Sleepwalking to Serfdom: Are We Still Free?

The Road to Serfdom by the great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek was published in 1944, in London, as free people around the world wondered whether or not they would be doomed to a totalitarian and homicidal dystopia. Hayek wrote much of the book when the Allies were losing the war. The book was a defense of liberty and free markets during a period when even democracies seemed to favor government control and centralized planning.

To be clear Hayek correctly and accurately defined socialism as government control of production. Unlike most pure libertarians and more consistent with classic liberals (not present day cultural Marxists who hijacked the term liberal) and conservatives, Hayek had no objections to well thought out and efficient social programs. However, we was skeptical that politicians could withstand their natural proclivity to become corrupt and misuse those programs. He was also concerned about pollution and the “fouling of the commons" but was aware that society needed to avoid having the cure be worse than the disease. If Hayek were alive today, he no doubt would have alerted the public to the danger of socialist solutions to the global warming narrative as climate Marxism would kill far more people and cause more unimaginable suffering than a two degree increase in temperature would over the next few centuries. Hayek, wisely, was concerned with despots using the altruistic sensibilities of the public as an excuse to impose tyranny. Hayek was not a prophet. He merely studied history and his present day and understood that tyranny was a constant threat.

Hayek had a profound effect on me after I graduated university. His work and that of Milton Friedman impacted upon my world view. I wonder what Hayek and Friedman would say about our chaotic world of today. In fact, it is doubtful if Hayek would think we are still “free" in the West, especially in a North America under the boot of the Biden administration and the Trudeau dynasty.

Free and democratic are two different things. All free nations are democracies but not all democracies are free. Most Germans supported the Nazis before World War II as most mainland Chinese support the corrupt, brutal and genocidal regime of the Chinese Communist Party today. Great thinkers from Socrates and Aristotle to Jefferson and Franklin worried that democracy would deteriorate into the mob destroying the culture and civilization causing the very enslavement they believed they were struggling against. As Franklin put it, democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on their next meal. That’s why the founding fathers in the US and the reformers in the British Empire favored representative democracy. These brilliant men also understood that to have an effective system people would have to be learned and virtuous. They would be disgusted with today’s brainwashed automatons who elect the corrupt, power hungry degenerates that every day further limit our freedom and turn citizens against each other to distract from their theft of our work by redistributing wealth to those they favor. Libertarians have been proven right as decades of corrupt teacher’s unions and government officials have turned young people into compliant neurotics with little to no ability to think critically. They support critical race theory and believe government is a wish machine but do not know who Adam Smith and John Locke were.

People cling to their cultural beliefs despite evidence that they are wrong. We are going through this phenomenon right now as many people in North America are trapped in the pre-2008 era of believing that our society still enjoys continuing prosperity and personal freedom. If one actually looks at what actual freedom means, it is apparent that we are far less free than a generation ago. People might argue that our loss of human rights is necessary temporarily because of the Covid pandemic and perhaps permanently to combat the imminent catastrophe of climate change (or so they would have people believe) in order to save lives. As Hayek warned: “Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.” And frankly, this erosion of freedom began well before Covid.

Free nations have certain characteristics. The first thing that springs to the mind of most is free speech. This is a right we no longer have as we once did. Any speech that does not mindlessly parrot the beliefs of woke globalists is deemed hate speech. It was incomprehensible only a few years ago that a person could lose their jobs and careers for supporting a sitting President. Governments, the legacy media and the tech giants who finance their campaigns are colluding to suppress legitimate and non-violent opinions. In turn, tech lords have their monopolies protected. For this protection, they censor the opponents of their political brethren. The industrialists of Germany in the 1930’s who helped build Hitler’s war machine were behaving in the same way as current tech lords by being an instrument of totalitarianism in the pursuit of wealth albeit with less lethal consequences at present.

The cultural Marxists, who know so much more than us, use the argument that words are violence. Clearly these testosterone challenged demi-men and histrionic feminists have never experienced real violence. In the case of Antifa and BLM, the words of people they disagree with constitute violence but dragging a man out of his car and beating him, burning down a police station, robbing a store or sucker punching an elderly Asian man on a city street are manifestations of peaceful protests and an understandable reaction to whiteness. Even a former President has been silenced by the social media platforms. Companies controlled by incredibly wealthy oligarchs openly conspire to destroy competition like Parler; a competing platform that allows more diverse opinions to be expressed. Free speech is under siege if it still exists at all.

Freedom of assembly is also a right that citizens once enjoyed. If you are Antifa and BLM, you still have the right to assemble and even to ignore such laws as arson, vandalism and assault. These hooligans are even encouraged to do so by officials like Maxine Waters and Vice-President Harris. However, churches are still closed in many places and clergymen are harassed for merely having services. This obvious lack of religious freedom also disqualifies our society from calling itself free. In the province of Quebec the population is still subject to curfews and the Jewish community of Montreal has particularly been singled out for harassment. The “free press” has ignored this but thanks to Rebel News, who caught one cop on camera calling a reporter for the outlet “les media Juif” (the Jewish media) the truth is getting out to those industrious enough to search for it.

So it’s apparent we have far less freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion than we have traditionally enjoyed but at least we have free and fair elections giving us the opportunity to take back our rights. Or do we? For democracy to work, society requires an informed and reasonably logical and virtuous electorate. That requires a free press and we clearly do not enjoy that any longer. The mainstream media have become lickspittles for the Dems in America and Liberals in Canada. In fact, in Canada, mainstream outlets have been subsidized and bailed out by the government. There are alternative voices but the powers that be use any means necessary to silence them. People who dare voice different opinions are kicked off platforms and threatened with a loss of income. You cannot call an election fair when the media is overtly and overwhelmingly supportive of one party and engage in outright deception and manipulation. Consequently, just on the basis of the press, we no longer have free and fair elections. Elections now look like advertising campaigns in an alternative clown universe where Coke get 95% of the air time and consistently points out that Coke drinkers are smarter, have better sex and live longer and have more prosperous lives because of their product while simultaneously pointing out that Pepsi causes herpes, cancer, and makes people into pedophiles. The fact that so many of us are so gullible speaks to the complete favor of our education system.

If Dems are not actively trying to fix elections, then they are complete fools for behaving like they are getting electoral integrity advise from the ghost of Saddam Hussein. They are behaving like they are guilty. The MLB All-Star game was moved from Atlanta to Colorado because of pressure from cultural Marxists and President Biden because Georgia passed a bill ensuring election integrity. Of course, the left claims voter suppression but this is a blatant falsehood. In fact, even under the new Georgia law, voting is still easier than in that state than Colorado or even New York, where MLB offices are located. One must also question the Dems hysterical behavior around Arizona election audit. Innocent people do not routinely freak out about investigations. We must point out that an objective investigation is not the same as a witch hunt as was the case in the Russia Hoax.

Another important trait of a free nation is a justice system that is fair and politically impartial. Political prisoners should and by definition cannot exist in a truly free country. A political prisoner is defined as someone who is incarcerated merely for their political beliefs. Contrary to what BLM activists would have you believe, murderers and other types of violent criminals who happen to also be leftist activists are not political prisoners. We just have to look at the legal harassment of Roger Stone, General Flynn and most recently Rudy Giuliani to see that the justice system and the F.B.I. have become politicized. Derek Chauvin is found guilty despite an obvious mistrial as President Biden himself admitted he prayed for a conviction as activists and the unthinking mob openly terrorized the jury. Whether Chauvin is guilty or not, in free nations, even the worst serial killers get due process. Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed protestor who was shot and killed on January 6 at the Capitol is forgotten by the mainstream media. No public inquiry has resulted. The name of the officer who killed her has not even been published. It is nothing short of self-delusional to believe that the American justice system has not been compromised and that should alarm everyone who rejects authoritarianism.

The citizens of free nations enjoy free speech, free and fair elections, a politically blind justice system, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly. These fundamental freedoms are under attack at best and hardly exist anymore at worst. Sadly, we do not value freedom anymore and, especially young people, have learned to love their chains. This is especially true if a welfare check is involved. Our freedom is being quietly stolen by moochers, leaches and grifters who desire the economic benefits of a free society without the effort or ability to attain wealth in a fair system. Hayek warned us about this as did Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and Orwell did in Nineteen Eighty Four. Those who currently support this loss of freedom as necessary will be proven wrong as we lose both our rights and prosperity. There are only so many leeches that can attach itself to an organism before the host dies and the parasites starve to death.