The Road to Serfdom
By F.A. Hayek
University of Chicago, 1994 Ed - 274 pages  

I started reading this book awhile back but did not finish reading it because it wasn’t what I started the website for.  I’m only about 50 pages into it and I don’t foresee myself picking it up until I am done reading the historical-oriented books previously mentioned.

F.A. Hayek, the 1974 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, is primarily known for this book.  The basic concept of the book is that governments shouldn’t play too large a role in our society and that greater government involvement is a bad thing. 

This book, along with Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom) and Ann Rynd, is one of the most quoted books by Libertarians. 

At their core belief Libertarians believe that free markets and freedom are inseparable because freedom requires individuals to be free to use their own resources in their own way, and modern society requires cooperation among a large number of people.

This book, published around 1945, was written in a time and age when government spending and planning was increasingly playing a larger role in western societies given the rapid growth in Keynesian economics following the publishing of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money which basically says “spend your way out of economic stagnation to stimulate demand.” 

One needs to remember that Keynes wrote his work during the Great Depression in the 1930’s……..as a result of the success from The New Deal government spending, as a percentage of GDP, grew through the 1970s.  Since that time free marketers and Libertarians have managed to slow the growth in government spending, on average, throughout the western world.  

About the Author: F. A. Hayek is undoubtedly the most eminent of the modern Austrian economists. Student of Friedrich von Wieser, protégé and colleague of Ludwig von Mises, and foremost representative of an outstanding generation of Austrian school theorists, Hayek was more successful than anyone else in spreading Austrian ideas throughout the English-speaking world. "When the definitive history of economic analysis during the 1930s comes to be written," said John Hicks in 1967, "a leading character in the drama (it was quite a drama) will be Professor Hayek. . . . It is hardly remembered that there was a time when the new theories of Hayek were the principal rival of the new theories of Keynes" (Hicks, 1967, p. 203). Unfortunately, Hayek's theory of the business cycle was eventually swept aside by the Keynesian revolution. Ultimately, however, this work was again recognized when Hayek received, along with the Swede Gunnar Myrdal, the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. Hayek was a prolific writer over nearly seven decades; his Collected Works, currently being published by the University of Chicago Press and Routledge, are projected at nineteen volumes.