It’s book review Monday again. I bought the book The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek. But I actually got the wrong book. I didn’t realize I bought a physical book until I got it in the mail and the book itself is a condensed version. I read it anyway. It’s a small booklet and it contains two main essays. One is the abbreviated version of The Road to Serfdom. The other is the paper titled The Intellectuals and Socialism, which is available online. Anyway, I think this book is great and at the same time it makes me worried.
The Road to Serfdom is an essay about why Socialism doesn’t work. It was published in 1944 and many intellectuals back then believed socialism was the solution and could bring Utopia to humanity. We all know what happened after decades of socialist experiments by National Socialists in Germany, communists in the former USSR, China, etc. These experiments were disastrous, created living hells and literally killed tens of millions of people through Holocaust, the Great Purge, and the Cultural Revolution. Hayek’s predictions were prescient. He said for socialism to succeed, the state has to have total control to make the central planning work and the people would lose their freedom. The state will decide for the people what work to do, how to distribute output of work and exactly who gets what. Individuals’ freedom to choose, their preferences and their capabilities would not and could not be properly incorporated. It will be too complex for the state to plan as the future is uncertain and the collective is more important than the individuals. The state would have absolute control of the people’s lives and power hungry people would eventually take over and cause disasters. Hayek was so right as that’s exactly what happened. Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong were enabled by totalitarian socialist regimes. In other words, these monsters didn’t appear in history by random. Socialism created these monsters. Animal Farm captured this extremely well.
I was born in 1976, the year the Cultural Revolution ended. I feel young people these days don’t understand the danger of socialism. Socialism is a seductive concept due to its ideal of material equality. But in practice, it simply doesn’t work. Capitalism is harsh but people can exercise their freedom by deciding how to earn and spend their money. With socialism, people have to request(beg) the state in order to make free choices. If everyone wants to be a movie star or a CEO, how does the state decide who should get what position? In capitalism, it’s through competition and market forces these decisions are made. In socialism, it’s decided by the most powerful person of the state. Which system would you prefer?
In his The Intellectuals and Socialism essay, Hayek said many intellectuals believe in socialism with good intentions. But intellectuals are the second hand-dealer of the ideas. I found this analogy apt. Basically, he is saying intellectuals such as journalists and academics are experts at communicating their ideas but are not actually in the trench to truly understand the substance of a particular field. Here is my own example to give. I used to own a restaurant. The work was grueling. People were on their feet for hours running around serving food and cleaning. My employees complained they were not being paid enough to do this work. I agreed with that. What they didn’t realize is that I, the owner, was paid even less to run around with them. In fact, I lost money on the business and had to close it down. It’s not that I didn’t want to pay them more. The business model didn’t allow me to do that. But socialists would say I, the capitalist, took advantage of my workers by not paying them a living wage. Socialists are not really interested in understanding the nitty gritty details and knowing the reality of running a small business. Business owners get the lion’s share of the profits because of the enormous risks they take. More often than not, they fail at business. Socialists want a cut of their profits but have no interest in paying for their losses.
The real issue with the talking-head intellectuals is that they have no skin in the game. As a business owner, I take the risk of starting my business. When it fails, I have to swallow all the losses myself and deal with the aftermath so I better know what I am doing. Intellectuals, on the other hand, are not accountable to the ideas they are spreading. They are rewarded by giving speeches and writing books about interesting and innovative ideas. But if they are wrong about these ideas, they get to keep their royalty and speaking fees. They socialize the losses of their bad ideas and privatize the gains. Hayek warned us that intellectuals’ dissenting ideas yesterday can become reality tomorrow and we must be vigilant. They also tend to form an intolerant cult-like existence and monopolize mainstream media and college campuses. This gave me chills as I observed the rampant antisemitism on college campuses since the October 7th attack. Something is very wrong and out of touch on the elite college campuses.
Obviously, the media landscape has changed since Hayek’s days. But the rise of social media and the manipulative feed algorithms are even scarier. That last thing I want to see is to have socialism 2.0 come back in a slightly different form but with the same totalitarian substance. Tens of millions of people were killed from the previous socialist experiments. I wish we learn from those painful mistakes and never fall into the same traps. But these second-hand dealers of ideas are now everywhere on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and TikTok in the form of social media influencers and disinformation bots. It’s truly scary how they are going to shape the political narrative and potentially take us to very very dark places.