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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Right wing fears world on the road to serfdom
The credit crisis was kind to the reputation of John Maynard Keynes, whose scribblings from over 70 years ago inspired practical men of action to fight the recession with uninhibited stimulus. Now that a backlash against expansive government is taking hold, one of Keynes' old antagonists is getting his turn in the sun.
For the past few weeks Friedrich Hayek's 1944 classic The Road to Serfdom has battled Swedish thrillers and vampire novellas atop Amazon's charts. The Viennese apostle of the free market owes much of his success to Glenn Beck, a TV host on Fox News, who believes the book carries an urgent message for today's Americans.
Hayek left Austria for London in 1931, then watched with growing dismay as Britain's policymakers slowly succumbed to the same collectivist habits and distaste for the free market that he believed had set Germany on the road to National Socialism.
Beck thinks that America is on the same path. "We have a government car company, government banks, we're talking about government oil companies, government is hiring all the workers. We are there, gang!"
What would Hayek have made of his new fans? The book's popular success surprised him and his publisher the first time around, but he would probably have taken the latest surge of sales in his stride. The free market, after all, satisfies demands that no planner could anticipate.
But the "enthusiastic welcome" his book earned in America disquieted him almost as much as the savage attacks it also provoked. In Britain, labouring under wartime rationing, planning was a practical problem. In America socialism was still a "fresh" idea -- a cherished dream for some; a repellent spectre for others. That made it hard for Americans to talk about it calmly, he wrote. He found his critics and fans a bit hysterical.
Hayek would probably have shared Beck's concerns about government banks and car companies. But even if he supported some of right-wing America's attacks on "liberals," he would certainly have objected to its choice of words.
As he wrote, "I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium."
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 28, 2010 A12
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