Saturday marks the 100th anniversary of Friedrich August Hayek's birth. It's a date we should remember, for Hayek is as responsible as any man for the gains economic freedom has made across the world in recent years.
Though he put in a lifetime of exemplary work, the Austrian economist is best remembered for ''The Road to Serfdom.'' It was a stinging rebuke of socialism and central economic planning, which had come into favor among intellectuals when the book was published in 1944. And it became a handbook for those who have sought to counter the coercive forces of government.
In Hayek's obituary in 1992, the late economist Murray N. Rothbard wrote that ''The Road to Serfdom,'' published ''at a low point in the fortune of human freedom,'' became ''extraordinarily influential in American intellectual and academic life.''
In his 1971 introduction to the German edition of ''The Road to Serfdom,'' economist Milton Friedman noted that ''Hayek's remarkable and vigorous tract was a revelation particularly to the young men and women who had been in the armed forces during the war. Their recent experience had enhanced their appreciation of the value and meaning of individual freedom.''
While many in academia have heeded Hayek's warning that socialism would never work, his cautionary
message has had less effect in the halls of government - in America and elsewhere. Since the 1930s, governments, from the smallest city council to Capitol Hill, have swelled while liberty has yielded to its inroads. Thomas Jefferson lamented that government growth is the ''natural progress of things.''
Through this period, lawmakers embraced central planning. They merrily redistributed the wealth in greater and greater amounts. Taxes grew and government became more intrusive in private lives.
Trends in the late century, though, have proved Hayek right. Political and economic systems across the world have been liberalized. Socialism and communism collapsed with the Berlin Wall.
Even Red China is a little less red today than it was when President Nixon opened relations in the 1970s.
The trend is just as apparent in this country. Congress has been taken over by the GOP, supposedly the party of less government and more freedom. Americans, weary of high taxes, government red tape and unresponsive bureaucrats, are calling for change.
Though the empire Franklin Delano Roosevelt built still rules Washington, talk of freedom and limited government is now more broadly accepted than at any time in the last 70 years.
In fact, the rhetoric of liberty has driven much of the recent public policy debate. We've learned that less is better when it comes to government.
Had lawmakers only heeded Hayek's warnings decades ago we could have been spared today's punishing tax rate, the onerous regulatory regime run by planners and governments' infinite intrusions into private affairs.
It's too bad that his most famous work hasn't been required reading for every elected official in the country. We'd be farther along the road to freedom if they had.
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