Is America on the Road to Serfdom?

Introduction

The Road to Serfdom, specify the steps that lead societies to abandon individual freedom and replace central planning and socialism. The New Road to Serfdom follows that path, explaining what is great about American democracy and why it is so much preferable to the European version (Wunder, 249). There is also a road to salvation and, because it is narrow, few find it and fewer still take it. The question that we are focusing in this paper is that whether America is on the Road to Serfdom or not.

Discussion

The particular dangers America faces is heading down a road the end of which leads to the loss of individual liberty and the diversity of human choice that is a hallmark of a free society, and the strangling of free enterprise and the competitive pricing system through a growing spider's web of government controls, regulations and restrictions. The expanding control of government over more and more areas of the economy means, as Hayek pointed out, means that each and every one of us most increasingly conforms to the hierarchy of values imposed by those in political authority (Vadey, 369). The State reduces us to a homogeneous mass to be easily manipulated and molded to fit the design the social engineers wish to make us in to, and matching this, the growing network of economic controls means that the market pricing system is undermined through the edicts of “pay czars” and production regulations resulting in socialist reality of “planned chaos.

American government is taking us a long way down the Road to Serfdom. That doesn't just mean that more of us must work for the government. It means that we are changing from independent, self-responsible people into a submissive flock. The welfare state kills the creative spirit. Each of us who cares about liberty must do all in our power to persuade our fellow Americans that this is a road down which there is nothing but a new brand of serfdom and economic decay. With the rise of the Tea Party, it's become fashionable for folks on the right to warn that the Obama administration's policies are pushing us down the “road to serfdom. Tea Party favorite Rand Paul, for example, warns that reckless deficit spending could lead to the conditions that led to Hitler's rise to power (Perkins, 287). Paul Ryan argues that “the road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises. There are a couple of problems with this “road to serfdom” argument. One is that it's a misreading of Hayek's famous book with that title. But the more serious problem, as Conor Friedersdorf points out, is that we live in a society in which actual “knocks in the night” and “jack-booted thugs” are increasingly common.

My main point is simply that each side-right and left-does almost no policing of its own side; they are only concerned with sport of ...