Liberating Planet Earth

2 Liberating Planet Earth
out of date. And so it is, for our civilization today is humanistic,
not Christian. This is the heart of mankind’s problems.
The Road to Serfdom
In 1944, an Austrian economist living and teaching in Great
Britain published a remarkable book, 2% Road to S2@om. His
name is F. A. Hayek. As I write these words, he is still alive and
vigorous at age 88, working to complete his three-volume study of
modern socialism, The Fatal Conceit.
The book received little attention in Great Britain, but in that
same year, the Readeri Digest published a condensation of it. He
sailed to the U. S. as an obscure economist; he arrived as a celebrity.
It was The Road to S@dom, more thw any other single publication,
that launched the revival of free market economics in the Englishspeaking
world.
The book’s thesis was simple: it is impossible to preserve freedom
under an economy that is run by the State. If the State can
take your money, or the fi-uits of your labor, then it can leave you
without the means of pursuing your own personal earthly goals.
Democratic socialism is still socialism, he concluded, and voting
rights alone will not preserve freedom if men are not allowed to
keep most of the fruits of their labor, including intellectual labor.
This argument created outrage among democratic socialists
all over the world. But decade by decade, Hayek’s warning has
begun to be taken seriously by a growing minority of scholars. His
predictions about the failure of government economic planning
have steadily come true. By 1980, six years after he had won the
Nobel Prize in economics, he could no longer keep up with the
books, essays, and other publications written about his ideas. At
w age when most men have been retired for a quarter century,
Hayek is still going strong.
Is the West still walking the wrong way down the road to serfdom?
Yes. Even the various national conservative and “libertarian”
revivals have not reversed the overall trend, nor can they.
The reason is simple: on~ throughfmlh inJ&.s Chtit can any so+ dircov,q
o%velop, and nwu”ntain the legal institutwns that makej’+eednn possibk.