The Road to Serfdom

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A lot of the Nazi program was basically protecting failed, outmoded business models from competition. The Nazis were sort of the original anti-Wollmark movement if you want to be provocative. One of the themes of the road to serfdom, which I had forgotten, really runs to the book is competition. And he saw socialism clearly as a monopoly, as a state control of who you worked for and how much you got paid.

Bryan Caplan of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about two books: Eugene Richter's Pictures of the Socialistic Future and F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Both books warn against the dangers of socialism. Pictures of a Socialistic Future, published in 1891 is a dystopian novel imagining what life would be like after a socialist revolution. The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, explores the links between economic freedom and political freedom and the inherent similarities between communism and fascism. Both books look at the German roots of centralized planning and the nature of the people who rise to power when the State is powerful. The conversation includes discussion of the these topics as well as the rule of law and the amount of state control of the economy in Nazi Germany.