Quote of the Day: Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is about Resisting Change

Hayek never argued that the slightest deviation from laissez-faire capitalism launches a society on an unstoppable march toward tyranny. Instead, he reasoned that tyranny is the inevitable result of government policies aimed at preventing market competition from ever threatening anyone’s economic prospects. As long as voters demand that government protect them from all downsides of economic change, governments can oblige them only by shutting down, one after another, all avenues for economic change. Competition; entrepreneurship; innovation; consumer sovereignty; workers’ freedom to change or to quit their jobs; even changes in demographics. Government must obliterate these and all other sources of change if no one is to be exposed to the risk of losing a job or of having her wages or benefits cut.

Obviously, in reality governments cannot produce such a petrified paradise. But in the course of trying they will create hell on earth unless people come to accept the fact that widespread material prosperity is impossible without genuine change – and that change is impossible without some people suffering economic disappointment.

That’s from Professor Don Boudreaux at the Café Hayek.

This reminds me of former astronaut and engineer Frank Borman’s popular quote

capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell