More from Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.  The arguement is that economic success has come because of freedom and not in spite of it.  Hayek points out early in his work that people in a free society sometimes forget that freedom leads to success. Some people want more success, and think gaining some control over the market with help from the government is the ticket to success. While success of the turn of the 20th century was nice, it was slow (and consistent). More and more people wanted more and more success. Turn the clock forward to today. Does that sound familiar?  Of course it does. I want more and more myself. Most ambitous (and non-ambitous) people are never really satisfied with the economic success we obtain. Long periods of success can lead to some apathy as to the freedom that leads to the success. Hayek writes that people take their freedom for granted. Instead of an eagerness to understand freedom, and the cause of freedom, as well as the threats to it, people take up causes that only slightly relate to freedom, at the expense of understanding the unintended consequences of their causes. Causes that in the end, seemingly have only one solution, governement intervention. Thus, the freedom Hayeks warns we take for granted is not “stolen” from us, it is freely handed away.

 

As a bonus, I touch a little on emergent order.  Russ Roberts does an amazing job explaining this in the video attached. Emergent order is in Russ Robert’s words ” The hidden harmony that is all around us.  The semmingly magical way that we anticiapte and meet the needs of each other without anyone being in charge”.  This, of course, is in direct contrast to government intervention and central planning.  The fear that we will sell our freedom for our causes as we walk down the “road to serdom”.

 

 

Russ Roberts Video on Emergent Order

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