Subject: Hayek myths(posted 8758 days ago)Brad -- On the web page you've written on Hayek you write:
>> In 1944 he suggested in The Road to Serfdom that mild piecemeal reforms and governmental manipulations inevitably lead to the kind of ultimate domestic disaster that paves the way for totalitarian takeover by a Hitler. <<
In fact Hayek denigned this -- several times in _The Road to Serfdom_, and in later introductions to the book, and in a series of letters between Hayek and Paul Samuelson, in which Hayek takes Samuelson to task for spreading this falsehood -- Hayek in fact indicates that he was prepared to go forward with in a legal action to stop Samuelson from spreading the "inevitibility" myth.
Read Hayek's actual words in _The Road to Serfdom_. He allows for all sorts of piecemeal reforms in the book -- including socialized medicine. He also _explicitely_ rejections the notion that there is any inevitability to the road to serfdom, and he rejects this _more than once_, and even discusses the issue explicitly in one of his introductions.
Greg Ransom Dept. of Social Science