quinta-feira, setembro 04, 2003
A New Road to Serfdom?
"Recently, I was invited by the Ludwig von Mises Institute Europe to address an audience on what Friedrich von Hayek would have thought about the enlargement of Europe. I decided to reread his classic, The Road to Serfdom. Old hat, of course, because since Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, we know that after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, capitalist liberal democracies are the end-state of the historical process. So there is nothing to worry about. Yet, even before finishing the introduction (by Milton Friedman) and the (three) prefaces of Hayek's magnum opus, I realised that I was completely wrong. The Road to Serfdom still contains insights that today are as visionary and relevant as when they were published for the first time in 1944
(...)
Our freedom and economic well-being are still exposed to hazards, which could be grouped as follows:
Egalitarianism
High taxes
Interest groups
Trade unionism
The ideology of stasis
Regulation
Precautionary principle
Man-made global warming and Kyoto.
I venture the thought that, taken together, these tendencies may carry the risk of a new "Road to Serfdom."
posted by Miguel Noronha 2:39 da tarde
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