September 18, 1944: Friedrich Hayek Publishes "The Road to Serfdom"

September 18, 1944: Friedrich Hayek publishes The Road to Serfdom. It becomes part of conservative political scripture.

Friedrich August von Hayek was born on May 8, 1899 in Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family was ethnically Czech, but the official language of the Empire was German, and "Hayek" was the German spelling of the Czech name "Hájek." (Salma Hayek, a Mexican actress also of partial Lebanese descent, appears not to be a relative of his.)

As a teenager, he fought in the Austrian Army in World War I. He later said that this experience, coupled with his desire to help avoid the mistakes that led to the war, drew him into economics. After earning doctoral degrees in law and political science from the University of Vienna, he taught in the new Republic of Austria, and then at the London School of Economics. He was a conservative, but decidedly not a Fascist: Unwilling to accept Austria's 1938 Anschluss with Nazi Germany, he became a British citizen that year.

Among his students at LSE were David Rockefeller, grandson of oil baron John D. Rockefeller, brother of future Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and himself later the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank; and John Kenneth Galbraith, who went against his teachings and became the leading liberal economist of the 2nd half of the 20th Century.

Hayek was concerned about the general view in Britain's academia that Fascism was a capitalist reaction to socialism. His book The Road to Serfdom arose from those concerns. The title was inspired by the French classical liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on the "road to servitude."

Serfdom was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude that developed in the Early Middle Ages in Europe, and lasted into the Renaissance era. Russia did not end it until 1861. In other words, there are millions of Americans descended from the Russian Empire -- Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians; Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims -- whose ancestors were in bondage only 4 years before America ended the enslavement of black people, and whose families were in bondage for centuries more.

There is a difference between the conditions, showing that serfs, while severely oppressed, were far better off than slaves. Unlike slaves, serfs could not be bought, sold, or traded individually, though they could, depending on the area, be sold together with land. Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land. In return, unlike slaves, they were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence.

Hayek wrote, "I warn of the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning." He further argued that the abandonment of individualism and classical liberalism, with its embrace of the free market, inevitably leads to a loss of freedom, the creation of an oppressive society, the tyranny of a dictator, and the serfdom of the individual. He argued that Fascism, Nazism and state-socialism had common roots in central economic planning and empowering the state over the individual. 

This misguided belief has carried over into 21st Century thinking. While some American right-wingers do identify with the Nazis, the majority of them, desperate to not be identified with the murderers of 11 million civilians, 6 million of them Jews, have argued that the Nazis and the Communists were both left-wing. After all, it's right there in the Nazis' name: "National Socialist." Except the Nazis were no more socialist than East Germany, "the German Democratic Republic," was democratic or a republic.

Hayek argued that Western democracies, including the U.S. and the U.K., had "progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past."

He had it completely backwards: Without the progress of programs like FDR's New Deal, most people never had that kind of freedom. There is no "free market," and there never has been, and there never will be, until all are free to go to market. Conservatives have no desire to make that happen. Liberals have that desire, but, all too often, not the will, for fear of conservatives calling them "socialists" or "Communists" -- or, to use a term of which Hayek would have approved, a term conservatives like to use when they want to appear smarter than liberals, "statists."

After publishing the book, he taught at the University of Chicago, which had published the U.S. edition of the book. He later returned to Europe, teaching in Germany and Austria. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974, but shared it with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. As conservative economics took hold in Britain with Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and in America with Ronald Reagan in 1981, he became an occasional guest on talk shows, seemingly vindicated by history.

He died on March 23, 1992, on the campus of the University of Freiburg in Germany, still convinced that he had to share his Nobel Prize because the Nobel Committee wanted to give it to a leftist economist to balance him out.

Someone once said that books like Hayek's, and the supply-side economics they advocated, were the revenge of Austria, which had been a very conservative empire, on Western Europe and America for beating them in World War I.

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September 18, 1944 was a Monday. There was only one score on this historic day: The Boston Braves beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, 6-5 at Braves Field in Boston. Butch Nieman singled home Phil Masi with the winning run in the bottom of the 10th inning, making a winning pitcher of Nate Andrews, in relief of Johnny Hutchings.

Oddly, the losing pitcher for the Dodgers was Ben Chapman, normally an outfielder. Due to the manpower drain of World War II, Chapman pitched in 11 games that season, and 13 in 1945. He pitched in only 1 in 1946, by which point he was the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies. The following year, he would oppose the Dodgers, and launch the most disgusting bench-jockeying in baseball history, against Jackie Robinson.