The Road To Serfdom

Collectivist sympathizers sometimes explain the failures of centrally-planned societies by blaming bad leadership. Well-meaning administrators, they explain, would have brought about much better outcomes.

Hayek replies that any authoritarian regime must make decisions that will cause pain and anguish to some groups, and only leaders with few inhibitions will have the stomach to make the tough calls. Autocracies thus tend to fill up with brutal people. It’s no surprise that German National Socialism became a vicious dictatorship. Hayek notes that “the whole moral atmosphere” of such a regime is completely different from that of Western liberal democracy (158).

During the early phases of a planned economy, impatience with the slow progress of parliamentary procedure makes citizens yearn for tough-minded autocrats. The logjam gets broken by a political group large enough to impose its will on the rest of society. Socialists with democratic scruples end up paving the way for a takeover by the ruthless.

The strong political group is likely to contain society’s worst elements for three reasons. First, unlike groups of the educated, with their variety of ideas and opinions, the unified group is less educated and more thoughtlessly uniform in its views. Second, the leaders expand their reach by convincing “the docile and gullible” to follow them (160).