The Road To Serfdom

Our “elites” lecture us about climate change, then fly home in private jets.

They “order” us to stay indoors even as the actual evidence starts to show that the “models” they used, if they were put out by the private sector, would be considered frauds.

As parts of the “elite” get wealthier beyond belief, the media gets ever more flooded with puff pieces touting the virtues of insect-based diets, “high-density” living and “new normals” that sound ever more miserable…for the rest of us?

Worried that our new tech superstars are censoring speech on “social media” just as the political and media superstars do in the traditional media – and their kids at the universities are doing the same, literally and physically, in the working world just as they did in college?

Concerned that political “elites” like Lisa Bender to AOC consider whatever you *have* earned in this world to be a “privilege” to be extracted, statutorily by the IRS or by force by whatever group decides, with a nudge and wink from local politicians whose younger relatives they are, to take it at the point of a Molotov Cocktail and a baseball bat?

Think you’re seeing society sorting out, not by race, but by class, with the “elites” forming an ever-more cloistered pseudo-aristocracy, which gets to play by its own rules?

Well, you’re right. You are.

Hayek’s classic of conservative thought was titled The Road to Serfdom. It envisioned a different mechanism for this decline into feudalism – the telephone was the only social medium, back then – but he was, as always, right.

Joel Kotkin now argues the world is becoming more feudal – an “overclass” that becomes wealthy by turning everyone else, including most of you – into dehumanized production machines, no better than the gilded age robber barons did?

The situation can be saved – but victory is by no means assured, nor easy.

I’ gonna urge you toi read the article. Then the book. And my NARN people are calling his people as we speak.

3 thoughts on “The Road To Serfdom

  1. Rule by aristocracy is the default condition of mankind (rule by oligarchy is a superset of rule by aristocracy).
    Absolute rule by a king or tyrant is inherently unstable.
    While we think of aristocrats as inbred snobs, they serve a purpose: unlike the bourgeois or the peasant class, the fortunes of the aristocrats are tied to the fortunes of the nation.
    Our pseudo-aristocrats are loyal to only money and prestige, they are jumped-up bourgeois, with all the faults of the bourgeois.

  2. I believe that a century or so ago, the French would have described the issue as not just the old aristos, as Citizen Chambertin would have said in the Scarlet Pimpernel series, but rather the nouveau riche. The old aristos, to draw a picture at Elon Musk’s expense, might have been smoking dope, but they knew better than to do so while on (hee hee) a call with investors. The old aristos knew that they had to exercise some degree of restraint, or else the proletariat would rebel. The nouveau riche have not yet learned that lesson.

  3. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 06.09.20 : The Other McCain

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.