The Road to Serfdom is a book by Friedrich Hayek. Across the episodes of The Bob Zadek Show in which it is mentioned, it is treated less as a subject of exposition than as a shared reference point: guests date it, place it in the lineage of the modern libertarian movement, invoke particular chapters, and argue over whether its central warning is borne out by the evidence.
Publication and place in the libertarian lineage
David Boaz dates the book to 1944 and situates it immediately after a cluster of 1943 books by three women — Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — which he says together began to produce an ideological and intellectual movement of libertarianism. On his account, those three books were followed the next year by Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and a couple of years later by the creation of the first libertarian think tank. Boaz offers this as one way of answering the question of when the modern libertarian movement started, alongside the American Revolution and objections to the New Deal David Boaz on The Libertarian Mind (2015).
Richard Epstein gives 1944 as the year of publication as well, in the course of contrasting Hayek’s argument with the direction of New Deal administrative law. He says Hayek had many things wrong in the book, but credits him with catching one thing on the line: that an over-ambitious government lacks the knowledge and the ability to coordinate activities among diverse individuals, and that these things are better done through a price mechanism and voluntary arrangement. Epstein illustrates the point with Hayek’s example of roads and highways — government sets the rules of the road but does not determine the composition of the traffic — and sets it against Felix Frankfurter’s position in NBC v. United States, decided in 1943, just before Hayek wrote, where Frankfurter rejected the rules-of-the-road limit and said the regulator was interested in determining the composition of the traffic The Dubious Morality of the Modern Administrative State (2020).
The welfare state and the road to serfdom
Will Wilkinson takes up the book’s central image directly, as a hypothesis to be tested against comparative evidence. Responding to Bob Zadek’s question about the political danger that a guaranteed income or negative income tax would set off an escalating process of wealth transfer, Wilkinson says the question is best answered by looking at the data. He says it is just not the case that places that spend a lot on the welfare state go down the road to serfdom, and that these places are some of the freest places in the world. He cites Canada, which he describes as having socialized healthcare and a single-payer system financed mostly by the state, as taking a hit on the economic freedom index for that expenditure while nevertheless coming out higher than the United States in terms of economic freedom. He also cites Cato’s personal freedom index, which combines an economic freedom index with measures such as rule of law, freedom of assembly, and safety and security, and says many places with very big governments that spend a lot on the safety net rank at the top of it. On his account, the slippery-slope worry is simply not what the evidence shows Will Wilkinson: G.O.P. Should Embrace the Welfare State (2017).
Wilkinson’s argument is the one place in these excerpts where the book’s thesis is treated as an empirical claim to be checked rather than a warning to be heeded. He frames the question as whether countries with large welfare states in fact descend into serfdom, and answers with indices and cross-country comparison.
Chapter 10 and the question of who propagandizes
Abigail Hall invokes a specific chapter of the book. Discussing the idea that government needs to propagandize in order to convince the citizenry because it is in their best interest, she refers back to the discussion of noble deception earlier in her book, and then points to what Hayek talked about in Chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom regarding who are the people likely to be putting out this information. She asks whether it is likely that they will be the people who have the best interest of the public at heart, and says she does not think one has to stretch too far to conclude it is probably the latter rather than the former Manufacturing Militarism: A Fresh Look at Propaganda (2022).
The exchange occurs near the end of the episode, in a segment in which Bob Zadek interrupts Hall to remind the audience of her book, Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, and Hall notes that readers of the conclusion will find out everything she was about to say.
Use as a textbook
Thomas DiLorenzo says he used Hayek’s Road to Serfdom as one of the textbooks in one of his classes. The remark comes in answer to Bob Zadek’s question about how one sells free-market economics to high school and college students, a hard sell in his description. DiLorenzo says college students often resent learning that they have been lied to or fooled, and that explaining how markets work with real-world examples that contradict what their socialist professors have told them turns them around. He says he always has his students read about real-world markets and economic reality, that it is easy to sell socialism if all you talk about is a socialist dream world, and that he also taught them about the reality of what happened under socialism — using the Hayek book among his texts Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022).
The same episode’s earlier discussion concerns the number of new tax collectors, the characterization of that hiring as a tax increase, and the transfer of wealth from the private sector to the government; the book appears only in DiLorenzo’s closing answer about teaching.
Across episodes: no development
Four episodes touch the book — David Boaz’s 2015 conversation, Will Wilkinson’s 2017 episode, Richard Epstein’s 2020 episode, and the 2022 episodes with Abigail Hall and Thomas DiLorenzo — and the excerpts show no development in its treatment: it is dated, quoted, assigned, and disputed in place, with no guest responding to another’s reading of it.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the book’s argument in its own terms beyond the fragments guests supply, nor do they give its publisher, its reception, or its relation to Hayek’s other work. No excerpt states what the book’s chapters other than Chapter 10 contain, and the Chapter 10 reference is not elaborated. The excerpts also do not record any guest disputing another guest’s characterization of the book, and they break off before several of the discussions in which it appears are concluded.