Response to Comments: /Economists/hayek.html

Part of the problem with the critique of Hayek's RtS is that, when we talk about 'totalitarianism' or 'dictatorship' people tend to have too concrete an image of what that means. They immediately think about military uniforms ` la fascism or, still worse, concentration camps ` la Gulag. But one cannot reduce the question to this kind of folklore. The essence is that the mixed economy leads to a severe loss of personal freedom and one must be blind not to see this. Mises argued already that "middle of the road policy leads to socialism" (for a recent elaboration of this thesis see the book by Ikeda about the dynamics of the mixed economy). Whether one describes this phenomenon as 'totalitarianism', 'dictatorship' or whatever is of verbal interest mainly.

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