 Thank you. I'm delighted each time I speak at the Mises Institute, so I'm delighted this time. What I wanted to do is, although Road to Serfdom is an extremely very popular book, it sold a great many copies. Many people find the book rather abstract, at least in certain parts, so what I want to do is concentrate on what I think is the central argument of the book, which is found in Chapter 5, Planning and Democracy in Chapter 6, Planning and the Rule of Law. Now, in order to understand what I take to be the central argument of the book, I think we have to see what is the situation that Hayek confronted when he was riding Road to Serfdom. He was especially concerned that many intellectuals, many people at the time, some of whom were his colleagues, were saying that the old liberties, the liberties that were characteristic of classical liberalism such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, right to own property, were really either outdated or, if not outdated, were not enough that we needed new liberties in one footnote in the book. Hayek quotes the famous American historian Carl Becker, who was the author of a famous work on Declaration of Independence, who had a book called New Liberties for Old. So what the idea was of the people who said this, who said the old liberties of classical liberalism weren't enough, their argument was something like this. They said, well, suppose you have freedom of speech, you have freedom to own property, you have the right you can live your life as you want, so long as you don't interfere with other people or violate their rights, then what happens if you don't have any money or you're very poor or you suffer from handicaps or you have problems, you won't be able to get anywhere, you'll have all these abstract liberties. This is very good, but you're not going to get anywhere. It's necessary that we have, each person has to have the ability, it has to be given the means by which he can live a good life. And this is Tom was mentioning the contemporary relevance, but this is a very influential idea today. For example, we find in the Nobel Prize-winning economist and Marc Yacen has what he calls the capabilities approach, which is exactly what Haik was talking about. He says that what we should do is each person has to be given the capabilities so that he can lead a good life if he doesn't have, say the person is handicapped, he needs special benefits that this should be provided to him. So Haik is very opposed to this, and he says one of the most dangerous ideas is the substitution of power for liberty, the view that instead of having liberty in the sense that each person is free to lead his own life, what we need instead is that each person should have a certain power to be able to lead a good life. And what is it that Haik finds especially dangerous about this idea? Why is he opposed to it? It seems on the surface, of course, you wouldn't think this if you're thinking from the libertarian background, but it seems on the surface, well, isn't this a good idea? Don't we need to have, if we want to lead a good life, don't we need to have the means to do so? What's wrong with the giving people the means to lead a good life if they don't have one? This is, say, John Rawls in the most influential of all contemporary books on political philosophy. Theory of Justice came out in 1971. He says you have to distinguish between liberty and the worth of liberty. He says what good is liberty if you don't have the means to make use of your liberty. So what Haik says is how the danger is, if you say this, how is it supposed to be, how is it supposed to be realized? How are we supposed to give each person the means to lead a good life? And he says to do this, this will mean planning the economy, that's to say directing the economy in a centralized way will be saying instead of having the free market in which people, each person is leading his own life and people are interacting on the market, will have the government telling people what to do, will have the government say engaged in redistribution so people can have the means to lead a good life. Now the fundamental problem Haik finds in this, he says, if you have some view that the the government is going to have a comprehensive economic plan, this supposes that there's a set of values that the government is realizing. There's a particular set of values the government is trying to achieve because say the government says people with certain kinds of needs should get extra money while this supposes that the government values that. So Haik has the idea, says that it supposes there's some kind of comprehensive arrangement of all the different values and the government is trying to achieve that through its plan. But the problem with this is that in a large society, there isn't agreement among people on particular set of values. People have very different values and they won't agree with the government on the particular set of values it chooses or at least a lot of people won't agree. So then what happens if that's the case that there is a government says here is the set of values we're trying to achieve this but a lot of people don't agree with this. Then he says the government will have to start telling people what to do. The government will have to say this is what you should do. You must do this. We see this today say in the recent, all the recent stories about Obamacare, the government is telling doctors you must discharge such and such amounts for your services. You're telling people you have to purchase certain kinds of health care. You can't purchase the kind you want and we see how this directly affects people's values say church groups that don't believe in contraception have very difficult times in not putting this in their health plan. The government is telling people specifically what to do. And this is how it says inevitable because in an economic planning the government has to operate from some sort of set of values. Now he says in order to preserve liberty we can't we can't operate in this fashion where the government is telling particular people what to do. Now one way kind of a Rothbardian way of dealing with this would just be to say people have certain natural rights. But Hayek in his work like John Stuart Mill, who greatly influenced him, tended to avoid the language of rights. What he said instead was he appealed to what he called the idea of the rule of law. And what he said was given that there's this inevitable disagreement among people on values then the only real way in which people can preserve freedom is that the laws are restricted to state general requirements that don't refer to specific people. They just have set general requirements of what should be done. So given that there are these general requirements each person is then free to live his own life. He just has to know he knows what the general laws are and then he can try to realize his life according to whatever values he wants. And if that's the case then if we have a system like that then people will operate in a free market. We won't have a comprehensive plan but there'll be a market instead. So when Hayek, so what Hayek was doing then he's contrasting this notion of law as general just giving allowing people to do what they want within the framework of general laws and law as command to specific people to do something. So he's saying look if you favor this idea of of liberty as power this very influential idea that says people have to be provided with the means to achieve a good life then you're going this will involve this notion of planning which gives you law as specific commands to people and this is inconsistent with liberty. So then after he got this analysis it wasn't just a theoretical point for him. He wanted to apply it to the situation he the contemporary situation when he wrote 1944 of course the Britain and America were in a war with Nazi Germany. So what he wanted to do was to argue that the Nazi system and also he didn't discuss it as much the communist system was somewhat the had its they both had their origins in this same view that he was criticizing that's to say the classical liberal idea of freedom had to be replaced by this new idea that the government should engage in comprehensive planning and so at the time he was writing the dominant explanation of fascism and Nazism was a Marxist one that said that the Nazi system is the highest final stage of capitalism so Hayek said no this is wrong that socialism is really the Nazi system is really the outcome of socialism and this is what created the greatest controversy in the book especially in in Britain and America that he said that the ideas of the left of the people who were considered progressive thinkers who would view themselves as anti-fascists were really identical with those that had led to fascism and Nazism that those systems were also based on the notion of comprehensive planning and that once you have comprehensive planning this will lead inevitably to denying people liberty because you will be telling people what to do and he's he quotes very He said that he says that there are some of the socialists at one time Socialists had said they're in favor of liberty. They're just want to extend liberty to others, but he's able to quote various Socialist writers as admitting this for example one person he's one of his particular targets in the book was someone who was his Professor at the LSE at the same time Hayek himself was Carl Mannheim who was a Hungarian sociologist who wrote largely in German and then came to the LSE after the rise of the Nazi so Hayek quotes very effectively from him Mannheim statements while we have to The liberty isn't all that important. What's really important is that this we have to have planning This is the key to things and incidentally Mannheim thought that Hayek was in a conspiracy against him and he complained that Hayek and his allies were persecuting him But all Hayek was doing was very effectively quoting him and I guess he didn't like that. There was one other critic who It was also a professor of political science Herbert Finer who wrote a reply to Hayek called Short book called the road to reaction in which he described calls the book Road to Serfdom the reactionaries mine comf Though Hayek wasn't very happy about that. I think he broke off personal relations with fine, but he told me That he what finer was really upset was what he had a quarrel with harrell laski Who was a professor of political science at the LSE who had views? Dimetrically opposed to Hayek. So Hayek said well, he took it. He attacked him. He was really Angry at laski, but he took it out on Hayek instead. So it just it didn't That was but the socialist generally didn't take Hayek's message In very good spirit, but they really didn't have an answer to it because I think Hayek had showed very effectively that it wasn't a matter of what they They They're They thought they were aiming for some of them had thought they were trying to advance freedom Because their policies inevitably involved directing people what to do. They were inconsistent with Freedom and I'll just end up one point. Hayek has I think also a very good point In the book is that he says in this so-called new idea that the socialist had a freedom. They were in effect going back to the Conservatism of the old regime, which was one of Again telling people what to do and distrustful of human freedom And he points out say the parallels between the socialists and the policies of Otto von Bismarck who's not usually viewed as a left-wing progressive in Germany so what Hayek is is really arguing is that they They struck the movement for socialism is so-called new freedom that socialism is going to give is not really Freedom, but is a return to the is a progress toward totalitarianism and a return to the Past societies from which classical liberalism was trying to liberate people. Thank you