The Road to Serfdom: Despotism, Then and Now | Thomas DiLorenzo

Thomas DiLorenzo presented this sample lecture from the Mises Academy's course, "The Road to Serfdom: Despotism, Then and Now," on 26 July 2010.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-s8-O6u43U

The instructor, economist Thomas J. DiLorenzo, writes:

When Friedrich A. Hayek published his classic book, The Road to Serfdom, in 1944 he was loudly denounced by academic statist apologists in England, where he resided at the time, and in America. In the preface to the 1976 edition of the book Hayek noted that a prominent philosopher even denounced the book despite admitting that he had not read it! But average citizens did read it. The book was a gigantic success in America, quickly selling over half a million copies. Millions of copies of a condensed Reader’s Digest version of the book were also sold and widely read.

The court historians in academe were not concerned about Hayek’s age-old warnings about the dangers that centralized political power posed to liberty and prosperity, for they intended to be beneficiaries of that power as well-paid advisers to the state. Millions of average citizens were not as enthusiastic, especially Americans who, during the war, had experienced oppressive and confiscatory taxation, the slavery of military conscription, government-imposed product rationing, pervasive shortages of basic staples, and endless bureaucratic bungling.

Hayek’s motivation for writing The Road to Serfdom was the shocking speed at which so many Europeans — especially in Germany — had simply forgotten all that they had learned over the centuries about the virtues of a free society, the need for limitations on government power, the dangers of centralized power, and the workings of capitalism as a worldwide network of mutually advantageous exchange. It only took a couple of decades of socialistic sloganeering to persuade Germans to abandon their classical-liberal roots and embrace Big Government of the worst sort.

Continue . . . http://academy.mises.org/courses/the-road-to-serfdom-then-and-now/