Tag: Road to Serfdom

Guest Post by Jeff Thomas via International Man

The concept of government is that the people grant to a small group of individuals the ability to establish and maintain controls over them. The inherent flaw in such a concept is that any government will invariably and continually expand upon its controls, resulting in the ever-diminishing freedom of those who granted them the power.

When I was a schoolboy, I was taught that the feudal system of the Middle Ages consisted of serfs tilling small plots of land that belonged to a king or lord. The serfs lived a meagre life of bare subsistence and were subject to the tyranny of the king or lord whose men would ride into their village periodically and take most of the few coins the serfs had earned by their toil.

Continue reading “Escaping Serfdom”

Via Epsilon Theory

Some years ago, Look, a now-defunct American magazine, published a set of cartoons which attempted to illustrate the basic framework of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. We have published them in other essays. We did it here. And here. And…here. Today we do it again with an excerpt of the first ten ‘steps’. You can see the full range on the Mises Institute’s website.

We keep publishing these cartoons because they are relevant and because they are powerful illustrations of the role of narrative in aiding the concentration of political power. We also think it is valuable to frequently consider forces like this which remain so applicable across time and circumstance.

Continue reading “A New Road to Serfdom”