky origins of the conceptions of "Left-Wing" and "Right-Wing" in American politics. For the record: "Right" in America theoretically means small-government, decentralized-governance, constitutional limitations under the doctrine of enumerated powers; in short, what Europeans a hundred years ago called "liberal!" Hayek also (tangentially) discusses that the political differences between the famously mis-labeled leftist Adolf Hitler and the universally recognized leftist, Josef Stalin, amounted to a minor infight between two similar political philosophies whose differences were greater in rhetoric than in fact. The realization that central planning, as practiced in European socialism, is ultimately different from Nazism only in degree is only the first paradigm shift that awaits the reader. Hayek's book is a masterwork. Although some of the particular policies it discusses are now out-of-date, when taken as history it lays a foundation for every American's understanding of what's at stake when he votes.
Rating: 
Summary: Old intellectual political harangue
Review: The vast majority of people, a long time ago, were serfs. Those who are rich still get richer, but those who lived in California knew they could never pay enough property taxes to keep their government solvent. In a war, with frequent incidents of destruction, political logic is easily portrayed as perverse. THE ROAD TO SERFDOM by F. A. Hayek was published in 1944, and its history up to the fiftieth anniversary is well summarized in the Introduction by Milton Friedman and Prefaces by F. A. Hayek that are included in the 1994 paperback. Due to new modes of triumph, some people have great expectations, but THE ROAD TO SERFDOM is about modern economic development leading to the stagnation of socialism. Military measures are a topic of concern in Chapter 9, Security and Freedom. The author's knowledge of Europe, where he was born and raised, prompted him to follow such considerations with Chapter 10, Why the Worst Get on Top, in which it is written: "In the Central European countries the socialist parties had familiarized the masses with political organizations of a semi-military character designed to absorb as much as possible of the private life of the members. All that was wanted to give one group overwhelming power was to carry the same principle somewhat further, to seek strength not in the assured votes of huge numbers at occasional elections but in the absolute and unreserved support of a smaller but more thoroughly organized body." (p. 151). Television hardly seems to be as threatening, no matter how weirdly the news and entertainment mix and match, but combined with the courts, the major political parties, and the American electoral college in 2000, it largely seemed to support the imposition of a geopolitical superpower over the rest of the world, comparable to what Europe experienced when Hitler showed, "The chance of imposing a totalitarian regime on a whole people depends on the leader's first collecting round him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that totalitarian discipline which they are to impose by force upon the rest." (p. 151). Hayek was writing far too early to consider television, but his book has an antiquated view of the role of law which seems to me absurdly scholarly. There is a big difference between legal training (his degree from the University of Vienna) and legal practice, mostly related to deals that involve real money. Hayek writes about privilege without referring to attorney-client privilege, a consideration which makes most lawyers reluctant to discuss fraud by the officers of any corporation that has ever hired a firm that pays its lawyers to do legal work with the usual great degree of confidentiality assumed by those who expect to get paid. Unexpected massive losses, no matter how likely in volatile times, don't get any consideration, even in this book. Hayek is more concerned about people who are granted privileges by a government which expects them to perform a task that others will not be allowed to do. Assume that for Hayek, "liberalism" means that no one is entitled to such privileges, which were standard in a feudal society, and could be blamed for the position of the serfs in such kingdoms, and interpret for yourself what he meant in 1944 when he wrote, "Because of the growing impatience with the slow advance of liberal policy, the just impatience with those who used liberal phraseology in defense of antisocial privileges, and the boundless ambition seemingly justified by the material improvements already achieved, it came to pass that toward the turn of the century the belief in the basic tenets of liberalism was more and more relinquished." (p. 23). The turn of the century in 1900 was a time of restless thinking, when "the hope of the new generation came to be centered on something completely new, interest in and understanding of the functioning of the existing society rapidly declined; and, with the decline of the understanding of the way in which the free system worked, our awareness of what depended on its existence also decreased." (pp. 23-24). Financial speculation within the United States might have replaced manufacturing as the hope for the future, with an internet economy offering personal connections to whatever turned on the consumer becoming the ultimate shopping system for intimate personal interactions, by the year 2000, but on an individual level, each worker was assumed to have a financial interest in the Social Security system, with its lockbox for U.S. government bonds purchased with a portion of earnings and employers' contributions. Defining the serfs, Hayek wrote, "It would indeed be privilege if, for example, as has sometimes been the case in the past, landed property were reserved to members of the nobility. And it is privilege if, as is true in our time, the right to produce or sell particular things is reserved to particular people designated by authority. But to call private property as such, which all can acquire under the same rules, a privilege, because only some succeed in acquiring it, is depriving the word `privilege' of its meaning." (p. 89). Hayek was writing long before anyone thought of a lockbox protecting social security benefits, but it is easy to see Hayek's exasperation with guaranteed incomes putting everyone on the downhill path. "Within the market system, security can be granted to particular groups only by the kind of planning known as restrictionism (which includes, however, almost all the planning which is actually practiced!)." (pp. 141-142). The biggest fraud to be guarded against is the devaluation of the lockbox by an utter collapse of fiscal discipline, recently observed in Argentina, suspected in the unbalanced budget of California, and bound to be worse in our future, but this is most likely, given the level of utter frustration with the economy we are rapidly approaching.
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