F.A. Hayek starts off his writing about the road to serfdom by saying that a single group of people with one voice can’t achieve more than the same group of people acting individually. This is false in every aspect of life from fighting to factory lines. Across the United States there are disgruntled workers who hate their working conditions but can’t afford to quit so are stuck in a horrible position individually they are ignored and nothing changes. However as one voice they can create a union or strike as one and force the business to bend. Another example from even farther back is the militaries during the Greek and Roman era’s. A single soldier was not dangerous but as a single shield wall could be essentially immortal.
Hayek talks about how the Nazi’s rose first as socialists then became fascists. This ignores a major part of history as well as the truly despicable things Hitler did to get into power. First of all the Nazi’s were not the German Socialist Party. They were two different parties and the Nazi’s were far more radical than the socialist party but used the same rhetoric to try to steal members from the socialist party after they rejected Hitler and forced him to join the National Socialist German Workers Party. Saying these are the same would be like calling democrats and Antifa the exact same thing. Anyways many high up in the party that were drawn by this rhetoric and campaigning were intending to implement socialist policies when they got into power. However the night that his party one Hitler ordered his private army to kill all those that had helped him rise to power. I view this as when it changed from a socialist to fascist government as all those that intended to make a socialist political structure were murdered.
The author writes about how governments can’t create policies against competition or they would slowly slip into socialism and then into fascism like Nazi Germany or the soviet union. I think the word usage here should be changed as this statement presents many logical fallacies that cause it to fall apart. First of all is that you are either for or against competition. Like most things nothing is black and white and thus a little bit of for and a little bit of against is needed for a functioning society to exist for any extended amount of time in the current age. A perfect example of competition is low interest loans for small startups so they can join the industry and push prices down in the market while keeping monopolies from forming or staying in power for long. On the other side of the spectrum is crushing competitive practices. I would consider increasing safety protocols and methods to be anti competition as it would limit the processes a company could use to save money and therefore be competitive in the market. A perfect modern day example of competitive practices being bad was the Norfolk Southern train derailment and toxic chemical spill. The company fought tooth and nail to get restrictions removed that would put safeguards in place on trains carrying hazardous material and thus cut into their profit margin over different travel methods. While no one wants fully unchecked competition or the government running everything, there is a middle ground. I like to think of unchecked capitalism and socialism being on a scale. We want to be around the middle where we use the safeguards and group minded progress of socialism with the individual drive of capitalism.
A quote that sums up most of humanities power struggles very well is ‘morals are a poor man’s quality’. Hayek says that advancement is earned through immoral actions in a totalitarian group yet does not speak about how this is also a fact in a capitalist society. Throughout the U.S. it is routinely shown that the way to gain massive amounts of wealth is to exploit others as much as possible as long as you don’t get caught. While this is seen in a fascist or totalitarian society through imprisonment and executions, it is seen in a capitalist society through awful working conditions and bare bones wages. A perfect example of this is Amazon’s warehouse staff. These staff have reportedly told news outlets that they run around 10-12 hours a day and are given such little time for a bathroom break that they physically can’t get to the bathrooms and back before they would get penalized. This has led to some employees relieving themselves in water bottles out of necessity. While this is not as violent as the Nazi’s were it is also longer lasting as people are less likely to revolutionize or overthrow the status quo if there is no immediate danger to their lives like there is in a fascist government.
