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It happens I grew up on the actual road to serfdom. It was called Moore Road in Hamilton County, Tennessee, and my father lived there and his father before him. Our family were not serfs, but some of our neighbors were, and if you went down to my grandfather's mailbox and turned left and walked down Moore Road, you would soon encounter the tarpaper shacks of the serfs. These people had been enserfed by an economic and political system that Friedrich Hayek believed was the only certain guarantee of liberty. "The Road to Serfdom" is a strange, fanatic volume, written in 1944 under conditions that turned out to be, contrary to Hayek's expectations, transitory. In effect, Hayek made the same error, in the opposite sense, of those early socialists who supposed that conditions of class, oppression and cruelty they observed in early Victorian England were manifestations of inevitable history. In his "History of the World," the English historian Hugh Thomas said that no general theory of human behavior based on conditions in Manchester in the 1840s could be valid. He might have cautioned the Hayekians in the same sense, substituting central and eastern Europe in the 1930s for Manchester. Nevertheless, it is possibly worth reading "The Road to Serfdom" even now, at least if you are inclined to be a Hayekian libertarian, in order to see what Hayek did not say. Because he did not say that all government intervention is bad, although many of his present-day acolytes do. It is not well-known, but Friedrich Hayek had only one pair of shoes. He never needed to replace them, because his feet never touched the ground, However, in a preface he wrote for an American edition in 1956, Hayek made one of his few statements that indicated any familiarity with life as lived by real people: "But scarcely less surprising to me was the enthusiastic welcome accorded to the book by many whom I never expected to read a volume of this type -- and from many more of whom I still doubt whether in fact they ever read it." Me, too. Hayek proposed that socialism or collectivism -- which he defined very broadly -- could not work, and furthermore required the destruction of individual liberty. One wonders why, other than a sense of personal pique, he picked on socialism in this respect. He was born in Austria in 1899, where there were still real serfs in all but name, and in a world where individual liberty was scarce anywhere, whether governments were collectivist or not. Liberty has many enemies, but Hayek could recognize only one. Or, rather, he redefined all enemies of liberty as socialists. According to this book, Wilhelmine Germany was collectivist. Apparently, he thought that giving old people money to buy food eroded their political integrity, and he objected to workers banding together to bargain for a best price for their labor, although when manufacturers did the same thing to set prices for their output, he found that tolerable. As far as he was concerned fascism, Nazism and Stalinist communism were all the same thing, although he did admit they happened to be in a death struggle at the time. He notes in 1956 that, writing in England in the early '40s, he was constrained to attribute bad things to Hitlerite Germany, but tells us Americans that we are to understand that he meant Stalinist Russia most of the time. Thus he spends a great part of his small book trying to show that Naziism was, as the party name said, really socialist. That would explain why the only effective opponents of Hitler's rise to power were the declared socialists, and why Hitler's financiers came from among the German industrialists. It is not going too far to say that Hayek's view of European politics was crazy. In fact, Germany in the '30s was not a collectivist state, for all that it had a Four-Year Plan, but a gangster state, and the Brown Shirts were not really the inevitable evolution of the practice of the Social Democrats of putting uniforms on the children in their youth sports clubs. Central planning of comprehensive type is indeed difficult, maybe impossible, although if one's goal is economic abundance, the example of Japan since 1945 suggests that a a lot of planning can be effective. In any event, the triumph of the Labour Party in the postwar elections, which Hayek was certain would turn Britain into a totalitarian state, did not pan out that way. By 1956, this was clear to everyone except Friedrich Hayek, who wrote that he saw no reason to modify his views of 1944. Western Europe did not become totalitarian after 1945, and although Hayek said firmly in 1944, "Who imagines that there exist any common ideals of distributive justice such as will make the Norwegian fisherman consent to forego the prospect of economic improvement in order to help his Portuguese fellow, or the Dutch worker to pay more for his bicycle to help the Coventry mechanic, or the French peasant to pay more taxes to assist the industrialization of Italy?" that is what the fishermen, the mechanics and the peasants decided, in free elections, to do. And it has worked out very well. There were other, non-collectivist tyrannies in western Europe when Hayek wrote, and when Franco died, the last totalitarian state in western Europe closed up shop, to be replaced by a moderate socialist regime. Hayek had everything exactly backward. In reading "The Road to Serfdom" from the perspective of 2010. I also was deeply unimpressed by Hayek's expertise in economics (his academic specialty), although he from time to time disparages mere social theorists for not understanding economics. In a note in Chapter VIII (page 103 in the Phoenix edition published by his idolators at the University of Chicago), Hayek writes, "It is probable that we habitually overestimate the extent to which inequality of incomes is mainly caused by income derived from property . . . Information from official Russian sources . . . suggests that the difference between the highest and the lowest salaries paid in Russia is of the same order of magnitude (50 to 1) as in the United States." This is as clear an example as you will need of Hayek's complete divorcement from common or garden variety economic reality. Whatever the situation may have been in Russia, reading American newspapers would have told Hayek that the range of income in America was at least 600 to 1 (newspaper reporter, $7.50 per week; Hollywood contract actor, $5,000 per week). In truth, it was far more, which brings us back to the real road to serfdom, Moore Road. There were, when Hayek wrote, sharecroppers in Alabama whose annual income was around $100 a year (giving, in large families, a per capita income of 2 or 3 cents per day, say 40 or 60 cents in today's. money). Their landlords were in no sense collectivist. None had ever seen a socialist or would have known what one was, but they knew socialism was sin, and they were ag'in it. If it is true -- and here I do not dispute Hayek -- tbat "money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man," then Hayek`s next sentence is self-contradictory: "It is money which in existing society opens an astounding range of choice to the poor man." Self-contradictory because, by definition, the poor man doesn't have it, and the serfs of the South did not enjoy an astounding range of choices. It is significant of Hayek's delusions that his great hero, the man he quotes more than any other, was Acton, Acton whose public political position was that the most desirable polity ever devised was the Confederate States of America, whose economic and political principles certainly still animated the powerful in Alabama in 1944; and whose private idea of liberty was to knuckle under to the restrictions of "the most obscurantist regime in Europe" (in the words of A.J.P. Taylor). So much for the actual performance of the ideal of 19th century liberalism, as Hayek understood it. Hayek ignored religion -- never mentions it -- as a source of political orientation, despite what religion did to Acton, and even wrote, in a passage that was the least prophetic of all his many bad guesses: "That the advances of the past should be threatened by the traditionalist forces of the Right is a phenomenon of all ages which need not alarm us."