Highway to Hell?

In 1944, Austrian British economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek published one of his best known popular works, 'The Road to Serfdom'. The book lays out the dangers of abandoning individualism and individual rights, through increasing central power and planning, eventually leading to totalitarianism. The first of Hayek's steps on the proverbial road, is "war", forcing some form of central planning. In the past, this was a literal war or , at least, some military conflict to mobilize popular opinion to relax individual liberties, to combat some external "enemy".

With the advent of the "cold war", the rationale for further centralization, and resource extraction from the citizenry (for the political 'right') became the mere threat of war. The result being trillions of dollars added to the national debt, and increasing restrictions on individual liberties. Around the same time, the political 'left', found an external "enemy" of their own to rationalize more government control, environmentalism.

For fifty-odd years, the two main political powers in the U.S. have used these "enemies", to increasingly chip away at the idea of individualism, in favor of their own view of collectivism. The right shifted to the "War on Terror" after the fall of their main antagonist, the Soviet Union, while the left scrambled to make climate cooling (and warming) data fit their doomsday scenarios.

Now (this piece was written in April of 2020), we are in the grips of the COVID-19 "pandemic", and it seems that the both the left and the right have found an "enemy" that will allow them to implement their central planning and restriction of individual liberty, with the blessing of those from whom liberty is stripped. Travel restrictions, with threats of fines and jail time, have been implemented in a nearby city with a population of less than 70k. Informal threats of harassment by law enforcement (for people who are out without a "good reason") have been expressed in my home town of less than 10k residents. State and local governments have force-ably closed businesses they deem "non-essential", and the Federal government (against even lip service to constitutional principles) has approved sending money directly to individual citizens, to offset the economic losses of these closures. There is even talk of conscripting medical workers. These seem to be met with a disturbing amount of support from people who claim to advocate for individual liberty.

This "crisis" (in the Rahm Emanuelian sense) is predicted to peak in a couple of weeks. Hopefully, in a couple of months, the medical crisis will be over, and we, as a people, can get back to some semblance of normalcy. The economic fallout from the forced shutdown of much of the economy will have farther reaching effects, both economically and politically, as the precedent for government overriding the choices of individual citizens will be exercised for increasingly trivial "crises".

I sincerely hope I'm wrong about the implications of the recent measures taken to "protect" people from this most recent "threat", but I fear I'm not. I fear that the road to serfdom may have become an expressway, with no off-ramps.