I have been very impressed with the first chapter of Witness. I wish I had been exposed to this book in high school. So far, this book has been a very powerful testimony to both Mr. Chambers conversion, and to the evil’s of communism. There have been a number of passages that have really touched me, and repeating them here would take too much space. | Read More »
There has never been a society or a nation without God. But history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died. Whittaker Chambers, from the preface to Witness I have been surprised by this book already. I expected a narrative of Communism from someone who once believed in Communism. I expect as we go through the book we will | Read More »
This is the last post in the Road to Serfdom book notes. I finished the book and have been very amazed by it. I want to do this post a little different from the others. Instead of covering just this weeks reading, I would like to open it up. What lesson did you take from this book? Regardless of whether you read a chapter, or | Read More »
For this weeks reading, I want to focus in on one point Hayek makes in Chapter 14. I think this is crucial, because this is a theme we have already seen from the present administration and are likely to see over the next two years. Rahm Emanuel will alwaysbe remembered for explaining that, “you never want a crisis to go to waste.” He was simply | Read More »
The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new | Read More »
“We must here return for a moment to the position which precedes the suppression of democratic institutions and the creation of a totalitarian regime. In this state it is the general demand for quick and determined government action that is the dominating element in the situation, dissatisfaction with the slow and cumbersome course of democratic procedure which makes action for action’s sake the goal. It | Read More »
It really is amazing how much The Road to Serfdom can tell us about today’s world. The following passage jumped out at me during the reading this week: The power of the planner over our private lives would be no less complete if he chose not to exercise it by direct control of our consumption. Although a planned society would probably to some extent employ | Read More »
In Chapter Five of The Road to Serfdom, Hayek points out that in order for any central planning to work, there must be some sort of national “moral code”. The government needs some sort of hierarchy to decide what projects to move forward with, and what to ignore. For example: If the government runs GM, should the auto manufacturer make hybrids or trucks? If the | Read More »
It is, for example, at least conceivable that the British automobile industry might be able to supply a car cheaper and better than cars used to be in the United States if everyone in England were made to use the same kind of car or that the use of electricity for all purposes could be made cheaper than coal or gas if everybody could be | Read More »
For this week’s discussion, I read the first two chapters of The Road to Serfdom. If you haven’t picked up your copy yet, run out and get it. The book is pretty easy to read, and the chapters aren’t very long. Hayek argues that in promoting a socialist type agenda, many of his contemporaries had abandoned freedom. He argues that in pursuing a socialist agenda, | Read More »
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