by Rick Lowe

Recent personal events and the continued desire of government to move The Bahamas closer to a welfare state, I went back to read snippets of F.A. Hayek’s 1944 classic The Road to Serfdom.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in the future of our country.

In his foreward to the paperback version of The Road to Serfdom released by The University of Chicago Press in 1972, Professor Hayek writes:

“It seems now unlikely that, even when another Labour government should come into power in Great Britain, it would resume the experiments in large-scale nationalization and planning. But in Britain, as elsewhere in the world, the defeat of the onslaught of systematic socialism has merely given those who are anxious to preserve freedom and breathing space in which to re-examine our ambitions and to discard all those parts of the socialist inheritance which are a danger to a free society. Without such a revised conception of our social aims, we are likely to continue to drift in the same direction in which outright socialism would merely have carried us a little faster.”

All our politicians should have to read The Road to Serfdom before they are allowed to be sworn in as a Member of Parliament. And each time they want to make the government larger they should have to write the following statement by Hayek 500 times on the blackboard:

“The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century.”

You can read The Reader’s Digest condensed version of The Road to Serfdom by clicking here.

The link is compliments of the Institute of Economic Affairs in Londaon, England.