The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Collected Works of F a Hayek) (Taschenbuch)

_The Road to Serfdom_ and _The Fatal Conceit_ were the bookends of Hayek's career.

_The Road To Serfdom_ roughly started Hayek's fame and was the first word spoken (along with pioneers like Popper) against this "century of the state".

_The Fatal Conceit_ roughly concluded Hayek's career and long life, and stands as a fairly magnificent beacon at the end of the abject failure of the 50 year experiment in collectivism and plannerism, the end of the 100 million+ slaughter caused by socialism in our century, and indeed the final success of the "Austrian School" of economics and the tremendous prosperity we all now enjoy due to it (including handy features such as amazon.com).

Hopefully this beacon, this book, will shine for many centuries before it is forgotten and, once again, civilization slips away for awhile for another experiment in collectivism and planner-ism.

Just a superb book of macrohistorical importance, magnificently written; every chapter seems more important than ever (such as the warnings on "junk science" and the corruption of language).

It is the primary beacon marking the end of the "great socialist experiment disaster" of our century, written by the man who saw it coming, had to sit through it, and wrote the cure.

1. The idea that socialism neccessarily entails centralized governmental control over the socioeconomic structure of a given body politic is plainly false, although it is certainly an excusable error considering that the erstwhile "socialist" bloc was organized accordingly. If you know anything about the 200+ year history of socialism, you are no doubt aware that there has been in fact a long-running, acrimonious debate between advocators of statist and bottom-up models. Of course, you can get around this annoying historical fact by simply defining "socialism" as "economic centralism," but this is a little like defining "democracy" as "mob rule." Mob rule is a form of democracy, not identical with the class of all possible democratical systems of rule.

2. Be very careful when comparing the "successes" of capitalist economies with the "failures" of "socialist" ones. Comparing the United States, a country with a long history of industrialization and with almost incomparable natural advantages, with the Soviet Union, a nation that began its existence as a devastated and famine-ridden Third World country with no industrial infrastructure to speak of, is a little bit ingenuous. Remember that the Soviet Union was at least able to care for all of its population, as opposed to such capitalist states as Chile, Mexico, Honduras, Brazil, Haiti . . . the list could be extended quite a bit. Remember also that Cuba possesses the highest standard of living in Latin America (you don't have to take my word for this--I'm drawing on UN statistics). Yes, non-capitalist Cuba is poor and people are attempting to emigrate, but ALL of Latin America is poor, and Cuba at least does not have starvation, malnutrition, an economy based on cocaine exportation, or death squads roaming the landscape.

3. The idea of laissez-faire has NEVER been taken seriously by anybody outside of the academy (except for a brief period in the 1800's in Britain, which made a rapid about-face when its economy studied to collapse). If you look at the historical record, you will be very hard-pressed indeed to find an instance of an economy developing using a free-market model. The U.S., for instance, was only able to get its steel industry off the ground because it engaged in very stringent protectionist policies to keep out much cheaper imports from Britain. Indeed, historically, free-market eonomies have been imposed on countries by foreign powers in order to ruin their economies and make them dependent, as was the case in India in the 1800's, most of Latin America in the 1900's, and, the more cynical among us might suspect, Eastern Europe in the 1990's.

Oh yes, I should I suppose make a few comments about Hayek's book--I find him an engaging writer, of keen intellect but very limited in scope and grievously hampered by his own ideological presuppositions. Certainly worth reading, but I wouldn't want to run a country based on it.