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“Written in exile, while Europe burned, The Road to Serfdom’s simple but powerful thesis was that the encroachment of the state into economic affairs inevitably leads to an encroachment in all spheres. For Hayek and his intellectual descendants — from Friedman (Milton) to Friedman (Thomas) — political freedom and economic freedom were inseparable and mutually reinforcing. And over the last 30 years, the adherents of the Friedman/Hayek School have pointed to two coincidental trends in global political economy to back this grand claim: First, the fall of command-and-control economies and the dismantling of welfare states. The second, the rise of democratic governance. With cunning aplomb, neoliberal writers and historians have packaged these two distinct phenomena together as one single story of progress and development. Look: Freedom’s on the march!
Read the whole thing, because Hayes doesn’t stop thinking when he finds a good book he agrees with, and he doesn’t hesitate to explain how Klein’s book overreaches — a quality too rare at all ends of the political spectrum. The comments are intelligent too.
