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Summary: Should be required reading for all Students
Review: I adored Hayek's points about the linkage between Stalinist Russia and the National Socialist in Western Europe. It helps the American/British right debunk the myth that Hitler was of a conservative mould.We should not forget the power of the free market. When man can no longer control his own economic future, then there is no freedom. Milton Freidman's 'Capitalism and Freedom' is another great work displaying the erudition of economics that every College Student and most High School students should be aware of.
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Summary: I love my freedom to choose my way!
Review: A great treatise on why government should step aside and let the human moral compass lead the way to the human ideal. Why, we could still have children working seven days a week for pennies in airless factories if it weren't for the government coming in to legislate morality. Pay for safety inspections, or non-polluting equipement? How dare they get in the way of my Progress! Without government, we wouldn't have a facist minimum wage, and we wouldn't have to pay pensions for all those old people's useless years of work, or overtime, or the end to slavery. It's shameful! And what's up with those government research grants, or government contracts? Why should they limit my ability to use posions in my mining operations on public lands? Truly, a must read for anybody who wants to act as a hypocritical fascist and call it freedom.
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Summary: A Must Read to Fully Understand Free (and not Free) Markets
Review: I am not a professional economist, but have studied the subject for over 20 years. My three favorite authors on the subject are Adam Smith (for his work that helped shape a nation), F.A. Hayek (for his work that is still helping a world to recover from a 50 year "experiment" with collectivism), and Thomas Sowell (for his work to bring an understanding of economics and free markets to the general public). Hayek's work explains many of the social and political upheavals of the 20th century. This book is powerful.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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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