 OK, this is the session on the 70th anniversary of the road to serfdom. And I thought that we, of all people, should have something to say about it, arguably the most famous book in Austrian economics in the 20th century. And so I don't know if everyone knows that when our friend Yuri, over here, Yuri Maltsef and Tom Woods were on the Glenn Beck television show a couple of years ago talking about the road to serfdom, the next day the road to serfdom went the number one in sales on amazon.com, which is pretty remarkable. And I had mixed feelings about that because when my book The Real Lincoln came out, I was on the Rush Limbaugh show after that. Walter Williams' guest hosted it. And my book went the number two in sales on Amazon. But it never made it the number one. I sat in front of that computer for about 36 hours waiting for the two to turn to a one. Because I had the printouts. I had the printout of Amazon with my book, number two in sales, but never happened. So anyway, so I guess I can get my revenge, if I say bad things about the road to serfdom. So I'm just going to make a few comments. I asked the speakers to say something about the applicability or relevance of the road to serfdom today, even if you think it's not relevant today. David Gordon might take that tag. I don't know. And so that's what I plan to do, nothing too heavy duty. But so I wrote down some notes about things that I think should be especially useful in teaching and teaching students or anybody about some of the lessons of the road to serfdom. And we each have about 17 minutes. And so I wrote down a few of my favorite quotes from the road to serfdom. In chapter three of the chapter on individualism and collectivism, Hayek wrote this, the economic planning, which is the prime instrument of socialist reform, can be used for many other purposes. We must centrally direct economic activity if we want to make the distribution of income conform to current ideas of social justice, for example. Planning, therefore, is wanted by all those who demand that production for use be substituted for production for profit. So in other words, environmentalism, welfare state, socialized health care, the public schools, the government roads, it's all socialism. And so the lessons of the critiques of socialism really should apply to all of that because it really is the argument for government intervention in all these areas really is production for use, not for profit, which of course is probably the dumbest idea ever to come along. It seems to be the mantra of the current pope, though, however, he keeps repeating the idea that successful business people are only in it for themselves. That somehow you can make money by only benefiting yourself and not benefiting your customers. But that's what he says and that's wrong. Chapter four is called the inevitability of planning. And here's where Hayek in the road to serfdom comes back over and over again to his knowledge problem even before it was known as the knowledge problem. And he says this, the more complicated the whole, in terms of society, whole society, the more dependent we become on that division of knowledge between individuals whose separate efforts are coordinated by the impersonal mechanism for transmitting the relevant information known by us as the price system. So the more complex, the more complicated society becomes, the more globalization there is, the more important it is to rely on the market. And that's a theme all throughout Hayek's writing, not just the road to serfdom. And that was always one of the key arguments that was made in debates over socialism before the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late 80s, early 90s. On the chapter on planning and democracy, chapter five, Hayek said this, it would be impossible for any mind, this is the knowledge problem again, to comprehend the infinite variety of different needs of different people which compete for the available resources and to attach a definite weight to each. Even if a man takes a warm interest in the welfare of every human being, he knows, the ends about which he can be concerned with will always only be an infinitesimal fraction of the needs of all men. And that's sort of classic Hayekian statement that no human mind could possibly comprehend the needs of all the people. Therefore, the phrases like the general interest, the public interest are just meaningless, social justice meaningless, because even if you are well-meaning, he said, even if you're an angel, it's impossible to process all that information. No human being or group of human beings possibly could do it. And that's another sort of really a restatement of his knowledge problem. And then he goes on the same chapter. He says this, planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and as such essential planning on a large scale is to be possible. That's why I put this handout around the room that because in the same chapter, he talks about how whenever governments engage in interventionism and one interventionism sort of interventionism fails, they resort to a different kind of intervention to rescue themselves, that fails and it goes on and on. And so they can't, but they will never admit failure. And no matter how much they screw up the healthcare system, for example, they're never gonna admit that socialized healthcare is a bad idea. And so what they have to do is to crush all kinds of dissent on the part of people who have realized that, hey, this is not working. And so then they turn to a dictator of some kind. And when I reread that, it reminded me of all the czars that we have in America today. So I went online and did a little search in the source of all human knowledge, Wikipedia. And it did have a list of these are actual government jobs of people who are given jobs as czars, which means they're unaccountable, even more unaccountable to voters than anybody else. Of course, not even Congress is accountable to voters because they've gerrymandered all themselves in. And so they can pretty much do whatever they want, but these guys, they can really do whatever they want. And no one even, no one knows any of them. Did you know we had an Asian carpazar in the United States, for example? And so anyway, that is what popped into my mind when I reread Hayek's statement about turning to some sort of economic dictator. And these are all areas in which the government has attempted to impose economic dictatorship of some kind that has totally, it issues regulations and orders that are even more detached from public scrutiny than government normally is. Now on the chapter of who and whom, this is something that I always make it a point to tell my students whether we're talking about the road to serfdom or not. He says this, the power which a multiple millionaire in Hayek's days, there were only multiple millionaires. There weren't billionaires I guess. And the power which a multiple millionaire who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work. And the way I tell it to my students is usually the lowliest bureaucrat at the Department of Motor Vehicles has a more of a negative effect on your life than the richest man in the world, Bill Gates ever could. All Bill Gates can do is try to persuade you to buy his products. And you can always tell Bill Gates, go play in the traffic Bill Gates. I'm using, I'm an Apple computer user. You can't say that to the DMV bureaucrat. They'll call the state cop that's lurking in the background to do something. Maybe Taze or you are taking out back and beat you up or something. That's police nowadays seem to be doing a lot of that. But it is true, the lowliest bureaucrat in local government has a bigger effect on your life than the richest people in the world do as far as coercion goes. And then he says this, he says, as the coercive part, this is another one of my favorites from Hayek, as the coercive power of the state will alone decide, under socialism or planning, so will alone decide who is to have what the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power. So under a planned society or some version of socialism, the only power worth having is political power. And this was long before the phrase rent seeking was invented, I think in the 1970s, that phraseology came into the economics lexicon. But this is basically what he was talking about, I think here, because it is a very old idea, the idea of rent seeking. So once a society becomes sufficiently politicized, the only power worth having will be political power. And the opportunity cost of that is that people will invest less in becoming producers and will invest more in becoming political manipulators. Fewer students will go to engineering and business school, more go to law school, or the Kennedy School of Government, as they call it, places like that to become rent seekers. On the chapter, most people who have read the word, I wrote a serfdom, their favorite chapter seems to be chapter 10, why the worst get on top, why under a planned, government planned society, the worst human beings tend to rise up to the top. My old friend, Jim Bennett, years ago, maybe 25 years ago, told me that he called this his septic tank theory of government. He said, in government, the big chunks always rise to the top. That was in the course of a context of us talking about the road to serfdom at the time, in this chapter on the road to serfdom. But one of the things that Hayek says here is the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism. So again, you don't have to be talking about Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia, tending toward totalitarianism is what he said here. And it certainly does seem true, doesn't it, that the people you see in government are the people at the top, the people with the least qualms about brutalizing or plundering their fellow citizens. In the chapter on the end of truth, chapter 11, all of this sounds so familiar to someone like myself who's been in academe so long. Myths are essential to creating a government plan society. The Lincoln myth, for example. Since I mentioned that, my old friend Clyde Wilson, one of my favorite Clyde quotes. Of all the years I've been in academe, Clyde is one of the wisest old men that I've met in academe. And I've known Nobel Prize winners and I've known David Gordon for a long time. But one of Clyde's things that he said, the image of America has changed. It once was George Washington on a white horse and it has become a corporate lobbyist in an armchair. And he speaks about the Lincoln Memorial. Yes, the image of America. So myths are essential. Hayek said, critics must be silenced. Walter Block here, Walter is ill, he's not here. Intolerance is encouraged. And of course, hate speech laws, intolerance is encouraged. And of course, one of the things I've been observing on the college campuses, and many of you have too in the past 20, 25 years, is many students have been taught now that they're not taught the reasons for free speech. They're not taught the case for free speech. But they are taught why it is that it's legitimate to crack down on free speech. For example, one theory that is very popular among the so-called cultural Marxists who now dominate the American university systems is that speech is a tool in which the oppressors used to oppress the oppressed classes so that it is actually meritorious to censor and character assassinate the oppressors, which are basically, as far as I can tell, white heterosexual males. And the oppressed is everybody else. And so when you see these things on college campuses of a conservative speaker shows up and they scream and yell and they have to call the police and they cancel the lecture or they maliciously libel a good man like Walter Block or something like that. They think they're doing the right thing. The meritorious thing because the ends justify the means. And students have been taught that. And I've talked to quite a few of them over the years and they've been indoctrinated into this idea there. In the same chapter, and this should sound familiar too, Hayek wrote this. He said, the whole apparatus for spreading knowledge, he's talking about a totalitarian society and ask yourself if this fits your society. So the schools and the press, radio and motion picture will be used exclusively to spread those views which whether true or false will strengthen the belief and the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority. And all information that might cause doubt or hesitation will be withheld. There is no field where the systematic control of information will not be practiced and uniformity of views not enforced. Well, I think everybody could recognize a lot of that happening. Although at the same time, we've got the internet on our side and we've got the Mises Institute, which is why so many people hate us so much. And so one thing everybody should understand is that if you're hated by the right people, you know you're doing the right thing. And so every time I run into somebody that says, oh boy, that John Stuart or somebody really that really doesn't like what you're doing, does he? Well, that's good. I'd really be worried if they said, oh, the New York Times loves you. So when we were attacked by the New York Times, that's a big gold star for us if you're doing that. And finally, the final comment I would make is that Chapter 13, Hayek, this is a very quaint. It's called The Totalitarians in our midst. And you read this and you get the impression that Hayek was seeing there writing this thinking, well, I need to warn people that this is England. He's writing this in Cambridge, England, and thinking, well, the Totalitarians aren't all in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia. We've got some right here. And so apparently in his day he had to inform people that there were Totalitarians in our midst. But of course in American society today, they're everywhere. I mean, you trip over them, you just go to any college campus and as far as that goes, listen to the news media at night. And so they were polluted with Totalitarian minded people all around. So this is a good warning, I guess, to Totalitarians in our midst. And it's not anything too exotic. They seem to be pretty much everywhere in our day also. And maybe my time is about up. I'll end with maybe one little story. I might have told this some other year at this course, but I met Hayek years ago. I have a picture of me and Hayek in my office. And he told a story. He was at a Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Cambridge, England where he wrote The Road to Serfdom. And he claims to have written it while sitting on the roof of a building in Cambridge, where he and Keynes took Terrans watching out for the German Luftwaffe to bombing Cambridge. And so anyway, he told this story that he said that there's a man, I understand there's a man here tonight. This is a room with 700 people in it at Cambridge University. I understand there's a man here tonight who really should have been the co-author to The Road to Serfdom. And I have not seen him since 1945. And I understand he's here. Where is he? And this old white-haired old gentleman stands up with his cane. And the women were crying. And some of the men were crying. And these were all Hayek fans, Mont Pelerin Society. And a huge applause. And the two old men got embraced and hadn't seen each other in all those years. The next day, Jim Bennett, my septic tank theory, a government friend, we're at a pub. And the old man is there, the old gray-haired old man. And we walked up to him and said, well, that's quite a story. You should be the co-author of The Road to Serfdom. And he said, oh, I don't know what Hayek is talking about. I see him all the time. And we just went to the theater last month with Hayek, so he made the whole thing up, in other words. He made the whole thing up. And when he gave a talk at George Mason when I was there, the first thing he said is, I'm the only human being that I know of who has recovered from senility. And I think quitting smoking did it. It returned oxygen to my brain. So that's one of the things I remember personally about Hayek.