Socialism In Friedrich Hayek's The Road To Serfdom

Socialism. It seems like a good idea on paper until it all goes bad. Friedrich Hayek explores this concept in his book The Road to Serfdom. So a little background on Hayek is required to fully understand why he wrote this book and why it is so important in modern day politics. Hayek was a British economist and philosopher living in the World War 2 era. After the war he observed the way England, Germany, and the rest of Europe was handling post war government. Fascism and Communism were growing in popularity after having somewhat worked to maintain the government afloat during the conflict and other countries took notice. Hayek took notice of this and wrote this book as a commentary of the current state and as a warning against the dangers of …show more content…
To simplify everything lets just say that everyone sells fruit. In a capitalist society we see that the fruit shops that have good product tend to do better as they encourage growth and accumulate more wealth. Capitalism tends to favor those who do prosper and have higher quality goods. But in this style of government we also have those shops that aren’t doing well. It could be for a plethora of reasons, maybe they don’t have good product, maybe they’re lazy, maybe they just aren’t popular. All in all, in this system, there are those who do well and those who really don’t. So in an attempt to fix this, Socialism says it has a perfect solution. If you take those fruit shops and regulate them then everyone will do well. They take part of what the successful shops have made and share it with the worse off shops. Socialism comes in and says it has a plan. That is the key word when it comes to Socialism, plans and planning. This is where Hayek starts his book …show more content…
The people have a common goal, stay afloat back home so that they can survive and win the war. But once that common goal is gone then there begins to be some divisions in what this end goal is. You have the people wanting one thing and the people who are in charge of planning everything, or the planners, wanting something completely different. But since the planners are in charge then they get more say. So they go to work setting up a plan and once they decide on one plan, since the planners each have a different goal in mind they will naturally disagree, then they implement it whether the people like it or not. The big problem about this is that in war some freedom is taken away but it is to be expected as everyone is giving something up for the greater good. Once that is gone but the planners still want to take away freedom, then people start to get upset. This is the big tradeoff that Socialism has that Capitalism doesn’t, Socialism sacrifices individual freedoms and liberties for the greater good, so that everyone may benefit. The big question with this is is it worth