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“It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program—on the hatred of an enemy.” – Hayek

F.A. Hayek’s 1944 classic The Road to Serfdom serves as a clarion warning against concentrated government planning. He highlights Nazi Germany and asks his readers, do you want to go down that path? The book reads easily if you agree with his premise. He hones in on something wrong—complete government control of industry—and hammers away at it. However, the book slows down if you stop to consider the seemingly endless number of concessions for situations where government action makes sense to him:

1. “To prohibit the use of certain poisonous substances or to require special precautions in their use, to limit working hours, or to require certain sanitary arrangements, is fully compatible with the preservation of competition.”
2. “The functioning of a competition not only requires adequate organization of certain institutions like money, markets, and channels of information—some of which can never be adequately provided by private enterprise—but it depends, above all, on the existence of an appropriate legal system, a legal system designed both to preserve competition and to make it operate as beneficially as possible.”
3. “Even the most essential pre-requisite of its proper functioning, the prevention of fraud, and deception (including exploitation of ignorance), provides a great and by no means yet fully accomplished object of legislative activity.”
4. “But there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. Indeed, for a considerable part of the population of England this sort of security has long been achieved.”
5. “The case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.”
6. “Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken.”
7. “In any case, the very necessary efforts to secure protection against these [employment] fluctuations do not lead to the kind of planning which constitutes such a threat to our freedom.”

This hedging leads to some confusion as to what exactly he’s trying to say. All the above programs would require government planning and allocation of market resources. While he allows the government to plan programs to provide an adequate amount of food, shelter, and clothing for each citizen, in practice he would likely oppose any proposed policy to meet those minimums. As he makes clear, a government with this authority “would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distribution between districts and groups and could, if it wished, discriminate between persons to any degree it liked.” Furthermore, a defense on the basis that a government redistribution of food and shelter represents a benign and trustworthy act would there again oppose his own suspicious words: “even if we assume the dominant power to be as idealistic and unselfish as we can possibly conceive… How small is the likelihood that it will be unselfish and how great are the temptations!”

Furthermore, he seems to attribute the rise of Nazism to the German scholars and intellectuals that discussed Marx. He cautions against the same discussions happening in the West: “No description in general terms can give an adequate idea of the similarity of much of current English political literature to the works which destroyed the belief in Western civilization in Germany and created the state of mind in which Nazism could become successful.” Hayek manages to leave out a discussion of German hyperinflation in the early 1920s which appears to be a stronger explanation for why “the ideas of 1789—Liberty, equality, fraternity” became viewed as “commercial ideals which have no purpose but to secure certain advantages to individuals.”

Although the structure of his argument is weak he admits that his work is altogether incomplete—The Road to Serfdom exists as one part of a larger discourse on political and economic theory. In the preface to the 1976 edition of the book, he notes, “the discussion of the consequences of socialist policies which the book attempts is of course not complete without an adequate account of what an appropriately run market order requires and can achieve.”

He captures, appropriately, a larger concept and identifies a fundamental flaw with the socialist mindset. In the attempt to plan away inequities in the interest of the “common good,” even more get created. The scope of a centralized planning is broad, the goal is vague, but the consequences are very real. He explains:

The “social goal,” or “common purpose,” for which society is to be organized is usually vaguely described as the “common good,” the “general welfare,” or the “general interest.” It does not need much reflection to see that these terms have no sufficiently definite meaning to determine a particular course of action. The welfare and the happiness of millions cannot be measured on a single scale of less and more. The welfare of a people, like the happiness of a man, depends on a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations. It cannot be adequately expressed as a single end, but only as a hierarchy of ends, a comprehensive scale of values in which every need of every person is given its place.

As an alternative to the “common good” and “general welfare,” Hayek adopts “competition” and “freedom” as counterparts. But like the socialist theories he denounces, he fails to inject meaning into these platitudes. The Road to Serfdom succeeds in questioning socialism, however in not advancing a clear alternative, Hayek fails “to determine a particular course of action.”