HAYEKWEB: M Friedman Interview on Hayek & The Road to Serfdom

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

--- begin forwarded text


Date:         Thu, 20 Nov 1997 23:17:30 -0500
Reply-To: Hayek Related Research <HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU>
Sender: Hayek Related Research <HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU>
From: Greg Ransom <Gregransom@AOL.COM>
Subject:      HAYEKWEB: M Friedman Interview on Hayek & The Road to Serfdom
To: HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU

>>  Hayek on the Web  <<

C-SPAN 'Booknotes' Interview with Milton Friedman
on Friedrich Hayek and his _The Road to Serfdom_.

On the Web at:

 http://www.c-span.org/mmedia/booknote/lambbook/transcripts/50060.htm

Excerpt:

"Booknotes Transcript

Author: Milton Friedman
Title: Introduction to F. A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom"
Air date: November 20, 1994

BRIAN LAMB: Dr. Milton Friedman, why did you choose or why did they ask
you to write the introduction to the F. A. Hayek "Road to Freedom" 50th
anniversary ...

MILTON FRIEDMAN: ""Road to Serfdom"."

LAMB: Yes, that's your title on your book. Why did you do it?

FRIEDMAN: The reason they asked me was very clear, because Hayek and I
had been associated for a very long time, in particular in an organization
called the
Montbelleron Society that he founded. The charter meeting was in 1947 in
Switzerland. Hans Morgenthau, who was a professor at the University of
Chicago when I was there, a political scientist, when I came back from the
meeting, he asked me where I had been, and I told him that I had been to a
meeting that had been called by Hayek to try to bring together the believers
in a
free, open society and enable them to have some interchange, one with
another.
He said, "Oh, a meeting of the veterans of the wars of the 19th century!" I
thought
that was a wonderful description of the Montpelleron Society.

Well, Hayek and I worked together in the Montpelleron Society and we were
fostering essentially the same set of ideas. His "Road to Serfdom" book, the
one
you have there, which was published 50 years ago, was really an amazing event
when it came out. It's very hard to remember now what the attitude was in
1944-45. Throughout the Western world, the movement was toward
centralization, planning, government control. That movement had started
already
before World War II. It started really with the Fabian Society back in the
late
19th century -- George Bernard Shaw, the Webbs and so on. But the war itself
and the fact that in war you do have to have an enormous amount of government
control greatly strengthened the idea that after the war what you needed was
to
have a rational, planned, organized, centralized society and that you had to
get rid
of the wastes of competition. That was the atmosphere.

Those of us who didn't agree believed in what we would call a liberal
society, a
free society -- 19th century liberalism. There were quite a number of us in
the
United States and in Britain, but in the rest of the world they were very
isolated,
indeed. Hayek's idea was to bring them together and enable them to get
comfort
and encouragement from one another without having to look around to see who
was trying to stab them in the back, which was the situation in their home
countries.

LAMB: The New York Times put on the Op-Ed page your introduction to this
edition. Do you know why they did that? What got their attention?

FRIEDMAN: I can't answer that. You'd have to ask the people at the New York
Times. On the whole, they have in the past not been very favorable to these
ideas
-- quite the contrary -- but they've been changing. About two or three years
ago,
they published -- they've turned down many an Op-Ed piece from me, which I
subsequently published in the Wall Street Journal or somewhere else. But a
couple of years ago, they did publish an Op-Ed piece from me about the
situation
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which my thesis was a very simple one.
Everybody agrees, as a result of the experience in the West, that socialism
has
been a failure. Everybody agrees that capitalism has been a success, that
wherever you have had an improvement in the conditions of the ordinary people
over any lengthy time, it's been in a capitalist society, and yet everybody
is
extending socialism.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were no summits in Washington about
how
we cut down government. The lesson from the fall of the Berlin Wall was that
we
have too extensive a government and we ought to cut it down. Everybody
agrees,
but yet wherever you go, we have to extend socialism. The summit in
Washington
was about how you enable government to get more revenue in order for
government to be more important, which is exactly the opposite. So socialism
guides our behavior in strict contrast to what we believe to be the facts of
the
world.

LAMB: Let me ask you a little bit more about Friedrich Hayek. Who was he?

FRIEDMAN: Fritz Hayek was an economist. He was born in Vienna. He started
his professional career in Vienna. In the late 1920s, some people in Britain
at the
London School of Economics were very greatly impressed with the book he had
written and with the work he had done, and they invited him to come to the
London School. At a relatively young age, he became a professor at the London
School of Economics. He spent the 30s and most of the 40s there. Early in the
1950s, he left London and came to the University of Chicago where he was a
professor for about 10 years, and then he went back to Germany. He
essentially
retired to the University of Freiberg in Germany.

LAMB: How long has he been dead?

FRIEDMAN: He's been dead about two years now, I think. He lived to be 90,
and he has an enormous list of books and articles and so on he has published.
The "Road to Serfdom," the one we're showing here, was a sort of manifesto
and
a call to arms to prevent the accumulation of a totalitarian state. One of
the
interesting things about that book is whom it's dedicated to. It's dedicated
"to the
socialists of all parties," because the thesis of the book is that socialism
is paving
the way toward totalitarianism and that Socialist Russia, at the time, is not
different from Nazi Germany. Indeed, it was National Socialism -- that's
where
"nazi" comes from.

This was a kind of manifesto and had a very unexpected effect. It was turned
down by several publishers in the United States before the University of
Chicago
published it, and both in Britain and the United States, it created something
of a
sensation. It was a best-seller. The Reader's Digest published a condensation
of it
and distributed 600,000 copies. You had a big argument raising about people
who were damning it as reactionary against all the good things of the world
and
people who were praising it and showing what the real status was.

It's a book well worth reading by anybody because there's a very subtle
analysis
of why it is that well-meaning people who intend only to improve the lot of
their
fellows tend to favor courses of action which have exactly the opposite
effect. I
think from my point of view the most interesting chapter in that book is one
labeled "Why the Worst Get on Top." It's, in a way, another example of the
famous statement of Lord Acton that "power corrupts and absolute power
corrupts absolutely.""


Hayek on the Web is a regular feature of the Hayek-L list.

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Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
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