Most Stanford students are intimately familiar with collectivism. The left-leaning faculty and student body ensure that almost everyone hears collectivist arguments: the Daily routinely carries editorials extolling the virtue of taxation, the ASSU begs students not to request special fee refunds, and all sorts of humanities professors just love to pick readings by Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, and the like. Our cam- pus leftists do not usually argue for abolishing private property, instituting central planning, and creating a totalitarian state. However, in The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich August von Hayek shows that their collectivist ideas lead inevitably to these conclusions. Hayek details how socialism necessitates totalitarianism; how disastrously flawed socialist states must always be; and how National-Socialism was, as many try to forget, a socialist movement. The book’s devastating attack on socialism and its continuing relevance make it an essential read for anyone interested in political economy.

Hayek first ravages socialism by exposing how deeply it relies on per- versions of language to hide its true nature. Consider freedom. To answer de Tocqueville’s criticism that “democracy seeks quality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude,” socialists began to promise “economic freedom” that made all other freedoms meaningful. But, as Hayek points out, freedom is “freedom from the arbitrary power of other men,” not “freedom from necessity”: “Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth.” The argument about central planning, similarly, “is not a dispute on whether we ought to employ foresight and systematic thinking in planning our common affairs. It is a dispute about what is the best way of so doing.” Socialists’ disingenuous use of these charged terms is fundamental: the socialist doctrine would be immensely unpopular if it revealed its essential thuggery.

Hayek then exposes socialism’s fundamental shortcomings. Central planning is incompatible with meaningful democracy, the rule of law, and any state less than totalitarian for the basic reason that control of all economic activity requires incredible powers of coercion. This power is inevitably malignant. Hayek shows that in order to make and enforce decisions, the government must be run by the most amoral and ruthless. Indeed, to create a true socialist state, we must jettison our morals, science, and even the concept of truth.

These consequences make socialism guilty of more than criminal inefficiency, as Hayek reveals in his examination of the deeply socialist roots of Nazism. The mass socialist movement prepared the working classes to take orders from the state, while politicians from all parties allied against classical liberalism. The result was a totalitarian state without a leader. Hitler merely had to take the helm; socialists built the ship. This section is perhaps the weakest part of the book, since Hayek relies on empirical evidence to make broad philosophical claims. Even so, the questions he raises and the points he makes are compelling.

Hayek’s ideas are disturbingly relevant today. People still cite the world’s uneven distribution of wealth and slow gains in tackling poverty and disease as a shortcoming of capitalism. Hayek writes how the explosion of prosperity during the Enlightenment has clouded our perception: “the principles which had made this progress possible came to be regarded more as obstacles to speedier progress.” Leftists gripe when ITSS shoves landlines down students’ throats or when Stanford Dining makes unpopular decisions, but they fail to make the connection to their own ideas. Hayek notes that “if we face a monopolist, we are at his mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable.” The federal government, whose annual budget is quite literally impossible to read, is trying its best to make states glorified counties. Hayek warns that “Least of all shall we preserve democracy or foster its growth if all of the power and most of the important decisions rest with an organization far too big for the common man to survey or comprehend.”

Hayek’s lessons are far too important to be ignored, and they take on even more significance in the current campus political climate. His theoretical critique of socialism is devastating, his concrete examples are illuminating, and his exposition of socialist lies is essential. Hayek’s ghost is more than capable of debating current leftists. Any Stanford student who isn’t satisfied with vague dogma and emotional rhetoric should read this book.