The road to serfdom logic of Obama's corporate tax plan

Redistributionist Democrats surely have the F.A. Hayek spinning in his grave

Obama.
(Image credit: (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images))

F.A. Hayek, a Vienna-born economist who taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, won the 1974 Nobel Prize for explaining how monetary policy contributes to business cycle booms and busts. But his more penetrating insights were actually in a slim, populist 1944 pamphlet called The Road to Serfdom, in which he argued that government interference in the economy inevitably raises the specter of tyranny in our politics.

Hayek's thesis was that when the government tries to achieve broader collectivist-socialist goals by interfering with private economic transactions, it puts the country on a road to serfdom. Individuals naturally resent the intrusions, and look for way to circumvent them, subverting the government's grand plans. But the government doesn't accept failure and back off. It redoubles its efforts and cracks down in evermore draconian ways. Individuals try to circumvent those new government intrusions. And so on.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.