The Road to Serfdom

by Friedrich A. Hayek

As he succinctly put it, “socialism can be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.”104 Even if it were to begin as a “liberal socialist” experiment (none of the real-world cases have ever done so, one might add), full-scale planning requires that the planning authorities take over all production decisions; to be able to make any decisions at all, they would need to exercise more and more political control. If one tries to create a truly planned society, one will not be able to separate out control of the economy from political control. This was Hayek’s logical argument against planning, one that he had succinctly articulated in 1939 in “Freedom and the Economic System.”