Reddit reviews The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2)

We found 32 Reddit comments about The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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32 Reddit comments about The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2):

u/haroldp · 14 pointsr/Libertarian

> The crisis in VZ is a product of lack of diversification and an over reliance on the oil economy to fund social programs.

This is simply nonsense. The crisis in VZ is a product of:

Price and currency controls
Corruption and mismanagement in nationalized industries

> how does participation [this] make VZ an example of socialism?

It makes it a perfect example of everything Hayek predicted would result from central/collectivist economies. That the whole thing devolves into starvation and oppression is no head-scratcher. It's right on script.

u/John_Yossarain · 12 pointsr/JordanPeterson

u/emi_online · 10 pointsr/neoliberal

Read Papa Hayek's best work. It will completely change you mind.

u/Alphado · 6 pointsr/getdisciplined

I recommend the book Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (4 Volume Set) by Ludwig von Mises of the Austrian School of Economics. Austrian Economists debunk many Keynesian fallacies such as the Broken Window fallacy.

Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell of the Chicago School.

The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) by F. A. Hayek (he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974)

The Ludwig von Mises Institute has many excellent articles, free books and lectures about economics and society. Watch Mises Media on youtube.

And The Peter Schiff Show about economic matters on youtube.

u/DrunkHacker · 3 pointsr/Libertarian

Three books I'd suggest, in the order I'd read them:

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

The Road to Serfdom by FA Hayek

Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick

Outside the libertarian canon, Rousseau's On the Social Contract and Rawls' A Theory of Justice should be on everyone's reading list. Rawls and Nozick are probably the two most influential political philosophers of the late 20th century and understanding their arguments about the justification of property rights and the original position are the ABCs of modern political debate.

u/[deleted] · 3 pointsr/economy

Hayek would hate this to no end, he thought the Reader's Digest cartoon version was bad enough as it is.

If you are 'libertarian' enough to care about what he actually said, get the definitive edition which includes lots of other valuable documents appended (including the letters where he deplores the devalued popularizations of his work) - The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition

u/PatrickKelly2012 · 3 pointsr/Libertarian

Meltdown and Nullification by Tom Woods.

Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek

u/Alfred_Marshall · 3 pointsr/CapitalismVSocialism

The Fourth Revolution, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge.

In Defense of Global Capitalism, by Johan Norberg.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon.

The Road to Serfdom by F A Hayek.

Asquith, by Roy Jenkins.

This is a weird one, but Woodrow Wilson by John Milton Cooper Jr. This influenced me a lot, but it obviously won't have the same effect on everyone.

u/mattymillhouse · 3 pointsr/suggestmeabook

Good list.

I might add:

Rousseau -- Social Contract
You can also add in Rousseau's Discourses

Machiavelli -- The Prince

Aristotle -- Politics

Locke -- Two Treatises of Government

Hayek -- The Road to Serfdom

u/Religious_Redditor · 3 pointsr/ConservativeLounge

I started to make one a while back but didn't get too far. There are just too many great books to choose from.

Classics 1950-1970

What is Conservatism?

The Conservative Mind

The Road to Serfdom

The Constitution of Liberty

Ideas Have Consequences

The Quest for Community

Economics in One Lesson

Capitalism and Freedom

In Defense of Freedom

Age of Reagan 1970-1990

The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945

Modern Times

Knowledge and Decisions

A Conflict of Visions

Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Roots Of American Order

Modern Must Reads 1990-Today

The Clash of Civilizations

A History of the American People

The Vision of the Annointed

Intellectuals and Society

Illiberal Reformers

Restoring the Lost Constitution

How To Be A Conservative

u/conn2005 · 2 pointsr/PoliticalDiscussion

You should read the Road to Serfdom, central planning has been tried and done.

Readers Digest Version Here

Full copy for purchase at Amazon

u/KissYourButtGoodbye · 2 pointsr/Libertarian

>I support government health care for all
I dislike excessive government intrusion

Does not compute. How, exactly, are you defining "excessive"? Because, at least to me, government controlling the massive healthcare sector of the economy is pretty "excessive".

But in general, the books these guys have recommended are great starting points. I don't know if Hayek's Road to Serfdom has been mentioned. It's not quite a definitive libertarian work (at least from what I've been told), but it did get me started towards my understanding of libertarianism, so it might be worth reading.

u/pupupeepee · 2 pointsr/chicago

The app works fine in Firefox v11.0 on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS so my email address is probably not the issue, though I'm kind of surprised that this book which is on my wishlist isn't available at any CPL branch. You know what, I've got Opera 9.80 (read the wrong version number), which may not support the HTML5 EventSource object (v10 definitely does). Looks like this is the error that's getting thrown when I click "submit" in Opera.

u/tgjj123 · 1 pointr/Libertarian

u/DammitDan · 1 pointr/australia

There have been entire books written on why everything you said is the opposite of what actually happens in the real world. It's great that you want to help people. But sometimes just giving people what they want doesn't actually help anyone.

u/Mourningblade · 1 pointr/AskReddit

I'm seeing a lot of criticism of communism based on the "it's never worked" or "you're forgetting the human factor" but I'm not seeing any Hayekian criticsm. So let me kick in.

First off, what I'll be saying comes from The Road to Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek. The book is intended to be a short, highly condensed version of a much larger argument. It succeeds at that, but is still over 200 pages. You can get an inkling of how little I'll be getting into here.

Second, none of these problems are a silver bullet in the heart of communism. They are core problems with the communist system of government, but rational people absolutely can look at these problems and say "sure, but it's worth it."

So having said that.

One basic problem with any system of government where you are determining outcomes is that we do not all agree on what that outcome should be. Even if we all agreed on the big stuff (abortion, murder, proper liability of controlling stock owners, etc), we would and do disagree on the small stuff - like where a park should be, or what size the swingset should be.

When you solve these issues by voting, you succeed in making the plurality mostly happy, but you fail to make others happy. Okay, so some people will be disappointed no matter what system you use - that's okay. The trouble is that when your decisions are made by a subset of the population (ie you're using representatives) then what decision your representative will make becomes far more important than whether or not they will do the right thing.

This is true for any representative system, but with systems where outcomes are determined by the state, much more will be governed by this problem. This problem is the essence of politics.

Systems that are not centrally organized have other problems, but they do not have this problem. As the US has moved toward centrally organizing more and more things, we have more and more of this problem.

Next problem: when you guarantee income levels, you start having a very bad set of problems.

If you guarantee the income levels for all workers, you cannot let workers choose what job they will take. Consider a very skilled man who could be a lawyer, doctor, or historian. Under a price system, he would consider which he liked doing and factor in how much he could expect to make in the jobs he would like doing. He would then make his choice. If there were too many lawyers, the expected salary would go down and he could take that into account as well.

If his employment were guaranteed, there would be no way to deal with a glut of attorneys. If everyone was paid the same, you would simply have to say "you cannot be an attorney. We have too many attorneys." Even if he loved being a lawyer and fighting for the little guy - and was willing to work for little pay - because you guarantee income he could not do that.

If you guarantee the income level only for some workers, then those positions become valuable out of proportion to their income. In fact, you create a superclass of people who's employment is guaranteed and compensation is guaranteed - we have seen this in every system that guarantees employment.

If you do not guarantee employment or compensation, then you either have a free market system, or you have to force people to work.

The interesting thing about using money instead of needs to compensate people is this: with money, people choose which of their needs are most important to them. When you give a man $100, you pay for the greatest of his needs. When you take $100 away from him, you take from the least of his needs.

There's more, but I don't feel the need to flood. I'm also a bit tired - my apologies for any bad writing.

u/EauRougeFlatOut · 1 pointr/energy

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226320553/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_ZEjSCbADPDBJ5

Intentions are nice but Bernie’s policies are dangerous

u/Scrybblyr · 1 pointr/trump

Thoughts:

In Jordan Sekulow's new book, "The Next Red Wave," he provides some practical answers to that question. Mostly in the final two chapters of the book. Voting is our sacred duty, and we simply must make sure Trump gets elected again, and also take control of the House of Representatives next year. But Jordan says voting is just the beginning. We need to be engaged with what is happening in our government. We need to BE what is happening in our government. We need to not just be whining about what has been done by whatever school board, city council, or county board, we need to be IN those groups, deciding what is done. We need a grassroots surge of Americans who refuse to let socialists erode our freedoms, and who will get into positions to stop them. Sometimes awful policy passes simply because no one was there to challenge it.

Because if the radicals running against Trump get elected, the loss of our 401k's will be the least of our worries.

u/jub-jub-bird · 1 pointr/Conservative

> In the twenties, the first writers and thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and the right.

This guy apparently forgot that the liberal party was founded in 1859 and there were a hell of a lot of people who called themselves liberals long before 1920 and who continue to be referred to as liberals today.

https://www.amazon.com/Treatises-Government-Everyman-John-Locke/dp/0460873563

https://www.amazon.com/Liberty-AmazonClassics-John-Stuart-Mill-ebook/dp/B074BYLSGG/

https://www.amazon.com/Law-Other-Essays-Annotated-ebook/dp/B00BMV0Y9I/

Seigal sounds interesting but I stand with Hayek on this one.

https://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Documents-Definitive-Collected/dp/0226320553

u/zangerinus · 1 pointr/Libertarian

https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/reading

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/5y49nz/as_a_hs_sophomore_i_would_like_to_venture_into/den54ll/

https://www.amazon.com/Law-Legislation-Liberty-statement-principles/dp/0415522293/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Documents-Definitive-Collected/dp/0226320553/ref=la_B000AQ6W60_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1503059047&amp;sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-Utopia-Robert-Nozick/dp/0465051006/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1503059077&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=nozick

https://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-Political-Philosophy-Will-Kymlicka/dp/0198782748/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1503059099&amp;sr=1-4&amp;keywords=contemporary+political

https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0199656495/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1503059282&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=new+history+of+philosophy

http://econlog.econlib.org/

http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/

u/Frexican · 1 pointr/pics

Don't waste your time, sombody's already came up with a rebutal about how socialism leads to serfdom.

u/nixfu · 1 pointr/Libertarian

If your a 'recovering republican' I recommend this book:
What it means to be a Libertarian It really explains the core of what libertarianism is from the perspective of a former mainstream republican.

Then start reading some classical Libertarian works like:
The Road To Surfdom by FA Hayek, where you will be amazed to learn that Big Corporations are the best friend the far left socialists ever had and know that they are full of crap whenever they say bad things about big business. I really like Hayek's writings quite a bit. Hayek is my favourite libertarian economist. The things he predicted right after world war 2 have happened amazingly like his predictions. This book is so popular its even been made into a comic book version.

/And don't forget all the links on the right hand side of this reddit. Lots of good stuff in those links.

u/ribagi · 1 pointr/Anarcho_Capitalism

Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, by Mises

Human Actiom, by Mises

The Theory of Money and Credit, by Mises

The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, by Mises

The Road to Serfdom, by F.A Hayek

The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, by F.A Hayek

Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt

‪No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, by Lysander Spooner

If anything, you should read this because it is on topic with transportation.

u/selfoner · 1 pointr/Anarcho_Capitalism

It's great to know that you are soaking in all that great material at such a young age! You are certainly way ahead of the curve.

For a fairly complete understanding of Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism I recommend reading these in the following order:

Society Without a State - an essay on the basic position that the state is unnecessary/undesirable.
For a New Liberty [PDF] - a book on the fundamentals of libertarianism, and anarcho-capitalism
The Ethics of Liberty [PDF] - a more philosophical and in depth analysis of how best to apply the non-aggression principle under various circumstances.

I also recommend the following books in no particular order:
An Agorist Primer [PDF] by Edward Konkin III
Practical Anarchy by Stefan Molyneux
The Road to Serfdom [Amazon, can't find a free version, probably available at a local library] - by F. A. Hayek - not an anarcho-capitalist, but an important work on sociology/economics by one of the original Austrian economists.
Anarchy, State and Utopia [link to download PDF] by Robert Nozick - Nozick is a minarchist, but I think that understanding his philosophy is a must for any libertarian, "anarcho" or not.

If you are interested in free audiobooks, you will find 3 great ones here:

http://freekeene.com/about/books/

And Stefan Molyneux turns most of his books into free audiobook downloads as well.

http://www.freedomainradio.com/FreeBooks.aspx

And if all that isn't enough for you, here is a list by Lew Rockwell:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/books/anarcho-capitalism2.html

u/Unwanted_Commentary · 1 pointr/news

> A completely free market would turn into a kind of serfdom

Okay, time for required reading:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Road-Serfdom-Documents-The-Definitive/dp/0226320553

Socialism is the cause of serfdom. Serfs have no economic freedom. They trade the option of having personal property for the protection offered by the lord. "Give up all your freedom so that you can have security." Sound familiar?

Trade unions didn't "create the middle class." The industrial revolution, a product of capitalism, created the middle class. Read history.

Find me one example of a republican talking down to someone because they have a "lesser" job. The republican party has focused on ensuring that college graduates have jobs waiting for them.

The fact that your parents are conservative and you are liberal is not evidence that conservatives are "retards" but that your parents are for failing to raise you.

u/water4free · 1 pointr/IAmA

Not at all. There's an epidemic of economic ignorance which is clearly apparent when watching Maher or Oliver while witnessing a resurgence of socialism as a plausible solution. "If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists." -F.A. Hayek

Here's an excellent place to start learning, if anyone is interested in a very readable, logical and engaging lesson in basic economics..

Happy to consider another source on economics if you have any to offer.

u/empleadoEstatalBot · 1 pointr/vzla

> For the next two years, I delved into the literature on Venezuela with renewed interest. Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold’s book, A Dragon in the Tropics, it turned out, was particularly well-researched and compelling. Since I could no longer get my writing published in any of the outlets for which I’d previously written, I redirected my energies into making a new film entitled In the Shadow of the Revolution with the help of a Venezuelan filmmaker and friend, Arturo Albarrán, and I wrote my political memoir for an adventurous anarchist publisher. But what preoccupied me more and more were the larger questions of socialism versus capitalism, and the meaning of liberalism.
>
> I’d visited Cuba twice—in 1994 and again in 2010—and now, with my experience of Venezuela, I felt I’d seen the best socialism could offer. Not only was that offering pathetically meagre, but it had been disastrously destructive. It became increasingly clear to me that nothing that went under that rubric functioned nearly as well on any level as the system under which I had been fortunate enough to live in the US. Why then, did so many decent people, whose ethics and intelligence and good intentions I greatly respected, continue to insist that the capitalist system needed to be eliminated and replaced with what had historically proven to be the inferior system of socialism?
>
> The strongest argument against state control of the means of production and distribution is that it simply didn’t—and doesn’t—work. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding—and in this case, there was no pudding at all. In my own lifetime, I’ve seen socialism fail in China, fail in the Soviet Union, fail in Eastern Europe, fail on the island of Cuba, and fail in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. And now the world is watching it fail in Venezuela, where it burned through billions of petro-dollars of financing, only to leave the nation worse off than it was before. And still people like me had insisted on this supposed alternative to capitalism, stubbornly refusing to recognize that it is based on a faulty premise and a false epistemology.
>
> As long ago as the early 1940s, F.A. Hayek had identified the impossibility of centralized social planning and its catastrophic consequences in his classic The Road to Serfdom. Hayek’s writings convinced the Hungarian economist, János Kornai, to dedicate an entire volume entitled The Socialist System to demonstrating the validity of his claims. The “synoptic delusion”—the belief that any small group of people could hold and manage all the information spread out over millions of actors in a market economy—Kornai argued, leads the nomenklatura to make disastrous decisions that disrupt production and distribution. Attempts to “correct” these errors only exacerbate the problems for the same reasons, leading to a whole series of disasters that result, at last, in a completely dysfunctional economy, and then gulags, torture chambers, and mass executions as the nomenklatura hunt for “saboteurs” and scapegoats.
>
> The synoptic delusion—compounded by immense waste, runaway corruption, and populist authoritarianism—is what led to the mayhem engulfing Venezuela today, just as it explains why socialism is no longer a viable ideology to anyone but the kind of true believer I used to be. For such people, utopian ideologies might bring happiness into their own lives, and even into the lives of those around them who also delight in their dreams and fantasies. But when they gain control over nations and peoples, their harmless dreams become the nightmares of multitudes.
>
> Capitalism, meanwhile, has dramatically raised the standard of living wherever it has been allowed to arise over the past two centuries. It is not, however, anything like a perfect or flawless system. Globalization has left many behind, even if their lives are far better than those of their ancestors just two hundred years ago, and vast wealth creation has produced vast inequalities which have, in turn, bred resentment. Here in California, the city of Los Angeles, “with a population of four million, has 53,000 homeless.” Foreign policy misadventures and the economic crash of 2008 opened the door to demagogues of the Left and the Right eager to exploit people’s hopes and fears so that they could offer themselves as the solution their troubled nations sought to the dystopian woe into which liberal societies had fallen. In his fascinating recent jeremiad Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen itemizes liberal democracy’s many shortcomings and, whether or not one accepts his stark prognosis, his criticisms merit careful thought and attention.
>
> Nevertheless, markets do work for the majority, and so does liberal democracy, as dysfunctional as it often is. That is because capitalism provides the space for ingenuity and innovation, while liberal democracy provides room for free inquiry and self-correction. Progress and reform can seem maddeningly sluggish under such circumstances, particularly when attempting to redress grave injustice or to meet slow-moving existential threats like climate change. But I have learned to be wary of those who insist that the perfect must be the enemy of the good, and who appeal to our impatience with extravagant promises of utopia. If, as Deneen contends, liberalism has become a victim of its own success, it should be noted that socialism has no successes to which it can fall victim. Liberalism’s foundations may be capable of being shored up, but socialism is built on sand, and from sand. Failures, most sensible people realize, should be abandoned.
>
> That is probably why Karl Popper advocated cautious, piecemeal reform of markets and societies because, like any other experiment, one can only accurately isolate problems and make corrections by changing one variable at a time. As Popper observed in his essay “Utopia and Violence”:
>
> > The appeal of Utopianism arises from the failure to realize that we cannot make heaven on earth. What I believe we can do instead is to make life a little less terrible and a little less unjust in each generation. A good deal can be achieved in this way. Much has been achieved in the last hundred years. More could be achieved by our own generation. There are many pressing problems which we might solve, at least partially, such as helping the weak and the sick, and those who suffer under oppression and injustice; stamping out unemployment; equalizing opportunities; and preventing international crime, such as blackmail and war instigated by men like gods, by omnipotent and omniscient leaders. All this we might achieve if only we could give up dreaming about distant ideals and fighting over our Utopian blueprints for a new world and a new man.
>
> Losing faith in a belief system that once gave my life meaning was extremely painful. But the experience also reawakened my dormant intellectual curiosity and allowed me to think about the world anew, unencumbered by the circumscriptions of doctrine. I have met new people, read new writers and thinkers, and explored new ideas I had previously taken care to avoid. After reading an interview I had given to one of my publishers a year ago, I was forwarded an email by the poet David Chorlton. What I’d said in that interview, he wrote, “goes beyond our current disease of taking sides and inflexible non-thinking. I’m reading Havel speeches again, all in the light of the collective failure to live up to the post-communist opportunities. We’re suffering from a lack of objectivity—is that because everyone wants an identity more than a solution to problems?”
>
> Clifton Ross writes occasionally for Caracas Chronicles, sporadically blogs at his website, [www.cliftonross.com](http://www.cliftonross.com/) and sometimes even tweets @Clifross
>
> Note:
>
> 1 Considerable confusion surrounds the definitions of “socialism” and “capitalism.” Here, I am using “socialism” to mean a system in which the state destroys the market and takes control of all capital, as well as the production and distribution of goods and services. I am using “capitalism” here to refer to a market economy in which the state, as a disinterested party, or a “referee,” sets guidelines for markets but allows private actors to own and use capital to produce and distribute goods and services.

- - - - -
        
        > (continues in next comment)

u/youreprobablyignoran · 0 pointsr/politics

>This is what conservatives mean when they talk about "government nanny state overreach".

This is called a straw-man.

Nanny State

>Basically, they wish to hand over the power that used to reside in the hands of the people through their elected representatives to the private sector where they have NO voice.

This shows a fundamental lack of understanding in political philosophy and economics.

Milton Friedman

F. A. Hayek

>It's downright undemocratic.

This is downright wrong. Democracy

u/tclipse · 0 pointsr/politics

Chile's transition failed due to militarist takeover- capitalism wasn't implemented correctly. Iraq can't really be included either as there was tampering from outside governments (ours). Try this one: The Road To Serfdom, F.A. Hayek

This is also a great read: Calculation and Coordination, Peter Boettke

u/stressssss · -1 pointsr/AskReddit

I don't have time to explain everything that makes me feel ill about your statement.

I'd suggest reading that book along with this: http://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Documents-Definitive-Collected/dp/0226320553

Even if you disagree and truly are statist at heart it's good to understand the opposite perspective.

u/bluepious · -1 pointsr/CapitalismFacts

I have in these books. Please excuse the fact that I wrote them under a few pseudonyms :

https://www.amazon.com/Free-Choose-Statement-Milton-Friedman/dp/0156334607

https://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Freedom-Anniversary-Milton-Friedman/dp/0226264211

https://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Documents-Definitive-Collected/dp/0226320553

https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465060730

https://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Democratic-Capitalism-Michael-Novak/dp/0819178233

https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Nations-Annotated-Adam-Smith/dp/1611040485

I don't yet have a newsletter but as soon as I do I will let you subscribe to it.

u/rammingparu3 · -5 pointsr/DebateFascism

This

This

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This