The Road To Serfdom

Collectivist sympathizers sometimes explain the failures of centrally-planned societies by blaming bad leadership. Well-meaning administrators, they explain, would have brought about much better outcomes.

Hayek replies that any authoritarian regime must make decisions that will cause pain and anguish to some groups, and only leaders with few inhibitions will have the stomach to make the tough calls. Autocracies thus tend to fill up with brutal people. It’s no surprise that German National Socialism became a vicious dictatorship. Hayek notes that “the whole moral atmosphere” of such a regime is completely different from that of Western liberal democracy (158).

During the early phases of a planned economy, impatience with the slow progress of parliamentary procedure makes citizens yearn for tough-minded autocrats. The logjam gets broken by a political group large enough to impose its will on the rest of society. Socialists with democratic scruples end up paving the way for a takeover by the ruthless.

The strong political group is likely to contain society’s worst elements for three reasons. First, unlike groups of the educated, with their variety of ideas and opinions, the unified group is less educated and more thoughtlessly uniform in its views. Second, the leaders expand their reach by convincing “the docile and gullible” to follow them (160). Third, the leaders unite this expanded group by stirring up its hatred of a common enemy, which affords the leaders “greater freedom of action than almost any positive program” (160).

In Germany, anti-capitalist sentiment morphed into anti-Semitism because Jews, traditionally excluded from many jobs, migrated toward business: “It is the old story of the alien race’s being admitted only to the less respected trades and then being hated still more for practicing them” (161).

Once in power, collectivists want to think they are in solidarity with other progressives worldwide, but as a practical matter, planning stops at the nation’s border. If poorer groups can get special redress, what about poorer nations? No socialist, though, is eager to sacrifice his nation’s wealth to another. Socialism begins with international ideals but quickly becomes nationalistic, and big-nation collectivists tend to become impatient with the inconvenient needs of small countries.

Hayek cites Bertrand Russell, a socialist who recognized “that the desire to organize social life according to a unitary plan itself springs largely from a desire for power” (164). Beyond that, planners must acquire as much power as possible—“of a magnitude never before known” (164)—to achieve the enormous goals of collectivism.

Planners may protest that they exercise no more authority than that of private boards of directors, but to possess that much strength in one department is akin to all company boards colluding to work in one direction, an enormous mass of power that private industry could never possess.

To wield this enormous power, the planner must work within a moral universe, one vastly different from that of the old-style individualist. The authority of the planner transcends all moral considerations: “The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals” (166). The people, on the other hand, must fashion themselves into pliant workers, be prepared to disregard standard social mores, and act cruelly if needed.

Hayek points to the many qualities instilled in Germans that make them useful for collectivists: hard work, obedience, ruthlessness, and lack of tolerance for outsiders or differing viewpoints. Hayek lists as examples in Germany the shooting of hostages and the old and sick, along with mass deportation of ethnic groups. Ultimately, “the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power”; the leaders of such a society “should be completely unprincipled and literally capable of everything” (169).