English Yokel : March 2008

They NEVER give up !

Just spotted this at Spyblog. Thank God that someone has their eye open for staff like this. Just in case you really can't go read the link, it is (yet) another attempt to institute rule by ministerial decree.

Comment is superfluous. Anger is reasonable. Action is essential.

The Road to Serfdom - F A Hayek

Yokel's just found this book, the Reader's Digest abridged version, republished by the Institute for Economic affairs in 1999. Originally written in the early 1940s while the author, an Austrian economist, was on wartime night Fire Watch duty.

The opening paragraphs had Yokel sitting bolt upright, suddenly alert. For if it was bad then, surely it is even worse now. But Yokel will let you, the reader, decide.

"The author has spent about half his adult life in his native Austria, in close touch with German thought, and the other half in the United States and England. In the latter period he has become increasingly convinced that some of the forces which destroyed freedom in Germany are also at work here.

"The very magnitude of the outrages committed by the National Socialists has strengthened the assurance that a totalitarian system cannot happen here. But let us remember that 15 years ago the possibility of such a thing happening in Germany would have appeared just as fantastic not only to nine-tenths of the Germans themselves, but also to the most hostile foreign observer.

"There are many features which were then regarded as ‘typically German’ which are now equally familiar in America and England, and many symptoms that point to a further development in the same direction: the increasing veneration for the state, the fatalistic acceptance of ‘inevitable trends’, the enthusiasm for ‘organization’ of everything (we now call it ‘planning’).

"The character of the danger is, if possible, even less understood here than it was in Germany. The supreme tragedy is still not seen that in Germany it was largely people of good will who, by their socialist policies, prepared the way for the forces which stand for everything they detest. Few recognize that the rise of fascism and Marxism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies. Yet it is significant that many of the leaders of these movements, from Mussolini down (and including Laval and Quisling) began as socialists and ended as fascists or Nazis.

"In the democracies at present, many who sincerely hate all of Nazism’s manifestations are working for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny. Most of the people whose views infl uence developments are in some measure socialists. They believe that our economic life should be ‘consciously directed’, that we should substitute ‘economic planning’ for the competitive system. Yet is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?"

Read the rest, easily obtainable from the IEA.